Major Plowing: A terror attack in Jerusalem

Now I’m going to talk about yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem. Everyone is calling it a terrorist attack, including the city police, but the government is calling the killer “a murderer, not a terrorist.”

Anyway, there are about a dozen interns. We all come from roughly the same half of Jerusalem, in Rechavia, Talpiot, or Emek, or actually from the Old City, so most of us take the bus via Yaffo St. past the Machaneh Yehudah shuk (mmm…Marzipan). Most of us got to work driving past there about 30 minutes to an hour before some crazy mother fucker cried allah hu akhbar and decided to knock over a bus full of people, toss a couple of cars, and totally level a bus stop. It looks like it was some kid with K’nex smashed his creation (or Lincoln logs depending on generation, but not legos, it wasn’t that type of design).

At work there was a frenzy. I was on the phone with the municipality about the Olympics thing when she said she’d have to call me back, some crazy hijacked a tractor and is driving like mad….okay.

The Hebrew speakers were sent in taxis to all the hospitals to interview the wounded, so I guess I am grateful that my Hebrew isn’t good enough. At the office we had some video that didn’t make it on the air around the world, of a zoomed in shot of the off-duty soldier (blue shirt) climbing up on the tractor and shooting the driver twice. Saw that a dozen times yesterday….good lord.

By the time I headed to city hall last night around 6 p.m. only a few hours after the attack it was as if nothing happened. Workers were back working in the construction zone for the Jerusalem lite-rail, where the tractor came from. There was no traffic, no broken glass, the bus that was knocked over, as well as the tractor that was used to do it had vanished.

Now I will do the most Israeli thing that I can think of, I will make a joke about yesterday’s attacks. I had a good one that I thought of on the bus to work this morning, but I forgot it, so I will force one. (I type this at work by the way, not working, as one would think is the allotted place to do work, work, that is) What Dane Cook says about when car accidents happen, it really is true. Once people are sure that everything is safe, they are rushing all over the place to tell people what they saw. “I was in my kitchen, I was washing a dish when the tractor started plowing around. Here officer, take this dish, it can be exhibit A. I saw the whole thing,” that type of thing. “Take me down to the police station, I saw the whole thing. I was eating my falafel, and some hummos dropped onto my shoe, and licked my shoe to get it off, and then he started plowing into people with a tractor. I saw the whole thing.”

Israelis are a special breed. Already things are back to normal, while in America, an event would go through a few weeks of tragedy and solemnity, then a few weeks of commercialism (such as 9-11 memorabilia), then a few weeks of acceptance, then finally, people would be able to make jokes about it. Israelis are able to do so in one day. (this is actually what I want to write an op-ed about).