Forecast Highs

Maybe if they’d posted billboards showing Iranian missiles on parade with the headline: “Coming to your neighborhood soon. Do you know where your shelter is?” someone here would have paid attention to the siren. Maybe if IDF Homefront Command opened a shiny new store, placed naked mannequins wearing only gas masks behind its windows, and handed out flyers advertising a party-in-a-bomb shelter, it may have gotten people to ask directions to ‘the bomb shelter’. Had it said that the party in the shelter, to be held on Tuesday June 2 at 11:00 sharp, would be kicked off by a specially arranged nation-wide siren followed immediately by the internationally renowned DJ Kid Koala, the IDF would have passed the Sheinkin Street test.

But as it happened, almost nobody on Sheinkin Street paid any attention to Tuesday’s siren marking the highlight of Operation Turning Point 3. Eleven o’clock came and then it went. The siren wailed – audible faintly over the sounds of Pink Floyd in one café, and loud, hard techno in the adjacent clothing store. For the duration of the siren, café customers continued sipping cappuccinos, window-shoppers continued staring at windows, whilst inside, others were trying on new shirts. One storeowner did go outside and stood bizarrely at attention, perhaps thinking for a moment that it was Remembrance Day, or some other solemn day, while shooting puzzled looks at passersby who obviously had no respect for such things.

Why is the Sheinkin Street test important?

Seeing as the stated purpose of Tuesday’s nationwide drill was to get the entire populace to practice taking cover in shelters when the siren went off, or, at the least, to identify where the shelters were, the IDF Homefront Command failed miserably. If the army could get people on Sheinkin Street to stop for a few minutes and seriously consider the threats this country faces, the rest of the nation would take it seriously too. If ‘Sheinkinaim’ could put aside all the distractions the Street has to offer, for only a few minutes, and prepare themselves for a future attack, the IDF could be confident that it has everybody’s attention, that its means of communicating to the public are effective.

But the information that there was an important drill coming up simply didn’t get through to most people here. And if it did, they didn’t seem to care. The very real and growing threat posed by Iran’s Shihabs, Syria’s Scuds, Hizbullah’s Fajars, and even Hamas’ Katyushas – was simply not effectively communicated to the residents of this neighborhood, this bubble of bubbles in Tel-Aviv. For some ‘Sheinkinaim’, the drill was really just a nuisance, not different from any other; a fatalistic attitude not uncommon in other parts of the country – but perhaps distinctly pronounced in this laid-back neighborhood. The gulf between how seriously Homefront Command and Sheinkin Street took this drill couldn’t have been wider.

To be fair to the army and Ministry of Defense, this neighborhood is probably the hardest nut to crack in terms of preparing its residents for war. The story of the menacing Middle East simply doesn’t sell well here. Drawing attention to bad news of looming war has little or no chance of a captive audience on a street packed tight with designer clothing outlets, accessory stores, book stores, electronic stores, music stores, tattoo parlors, organic supermarkets, chic restaurants, food stands, fruit shake stands, and trendy cafes. Who’s got time to look for a bomb shelter when Camper’s is having a sale? Almost every store is currently advertising a sale, in large type on its front windows. The soap store has up to 70 percent off everything. Nike has up to 40%, and Steimatzky is having a sale on non-fiction books. In between the stores and cafes, the walls of Sheinkin St. are covered with large posters heralding musicals, concerts, dance performances, plays, yoga classes, lost cat notices, and, of course, the upcoming tour of DJ Kid Koala. Competing for the attention of people who live on this street – flooded as they are with the brightest colors, latest sounds, and exotic tastes – is no easy task. Small, old-style IDF pamphlets with font designs harking back to the 80s, or even the 90s, stuck in between large colorful posters of international DJs is just not going to do it. Not that there were any pamphlets or signs pointing out bomb shelters. If you live in the neighborhood, you might know that the school on Balfour Street has a bomb shelter. On the other hand, you might not know that.

Charley Cohen, owner of Sheinkin’s Siah [Discourse] Café puts it this way: “When a new store opens, everyone hears about it. The message gets out loudly and in many different ways. You see pamphlets, people talk about it – you can’t escape it. When Yoplait [yoghurt] has a new flavor, it’s all over the TV, radio and in the newspapers – you can’t escape it, they go all out. But for this drill, we didn’t even get a little pamphlet stuck to our window.” Cohen is being disingenuous, of course, as all newspapers and TV stations have carried stories about the drill for weeks. But to catch people’s attention on this street, and there are always many people on this street, one has to come up with creative and effective communication, with new messages that hit the mark. Cohen’s customers, before, during and after Tuesday’s drill, said they were simply not interested in the exercise. It just wasn’t exciting or important enough to get them to find a nearby bomb shelter, or even consider moving to the back of the café, away from the windows. On Sheinkin Street, you can’t be seen taking this sort of thing seriously, it’s just not cool.

And talking about bomb shelters, several people in cafés and on the street pointed this reporter to about 3 different bomb shelters in the neighborhood, only one of which actually existed. Some people gave different directions to the same non-existent shelter. Others had heard there was a public bomb shelter in Sheinkin Park, entirely convinced that’s where they would run to if the real thing happened. On closer inspection, one finds there is no public bomb shelter in Sheinkin Park. There are public toilets, but no bomb shelter. There is one inside Beit Tami, a city-run community center straddling the small park, but almost nobody on Sheinkin Street knew that.

Journalist and blogger Lisa Goldman points out that Sheinkin has seen quite a few incarnations over the last 60 years. “Now it’s roughly equivalent to – oh, West Broadway in Manhattan, Notting Hill in London or Queen Street West in Toronto. Briefly edgy but now mainstream trendy and somewhat commercialized.”

If it wants to breach this bubble in the future, to get through to the people living on this street and the thousands who visit it daily, the IDF Homefront Command is going to have to put up some billboards pointing out where the bomb shelters are. Tuesday morning’s drill caught Sheinkin Street unprepared, but also during a relative quiet time. On Fridays, Sheinkin is flooded with tens of thousands of people. If a siren goes off on a Friday afternoon, pandemonium is sure to ensue.