Headline: A Tenuous Existence

Edition: FINAL

Publication: Maine Sunday Telegram

Memo:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Brinn was born in Portland in 1958 and graduated from Portland High School in 1977. At Boston University, he earned a bachelor's degree in communications and met his future wife, Shelley Goodman, from New Jersey. They moved to Israel in 1985. Brinn began writing for The Jerusalem Post in 1990. He has been news editor the last nine years. He also is a reserve sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces.

Section: Insight

RunDate: Sunday, September 29, 2002

"You live in Israel? Isn't it dangerous?" That was the question most frequently directed at me during my visit to Portland this summer, especially at my 25th reunion with Portland High School's class of 1977. I took devilish enjoyment in explaining to my old classmates that I was more nervous about meeting them after 25 years than living every day in Jerusalem.

It's been more than 17 years since I shocked my family, friends and even myself by leaving the friendly confines of New England for the unknown mystery of the Middle East. The salty air and jagged coast off Portland is 6,000 miles from the hilly, olive tree-studded terrain of Jerusalem. And I'm not just talking about the physical distance. The culture, the frantic pace of life, the very fibers of tenuous existence for Israelis are unlike anything most Mainers have ever experienced.

As a resident of Israel and journalist for The Jerusalem Post, I've been witness to some monumental historical events - donning gas masks during the Gulf War in 1991 as Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at the heart of the country, being in charge of the paper the night in 1995 when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv, sharing in the cautious euphoria over the signing of peace agreements with Jordan in 1993 and the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Authority in 1994, which many thought to be the beginning of the end of Israel's isolation and constant state of war since its inception in 1948.

But nothing prepared me or any other Israelis for the last two years. Call it what you will - the Al Aksa Intifada if you think the Palestinians are right, the Palestinian Authority's War of Terror if you think Israel is right - my fellow citizens and I have been thrust into the middle of a bloody battle for survival in which there haven't been any winners, only victims. No matter who is to blame, the facts are that Israel has become a markedly more dangerous place to live in these last two years - and it was never the most idyllically safe location to begin with.

Almost every Israeli knows somebody who's been killed or injured or emotionally damaged as a result of the last two years of violence. "We've spent eight years here and never knew any victims of terror, and in the last two months, a cousin was killed by a suicide bomber and friends of ours were injured in a settlement infiltration. Suddenly I feel more Israeli than I ever have," said Brian Blum, a friend and an American immigrant originally from Berkeley, Calif.

The upsurge of renewed attacks against Israelis in mid-September following a month of quiet is misleading. Just because they're not reported in wire service roundups doesn't mean that there aren't daily mortar attacks at Jewish settlements in Gaza or the West Bank, potential suicide bombers nabbed on their way to perpetrate another atrocity or "work accidents" by Palestinian terrorists preparing explosive devices that detonate prematurely. The only difference between them and September's suicide attack on a Tel Aviv bus that prompted Israel's siege of Yasser Arafat's Ramallah headquarters is that the terrorist succeeded in getting through to his destination and carrying out his mission.

And looming in the near future is the specter of a chemical or missile attack on Israel by Saddam Hussein if and when the United States launches its invasion of Iraq. What is it like to raise a family in such a climate of uncertainty and potential peril? Trying to conduct a semblance of a normal life under the barrage of terror consists of a complicated equation of rationalizations, calculated risk-taking, faith and a good amount of whistling in the dark. Imagine driving from Falmouth south on Interstate 295 to Portland every night (the distance I drive to my home in Ma'aleh Adumim, a suburb of Jerusalem) with the knowledge that in the past year there have been two incidents of drive-by shootings, a car bomb explosion at the entrance to Baxter Boulevard and a suicide bomber who blew himself up at the Forest Avenue exit. Not to mention dozens of rocks or Molotov cocktails thrown at cars at all times of the day.

