As terrorist attacks become more
common, public tolerance for liberal pieties will wane.
By BRET STEPHENS
Long after I returned to the U.S. after living in
Jerusalem I kept thinking about soft targets. The peak-hour commuter train that
took me from Westchester to Grand Central. The snaking queue outside the
security checkpoint at La Guardia Airport. The theater crowds near Times
Square.
All of
these places were vulnerable and most of them undefended. Why, I wondered,
weren’t they being attacked?
This was
in late 2004, when Jack
Bauer was
an American hero and memories of 9/11 were vivid. Yet friends who were nervous
about boarding a flight seemed nonchalant about much more plausible threats.
Maybe they expected the next attack would be on the same grand scale of 9/11.
Maybe they thought the perpetrators would be supervillains in the mold of Osama
bin Laden, not
fried-chicken vendors like Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the
suspected 23rd Street bomber.
Life in
Israel had taught me differently. Between January 2002, when I moved to the
country, and October 2004, when I left, there were 85 suicide bombings, which
took the lives of 543 Israelis. Palestinian gun attacks claimed hundreds of
additional victims. In a small country it meant that most everyone knew one of
those victims, or knew someone who knew someone.
To this
day the bombings are landmarks in my life. March 2002: Cafe Moment, just down
the street from my apartment, where my future wife had arranged to meet a
friend who canceled at the last minute. Eleven dead. September 2003: Cafe
Hillel, another neighborhood hangout, where seven people were murdered,
including 20-year-oldNava Applebaum and her father, David, on the eve of
her wedding. January 2004: Bus No. 19 on Gaza Street, which I witnessed close-up before the ambulances
arrived. Another 11 dead and 13 seriously injured, including Jerusalem Post
reporter Erik Schechter.
Living in those circumstances had a strange dichotomous
quality. Things were absolutely fine until they absolutely weren’t. Memories of
bombings mix with other memories: jogs around the walls of the old city,
weekend outings to the beach, the daily grind of editing a newspaper. The sense
of normality was achieved through an effort of will and a touch of fatalism.
Past a certain point, fearing for your own safety becomes exhausting. You give
it up.
But it
wasn’t just psychological adjustment that made life livable. Israelis recoiled
after each bombing, mourned every victim, then picked themselves up. Cafe
Moment reopened weeks after it was destroyed. The army and police could not
provide constant security, so every restaurant and supermarket hired an armed guard,
every mall and hotel set up metal detectors, and people went out. More than a
few attacks were stopped by lone Israeli civilians who prevented massacres
through the expedient of a handgun.
As for
the Israeli government, after much hesitation it did what governments are
supposed to do: It fought. In April 2002 then-Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon sent
Israeli tanks into Jenin, Bethlehem and every other nest of Palestinian terror.
He trapped Yasser
Arafat in
his little palace in Ramallah. He ordered the killing of Hamas’s leaders in
Gaza.
All this was done in the teeth of overwhelming
international condemnation and the tut-tutting of experts who insisted only a
“political solution” could break the “cycle of violence.” Instead, the Israeli
military broke that cycle by building a wall and crippling the Palestinians’
capacity to perpetrate violence. In 2002 there were 47 bombings. In 2007 the
number had come down to one.
What’s
the lesson here for Americans? This past weekend’s terrorist attacks hold at
least two. One is that there is a benefit for a society that allows competent
and responsible adults to carry guns, like the off-duty police officer who shot
the knife-wielding jihadist in St. Cloud, Minn. Another is that there is an
equal benefit in the surveillance methods that allowed police in New York and
New Jersey to swiftly identify and arrest Mr. Rahimi before his bombing spree
took any lives.
These are
lessons the political left in this country doesn’t want to hear, lest they
unsettle established convictions that weapons can only cause violence, not stop
it, and that security is the antithesis of, not a precondition to, civil
liberty.
But hear
them they will. The eclipse of al Qaeda by Islamic State means the terrorist
threat is evolving from elaborately planned spectaculars such as 9/11 or the
2004 Madrid train bombings to hastily improvised and executed blood orgies of
the sort we saw this year in Nice and Orlando. As attacks become more frequent
and closer to everyday life, public tolerance for liberal pieties will wane.
Not least among the casualties of the Palestinian intifada was the Israeli
left.
Living in
Israel in those crowded years taught me that free people aren’t so easily cowed
by terror, and that jihadists are no match for a determined democracy. But it
also taught me that democracies rarely muster their full reserves of
determination until they’ve been bloodied one time too many.
