Safe at Home?

ISURVIVED Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, that's how my mother and many of my friends and other family members in America translate the fact that I spent the past six months in Israel's capital and lived to tell about it. They think only luck--or, better yet, divine intervention--can explain my "survival" in a city best known these days for stabbings, shootings and other messy manifestations of the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

They're wrong.

As for luck, any present or former Radcliffe student can attest to my absolute lack thereof. As for life-saving help from the Good Guy in the Sky, I'm the first to acknowledge having received a bit in the past. How else can I explain making it through Social Studies sophomore tutorial last year?

But after a half-year in a place that over the millennia has known its fair share of miracles, I don't count my continued existence as one of them. In fact, given what's been happening in America lately, I might even say I stood a better chance "surviving" over there than I do back here.

"PLEASE BE ESPECIALLY careful walking in the neighborhood at night," read the top item in last week's Currier House newsletter. "There have been a number of muggings in the area this month, most notably on Shepard Street near Hilles Library and on Linnaean Street only 200 feet from Currier."

It wasn't a particularly nice welcome home greeting. But it wasn't too surprising.

Over the past year or so, the Harvard community has hardly been immune to violence. In the most tragic case, Bunting Institute fellow Mary Jo Frug was stabbed to death near Brattle Street last April. That same week, a woman was raped near the Quad. Two weeks later, a Boston resident was knifed outside the Border Cafe, just a one-minute walk from the Yard.

Last October, while I was studying in Jerusalem, a Law School student was violently attacted at a Harvard party. Even journalists aren't safe. The same month, Crimson editor J. Eliot Morgan '92 had his life threatened by CUNY Professor Leonard Jeffries.

Statistics give a more complete picture of crime at Harvard. In 1990 there were 70 reported assaults, three armed robberies, seven unarmed robberies and one sexual assault on University property.

That's just what's reported to Harvard police. Many victims of crime--particularly rape survivors--never inform the authorities. One in four women college students will be raped at some point in her four years.

At other colleges, crime is just as rampant. At Yale, one student has been shot dead on a campus that has come to resemble a firing range. At New York's City College last month, a combination basketball game and rap celebrity event ended when an out-of-control crowd crushed nine people to death.

A look at the real world is even more nauseating. In Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer cruised the streets, luring gay men to his apartment. He murdered them--at least 16 young males--before sodomizing and mutilating their bodies. In one case, Dahmer admitted to boring a hole in a young man's head and pouring acid into his brain.

Back home in Cambridge, the police reported over 1000 incidents of violent crime last year. And in cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C., simple murder is old news unless there's a sex scandal or a psychopathic weirdo as a backdrop to the killing.

Forget about cruising California's freeways, riding New York's subways or eating in small-town Texas cafeterias that may attract deranged men with machine guns. You'd probably be safer in Jerusalem.

BECAUSE MOST VIOLENT crime in Israel is politically motivated, it's usually pretty colorful stuff.

That's one explanation for why every shooting and stabbing in Jerusalem makes headlines here, while on the home front only cases like Dahmer's become news sensations. It doesn't hurt that bloated news staffs in Israel, under pressure to produce copy, tend to hype tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.

News reports of violence in Israel, though, are not outright lies. The intifada exists. Palestinians do throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli targets, stab Israeli soldiers and civilians, and--increasingly--shoot and kill Israeli settlers travelling in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military does respond with arrests and occasionally with beatings and bullets. Israeli settler groups have recently taken to vigilante acts of vandalism against Palestinians.

Since the intifada began in December 1987, 18 Jewish soldiers and civilians have been killed in the territories. During the same period, 1,326 Palestinians have been killed, 708 by Israeli security forces and 618 by fellow Palestinians in what has become known as the "intrafada."

When Palestinian-Israeli violence does occur, however, it is for the most part limited to certain areas--the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem--and to those most intimately connected with the conflict--Israeli soldiers and settlers and the Palestinian youths who engage in most of the violence of the intifada. If you're not in one of these high-risk groups, life is relatively normal.

AS A COLLEGE STUDENT interested in the politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I went out of my way to visit both Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugee camps in the territories.

It wasn't the safest thing to do, and I didn't feel 100 percent secure in either place. But I don't feel completely safe all the time in America. The Crown Heights murder of a Hasidic Jewish student last summer and the assassination of Meir Kahane in 1990 serve as reminders that anti-Jewish crime exists in this country--as it does in Israel and throughout the world.

For Israelis, the leading cause of death is traffic accidents--not terrorist bombings or even war. Outside the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, violent crime is so rare that when a murder occurs it makes top headlines in Israel's nationally circulated papers.

For Israelis to have equalled Washington, D.C.'s murder rate in 1990, they would have had to kill over 3000 of their fellow citizens that year. In 1988, the last year for which figures are available, they managed only 58 murders.

Crime against women in Israel is a more troubling problem. Israeli women avoid walking the streets at night alone. But from what my female friends tell me, Harvard women don't like to cross the Common after dark by themselves.

The bottom line: daily life in Jerusalem, as in most parts of Israel, is not dominated by violence--politically motivated or otherwise. So I really don't consider it a miracle at all that I "survived" Jerusalem. I never thought I would need divine intervention.

But as for travelling in Milwaukee, Cambridge, New Haven or New York, I just might.

Kenneth A. Katz '93 studied last semester at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.