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In death's shadow
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent
© St. Petersburg Times
At Lord's boutique, Naomi Sidelsky wishes her 17-year-old daughter, Lea, would hurry up trying on skirts so they can get home before lunchtime. Next door, at Sbarro's pizzeria, a suicide bomber blew himself up at midday last August, killing one of Lea's best friends and 14 others. Across the street, Liana Sharon's jewelry store is open for business though by noon she hasn't made a single sale. The only way she can get through the day -- and stop thinking about the image of her own 16-year-old son, covered with blood from another suicide attack -- is by taking a tranquilizer each morning before she leaves for work. And on a main road leading to the center of town, Hassam Abu Elhawa, a 54-year-old pharmacist, is standing by his car with his shirt hiked up over his belly and his trousers dropped down to his knees. It is a humiliating sight, but Israeli police won't let him or other Palestinians pass until they can show they don't have belts with explosives strapped around their waists. For all of its magnificent churches and mosques and spiritual aura, Jerusalem at its physical core is as commercial as any American town. The streets are lined with one-hour photo shops and clothing stores, appliance dealers and travel agencies. You can get a pita sandwich at the corner deli or a Big Mac and fries at McDonald's. And because it is a place where Israelis have long come to shop, eat and shmooze, central Jerusalem is popular with terrorists, too. Since the latest Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, 55 people have been killed and more than 650 wounded in terrorist attacks as they went about their everyday business in downtown Jerusalem. The threat of sudden death has turned life here into a gruesome lottery -- it is impossible to walk down Jaffa Road or King George Street without wondering: Is this the time, is this the place my number comes up? "I come to town infrequently and very nervously at that," says Sidelsky, a nursery school administrator who lives in north Jerusalem. As she talks, she throws darting glances at the wall that separates the clothing store from the pizza parlor next door. The damage from the Sbarro bombing was quickly repaired -- Israelis have become highly efficient at erasing all traces of carnage -- but that doesn't mean anyone has forgotten what happened Aug. 9.
What is it? A package bomb? A car bomb? A human bomb? No one seems to know; when nothing happens, traffic surges back into the road and pedestrians warily continue on. Like many other Israelis, Sidelsky and her family have changed their lives to reduce the chances of getting killed. At the Sidelskys' synagogue, the men of the congregation have armed themselves and take turns every 15 minutes standing guard outside during services. When Sidelsky and her husband decided to eat out during the recent Passover holiday, they thought long and hard about where to go and what bus to take. They finally decided on a restaurant off the beaten track. Today, Sidelsky and her daughter took the No. 11 bus downtown but only after eying the other passengers. "You're anxious," she says, "you look around at who's on the bus. If you're doubtful, you get off. I look to see if there are any Arabs, but you can never be sure. This morning I said, That guy looks like an Arab but he talked Hebrew and had a kippah on. He wasn't an Arab. "I only come downtown when I have a specific purpose and I like to get home as soon as possible. We stay home much more and prefer not to go to public places. We try to do errands early in the morning so we're not there at peak times when there are a lot of people. My daughter has a very fatalistic attitude: If something is going to happen, it's going to happen. My attitude is: If you can prevent something happening, you should." Sidelsky doesn't hate Palestinians; indeed, she says, she feels empathy with "ordinary Palestinians who like to live their lives and go to school and not be killed. I don't believe every Palestinian wants to kill a Jew and Israel is not looking to kill all Palestinians. We like to live in peace."