People react differently to this set of facts. My wife, Shelley, originally from New Jersey, refuses to drive on the road after dark for a self-defined period of time after each one of the incidents. And when she does make the journey, her hands grip the steering wheel tightly and she peers at passing cars out of the corner of her eye assuming any one of them could be the next drive-by shooter.

I take a different approach. Usually riding in a municipal bus to Jerusalem, I often doze off before leaving Ma'aleh Adumim, only to wake up at my bus stop in Jerusalem totally oblivious to whatever danger may have awaited me. For me, those are not bad odds - four deadly incidents in 365 days. Maybe it's a fatalist's view, but surely there must have been more traffic fatalities on that stretch of road in the same time period. Calculations like that pop up dozens of times a day. "Should I go to that restaurant even though there was a suicide bomber on the next street over? Well, it was last week, and nothing's happened since then. Or, a bomb exploded there yesterday, so now it's safe for the next few days because there'll be extra security around."

We've never had a terror attack in Ma'aleh Adumim, a community of 25,000, two miles over the Green Line into the West Bank. My four children (ages 14, 11, 8 and 2) all attend educational facilities there, they ride the buses freely, they hang out at Burger King and the Cineplex in the local mall. After a terror attack, especially at a public location like a mall, my wife and I may worry about them going out. But to prevent them from doing so would be, in effect, giving in to the terrorists who are trying to disrupt our daily lives and force us to live in fear. Given that, their lives are probably very similar to the lives of American children their age. Normal, that is, if you're used to having armed guards at every entrance, checking patrons' bags and doing body searches with metal detectors. It becomes second nature; in fact, it only feels unnatural when the opposite occurs, and for some reason there's nobody there to check you.

Terror and coping with it have become so much a part of life for us that we often find ourselves mourning and celebrating at the same time. On the night of last month's horrific bombing attack on the Hebrew University campus, which left seven dead, including five Americans, I attended the wedding of a colleague at a luxurious setting overlooking Jerusalem's Old City. Aside from the armed guard and attendant at the entrance checking my name off the list of invited guests, there was no indication among the 300 revelers that anything was amiss. "Make sure you tell them that it's safe where we are and I'm not scared," my 14-year old daughter, Adina, told me before I drove off to be a guest during our stay in Portland last month on WMPG, the University of Southern Maine radio station. And I don't think she was lying. Maybe it's a combination of that endearing youthful belief in invincibility and a blinding naivete that many adults have also been forced to adopt. Otherwise, the tension and day-to-day atrocities can drive you to something resembling paranoia.

Stopping off at the food court of the Maine Mall last month with my son, I had an out-of-time experience that reminded me of the differences between Portland and Jerusalem. We were finishing a snack when I noticed a small knapsack at the next table where there were no diners. I immediately forgot I was in Portland, in Maine, in the United States, and I was transported back to my local mall in Ma'aleh Adumim. There, a knapsack without an owner usually means there's a bomb in the bag. In that split second of confusing panic, I was ready to yell out for everybody to get out of there and call for the mall police. Just as quickly, I realized where I was, and that at the Maine Mall a solitary knapsack means . . . somebody forgot their knapsack!

Some people haven't been able to take the heat. Two American immigrant families we know in similar situations to ours have packed it in, at least temporarily, for the more secure confines of their American homeland. But as the events of Sept. 11 demonstrated, you can run from terror but terror pops up in the most unexpected places. "I have a front-row seat for the history of the Jewish people. I am part of the struggle for Israel's survival," wrote Marla Bennett, one of the victims of that same Hebrew University suicide bombing, in a letter to her family only a few weeks before her death. As a Jew and a Zionist, I agree wholeheartedly with those sentiments, and they have given me the strength to remain in Israel through all the rough times. As a journalist, it's a chance to cover THE big story. There's a reason why there are more foreign correspondents in Israel than anywhere else in the world except for Washington, D.C. Israel is history in the making, and chronicling it is a wondrous challenge for any journalist. As a Mainer, I can't wait to come home to visit that rocky coastline as often as I can.


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