Archives>MIDDLE EAST> Numbness Sets In as Horror, and Its Aftermath, Become Routine

Numbness Sets In as Horror, and Its Aftermath, Become Routine IHT/Washington Post . 07 february 2002 JERUSALEM Chaim Weingarten wears his emergency response center clipped to his waist - two cell phones, a walkie-talkie and a beeper. When a suicide bomber attacks in the heart of Jerusalem, Mr. Weingarten knows about it as soon as the ambulance drivers do. Often, he arrives on the scene even faster. . Once he gets there, Mr. Weingarten, a trained volunteer for a highly specialized religious group known as ZAKA, sees to it that body parts, down to the last bits of flesh, are recovered so the victims can be accorded a proper Jewish burial. . It is a grisly job. But after more than 30 suicide attacks in the last 16 months, Mr. Weingarten and 600 other volunteers from ZAKA are fixtures in the response to terrorist assaults here and a staple of the evening news. . They are part of a disaster-relief drill that has become so highly organized, so well-oiled and so routine that many Israelis fear the country has become nearly numb to the horror in its midst. ZAKA is the Hebrew acronym for Identification of Victims of Disaster. . "Every terror attack we come to is an individual trauma. You can't get used to a child without a leg or an arm, or a head found on the second floor," said Mr. Weingarten, 31, a slight, serious man who owns a grocery store. "But human nature is - the first time something awful happens, you talk about it for a few weeks or a month. The next time," he shrugged, "you talk less. It becomes routine. And everyone has to decide how to deal with this new routine." . Nearly all of those involved in responding to such attacks - the volunteers who collect body parts, the police, hospital emergency staffs and social workers who comfort relatives - say they have developed well-established procedures for dealing with them. . And after so much bloodshed, the Israeli public seems to regard the carnage as terrible, but also run-of-the-mill. . "We hope to return life to its normal routine in another hour or so," Yossi Setbon, the Tel Aviv police chief, said less than an hour after a suicide bomber blew himself to pieces on a packed pedestrian mall last month. Out of despair and desperation, some people are also starting to tune out. Surveys have shown that fewer and fewer Israelis pay attention to television and radio news reports, a sharp shift for a famously news-obsessed country. . The Israeli media are reacting accordingly. After the suicide bombing on the Tel Aviv mall, one of the country's two main television stations returned to its regular programming, Israel's version of "Sesame Street" children's show, after barely half an hour of news broadcasts. The other main channel did the same about 20 minutes later. . A week ago, Nahum Barnea, the premier Israeli newspaper columnist, rushed to the scene of a suicide bombing on Jerusalem's bustling main street just minutes after the explosion. With a mixture of awe and pity, he described the rapid arrival of police, ambulances, medics and volunteers. . "Everything is fast, so businesslike, so well executed, that it seems for a moment that it was all a show prepared in advance," he wrote in the best-selling newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth. "A few dozen meters away life went on supposedly as usual. People sat in cafés. Bought books. Sat in their offices. That is an optical illusion. Concealed beneath this energetic routine lies deep despair." . Underlying the despair is a strong sense among Israelis that there is no way out of the fighting that has convulsed this place for 16 months, costing more than 1,000 lives, three-quarters of them Palestinian. . The numbing routine of violence, and its pervasiveness, have convinced some Israelis that nowhere is safe. Last month, Israelis began moving into Har Homa, a new hilltop neighborhood in East Jerusalem built on land captured from the Arabs in 1967. As the buildings were being constructed last year, Har Homa was shot at from time to time. But asked if they feel at risk, the new residents just shrug. . "Listen, the Arabs are every place, their snipers can shoot right here or anywhere else," said Sassi Sadeh, 28, a maintenance man who moved to Har Homa. "So what's the difference where we live? I don't think we should leave Jerusalem." . But for other Israelis, perhaps most, the country is not so much besieged as in a deep rut. . In an opinion poll published Friday in the newspaper Ma'ariv, just 29 percent of Israelis said they believed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a plan to extricate the country from the spiral of violence. . Twice as many respondents, 58 percent, said the prime minister