"There is no way people can understand. The Americans after what happened in New York were so totally devastated, but we are living with it in our everyday lives. We're all affected by it -- we're all linked up. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post had a page of photographs of people killed in March -- words can't describe how we feel." Sidelsky doesn't know Liana Sharon, who owns the jewelry store on Jaffa Road. But there is a link: The pizza parlor bombing that killed a friend of Sidelsky's daughter also killed three people Sharon knew. Although it is across the street from her store, Sharon has not set foot in the restaurant since it was attacked eight months ago. It bothers her that Sbarro's still hires Palestinians. "You can't look at them," she says. "It just hurts too much." On that August day, Sharon was sitting by the window of her shop, talking on the phone, when the suicide bomber walked into the crowded pizzeria at lunchtime. She saw pieces of bodies rain down on the street; the blast was so strong that it knocked plaster from the ceiling and onto her head. After the bombing, the Israeli government paid to install shatterproof glass and strengthen the outside walls of Sharon's shop and other nearby stores. But with eight suicide attacks in the past 18 months, business is bad because so many people are afraid to come downtown. Sharon dreads going to work. "I have children and I can come here and never return to my home," she says. "You never know who's the next." Last Dec. 1, it was almost her son, Michael. It was his 16th birthday, and Michael and a group of friends from school headed downtown that night to celebrate. Some went straight to Catzefet, an ice cream parlor and popular hangout on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. Michael and the others first stopped at a nearby McDonald's. At 11:30 p.m., two Palestinian suicide bombers walked into Catzefet and blew themselves up. Michael heard the blast and raced around the corner. His classmate Omer was bleeding from a gaping stomach wound; Michael tore off his own shirt and put it around his buddy. Then he looked for his other friends, to no avail: "I got close to them," he says, "but everybody was full of blood and you can't recognize your friends lying down there." With a speed born of too much experience, paramedics arrived and began tending to Omer and the others -- more than 180 in all -- who had been injured. Michael and his unharmed classmates decided it was time to leave. "We were sure it was not just an explosion, we were sure it was sabotage. We were very frightened and scared about our friends. Me and my friend, Amir, ran out of there as fast as possible. We didn't find a bus or taxi, we ran by foot and after a couple of miles his dad called (on a mobile phone) and drove us to our house. "My parents were very frightened, they hugged me. We sat up all night to find out information on my friends. The next morning my brother told me. I still don't believe it." Omer lived, but among the 10 who died that night were two of Michael's closest friends, Golan Turgeman and Assaf Avitan. Both were 15. Michael went to their funerals, the first he had ever attended. "It was very sad. Assaf's mother started to scream. She wanted him to come back home. "I tried not to think about it but I can't. It's a part of you, it's not every day your friends get killed, people you regularly see are just not there. I remember all the stuff that happened -- you want to be there and save everybody, but you can't go back in time." Michael escaped physical injury but his life is not the same. He hasn't been to a movie theater since the attack because he is afraid to go into crowded places -- "It's dangerous now and I prefer not to see the sights I saw that evening." He rarely visits the mall and he no longer goes downtown on Friday and Saturday nights. Instead, he walks in his neighborhood or stays home and synthesizes music on his computer. His mother takes him to and from school; if he has to ride a bus and there's a suspicious-looking man on board, Michael asks, "Manishma?" -- Hebrew for "How are you doing?" If the man answers, he's probably a fellow Jew. Michael still goes out with friends, but "we try to look with seven eyes, what's behind us, what's near us, if everybody is okay, if one is missing. We just try to get along with this though it's hard. Everybody is sticking together in our class, we tried to hold on to each other." One of Michael's friends, Eran, had such a serious brain injury that he only recently has been able to recognize classmates and walk without help. There is still a nail in his head -- the bombs were packed with nails -- and he will need surgery when he gets better. Michael visits Eran several times a week but sees that "he's changed a lot. He was the funniest guy and the happiest guy. Now he laughs less, he smiles less." The attack has brought Michael and his parents closer. He always carries a mobile phone and they call him three or four times a day, even after he has just left the house. It doesn't bother him; "they're doing it out of concern, so it's okay." He, in turn, worries about his parents, especially since their jewelry shop is in the most dangerous area of Jerusalem. "It's the center of their terror activity," he says of Palestinian militants, and "I'm very afraid to hang around there now." Michael will begin his mandatory military service two years from now and after that, he hopes to go to college and law school. He wants to remain in Israel, but he doubts there will ever be peace with the Palestinians. Does he understand how a boy or girl his age could become a suicide bomber? "I can't. It's not human. You take a person who has a full life in front of him and chooses to die, it's unbelievable." -- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com
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