A few weeks ago, I spoke with a friend living in Beersheba, a town located in the southern desert known to Israeli Jews as the Negev, and to Palestinians as the Naqab.
"Your country (the USA) is terrifying," she told me. "There is a mass shooting almost every day. I would never visit America."
Her comment struck me as somewhat odd. After all, the Israeli military and Islamic Jihad fighters had just finished trading rocket fire, in which Israeli forces launched 422 strikes on Gazan targets, while Islamic Jihad fired 1,500 makeshift rockets towards Israel.
34 Palestinians were killed in the barrage, 13 of whom were civilians, along with one Israeli civilian. Most Islamic Jihad rockets fell in open areas, but one struck an Israeli apartment building. The Israeli strikes hit Islamic Jihad fighters but also caused damage to civilian structures.
The fighting was the latest round in a series of nasty skirmishes that have, at times, transformed into full-blown wars. The killings have raged across the Gaza-Israel border since 2007, when Hamas forces took over the narrow strip of land from the Palestine Authority.
To my Beersheba friend, none of this mattered. It was the US and its endless mass shootings that were truly dangerous, not the Israeli/Palestinian space. She was too terrified to visit America, fearing an anonymous gunman would mow her down in a suburban mall.
Her comments reminded me of a Mexican academic who told me a few years ago that she was overcome with anxiety at the thought of spending a year's sabbatical in Minneapolis. She was raising her children in Mexico, a country known to Americans as a site of intense criminal violence. In her mind, however, America and its guns posed a mortal threat to her family.
Humans are not always good at calculating the statistical probability of danger. Terrorism poses a negligible risk to Americans, for example, but the US government has nonetheless spent a fortune on anti-terrorism operations since 9/11.
Despite the unending drumbeat of mass shootings in this country, "only" 700 Americans died in such incidents in 2021, a comparatively small number in a land of over 336 million souls. And for those terrified of Middle East violence, note that in 2022 - one of the deadliest years for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza - Israeli soldiers and settlers killed "only" 231 Palestinians out of a population of roughly 5.3 million. Palestinian militants, for their part, killed 29 Israelis out of 9.3 million.
The fear in these places is very real. Israeli Jews are scared of Palestinian Arabs, Palestinians are scared of Jewish settlers and soldiers, and everybody worldwide is scared of American mass shooters.
However, the dangers are far more mundane depending on where you live: the sugar in your food, the vehicles on your highway, or the tainted water in your faucet.
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