A cool, objective look at the Dubai scandal

February 21st 2010

Today I took the bus from Jaffa Road to the Central Bus Station.

I haven't taken a bus in a long time, but Aryeh needed the car.

Yes. Aryeh and I live, operate and work in the world with one car. As do most of our friends. The great thing about having one car is that you develop fantastic powers of negotiation. For the past 5 years, since my son Yonatan got his license, the 3 of us have sat around the dining room table at night negotiating over Who Gets The Car. We each have to say: "I need the car the because..."

Anyway, here I am boarding the number 20 bus on the Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem. It's very crowded and I struggle to get to the back where I can hang on to a yellow pole and sway back and forth in unison with all the other passengers. Out of habit, I scan the face, body language and clothing of every single person standing or sitting in my vicinity. Why? Because that's what I learned to do for four years during the Intifada of 2000-2004, when I was commuting back and forth to film school, and was afraid of getting blown up on the bus every day.

I was very, very lucky not to get blown up, but other people were not so lucky. A lot of young people got blown up, and a lot of old people got blown up, because they use the buses the most. Lots of school children got blown up, because that's who the buses are packed with at rush hour every morning. One schoolgirl was on her way to a swimming competition, because she was a swimming champion. After the bomb, they were only able to identify the body by analyzing the shreds of fabric from her swimsuit.

In those days I would get on the 20 or the 6 or the 21 outside Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and I would try and work out which seat would be least likely to get me killed. I couldn't sit at the front because some bombers would panic as soon as they boarded and detonate right away. I couldn't go to the middle of the bus because so many bombers would the choose the middle as the place to detonate, causing maximum damage to the front and back of the bus.

At night on the news, there would always be footage of the latest blown up bus to look at. I would try and calculate from the wreckage, which seats had been the safest and which had been the deadliest, on that bus.

Usually I would make my way to the back of the bus, figuring that most bombers would lose their cool and detonate before reaching the back. And I would always scrutinize my fellow passengers very, very carefully, at the same time, of course, that they were scrutinizing me. If I saw any dark skinned young man travelling alone with a backpack, I'd get off the bus and just walk the rest of the way. And that would happen say, five times a week.

Today I scanned all the faces on the bus and I felt relatively safe.

Because we got them.
The bomb-makers and the masterminds and the organizers and all the eighteen-year-olds who couldn't wait to get recruited. We got them all, pretty well. We took them on, and we dismantled their networks,we smashed their bomb factories, we listened to their phone calls and blocked their bank accounts, and when any of their top brass forgot to be vigilant, we assassinated the hell out of them.

As well as doing all of this, there was the small and simple matter of involving our children in this fight. All our little boys, the ones who had been playing with meccano and lego and playmobile on the living room floor. The ones who loved reading Tintin and Asterix or the Israeli equivalent, and who gobbled their Frosties for breakfast every morning before getting the bus to school. All our beautiful boys - the ones who were on Ritalin and the ones who weren't, the ones who loved football and the ones who were too nerdy for sports. The ones who wore kipppot and tzitzit and the ones who didn't. We waited till they turned eighteen and then we put them in uniform and trained them to use weapons and taught them to speak Arabic, and they went into every one of those viper's nest towns like Jenin and Ramallah and Nablus, usually during the night, and they arrested every single person hiding a weapon or in possession of explosives. When Jewish kids outside of Israel were at university studying law or medicine or engineering, our children were in those towns. Every night.

As for the big shots, the cowards who were recruiting teens to do their terrorist work for them but who didn't get their hands dirty themselves, the ones who travelled around Jordan and Syria and Egypt and who hid in safe houses and got themselves new identities - we got them too. In Gaza and in Tulkarm and possibly even in Dubai. They will never, ever be safe from us, and we will get every last one of them.

We don't know for sure if Mahmoud Mabhouh was assassinated by Israel, but as an Israeli I sure as hell hope so. He was a key player in smuggling weapons into Gaza from Iran. Weapons to fire on our civilian populations. Special long range rockets for hitting Tel Aviv. Guns and mortars for terror attacks.

So if any of you are feeling outraged about the Dubai assassination, go ahead, you're entitled.

You probably weren't using the buses here between 2000 and 2004.