Confusion seemed the order of the day in the minutes after a gunman had opened fire on a pub and a café on Dizengoff Friday afternoon, killing 2 and wounding 8 before vanishing without a trace.
A rumor caught wind – from a reporter, maybe, or a random cop – that a suspect had been spotted a few blocks north on Nordau, and plainclothes cops with assault rifles started to give chase. It was then that something I’d never seen before happened – a female cop with an M-16 hopped on the back of a civilian’s electric bicycle, as did a detective and then a third plainclothes officer, their assault rifles held high as they set off on a moderately fast, low-carbon footprint pursuit of a possible attacker further up Dizengoff.
(It seems a bit formal to say they “commandeered” the bicycles. I think in America cops commandeer a vehicle, flashing a badge as they chase a bus that must stay above 50mph or it explodes. In Israel though? I’m pretty sure the cyclist sees the cop running to stop an attack and says nu, yalla and they head up the sidewalk.)
As a cameraman and I gave chase on foot, another strange thing happened. An empty #5 bus that had been abandoned further down the street past the police tape where its passengers got off and fled during the attack began driving up the street. It opened its front door and three reporters and two detectives jumped in, their colleagues pulling them in like they were hobos jumping onto a freight train. The bus keeps driving on the way to Nordau but stops after a block and everyone gets off, the detectives included.
The two officers – who said they are stationed in the West Bank District and just happened to be in Tel Aviv on Friday – don’t actually know where Nordau is, or what report they’re following. They ask this reporter what the story is and start running towards Nordau, only to double back.
They seem confused, but they’re trying.
Speaking of confusion, Friday wasn’t the greatest display in the history of the Tel Aviv District spokespersons either.
Their first message about shots fired went out on WhatsApp to crime reporters at 2:53pm, and then they went silent until 3:12, only to report that there were people shot outside a bar/restaurant/café and some were hurt. They added that paramedics were working the scene, and it’s unclear if it’s a terror attack or criminal.
The first comprehensive report (or something approaching such) went out finally at 5:52 pm, almost three hours later. Sure, it’s important in such hectic stories to be careful and know what you’re reporting, but they seemed lost, unable or willing to answer questions in real time.
That’s certainly not always the case, and in the last attack in Tel Aviv – the stabbing attack at the Panorama building that left two dead – the spokesperson’s branch did a great job and all but one reporter praised them in the WhatsApp group. The reporter (not their first time) dissented and was roundly shut down by the rest of the reporters.
I don’t know if to chalk up today’s failure to the mass confusion and the fact that the attacker hadn’t been caught (unlike in the Panorama attack), but there was something disconcerting about the whole display.
The attacker wasn’t the first one to get away in this recent wave of terror attacks, but that fact also bears noting. With all the talk about the increased police patrols and the spike in the number of civilians getting firearms permits, there was no armed person on the street at the scene when the shooting started, or apparently nearby. The attack was only a few blocks south of the police station on Dizengoff between Jabotinsky and Nordau, but still, the man was able to flee through the streets of the country’s busiest city on a Friday afternoon and vanish.
The city was already a bit slower than usual for a Friday afternoon, it bears saying. It was the morning after New Year’s eve and all day the weather had been cold and rainy, and there was even a bit of hail earlier in the day.
Still, even in the minutes after the shooting, there were restaurants and bars further up Dizengoff that were pretty full. One could say this affirms a Tel Aviv cliché about how “life goes on” and people “won’t give in to terror”, and they’d probably be right. I figure though you can get a pass on that when the shooter is still at large, especially if you already got the check.
This is probably the point where a writer would mention how close they were to the attack in the minutes or days before. Well, turns out I was actually right next door to the pub two days ago, joining a friend while he got his hair cut at this new hipster sort of lumberjack rockabilly barber shop. Going further back in time, it was a couple doors down from the place where my wife used to get her hair done and the café was years earlier the Café Joe, where my wife wrote her MA thesis on many busy nights back in 2007. A few doors down from there is Dizengoff 148, the building where we lived on the top floor, above the Ilka, and where we had all those rooftop parties years before everybody started having kids.
Why’s that matter? It doesn’t really, and truth be told, in a city as small and packed as Tel Aviv, it’s rare that an attack won’t be near some place that has some meaning to you if you lived here.
It’s part of what’s normal here – seeing your surroundings as being touched by political violence in the not too distant past or somewhere around the corner.
The feeling of a Friday night in the city with an attacker at loose and people saying they’ll stay at home also feels familiar from years earlier, but that will pass too.
It always does.