Close Call in Jerusalem

It was the loudest sound I had ever heard. Just five minutes earlier, I stood in that cafeteria deciding whether to eat a hot, sit-down meal, or take a sandwich out into the brutally hot but quiet courtyard.
Having chosen the courtyard, I sat shaken but unharmed in the shade of a nearby building, the bomb's blast echoing across the Judean hills as the screams began. This was Hebrew University, Jerusalem, July 31, 2002. Seven people died, including five Americans, and over 80 were wounded at Israel's oldest university as a bomb hidden in a backpack was set off by remote control in the middle of the lunchtime crowd.
Minutes later, as I offered water to a bloodied and dazed young woman who had been brought to my bench, I knew I was being given a chance to understand what it is like to be an Israeli today.
Days later, as I stood in line to board El Al Flight 6 for New York with Gary, who had lost not one, but two close friends in that attack (friends he had ridden to school with each day in a taxi, honoring a parent's request that they not use the buses), I knew as never before the cost Israelis incur in their quest for a home that is simply safe.
I am not Jewish. I went to Israel to join an ulpan, a super-intense Hebrew course at Hebrew University, in preparation for further graduate work in international education. And while my ancestors survived the great Irish potato famine, I knew little about living under the constant threat of violent attack.
For my first four weeks in Jerusalem, I lived in a guesthouse on King George V Street, one block from both Jaffa Road and Ben Yehuda Street, thoroughfares hit frequently in the recent wave of attacks.
Each morning, while waiting for the No. 9 or 19 bus that would take me to campus, I had learned to be watchful, to avoid the crowds. I had learned, too, to watch my imagination, not to let my mind dwell on the reason for the bright new awning shading the café where I bought my morning coffee, or the shiny new sign at Sbarro down the street.
Such was a morning commute in Israel, a daily battle in the mind, an insistence on normalcy and calm in an atmosphere that could explode at any moment. Five weeks was my portion--but there are many who live with this every day.
Take Rahel for instance. A 75-year-old widow, she has lived in Jerusalem all her life. I moved to a nearby apartment on Jaffa Road for my last week in Israel. As I climbed the stairs to my third floor flat on that first day, Rahel's door opened.
"Have you been to the shuk?" she asked. (A shuk is an open-air market.) I had not. So, off we went as she chatted away, like my grandmother, telling me about her childhood in Jerusalem, her son the doctor, and the location of the various bombings that had taken place in the market.
Later, on the afternoon of the attack, I stopped by her apartment to tell her what had happened. As we sat in her living room watching the television she showed me the corner where she and her children had slept on mattresses beneath sandbag-filled windows during the struggle for Jerusalem in 1948. Each stone of this city, she said, was bought with the blood of some young Jewish boy.
Like Mike, our cocky young soldier-guide at Masada, she wasn't angry. She was simply determined; quietly, calmly determined to go on living. Where else could they go? "Masada will never fall again," Mike had us yell from the cliffs of the ancient desert fortress where a band of Jews once held at bay legions of Roman soldiers, a refrain echoed by succeeding generations of Israeli soldiers.
This is my home, Rahel was telling me. "We love our land and liberty as much as you do yours."
I remember the request that the university dean had made to the international students the day after the attack. "Tell your countries that we are a humane people," he had pleaded. "Tell them that we are a decent people." They were, and they are--Gary, Mike, Rahel and many, many others.
Mourning the dead, they press on, fighting if they must, but hoping, always hoping, for the day when they will know peace.
Among the Palestinians, caught in the cross-fire, some nurture a similar yearning.The author is a student at Teachers College.