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Erin Osbrach, a journalism student at HSU, spent three months working and living in Tel Aviv, the cultural, financial, and commercial heart of Israel. photo courtesy of Erin Osbrach
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by Megan Skillings-Garrison
Two weeks after Erin Osbrach arrived a bomb went off in downtown Tel Aviv that was heard around the world.
A Palestinian suicide bomber joined a line of mostly Russian teenagers outside a nightclub called the Dolphinarium and detonated himself. Twenty people between the ages of 14 and18 died that evening, and 80 others were maimed or wounded. A friend of Osbrach’s worked as a guard at the club.
“He told me he saw body parts flying,” she said quietly.
Osbrach, a journalism student at HSU, spent three months working and living in the culture she had already grown to love. She chose to visit Tel Aviv, which is the cultural, financial, and commercial heart of Israel. Tel Aviv is a fairly young city that evolved from Jaffa about one hundred years ago and is now home to over 400,000 people. Jaffa, the colorful southern quarter of Tel Aviv, combines the vibrance of Israel’s cultural and commercial center with the exotica and history of thousands of years..
The evolution of Tel Aviv is explicitly explained in The Dynamics of a Dream by Ilan Shchori:
“We must occupy a decent stretch of land on which to build ourselves houses. It should be situated near Jaffa, and will constitute the first Hebrew town, which will be spoken, and purity and cleanliness maintained; and we shall not walk in the ways of the nations, and just as the town of New York symbolizes the gateway to America, so must we improve our town, until someday it becomes the New York of Eretz Israel.”
Osbrach was not alone in her quest to explore this burgeoning city. Newsweek magazine has listed Tel Aviv as one of the top ten cities in the world to which young people migrate. According to the magazine, it is the country’s most expensive city and has become the whining center of high-tech growth almost by default, since it is the only Israeli metropolis that operates on the same 24-hour schedule as the tech industry.
A veteran waitress, Osbrach was quickly hired upon her arrival in Tel Aviv. One of her jobs was at a traveler’s blues bar on the beach, next door to the U.S. Embassy. As the waves of the Mediterranean Ocean crashed against the sand and the blues wept from the instruments, Osbrach served drinks to various diplomats. In Israel, bombings are reported daily, and she met many people in Tel Aviv who avoid the press because the news is basically bad.
When asked if she was afraid of entering this kind of environment by herself, as a young American woman, her face relaxed into a calm smile.
“My fears aren’t about life or death. Everything’s working out the way it’s supposed to,” she said.
The suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium intensified already fierce pressure on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for retalitory air strikes, assasinations, and other attacks on Palestinian targets, which had been suspended under a policy of restraint for two weeks.
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., Americans have been horrified by images of business people jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers. To most, the carnage is incomprehensible. Osbrach learned in Israel that what Americans consider “terrorism” is a way of life for many people.
“Israeli people are incredibly strong and brave. They’re very outspoken and honest in general; they’ve learned how to cope,” she explained.
Instead of cowering under the shadow of violence, citizens of Israel abide by stricter security regulations to help combat the threat of violence. Based on her experience, Osbrach believes it would have been impossible for the suicide hijackers who attacked the U.S. to board an Israeli flight
After the bombing at the Dolphinarium this summer, Osbrach’s dad called to offer her a plane ticket to anywhere else in the world if she left the turmoil of Israel. She stayed.
“Fear has its place and can help keep us safe, but it can also inhibit us from life and fulfilling our dreams,” Osbrach said. “I learned from the people I met in
Israel that we should make the most of our time here, and do our best to live our lives without fear.”
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