Sunday, May 06, 2007

Blood on the Pavement

(Originally posted (without the Flickr image) here)

There was blood on the pavement, and a crowd of onlookers.

One guy, he looked to be about fifty, had spots of blood on his shirt. It didn't look like any of it was his. The other guy looked bigger and younger, maybe forty. he had blood all over his shirt and a dripping cut on his forehead. He was shouting at the first guy: "Ata crazy! Ata crazy!"

That's the Hebrew word for "you" (ata), and the English word for "crazy". People milled about, talking on cellphones, craning their necks, talking to each other. A security guard stood in front of the bank. An ambulance eventually arrived and took away the bleeder.

Both of them were wearing guns. No one, not the guys, not the onlookers, not the bank teller, not the police, not the ambulance workers evinced any concern about this. No one was going to use a gun.

People walk in and out of banks with guns in Israel. Most adults are either in active service or live in the "territories", or do some civic guard duty. We have tons of guns. We have no gun shootings outside of combat. No bank robbing. Very, very rarely do you hear about some mafia criminal gang violence in the Tel Aviv area. And we're always surprised to hear that it's criminal and not terrorism.

I got my money out of the automatic teller machine and left. I don't know what the fight was about, and I didn't ask. It might have made for a better blog post, but I didn't want to ask just for gossip's sake.

Yehuda

1 comment:

Gerald McD said...

In America, as you know, everyone holding a gun would have been shooting it, unfortunately.