was simply reacting to events. And by a ratio of more than 3 to 1, Israelis said they believed the terrorist attacks would continue in the coming year. . "These days if it's less than 15 or 20 people killed in a terrorist attack‚ people say, 'Well, it's a shame but there's nothing to do,'" said Galia Golan, a veteran peace campaigner. "There has been a routinization, a resignation among the public, that we'll go on having shootings and bombings and nothing is going to change. It's led to an internal withdrawal. People don't listen to the radio or read the papers because nothing is going to change." . No class or income bracket is immune. In Tel Aviv's Square of the Nation, where smartly dressed Israelis window-shop on sidewalks lined with brand-name stores, business is down by 50 percent and the windows are plastered with banners advertising steep discounts. . Much of the downturn is a product of Israel's weak economy and the collapse of tourism, but shop owners say the slump is also tied to a society-wide depression. Customers are around, but even the rich ones are in no mood to buy, they say. . "Because of the situation, the mood is down," said Amnon Deri, whose brother owns a store that sells expensive men's clothing. "We need two or three days to forget what happened in the suicide bombing‚ last week. Then people will go out again - until the next bomb. What else can you do but forget?" AT ZAKA, the religious emergency response group, planning is based on the assumption of continued sudden death and urban carnage. The group, which responds to accidents, murders and suicides as well as terrorist attacks, is organized like a small company: six divisions across Israel with headquarters in the far south, the West Bank, the Tel Aviv area, Jerusalem, the northern coast and the southern coast. . ZAKA has motor scooters for volunteers to thread their way through traffic, training courses for new volunteers, refresher courses for veterans, debriefing sessions to examine performance after each terrorist attack, even fund-raising drives in Israel and the United States. . "We're very organized," Mr. Weingarten said. . The group got its start in 1995, as Palestinian attacks were on the upswing in Israel. Its Jerusalem headquarters is in a bomb shelter. . At the scene of suicide bombings, the volunteers, clad in yellow and black vests, fan out with crisp efficiency, dividing into squads that work the sidewalk, the victims, the shopkeepers, even the bomber. . The organization keeps a photo album documenting its work, which it shows to new volunteers so they know what to expect. Page after page of violent images attest to a ghastly mission. . Lately, ZAKA has found it more difficult to recruit and retain volunteers; those it does attract tend to quit more quickly. . Yehuda Zahav, the rabbi who founded and heads ZAKA, said the difficulties in finding volunteers reflect a general turning inward among Israelis. "The problem is a psychological problem. It gets harder and harder to maintain our mental stability," said Mr. Zahav, who is 42. . "At first the issue was, who will rescue the rescuer? Now the problem is the dulling of the senses. The problem is that as long as it doesn't affect you personally, it's easy to watch it at 9 or 10 o'clock on TV and say, 'Oh, that's too bad.'" JERUSALEM Chaim Weingarten wears his emergency response center clipped to his waist - two cell phones, a walkie-talkie and a beeper. When a suicide bomber attacks in the heart of Jerusalem, Mr. Weingarten knows about it as soon as the ambulance drivers do. Often, he arrives on the scene even faster. . Once he gets there, Mr. Weingarten, a trained volunteer for a highly specialized religious group known as ZAKA, sees to it that body parts, down to the last bits of flesh, are recovered so the victims can be accorded a proper Jewish burial. . It is a grisly job. But after more than 30 suicide attacks in the last 16 months, Mr. Weingarten and 600 other volunteers from ZAKA are fixtures in the response to terrorist assaults here and a staple of the evening news. . They are part of a disaster-relief drill that has become so highly organized, so well-oiled and so routine that many Israelis fear the country has become nearly numb to the horror in its midst. ZAKA is the Hebrew acronym for Identification of Victims of Disaster. . "Every terror attack we come to is an individual trauma. You can't get used to a child without a leg or an arm, or a head found on the second floor," said Mr. Weingarten, 31, a slight, serious man who owns a grocery store. "But human nature is - the first time something awful happens, you talk about it for a few weeks or a month. The next time," he shrugged, "you talk less. It becomes routine. And everyone has to decide how to deal with