A water shortage . . . a cash-strapped university . . . problems with the health service . . . And then someone blows up a bus full of young people. Helen Motro comments on how terrorism elbows out normal problems for most Israelis
'Used to be that people robbed banks, now it's the banks robbing people," goes the joke making the rounds in Israel. It is a cynical take on multiple embezzlement scandals, one of which, to the tune of $60 million, forced a bank to shut down and leave its customers at the mercy of a government bailout.
Until the bus full of young people blew up last week, on Israeli terms things had been relatively quiet. Violence came in dribs and drabs - a victim or two every few days, giving rise to a solemn pause and a shaking of heads, but nothing to make people drop everything and concentrate on the news.
So, in the absence of blockbuster headlines of mayhem, stories normally pushed off page one began to surface. None of them was good.
An emergency water warning was issued for the umpteenth time. If extraction of water from the Sea of Galilee, Israel's primary aquifer, wasn't curtailed, it would continue to shrink, and sooner rather than later drinking taps would dry up. Still there were no regulations in sight, and society in this semi-arid climate kept squandering water as if it had the lakes of Minnesota at its disposal.
Cable TV subscribers looking forward to watching the World Cup got a rude shock when they learned the cable company would be blocking out live broadcasts of the matches. Real-time viewing would be available only to those paying an extra surcharge. Angry protests were unavailing, and the majority had to content themselves with canned rebroadcasts.
This term, university students were among the 20 per cent of reserve soldiers called up for active duty in the recent military incursions. Deans sent out directives advising extensions and even canceling some academic requirements. Then, just when the reserve students were released, those returning to Tel-Aviv University found the institution almost at a standstill.
Faced with a $120 million deficit, the university attempted to trim its administrative workforce. The union responded with a strike, closing the university's libraries for a month and shutting down its Internet. From undergraduate seminar papers to doctoral dissertations, all research was frozen. Then, only two weeks before the end of term, the strikers intensified their tactics by locking classroom doors.
The students' high school counterparts were hardly more fortunate. Teachers disgruntled at cuts in the education budget held protest work stoppages on the date set for various end-of-year finals.
Meanwhile, the country's third largest health fund was reported near bankruptcy, sending many patients into panic that coverage for their operations and medicine might be cut off. Twenty-two people killed in road collisions and over one thousand injured made the first week of June one of the worst in the country's infamously high traffic-accident records.
And then came the biggest scare of all: the first case of mad cow disease in Israel was conclusively diagnosed in Galilee. As consumers confusedly heard alternating messages of warnings and assurances from authorities, many appetites for meat vanished, and Romania was quick to announce it was halting beef imports from Israel.
By week's end nature delivered its own Pharaoh's plague. A heat wave accompanied by dry winds descended, sending temperatures soaring to over 110 degrees in the interior and 104 on the coast. Fires crackled, ravaging Israel's tiny forests.
People flocked to the beaches to escape the heat, only to find that sitting at the water's edge was impossible. Hordes of biting mosquitoes had invaded along with the heat.
The week's events brought to mind the sardonic observation that in Israel it's impossible to relax.
But these inconveniences were swept aside when people arose on June 8th to gasp at one of the latest terror victims: a 24-year-old expectant mother in her ninth month shot dead at close range.
Many tried to cope by turning their attention to what they could see of the World Cup. Focusing on football allowed them to take their minds off themselves, imagine they lived in a "normal" nation, and entertain the illusion that even in Israel a person could come home from work and find a little relaxation.
Helen Motro is an American lawyer and writer living in Israel and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.