Tel Aviv Diary - January 15-19, 2015 - Karen Alkalay-Gut


January 21, 2015

So we're back to where I started this diary in the first place. To tell my friends that this time I wasn't one of the injured in the latest terrorist attack.

I could have been. It's all a matter of chance - some guy with a knife gets on the bus and goes for the driver then as many passengers as he can slice. The driver peppers him, a kid throws his schoolbag at him, a woman calls the magen david, but in the meantime the assassin is stopped only by passersby who happen to be armed.

Most of the citizens are not armed in this country, but since so far every recent attack has been contained by people with weapons, it is feared that this may be the only way.

So up north there was a lockdown for a few hours in fear of infiltration and now everyone is talking about tunnels from Lebanon. What an amazing thought. How many years have I been posting photographs?

January 23, 2015

published this today:

The Bridge at Raqqa - 1942

The book is about Arpad Gut's bridge over the Euphrates river. We actually check on Google Earth periodically to see if the bridge has been blown up.

"Don't come up to visit right now," my friend in Metulla said, "Too much going on around here." Right. I was in the market today - teeming with people - and could barely think for a moment about the possibility of some kind of terrorist attack. Got a great bracelet for my granddaughter for 10 shekel. Examined every earring on sale. Very exciting.

January 24, 2015

A birthday present to a granddaughter - the science museum in Haifa. If I hadn't been in places like this a thousand times with a thousand children I might have enjoyed this more, because it really parses out many of the laws of physics beautifully, and in 3 languages. I'm just an old fogie with a bad back who remembers the old building of the Technion when it was a monument to learning. Yes, it was a perfect day for a day trip, but I had beheadings on my mind, and devious strategies with the congress that might work despite their transparent manipulations, and iranian generals who didn't turn off their cellphones and got blown up. And the elections, the elections.

You know I didn't manage to get a single Israeli citizen living abroad to decide to vote in the next elections. They all said they don't have a right to interfere with our going to hell in a handbasket.

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