It is unsettling the first time the doors of a shopping mall glide open to reveal a magnetometer, an X-ray machine and a person wearing a holster. Less so the second time, and the point quickly arrives when it’s no more remarkable than finding a maze of chrome posts and retractable belts standing between an airport’s ticket counters and the boarding gates. Put your phone, keys and coins in the tray and get on with it. I first acclimated to the diffuse background threat of urban bombing in the summer of 2002, when I moved to Istanbul, where small explosives had become the weapon of choice for assorted separatists and radicals in the 1990s. Turkey was a fine preparatory course for life in Israel, which on Tuesday celebrated 65 years of existence, not one passed in peace. Security is a way of life in this country — most famously at the airport, where the solemn questioning and extraordinary inspections are almost a feature of a tourist visit, one that visitors often relate afterward with the specificity of a lion sighting after a drive through a game park. But the preoccupation is scarcely less present in Israel’s cities, where a decade ago, storefronts would from time to time disintegrate in the same burst of ignition and billowing dust that rose over Boylston Street on Monday afternoon. There are different ways to go afterward. The British “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as the sign says, stiffening the upper lip following the London subway bombings in July 2005 — a trait that held true from the blitz of World War II through the Irish Republican Army attacks of a quarter century ago. London barely missed a beat. Jewish Israelis take some pride in cultivating the same attitude. During the second intifadeh, which at its height in March 2002 meant something exploding somewhere inside Israel almost every day, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked the social psychologist Reuven Gal to measure how the Israeli public was bearing up under the stress. Politicians love anecdotes,![]()
