Tonight, as usual on Thursdays, came home to Jerusalem from a day in Tel Aviv/Herzliya on the public Egged inter-city bus (with my bicycle stored below). OK, first of all, I have to explain that most of my peer group does not take the bus, in fact I think I am the only fund manager in Israel that regularly takes public transportation, all the more so from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and back. What can I do…I am green freak, in my naïve manner I think I am helping the world just a little by leaving my car parked at home. In addition, I hate looking for parking and sitting in traffic.
Who rides the bus? Students, senior citizens (who remember when “everyone” took the bus), and soldiers. Self-respecting people with “important” jobs drive their company cars…
I want to focus in for a moment on the soldiers. These are mainly young people (18-25) who live in Jerusalem and are coming home for the weekend or are “jobniks,” meaning they have a desk job for their mandatory army service (rather than fighting unit) and go home every night. About half the riders are usually soldiers, and most of them, men and women, carry M-16 machine guns. So I travel with a heavily armed escort of 15-20 well trained members of the Israel Defense Forces.
This all gives me a certain level of a feeling of safety. First of all, I am on the bus, which automatically gives me a massive jump in the statistics over driving in a private car (certainly here Israel, where more people die every year in car accidents than in all terrorist attacks, even in the worst years of the intifada). Next, I have all these soldiers with me.
So what do I have this bad feeling in my stomach (besides the obvious, which is typing while sitting on a bus…)?
I think because I am sad that it is de rigueur in our society for our young people to walk around for three years and more with a machine gun in their hands – one cannot help but think that this desensitizes us to war, military choices, and some level of violence. Just today we saw headlines from a Palestinian rocket attack on the Israeli city of Sderot, and the reports said a 57 year old woman was killed, and a security guard of Defense Minister Amir Peretz (who lives in Sderot) was “injured.” Injury in this case means his legs were blown off.
For those of you reading this from the US, just imagine if there were rocket attacks on Staten Island, NY– America would be on a warpath. Here we have mastered self-restraint, but I for one feel the status quos of an “eye for an eye” must end.
With all of our technological might, creating cast virtual worlds and shattering borders of science on a daily basis, we seem unable to deal with our reality. We are way overdue for a fresh look, a reset, a new operating system.
For far too long we have accepted as “normal” people walking the streets with machine guns. In other circles a mental and physical separation has developed from this day-to-day reality…in the “fancy” parts of Tel Aviv and the high-tech cluster in Herzliya Pituach, soldiers are not seen, rarely does a machine gun make an appearance. Oh, many of the best Israeli tech entrepreneurs serve in the active reserves, but they literally partition their minds and their life. When not in uniform, total focus is given to the next great thing. Local “politics” are way too messy. And many of Israel’s best financial minds think more about developing Eastern and Central Europe than they do Sderot, Kiryat Malachi, or yes, Nablus and Khan Yunis.
It’s time to for all of us to take the bus…and take a fresh look at our society. And make sure that it shocks us, and do something to change it.
I want my 3 year old son to find it out of the ordinary to see someone with a machine gun when gets on a bus or a train by himself in a few years. Lets make it happen.
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