this new routine." . Nearly all of those involved in responding to such attacks - the volunteers who collect body parts, the police, hospital emergency staffs and social workers who comfort relatives - say they have developed well-established procedures for dealing with them. . And after so much bloodshed, the Israeli public seems to regard the carnage as terrible, but also run-of-the-mill. . "We hope to return life to its normal routine in another hour or so," Yossi Setbon, the Tel Aviv police chief, said less than an hour after a suicide bomber blew himself to pieces on a packed pedestrian mall last month. Out of despair and desperation, some people are also starting to tune out. Surveys have shown that fewer and fewer Israelis pay attention to television and radio news reports, a sharp shift for a famously news-obsessed country. . The Israeli media are reacting accordingly. After the suicide bombing on the Tel Aviv mall, one of the country's two main television stations returned to its regular programming, Israel's version of "Sesame Street" children's show, after barely half an hour of news broadcasts. The other main channel did the same about 20 minutes later. . A week ago, Nahum Barnea, the premier Israeli newspaper columnist, rushed to the scene of a suicide bombing on Jerusalem's bustling main street just minutes after the explosion. With a mixture of awe and pity, he described the rapid arrival of police, ambulances, medics and volunteers. . "Everything is fast, so businesslike, so well executed, that it seems for a moment that it was all a show prepared in advance," he wrote in the best-selling newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth. "A few dozen meters away life went on supposedly as usual. People sat in cafés. Bought books. Sat in their offices. That is an optical illusion. Concealed beneath this energetic routine lies deep despair." . Underlying the despair is a strong sense among Israelis that there is no way out of the fighting that has convulsed this place for 16 months, costing more than 1,000 lives, three-quarters of them Palestinian. . The numbing routine of violence, and its pervasiveness, have convinced some Israelis that nowhere is safe. Last month, Israelis began moving into Har Homa, a new hilltop neighborhood in East Jerusalem built on land captured from the Arabs in 1967. As the buildings were being constructed last year, Har Homa was shot at from time to time. But asked if they feel at risk, the new residents just shrug. . "Listen, the Arabs are every place, their snipers can shoot right here or anywhere else," said Sassi Sadeh, 28, a maintenance man who moved to Har Homa. "So what's the difference where we live? I don't think we should leave Jerusalem." . But for other Israelis, perhaps most, the country is not so much besieged as in a deep rut. . In an opinion poll published Friday in the newspaper Ma'ariv, just 29 percent of Israelis said they believed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a plan to extricate the country from the spiral of violence. . Twice as many respondents, 58 percent, said the prime minister was simply reacting to events. And by a ratio of more than 3 to 1, Israelis said they believed the terrorist attacks would continue in the coming year. . "These days if it's less than 15 or 20 people killed in a terrorist attack‚ people say, 'Well, it's a shame but there's nothing to do,'" said Galia Golan, a veteran peace campaigner. "There has been a routinization, a resignation among the public, that we'll go on having shootings and bombings and nothing is going to change. It's led to an internal withdrawal. People don't listen to the radio or read the papers because nothing is going to change." . No class or income bracket is immune. In Tel Aviv's Square of the Nation, where smartly dressed Israelis window-shop on sidewalks lined with brand-name stores, business is down by 50 percent and the windows are plastered with banners advertising steep discounts. . Much of the downturn is a product of Israel's weak economy and the collapse of tourism, but shop owners say the slump is also tied to a society-wide depression. Customers are around, but even the rich ones are in no mood to buy, they say. . "Because of the situation, the mood is down," said Amnon Deri, whose brother owns a store that sells expensive men's clothing. "We need two or three days to forget what happened in the suicide bombing‚ last week. Then people will go out again - until the next bomb. What else can you do but forget?" AT ZAKA, the religious emergency response group, planning is based on the assumption of continued sudden death and urban carnage. The group, which responds to accidents, murders and suicides as well as terrorist attacks, is organized like a small