Last night a rocket hit a house in Be’er Sheva, which is the eighth largest city in the country with a population of about 200,000. That got me thinking about security.
When I take the bus to the Technion, it stops at the main gate and a guard gets on and walks to the back of the bus looking around. He (it’s never a woman) then exits through the back door and the bus goes on its way. Some days I miss the #31 and have to take the #28, which drops me off about fifteen minutes from the building. When walking in on foot, I show my campus ID card to the guard and continue my walk. Occasionally they ask to see what’s in your bag, but the ID card is key.
There are a lot of indoor malls where we live in Haifa. In Champaign, these places would be strip malls (horizontal), but here they tend to have two stories and a guard out front. I like the Mega in the City supermarket located in the basement of one of these indoor malls. There are two entrances, each with a guard. The guy at the front entrance takes his job very seriously and never fails to swipe me with his metal detector wand and look into my wheeled shopping cart.
The guy at the back entrance has never checked any of these things and seems to make a determination as you are approaching as to your threat level. The large SuperSol on HaNassi has its own guard at the front entrance who also never seems to stop anyone.
When we go to the children’s museum you pass through a metal detector and the guard asks if you are carrying ammunition. My guess is this is for new soldiers who may be required to carry their rifles with them everywhere. The other thing I noticed is that most school kids have cell phones. I see it when I pick Millie up in the afternoons and she has complained that not only do all the kids her age have phones, the younger kids do too. I’ve been told that the cellphones allow parents to know where their kids are and to check in with them as needed. As Adena noted, the kids here have more freedom and independence than their counterparts in the States. Part of that is due to how walkable things are, but it is also made possible by cellphone communication.
Since we have been here, I have not worried about being caught in a mass shooting. It’s funny to say I feel safer here than at home when rockets land on houses and there are sporadic stabbing attacks (mostly near Jerusalem), but here we are. I’m sure there have been mass shootings and maybe school shootings in the States since we left, but I haven’t heard about them. Maybe things are getting better there or maybe they haven’t and it just doesn’t make the news here.
It also raises the question of whether this is where the U.S. is heading with respect to securing public and private (looking at you SuperSol) spaces. Think of the jobs that could be created if we posted security guards at malls, museums, and schools and if cellphones were on the list of required back-to-school items for elementary school and up.
Keeping It Israel 