Excellent idea about the second, solidarity is vital and my first thought on hearing about the bombings was, "oh hell, there'll be attacks on Muslims again," but I disagree about the first.
In the summer of 1993 I was fifteen and spending a month in Israel. I went to a music summer school right up north in Galilee, near Kiryat Shmona, very close to the border of Lebanon, where I had great fun doing lots of music and even more flirting. Ten days or so in, Lebanon started firing katyusha rockets at Israel, at which point I got to know the inside of an Israeli bomb shelter. (To anyone whoh remembers this, the UK news totally buggered up reporting as ever: yes, Lebanon fired first.)
So we sat in the bomb shelter for a few hours that morning, during which my mad Chilean-Israeli composition teacher yelled at us for not having finished our compositions ("Well, Shidlovski, we've been sitting in a bomb shelter all morning and I didn't have a chance to get to my room..." "So?") and called everyone monster as per usual, then the afternoon was classes and such as usual. That evening, the camp leaders said it was up to us whether we wanted to sleep in the shelters or not, and we all drifted into our little groups to argue about this. One guy of fourteen, who was always the star of the midnight political discussions about socialism, argued very persuasively that we shouldn't give in to fear and intimidation. So a number of us, probably the majority, slept in our rooms. Somewhere around six in the morning we were woken up by explosions and dived into those shelters within a minute, where we sat around shivering for a few hours before being evacuated (I sat more or less under a harp in the car all the way back to Jerusalem). Saying "I refuse not to use public transport because I won't be intimidated" when it's high-risk (which I wouldn't consider London, but in Israel this situation arises all the time) doesn't do anything against terrorism, but it can get you killed. And most people I know in Israel have narrowly avoided death by bomb attack, and some have lost friends or family in the attacks.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: And
Date: 2005-07-28 12:27 pm (UTC)In the summer of 1993 I was fifteen and spending a month in Israel. I went to a music summer school right up north in Galilee, near Kiryat Shmona, very close to the border of Lebanon, where I had great fun doing lots of music and even more flirting. Ten days or so in, Lebanon started firing katyusha rockets at Israel, at which point I got to know the inside of an Israeli bomb shelter. (To anyone whoh remembers this, the UK news totally buggered up reporting as ever: yes, Lebanon fired first.)
So we sat in the bomb shelter for a few hours that morning, during which my mad Chilean-Israeli composition teacher yelled at us for not having finished our compositions ("Well, Shidlovski, we've been sitting in a bomb shelter all morning and I didn't have a chance to get to my room..." "So?") and called everyone monster as per usual, then the afternoon was classes and such as usual. That evening, the camp leaders said it was up to us whether we wanted to sleep in the shelters or not, and we all drifted into our little groups to argue about this. One guy of fourteen, who was always the star of the midnight political discussions about socialism, argued very persuasively that we shouldn't give in to fear and intimidation. So a number of us, probably the majority, slept in our rooms. Somewhere around six in the morning we were woken up by explosions and dived into those shelters within a minute, where we sat around shivering for a few hours before being evacuated (I sat more or less under a harp in the car all the way back to Jerusalem). Saying "I refuse not to use public transport because I won't be intimidated" when it's high-risk (which I wouldn't consider London, but in Israel this situation arises all the time) doesn't do anything against terrorism, but it can get you killed. And most people I know in Israel have narrowly avoided death by bomb attack, and some have lost friends or family in the attacks.