Safer Than Staying At Home

When I speak to groups and describe Susya, I often mention that there is no common crime. They seem incredulous. 

In this day and age, how can such a thing be possible?

Growing up in the US, a child of the 1980s, I remember all too well the faces of kidnapped children posted on milk containers. We’d see them every morning as we ate our breakfast. The warnings about kidnappers were constant. “Don’t take candy from a stranger” and the ever-popular “don’t talk to strangers,” and we girls were further warned not to ever walk alone. When we were home without our parents, we didn’t even answer the door when someone rang the bell. Even when we were teens, that’s how afraid we were.

Locking the doors at home, locking my bike, and the car….everything was always about locking things up, preventing theft. 

When I got married and had small babies, I would bring my small babies into the bathroom stall with me while at the grocery store or mall, no matter how difficult.

And when they played outside, I was always with them. I never left them alone.  

Imagine my surprise when arriving in Israel, I saw young children roaming freely about town at all hours of the day and night. This was strange at first, but something I quickly got used to.  

Israel, believe it or not, does not have too much crime. As noted by Quora.com “It is statistically very safe…personal safety in Israel is always incredibly high and crime very low, especially when compared to many Western countries and cities. In regards to crime, traveling in Israel is safer than staying at home in the UK, USA or most other Western countries.” 

And living here, almost twenty years now, I forget how my life used to be. 

My own children, teens now, are confident. But also I was confident as a teen. How are they different? Is it a lack of crime? 

No. Actually, a lack of crime makes them naive. And that naivete can be dangerous.

On one of my recent trips to the US, I watched a film about a 20-something young man named Rodney Alcala, who during the 1970s, met lots of young women and men, and took their photo for his portfolio. He said he was a fashion photographer. The people he met were flattered. 

He was artistic, wore his hair long, and was intelligent and personable. When he got women alone, he raped and strangled them.  

This movie left me shaking. I was terrified. 

There wasn’t scary music. There weren’t dramatic effects or eerie lighting. It was very ordinary. Simply two people alone, on a hike in the hills, having a conversation. Rodney the photographer would be arranging the girl’s hair, eventually touch her cheek, then work his way down to her neck. It is easy to see how this happened, and how it could still happen now. Today.

I have a daughter. A beautiful daughter. Have I mentioned how beautiful she is? Seventeen. She wants to go to the army, to be a fighter. She is slated to go this coming November. 

And I, like so many other Israeli parents, worry about that. Worry about her being injured or G-d forbid worse. Until now, I have worried about her safety when driving, and about her learning to be responsible with money…and about her skirts being too short and her hair being too long.

But I have never worried about her being strangled…or encountering a psychopath. Do psychopaths exist in Israel?  

So how strange I find it when people I meet ask me “aren’t you scared??” when I tell them where I live. 

They think I should be afraid of terrorists, who live out here in their villages right next to me. But I am not. I don’t think anyone living out here is afraid of them. We know who they are, where they are, what they are capable of, what they look like. No mystery there. They are not pretending. They aren’t surprising any of us.

Just this morning, a friend sent me a message on whatsapp about a planned Oct. 7th-like attack by Arabs in the cities here throughout Judea and Samaria. They planned to attack us on Purim. Yet we got alerts and it was thwarted. Again. 

It was interesting to read about myself, and my community, in that way. The preparedness of the IDF, the Security forces, the Air Force…they all know. I guess I should have been alarmed. But I wasn’t. We live this way, being alert.

So are we scared? No. We are ready. And as always, our medics are standing by.

Bikes outside, unlocked, on the sidewalk in my neighorhood in Susya. In Yehuda and Shomron, there is relatively little theft.