BECAUSE MOST VIOLENT crime in Israel is politically motivated, it's usually pretty colorful stuff.
That's one explanation for why every shooting and stabbing in Jerusalem makes headlines here, while on the home front only cases like Dahmer's become news sensations. It doesn't hurt that bloated news staffs in Israel, under pressure to produce copy, tend to hype tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.
News reports of violence in Israel, though, are not outright lies. The intifada exists. Palestinians do throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli targets, stab Israeli soldiers and civilians, and--increasingly--shoot and kill Israeli settlers travelling in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military does respond with arrests and occasionally with beatings and bullets. Israeli settler groups have recently taken to vigilante acts of vandalism against Palestinians.
Since the intifada began in December 1987, 18 Jewish soldiers and civilians have been killed in the territories. During the same period, 1,326 Palestinians have been killed, 708 by Israeli security forces and 618 by fellow Palestinians in what has become known as the "intrafada."
When Palestinian-Israeli violence does occur, however, it is for the most part limited to certain areas--the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem--and to those most intimately connected with the conflict--Israeli soldiers and settlers and the Palestinian youths who engage in most of the violence of the intifada. If you're not in one of these high-risk groups, life is relatively normal.
AS A COLLEGE STUDENT interested in the politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I went out of my way to visit both Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugee camps in the territories.
It wasn't the safest thing to do, and I didn't feel 100 percent secure in either place. But I don't feel completely safe all the time in America. The Crown Heights murder of a Hasidic Jewish student last summer and the assassination of Meir Kahane in 1990 serve as reminders that anti-Jewish crime exists in this country--as it does in Israel and throughout the world.
For Israelis, the leading cause of death is traffic accidents--not terrorist bombings or even war. Outside the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, violent crime is so rare that when a murder occurs it makes top headlines in Israel's nationally circulated papers.
For Israelis to have equalled Washington, D.C.'s murder rate in 1990, they would have had to kill over 3000 of their fellow citizens that year. In 1988, the last year for which figures are available, they managed only 58 murders.
Crime against women in Israel is a more troubling problem. Israeli women avoid walking the streets at night alone. But from what my female friends tell me, Harvard women don't like to cross the Common after dark by themselves.
The bottom line: daily life in Jerusalem, as in most parts of Israel, is not dominated by violence--politically motivated or otherwise. So I really don't consider it a miracle at all that I "survived" Jerusalem. I never thought I would need divine intervention.
But as for travelling in Milwaukee, Cambridge, New Haven or New York, I just might.
Kenneth A. Katz '93 studied last semester at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.