company: six divisions across Israel with headquarters in the far south, the West Bank, the Tel Aviv area, Jerusalem, the northern coast and the southern coast. . ZAKA has motor scooters for volunteers to thread their way through traffic, training courses for new volunteers, refresher courses for veterans, debriefing sessions to examine performance after each terrorist attack, even fund-raising drives in Israel and the United States. . "We're very organized," Mr. Weingarten said. . The group got its start in 1995, as Palestinian attacks were on the upswing in Israel. Its Jerusalem headquarters is in a bomb shelter. . At the scene of suicide bombings, the volunteers, clad in yellow and black vests, fan out with crisp efficiency, dividing into squads that work the sidewalk, the victims, the shopkeepers, even the bomber. . The organization keeps a photo album documenting its work, which it shows to new volunteers so they know what to expect. Page after page of violent images attest to a ghastly mission. . Lately, ZAKA has found it more difficult to recruit and retain volunteers; those it does attract tend to quit more quickly. . Yehuda Zahav, the rabbi who founded and heads ZAKA, said the difficulties in finding volunteers reflect a general turning inward among Israelis. "The problem is a psychological problem. It gets harder and harder to maintain our mental stability," said Mr. Zahav, who is 42. . "At first the issue was, who will rescue the rescuer? Now the problem is the dulling of the senses. The problem is that as long as it doesn't affect you personally, it's easy to watch it at 9 or 10 o'clock on TV and say, 'Oh, that's too bad.'" JERUSALEM Chaim Weingarten wears his emergency response center clipped to his waist - two cell phones, a walkie-talkie and a beeper. When a suicide bomber attacks in the heart of Jerusalem, Mr. Weingarten knows about it as soon as the ambulance drivers do. Often, he arrives on the scene even faster. . Once he gets there, Mr. Weingarten, a trained volunteer for a highly specialized religious group known as ZAKA, sees to it that body parts, down to the last bits of flesh, are recovered so the victims can be accorded a proper Jewish burial. . It is a grisly job. But after more than 30 suicide attacks in the last 16 months, Mr. Weingarten and 600 other volunteers from ZAKA are fixtures in the response to terrorist assaults here and a staple of the evening news. . They are part of a disaster-relief drill that has become so highly organized, so well-oiled and so routine that many Israelis fear the country has become nearly numb to the horror in its midst. ZAKA is the Hebrew acronym for Identification of Victims of Disaster. . "Every terror attack we come to is an individual trauma. You can't get used to a child without a leg or an arm, or a head found on the second floor," said Mr. Weingarten, 31, a slight, serious man who owns a grocery store. "But human nature is - the first time something awful happens, you talk about it for a few weeks or a month. The next time," he shrugged, "you talk less. It becomes routine. And everyone has to decide how to deal with this new routine." . Nearly all of those involved in responding to such attacks - the volunteers who collect body parts, the police, hospital emergency staffs and social workers who comfort relatives - say they have developed well-established procedures for dealing with them. . And after so much bloodshed, the Israeli public seems to regard the carnage as terrible, but also run-of-the-mill. . "We hope to return life to its normal routine in another hour or so," Yossi Setbon, the Tel Aviv police chief, said less than an hour after a suicide bomber blew himself to pieces on a packed pedestrian mall last month. Out of despair and desperation, some people are also starting to tune out. Surveys have shown that fewer and fewer Israelis pay attention to television and radio news reports, a sharp shift for a famously news-obsessed country. . The Israeli media are reacting accordingly. After the suicide bombing on the Tel Aviv mall, one of the country's two main television stations returned to its regular programming, Israel's version of "Sesame Street" children's show, after barely half an hour of news broadcasts. The other main channel did the same about 20 minutes later. . A week ago, Nahum Barnea, the premier Israeli newspaper columnist, rushed to the scene of a suicide bombing on Jerusalem's bustling main street just minutes after the explosion. With a mixture of awe and pity, he described the rapid arrival of police, ambulances, medics and volunteers. . "Everything is fast, so businesslike, so well executed, that it seems for a moment that it was all a show prepared in advance," he wrote in the best-selling newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth. "A few dozen meters away life went on supposedly as usual. People sat in cafés. Bought books. Sat in their offices. That is an optical illusion. Concealed beneath this energetic routine lies deep despair." . Underlying the despair is a strong sense among Israelis that there is no way out of the fighting that has convulsed this place for 16 months, costing more than 1,000 lives, three-quarters of them Palestinian. . The numbing routine of violence, and its pervasiveness, have convinced some Israelis that nowhere is safe. Last month, Israelis began moving into Har Homa, a new hilltop neighborhood in East Jerusalem built on land captured from the Arabs in 1967. As the buildings were being constructed last year, Har Homa was shot at from time to time. But asked if they feel at risk, the new residents just shrug. . "Listen, the Arabs are every place, their snipers can shoot right here or anywhere else," said Sassi Sadeh, 28, a maintenance man who moved to Har Homa. "So what's the difference where we live? I don't think we should leave Jerusalem." . But for other Israelis, perhaps most, the country is not so much besieged as in a deep rut. . In an opinion poll published Friday in the newspaper Ma'ariv, just 29 percent of Israelis said they believed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a plan to extricate the country from the spiral of violence. . Twice as many respondents, 58 percent, said the prime minister was simply reacting to events. And by a ratio of more than 3 to 1, Israelis said they believed the terrorist attacks would continue in the coming year. . "These days if it's less than 15 or 20 people killed in a terrorist attack‚ people say, 'Well, it's a shame but there's nothing to do,'" said Galia Golan, a veteran peace campaigner. "There has been a routinization, a resignation among the public, that we'll go on having shootings and bombings and nothing is going to change. It's led to an internal withdrawal. People don't listen to the radio or read the papers because nothing is going to change." . No class or income bracket is immune. In Tel Aviv's Square of the Nation, where smartly dressed Israelis window-shop on sidewalks lined with brand-name stores, business is down by 50 percent and the windows are plastered with banners advertising steep discounts. . Much of the downturn is a product of Israel's weak economy and the collapse of tourism, but shop owners say the slump is also tied to a society-wide depression. Customers are around, but even the rich ones are in no mood to buy, they say. . "Because of the situation, the mood is down," said Amnon Deri, whose brother owns a store that sells expensive men's clothing. "We need two or three days to forget what happened in the suicide bombing‚ last week. Then people will go out again - until the next bomb. What else can you do but forget?" AT ZAKA, the religious emergency response group, planning is based on the assumption of continued sudden death and urban carnage. The group, which responds to accidents, murders and suicides as well as terrorist attacks, is organized like a small company: six divisions across Israel with headquarters in the far south, the West Bank, the Tel Aviv area, Jerusalem, the northern coast and the southern coast. . ZAKA has motor scooters for volunteers to thread their way through traffic, training courses for new volunteers, refresher courses for veterans, debriefing sessions to examine performance after each terrorist attack, even fund-raising drives in Israel and the United States. . "We're very organized," Mr. Weingarten said. . The group got its start in 1995, as Palestinian attacks were on the upswing in Israel. Its Jerusalem headquarters is in a bomb shelter. . At the scene of suicide bombings, the volunteers, clad in yellow and black vests, fan out with crisp efficiency, dividing into squads that work the sidewalk, the victims, the shopkeepers, even the bomber. . The organization keeps a photo album documenting its work, which it shows to new volunteers so they know what to expect. Page after page of violent images attest to a ghastly mission. . Lately, ZAKA has found it more difficult to recruit and retain volunteers; those it does attract tend to quit more quickly. . Yehuda Zahav, the rabbi who founded and heads ZAKA, said the difficulties in finding volunteers reflect a general turning inward among Israelis. "The problem is a psychological problem. It gets harder and harder to maintain our mental stability," said Mr. Zahav, who is 42. . "At first the issue was, who will rescue the rescuer? Now the problem is the dulling of the senses. The problem is that as long as it doesn't affect you personally, it's easy to watch it at 9 or 10 o'clock on TV and say, 'Oh, that's too bad.'"