A week ago, as I was taking out the garbage, I heard a burst of gunshots, a pause, another burst, and then gunshots. The response of the ordinary Israeli is supposed to be to dive into the tiles while crying out for the woman and children to lie down as well. But my response was a bored peek at another one of my WhatsApp groups, to get details and how to find out that everyone was okay.
I didn't react that way because I'm a brave and fearless soldier (according to my mother, and I don't argue with my mother), I reacted that way because for the past 12 years I've been a resident of the city of Lod. The sound of gunfire or a burst in Tel Aviv is an event that leads to a jump in the SWAT force, but in Lod they call it "Wednesday," and the only thing that will jump here is a frightened resident, who will run from his bed to the children's room. He must be a new resident, not yet familiar with the customs of the place, which include forced acceptance of life alongside Arab criminal gangs and a barbaric culture of murders within the family because of a complicated and unclear calculation, which for some reason includes the words "honor" and "family."
Tel Aviv? Another galaxy is 25 light-years from Baltimore. Sorry, Melod.
Back to the incident, a few minutes later it became known that a stray bullet had entered the bedroom of my friend, journalist Ofra Lax, passed over her head and lodged in the table next to the bed. A miracle is an abstract definition of an event. She lives far away from me, about 200 meters straight away. Hardly justifies the blessing of the gomel in the synagogue.
A few days later, a kind of Sulha-Hudna-whatever letter was circulated, which for our Arab cousins symbolizes a temporary ceasefire: a letter signed by all sides and drafted by the mayor, Attorney Yair Revivo, that includes various sanctions if and when. This means that the Shin Bet, the SWAT, the court, and in fact all the authorities that are supposed to handle a case that some vehemently claim requires some kind of intervention on their part – all of the above have been left out of the equation.
Anyone who is certainly not a veteran is likely to be blown away by such a letter. A mayor trying to close matters under the table?! Local police giving the green light?!
Well, those who are not residents of the city, simply will not understand.
Who are we going to blame, Revivo? He is a native of the city and a resident of it, who also fears for the safety of his children, sees how the huge budgets he transferred to the sector do not matter in the slightest, and he is forced to put out fires with his own hands, working with what there is, and by and large there is none;
The police? The police officers in the city, under the direction of Shashi, the new and diligent station commander (since the riots), work night and day in off-hours and for insulting pay, occasionally managing to survive legal bureaucracy and arrest criminals, only to watch them with eager eyes released to their homes a few days later;
The Arab society in the city? Well, that's the easy solution. Most of them, who would have believed, also want to sleep soundly.
This is an unanswered column. No to-do list to be done, and, after a dozen years, no angry column. This is a column of despair: in the center of the country, the bullets are whistling – and the country, with all its high echelons, is simply not functioning. Who knows, maybe we'll be able to get to Sulha with her at some point. Just don't make a face when it deteriorates into this situation. You don't know and bullets didn't whistle in your bedroom, you won't understand.
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