Month: April 2025

On my first night in Israel I wanted a Big Mac. It had been a long flight, and my brain was telling me it should have been daylight when it wasn’t. I struck out on foot into Tel Aviv in search of the Golden Arches.

It’s always a treat visiting a foreign country for the first time. Well, not really. Sometimes the people who live there are trying to kill you. It’s usually a treat visiting a foreign country for the first time.

I found Mickey D’s easily enough. There are more than 38,000 McDonald’s restaurants in more than 100 countries around the world. If you’re in a place where you can’t land a Quarter Pounder with cheese (or Royale with cheese, depending) within fifteen minutes of your hotel you likely don’t want to linger there. I fell in behind a young Israeli man and his gorgeous date.

They looked to be in their late teens and made a handsome couple. Most Israelis I encountered over there were fit and attractive. Lamentably, that’s not so often the case in my own country.

This young man was bedecked in well-worn Levis and a t-shirt just like millions of other teenagers on the planet. These two could have passed for their counterparts in any dive in America with one noticeable difference: draped nonchalantly over this guy’s right shoulder was an IWI Tavor X95 bullpup rifle.

This was the real freaking deal, and it was ready to rock. There was a loaded 30-round magazine secured in the magwell and a Meprolight optic. The bolt was closed over a red plastic chamber flag. Everything, to include the flag and the magazine, was secured to the weapon via dummy cords. I knew from experience that it would take about three seconds to make that thing hot. I also rather suspected this young dude had plenty of practice.

I wouldn’t trust most American teenagers who don’t share half my DNA unsupervised with string, much less a loaded rifle. Yet, here he was, strolling through Mickey D’s with a hot girl on one arm and a hot weapon on the other. I clearly wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

That extraordinary place breeds institutional violence. Terrorist attacks occur with dispiriting regularity. However, they seldom last very long. That’s because of this guy and others like him—of which I saw many during my stay.

The tension between people groups could be seen everywhere over there. Americans are pretty safe in that part of the world, because everybody wants our money. If tourists get hurt they’ll stay home. Then everybody loses. However, the antipathy between Jews and Palestinians is manifest in countless little ways. One of the most obvious is the omnipresent nature of guns.

My wife and I homeschooled our kids. It has been my experience that children will rise to whatever levels of behavior are demanded of them. Treat a child like a child, and he will behave like a child. Treat a child like an adult and ruthlessly enforce the standard, and he will behave like an adult. So it is in Israel.

With precious few exceptions, all 19-year-old Israelis serve in the military. In the US you can’t buy a handgun until you’re 21. By contrast, Israelis freely walk the streets toting automatic weapons two years before they could legally buy a beer on our soil.

Israel is a nation of 9.3 million people. Most every person in the country is issued a rifle at some point. In 2009 they had 135 murders. The homicide rate in Israel is 2.4 per 100,000 people.

By contrast, ours is a nation of 328 million people. In that same year we had 16,799 murders. The homicide rate over here is 7.8 per 100,000 people, more than three times that of Israel.

I would posit that this extraordinary difference turns upon how we raise our kids. Demand that young people behave like responsible adults, and they will behave like responsible adults. Allow them to behave like violent egomaniacs, and you get violent egomaniacs. As a society, we’d do well to get our heads around this very simple fact and act accordingly.