Noah Chinitz: Israel and the U.S.-Bound together by fear

Is anyone surprised that the United States is attacking military and government targets in Afghanistan? I'm not. In fact, I wasn't surprised at all on Sept. 11. That's because I was studying abroad in Jerusalem in late September 2000, when the Palestinian uprisings and the latest wave of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism began.

I'm used to the threat.

While in Israel, I learned to be cognizant of my surroundings and never take my safety for granted. In this process of adopting the Israeli culture, I also witnessed Israeli reactions to the attacks -- to them, life went on. It was simply a sad truth; without warning, your own life or the life of a loved one could be taken by terrorism.

Why didn't such a large-scale attack occur against Israel? Such an attack would have strategically failed on multiple fronts. Not only is Israel's intelligence centered and focused on preventing the exact kind of attack that hit New York and Washington, but Israel also patrols its skies constantly. Those planes would have been shadowed and shot down immediately had they been suspiciously headed for targets in Israel.

Yet smaller attacks that are harder to track happen all the time. Every week a few Israelis are killed, and the Israeli people must somehow cope.

One of the amazingly terrible aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks is that virtually everyone on the East Coast seems to know someone killed by only one or two degrees of separation. This is exactly how it is in Israel. Many more people died on Sept. 11 than in the terrorist attacks in Israel, but we should still learn to cope like the Israelis do.

Native Israelis are nicknamed "Sabras," after a cactus fruit that is tough on the outside, yet soft on the inside. Our president has now become a Sabra. He consoles the American people, while at the same time planning and executing strikes against military targets of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

We can form coalitions all we want, but we must show through force that terrorism will not go unpunished.

But why, in this case, is the world not outwardly condemning a powerful country for its strikes against the militarily inferior terrorist host?

Israel restrains itself every day from performing such large-scale retaliations on countries housing terrorists that plague its society. Yet every time Israel retaliates even a little, the American media rebukes Israel.

Why is the media so complacent now when it was so critical of Israel's strikes against military targets of a host state housing terrorists?

To be just, the situations are a little different. The difference is the exact nature of the ruling governments, the Taliban and the Palestine Authority. It is quite obvious that the Taliban government is housing Osama bin Laden, and we further know that the Taliban government is comprised of Islamic extremists. On the other hand, the Palestine Authority is not necessarily as radical.

Regardless of the degree of fundamentalism in the respective areas, though, each government either promotes or overlooks terrorist activity.

Nobody under the Palestine Authority -- other than its own police force -- is supposed to have weapons, and the PA has the power to check terrorists who cross borders with machine guns.

Hopefully the world will see what Israel is going through, and also see that the United States is working hand in hand with Israeli intelligence.

Hopefully, the world will remember the images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after America was attacked, and thousands of lives were lost.

Hopefully, the world will finally understand what is at stake here, and that the only way to fight terrorism is by fighting with the only weapon that terrorists know -- fear.

Fear. Now we know what Israelis have been experiencing their entire lives.

Imagine what it would be like to fear terrorist actions like Sept. 11 every day and to have to live with it. Then you'll feel like an Israeli.

Imagine what it would be like to always know, through one or two degrees of separation, someone killed by terrorists. Then you'll know what it feels like to be an Israeli teenager, with all of your friends in the army.

The United States has now lived that fear, and is reacting exactly how Israel has. Are military strikes the solution to convincing the Afghanistan government to hand over bin Laden? Maybe, maybe not.

But the United States has now learned from Israel's experience, and experienced Israel's dilemma.

Noah Chinitz is a senior Computer Science major from New Rochelle, N.Y. His e-mail address is nchinitz@sas.upenn.edu.

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