Tel Aviv seems unusually quiet these days. Restaurants known for their long lines for a table still have seats available for lunch and dinner. Maybe it’s the Passover holiday, or maybe it’s the memory of the terrorist attack on a bar in central Tel Aviv earlier this month.

It was a Thursday, the start of the weekend in Israel, when we heard the wail of ambulance and police sirens. Less than 600 meters from our apartment, a Palestinian terrorist had shot several people in a bar. Three of them died and seven others were injured, some seriously. It was the fourth terrorist attack in Israel in just two weeks.

Shortly after the first reports, my cell phone started ringing: “Are you safe?” asked a father from our kindergarten WhatsApp group. “Lock the doors,” he wrote. “The attacker has not yet been arrested.”

Ding, ding, ding went my cell phone. People react quickly in such situations. Friends of Tomer Morad and Eytam Magini, 27 and 28, must have quickly suspected the two were among the victims – as they weren’t answering the phone.

Engaged community

When Israel is attacked, whether by terrorists on the ground or rockets from Gaza, there is an eerie sense of familiarity in Tel Aviv, a large, largely anonymous city. Whether you meet a neighbor in pajamas in an air raid shelter at two in the morning, or a stranger on the street the day after an attack, all it takes is a look that says: I know how you feel.

The actual probability of being injured or even killed in Israel in a terrorist attack or by rockets from Gaza is far less than that of having a serious car accident. Unlike the war in Ukraine, life in Israel is “completely normal” right now.

But what does “normal” mean? After all, terror has a psychological effect. People tremble when sirens sound, look around when ambulances rush. “What would have happened if I had dragged myself for a jog that night?” I asked myself in the days following the attack. I would have probably run right in front of the stage. I might have seen out of the corner of my eye the third death, Barak Lufan: a 35-year-old Israeli whose wife now has to raise her young children alone.

Clashes in the West Bank rage nearby but rarely burst the bubble isolating nearby Tel Aviv

20 years after the construction of the separation barrier

Tel Aviv is often referred to as a bubble where gypsies sip coffee, while less than an hour’s drive from Qalqiliya, Tulkarm and other towns, Palestinians live under Israeli occupation – behind a wall that Israel says was built to prevent terrorist attacks. The construction of the so-called separation barrier began almost exactly twenty years ago, during the second Intifada.

Following the April 7 attack on Tel Aviv, the Israeli army launched several military operations in Jenin and other places in the occupied West Bank. At least 23 Palestinians have been killed since, including militants, but also 14-year-old Qusay Hamamra. The Israeli army claims he threw a Molotov cocktail at them. According to some agency reports, he was completely uninvolved.

A 40-year-old woman was shot dead after approaching soldiers “suspiciously”, the Israeli army said. According to Palestinian sources, the woman was a visually impaired widow and mother of six children.

The last holes in Israel’s so-called separation barrier are being closed

On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out attacks in Gaza. Authorities say they targeted a weapons manufacturing site after a rocket fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was intercepted on Monday.

The current situation is not comparable to that of the Second Intifada twenty years ago. But it brings back memories and triggers trauma in Israelis and Palestinians alike. It is said that the second Intifada greatly reduced empathy for the victims on the other side. Indeed, to this day, many cannot understand the plight of civilians on the other side of the conflict.

The separation barrier has made human contact difficult for the past two decades. Apart from their military service, most Jewish residents of Tel Aviv have never met a Palestinian family. Palestinians used holes in the fence to go to work in Israel, sometimes illegally; now those gaps are being filled. Two of the killers in the most recent attacks entered Israel through these holes in the fence.

The Middle East conflict seems a long way off Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv’s isolation makes the West Bank conflict easy to ignore

It’s true, Tel Aviv is a bubble.

Most of the time, in this bustling, sun-drenched city on the shores of the Mediterranean, it’s easy to ignore what’s happening in the occupied territories. In Tel Aviv, it’s rare for a neighborhood to be cordoned off like on April 7, when anti-terrorist units burst into the bar. And if they are, they are Israeli soldiers who come to protect you. Many Palestinian families, on the other hand, often saw Israeli soldiers storming into their homes in the middle of the night, M-16 rifles at the ready.

Many Israelis do not believe that there will ever be peace with the Palestinians. A friend has made it her mission to make sure her family has more than one passport – a Sephardi Jew born in London, she has organized Israeli and British passports as well as Spanish and Portuguese passports for herself and her children. “You never know what the future holds,” she says.

A few people, including author and psychotherapist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, are actively fighting for an end to the occupation and peace with the Palestinians.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen does not want her sons to be victims or perpetrators

She told me in an interview after the recent war in Gaza that she had no choice but to get involved in politics. She said the thought of her sons pointing guns at Palestinians while Israeli occupation army soldiers made her sick. She wants her children to be neither victims nor perpetrators, she says.

It’s times like these that people realize what a real bubble Tel Aviv really is. A bubble that will burst again for a short time at the howl of the next sirens. To most city dwellers, Jenin and Nablus, less than 100 kilometers (about 60 miles), seem very far indeed.

This article has been translated from German.