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As many Israelis do not work on Fridays, the afternoons are a time when Tel Avivians gather and despite a colder-than-usual afternoon, Dizengoff Street—considered the heart of traditional Tel Aviv—was bustling today at 2:30 p.m. As friends gathered for a birthday party at a pub on this main drag filled with restaurants, bars and stores, a 29-year old Israeli Arab from Wadi Ara (an area in northern Israel known as the Triangle and heavily populated with Israeli Arabs) was standing in a small market next door, preparing to open fire.
A pub called Simta, located on the corner of Dizengoff and Gordon streets, very close to the beach, hotels and Dizengoff Center mall, was the target of this man's murderous act. As seen in video footage from the scene, he calmly opens his bag, pulls out his Karl Gustav sub machine gun, then steps out into the street and starts firing toward the pub and pedestrians passing by. The shooter fired 28 bullets—the full clip of his semi-automatic weapon—into the crowd. By the time he stopped firing, victims Alon Bakal and Shimon Roimi lay dying and five others were wounded, three of them seriously.
Though the gunman made no attempt to hide his identity and was caught on camera, authorities were able to identify him after his father—a volunteer with the police—called them. It also emerged that the gunman had a relative who was killed eight years ago by the police, and that he served a prison sentence for trying to steal a weapon from an army soldier. The gunman's relatives claim he is mentally unstable.
After the shooting, Tel Aviv turned into a city under siege as the police searched for their suspect. Rabin Square was turned into a command center, with hundreds of special police forces arriving from other parts of the country to reinforce the police in Tel Aviv as they did a house-to-house search. The restaurants, the cafes, and the bars quickly emptied.
"Tel Aviv has been the target before and we knew then and we will know now how to overcome," Mayor Ron Huldai said on Friday. He suggested that residents stay home until the gunman is caught.
Until now, most residents of Tel Aviv have felt that terror takes place somewhere else. Of course, anyone old enough to remember the 1990's and 2001-2003 knows that Tel Aviv has been a target before. The list of bombings here are long and deadly, but in the past few years, attacks have happened infrequently and never in the heart of the city. This was close by and personal. One of my daughter's friends works at a nearby bar; another friend was on Dizengoff during the time of the attack.
The implications of the attack being carried out by an Israeli Arab are also troubling. There are more than 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel, who have full citizenship and full access to all parts of the country. One of the challenges Israel has been facing is how to better integrate the Arab Israeli population and to work against discrimination that exists in the society. Today's attack will make that challenge all the more difficult.
At the moment it is not clear whether the gunman acted alone or on behalf of an outside organization. That will only be clear in the coming hours or days; how fast Tel Aviv—the city that never sleeps, the place that most of us have felt safe in—returns to routine is hard to say. What is clear, though, is that it will no longer be possible to call Tel Aviv a bubble