English follows the Hebrew.
Esser Agaroth (2¢):
I was on the bus in Tel-Aviv recently. I was on the way to the beach, and then to an event. The bus got particularly crowded when a bunch of junior high and high school students got on. An Arab woman, dressed in fully modest Muslim garb, got on the bus shortly afterwards.

Mind you, there had just been an Arab terrorist attack. Four Jews were murdered in a shooting attack on the road near the town of Eli in Efraim, in Samaria. I have never witnessed any Arab act in a bold manner so soon after a terrorist attack. In fact, I have only ever seen the opposite

When I lived in Tel Aviv 25 years, Arabs stayed out of sight, for fear of getting beaten up, as I heard they were on the beaches of Netanya and elsewhere. Actually, I do not remember so many Arabs in Tel-Aviv at all back then, not even Arab workers, and not any foreign workers.

This Arab woman had the hutzpah (gall) to yell at Jewish kids after a terrorist attack.

Why was she yelling? Because the kids were making noise. Imagine that. Teenagers making noise on the bus. And Arab teenagers never make noise on the bus? I can wholeheartedly testify that Arab teenagers do, in fact, make noise on buses.

I see myself as being fairly sensitive to noise. Yet, what I heard was just your typical conversation level volume. There were just a lot of conversations going on simultaneously. The bus driver was certainly not bothered by it. And Israeli bus drivers are not at all shy about telling kids, and adults talking on their phones too close to the driver's seat, to be quiet. But this bus driver was more bothered by the passengers not moving to the back of the bus, in order to let more people on in the front.

Unlike the bus driver, I wasn't having it. This woman was being completely unreasonable. Furthermore she was yelling in English. (I sometimes seem to forget that English in the official language of Tel-Aviv, and not Hebrew. But that's another post for another time...) So, I began raising my own voice in Hebrew, telling her that this is Israel, where we speak the language of the Jewish People, Hebrew! To my pleasant surprise, no one said anything critical of my actions. No one told me to shut up, not even the bus driver I was sitting in back of. No one made even a single sour face at me.

"If you don't know English, that's your problem. You should learn English," she shouted, clearly indicating that she understood what I had said in Hebrew.

Actually, she's wrong. If things continue to go the way they are going, we should concern ourselves with learning Arabic, not English.

One or two kids of the on the bus attempted to respond to this woman in English, in spite of my proving that she understood Hebrew. They started saying, "Just a bus!" or "It's just a bus!"

I asked the kid standing next to me, probably in seventh or eighth grade, what exactly that was supposed to mean. Did it mean that it's just a short bus ride, it can be noisy when it's crowded, and just relax about it? He said yeah, that's right.

But it wasn't just a bus, and we shouldn't just relax. Nothing like this would have happened 25 years ago. Instead, the Arab would be suspected of being a potntial suicide bomber. And the Jewish high school students, even the secular ones, would have responded a lot more passionately, a lot more forcefully. They would have had an ounce of pride of being Jews, speaking a revived language, and in a homeland inaccessible to us, even forbidden to most of us for hundreds of years.

When will we finally decide to make being Jewish, speaking Hebrew, and living in our only, true homeland fashionable, even great again?

Soon, I hope and pray.