In the inability to trust – Noam Pash, Israel

It’s weird how the events in the political and national sphere can be so different from those of the personal sphere. Now things are so warmed up, with this on-going acceleration of aggravation, that it’s impossible not to see them as contradicting. or are they? I mean – people are so nice. Everybody is perfectly normal, perfectly human. Where I work, we’re working together, doing our job as service providers in a hotel restaurant here in Jerusalem. We are people from all kinds of ethnic, national, religious, cultural and even racial backgrounds. On a more wider scale, however, the people we are supposed to represent are in the middle of a very serious and brutal clash, with tensions growing all the time. Some of the coworkers I really enjoy being with. We joke around and we help each other from time to time in a time of need. in general nothing comes into our minds other than the plainly simple notion that these are, and we are in general, perfectly regular decent humans and the whole reason for us as people to have such a harsh dispute is not only unnecessary but also severely unclear. But then again on the larger scale things are not that beautiful. I watched a video that got a lot of attention in Israel which showed an incident in the market of the old city of Jerusalem when  a woman who got stabbed was walking around screaming for the people around to help her, “my baby, my baby…” but not only did no one came to assist her, in the video you can see someone opening a can of coke drinking in a very convenient and ordinary manner, like nothing of any significance is going on around him. Now the point here is that this is a public domain. It’s a very worn saying throughout major events that occur in this country that you cannot imply an individual’s decisions and actions to the nature or character of the entire collective. But unfortunately this is clearly not the case. This event happened in the public, a very main street, a place where I have walked around trailing Jerusalem or perhaps even where one of my coworkers live. Could Bashar, such a nice person, stand there drinking coke while seeing a stabbed woman yelling for indifferent people around her to help her? Would Ahmed stand there seeing me, someone who has nothing to do with Al Aqsa Mosque, having never been there and with no plans to visit, like the vast aching majority of the people in this country, get stabbed and do nothing to help?