An American style shooting?

This week Israelis bore witness to a brand of violence not usually seen in this country. An armed man walked into a bank and killed 4 people, before taking a hostage (she survived the ordeal) and killing himself with his own personal weapon. Admittedly, I was taken aback at the first headline I saw regarding the incident, "American style 'lone gunman' shooting stuns Israelis." "What the hell is an American style shooting?," I thought to myself. After reading the article I learned that what we have become accustomed to at home; the Aurora, Colorado's, the Newtown Connecticut's, the Virginia Tech's and so on, are viewed as uniquely American phenomena. Only in America can people become so desperate, so unhinged, and so well-armed, as to enter a place of business, recreation, or education and take the lives of innocent strangers. That is how many Israelis felt until Monday. And when this happens, there always follows a discussion about the exhaustive list of symptoms that afflicted the gunman, and the questions about why no one noticed sooner. He was a loner. He was mentally unstable. He owned weapons that should have been illegal. The list goes on. But add to this particular tragedy yet another symptom, and the only one I'm interested in talking about for the purposes of this post: He was broke.

40 year old Itamar Alon was a former border police agent, security guard and decorated IDF soldier. Now unemployed, Alon was having financial difficulties and his account with Bank Hapoalim was overdrawn by several tens of thousands of shekels. Unable to take money from the ATM, he came in the branch to talk about his situation with staff and try to apply for a $1600 loan. After being denied and arguing with employees, Alon went back to his house to get his gun. His second visit to the bank claimed the lives of 2 bank employees, 2 customers and himself. Interviews with those who knew Alon paint a picture of 2 very different men. Some old comrades in the service recall the brave hero that shot a terrorist who tried to attack a military base in 2002. They remembered that man as they watched this horror unfold in disbelief. Others described him as weird, aggressive, unpredictable and dangerous. Those who lived near him most recently say he spent his days acting oddly and pacing the balcony where he lived with his parents. He certainly appeared to have had many of the telltale symptoms we look for in a lone violent gunman. But the best knowledge anyone has about his motive comes from the hostage he took before taking his own life. Miriam Cohen told police that some of the last words out of Alon's mouth were "Ill show them," apparently in reference to the bank employees who denied his loan application.

This tragedy was obviously the work of a desperate man, and desperation is an all too common theme among the clients under financial duress that I've encountered at the YEDID centers I've visited. Having their requests rejected and questions ignored time and again by agencies whose aim it is to help, it's easy for people to fall into a spiral of hopelessness. Ran Melamed, YEDID's Deputy Director for Communications and Social Policy, talked to Maariv Newspaper about Israel's economy, saying "We have warned for months that the situation is getting worse and is pushing many more people to great distress. With desperate people you never know what they might do. This event should send a clear message to the government and to the Knesset, you need to change your thinking about the state budget." Melamed's thinking has been echoed by various social activist groups around the country. These are the groups, groups like YEDID, that are working in the trenches with financially disadvantaged Israelis every day, encouraging them to put pressure on the system to recognize the struggles of all citizens through financial education and community organizing. And yet, some in Israeli government say all this talk about empowerment is precisely what leads people like Alon to act out through violence. One Bank Hapoalim official said in a statement "There is no doubt that public sentiment against Israel's banks enabled, one way or another, the shooting incident in Beersheba."

So what is the takeaway from this catastrophic event? Has the global downturn ushered in a new era of terrorism: "economic terrorism"? One Israeli politician told the media this week that "...this shocking incident should be taken as a wake-up call. At the very least, this was a man who fell apart due to poverty." I'm personally not of the opinion that we need to feel sorry for Itamar Alon, assuming he was not mentally incapacitated. I'm a big believer in personal responsibility, regardless of how down and out one may feel. If everyone in Alon's situation reacted the way he did, it would never be safe to leave our homes. Which brings me to the next point I'm not sure governments are taking seriously: financial security as a national security issue. Both Israel and The United States are countries that pour billions into military spending and the war on terror. Surely a suicide bomber professing to act in the name of Allah is desperate on some level. And we do our best to make sure that he or she never gets that opportunity. So was Itamar Alon a terrorist? Can opening fire in a public place be termed as anything other than a terror attack? So why don't we do a better job of making sure that ordinary citizens never get that opportunity?

We can't remove all traces of desperation from society. Like those before Alon in Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, and Virginia Tech, the shooter is no longer around to tell us why it happened. And if he was, the answer would likely involve a multitude of factors. But I do think that we can create societies where everyone has a fighting chance to be financially secure, and financial security goes a long way toward one's dignity. We can create a society that is more compassionate and responsive to our fellow countrymen in need. The feeling that someone is listening and genuinely cares about what you're going through is enough in many cases to weather the storm, financial or otherwise. This is exactly the kind of work being done by YEDID. Israelis learned this week that lone gunmen aren't any particular nation's problem. They're a human problem. Maybe if they felt treated that way, as fellow humans by society at large, we could reduce the carnage.