Southfield, Mich. (Jewish Renaissance Media) — Israel knows what it is like to live with both the reality and the threat of terror. So it’s not surprising that its press has paid a lot of attention to the sniper who has shot 14 people at random in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and to the bombing that killed 180 people at a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia.
What is surprising — and sad — is how little effort either Washingtonians or Australians seem to be making to understand that the terror is the same whether it is there or in Israel.
Obviously, there are major differences between a lone sniper who randomly attacks individuals at gas stations and mall restaurants and the organized gunmen directing fire at settlers on the West Bank.
The Washington sniper is a madman whose purpose is obscure. The Palestinian attackers, politically driven and professionally trained, want to drive out the settlers and, later, destroy all of Israel.
But the Balinese bombers seem to be Islamic militants who want the Indonesian civilian government overthrown and who are willing to organize mass murder for political gain — exactly like the agents of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, who over the last two years have sent homicide bombers to murder innocent Israelis in pizza parlors and hotels.
The Kuta bomber in Bali is indistinguishable from the Dolphinarium Disco bomber in Israel — and not much different from the terrorist who ignited his liquefied natural gas truck to blow up a synagogue and 21 German and French tourists on the Tunisian island of Djerba.
Yet a review of Australian media shows discussion of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center but almost no effort to draw any parallels with the more than 14,000 attacks that over the last two years have taken 635 Israeli lives — 13 of them just this week in the suicide bombing of a Hadera bus.
In a worrisome fact, some Australian officials even said the attack in Bali was a symbol that Australia had allied itself too closely with the United States, particularly in regard to its support of Israel.
Australia, the officials said, should distance itself from what is perceived as American military and economic hegemony and identify more closely with the continent’s nearest neighbors, like Indonesia and Malaysia.
That, of course, is just plain stupid. What the recent years of terror have proved conclusively is that the terrorists are never going to be content with anything except total victory, which they interpret as world-wide Islamic rule under sharia (Muslim religious law), hardly what the people in the vital democracy of Australia would want.
The public discussion of the Washington-area sniper has focused on the search for the killer and on his impact on local citizens — how schools have shut down, how gas stations have put up screens to protect motorists and, most of all, how fear has eroded daily life.
That fear is exactly what prompts Israelis to wear bulletproof vests on certain highways and to sleep at night with a gun by their beds.
But Washingtonians seem not interested in the parallels. They treat their situation as uniquely horrifying when it is, in truth, the ordinary agony for much of the Jewish state.
Somehow, Israel has lost its rightful claim for world understanding of its existential peril.
Perhaps that is because the Palestinian suffering — kids killed as a side effect of rocket attacks, the elderly thrown out of bulldozed housing — is so often documented by a news media that ignores the Palestinian violence that triggered actions intended to thwart additional terror.
Or perhaps it is some larger world feeling about Jews in general now that memories of the Holocaust are fading.
In any event, Israelis can grieve as much as they want over the Bali victims or the innocents slain around Washington.
But they are kidding themselves if they expect the Aussies and the Americans to say now, “We know how you feel.” That isn’t happening and, shamefully, isn’t going to.
Jonathan Friendly is contributing editor at Jewish Renaissance Media. appeared in The Cipher student newspaper and is reprinted by permission.
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