There was another terrorist attack on Friday, this time a shooting in Tel Aviv. The Israeli Arab suspected of the attack sprayed a bar with bullets from an automatic weapon. You can read all the details elsewhere. The killer is still on the loose (possibly somewhere near the neighbourhood I live) leading to scores of police on the streets outside my kids’ school today. One of the victims is the nephew of a blogging friend of mine.
I’m not really interested in whining about people not changing their profile pictures or under reporting by the world. I came to terms with that years ago. Certainly this one attack in Tel Aviv is no worse or better than the ongoing stabbings, vehicular attacks and especially the other shootings at cars in Judea and Shomron.
Downplaying attacks on us is just the world’s usual method to exaggerate the inflated ire when we defend ourselves. We just have to learn to ignore their ire and do what is right for ourselves.
But, even though this didn’t happen in the space of a few hours, Israelis are dying from these terror attacks in numbers comparable to Paris. Two people here is like 16 in France. The scale up factor to the USA is 40! That means 2 murdered here is like 80 in the USA. Do you understand the impact this has on our small country?
It’s just maths. In the first 7 weeks of these attacks (back on 19 November) I worked out that if we had the population of France, we’d have had 128 murdered. Today the number stands at 28 murdered in 4 months which would be 224 in French population terms or a staggering 1,120 with the USA population. And of course, there are many, many more survivors with grievous physical and mental wounds.
And that’s relatively few compared to what it would be if we weren’t on the top of our game security wise, if we hadn’t built a wall and if we let weapons in and terrorists out of Gaza. All actions for which Israel is regularly condemned.
That’s not to spurn the gestures of those who do want to #IAmTelAviv, perhaps we should all just be #Israel or #Jews or #Settlers but whatever, we’re all targets all the time. And we’ll just carry on doing whatever it takes to stay safe in our homeland.
