Amid terror in Jerusalem, a cab driver’s brave gesture showcased the Israel I’ve always loved

Members of Israel’s search and rescue emergency services transport a body from the scene of a shooting at the Ramot road junction in Jerusalem, Sept. 8. Photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images

Aviya Kushner September 13, 2025

I have been fascinated by a moment captured on dashcam video during the Monday shooting attack at a Jerusalem bus stop.

As people fled for their lives, and bullets flew, a taxi driver in busy traffic opened his door, then walked around to the other side of his car — the less-safe side, the side closer to the gunfire.

Once there, he opened the passenger door, waited for 12 long seconds, then extended his arm to an elderly religious woman carrying a cane.

He took her arm, and the two of them walked together to safety.

“That’s the Israel I know,” I thought.

As I watched and re-watched, I thought of how much I hear about Israel is simply untrue. For nearly two years, I have been inundated with angry accounts depicting Israelis as unilaterally barbaric and murderous. I have been lectured by people in academic and literary circles — people who have never ducked gunfire in their lives.

These accusers often have little patience for learning about Israel, and no interest in comprehending what every Israeli understands — that in Israel, an attack can happen at any moment.

In fact, the video starts with a four-word conversation. “Yeriot” — “gunshots,” a man says. “Mah od chadash?” A woman responds:  “What else is new?”

The truth is that this cabdriver’s behavior — heroic as it was — is nothing new for Israel.

There is a deep humanity there, one that often comes through in times of crisis. The country was founded on the old promise that no Israeli would be left behind. That promise, sacrosanct for decades, has been shattered as the hostages languish; but this cabdriver held up his end of the deal.

An existential despair

The government’s abandonment of that promise is only one of the many sources of great pain in Israel as this awful war continues, and only one of the questions about what kind of Israel will exist going forward. “How can I send my children to the army,” people are asking, “if I do not know that Israel will do everything it can to get them back?”

It is lost on no one that the army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, recommended against escalating the Gaza war further, but the cabinet decided otherwise.

There is fury, and existential despair. That’s even more true after Israel conducted airstrikes targeting Hamas in Qatar on Tuesday; now, Israelis await another threatened retaliation in another chapter of a war that has exhausted the country.

But it is not true that Israelis are uncaring, or that their empathy is reserved for only Israelis.

I say this because I often hear people who have not been in Israel since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — and who live in safety thousands of miles away — say with dismissive certainty that Israelis are unfeeling, cold to human suffering. Recently, I spoke with an Israeli friend who was incensed when someone in the small American city where he now lives casually compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust. He found himself yelling about a friend in the Israeli army who lost a leg in Gaza while going house to house to warn Palestinians to evacuate, in an effort to minimize lost lives.

“How can you compare that to the planned extermination of millions of people?” he said to me, still shaking from the encounter. Later, he asked: “Why do they think so many Israeli young men have lost limbs in the past two years?”

“They don’t know, actually,” I said, because I know that the many severely injured Israeli soldiers in this war are not an international news story.

The erasure of Israeli individuality

What will a person do to save a life?

I personally know two women who have spent years transporting severely ill Gazan children to Israeli hospitals. Both have been attacked online by so-called “social-justice” activists, who have never had to head to a hostile border to drive a child to get care.

I notice that people who otherwise insist on the importance of honoring various individual differences are also astonishingly comfortable lumping all Israelis together.

As I was thinking about why the footage of the cab driver cut so deep into my heart, I happened to go food shopping in Chicago. As I paid for my sweet potatoes and spoke on the phone briefly with my mother in Hebrew, the woman behind me in line glared at me with unmistakeable hatred.

I first experienced this anti-Hebrew attitude years ago, when I spoke at a 2017 literary conference in Washington, D.C., about my work as a translator of poetry. An audience member — an Arabic translator — kept asking why I did not translate from Arabic. Eventually, she said that Hebrew was not a legitimate language. “Thank you for saying that,” I said. At least it was out in the open.

Now that kind of thing is everywhere. The language has come under attack, whole, just as the country has.

Embodying pikuach nefesh

I regularly speak with Israelis who are torn apart over what is happening within Israel — including the inflammatory statements made by some political leaders, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that freeing the hostages is not “the most important” goal of the war, and the sense that many have that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is intentionally prolonging the war.

There is anguish over the continuing loss of life in Gaza, and major worries over what will come next. Even in the religious community, there have been major statements raising humanitarian concerns. There are plenty of individuals wrestling with this moment. It is not true that all Israelis agree on everything. And it is not true that Israelis are unaware, or somehow blinded from reality.

From the very beginning of this war, in October 2023, retired generals who are now commentators on Israeli television have noted that they are worried that there is no “day after” plan for Gaza.

I know Israelis who have been on the street, protesting the government’s decisions, every night, for months. And they were there before Oct. 7, during huge anti-government protests.

The world struggles to acknowledge that, at the same time as Israel’s conflicts are headline-making news, what is going on within Israel also matters deeply.

That was another reason that the cabdriver’s behavior got to me.

The truth is that there are divisions between people in Israel — secular and Israel, left and right, rich and poor — just as there are divisions in nearly every society in the world. But none of that mattered to this cabdriver.

What struck me was not just what happened, but what did not.

The cabdriver could have ducked. He could have lowered himself to the floor of his cab and focused on saving himself. Instead, he got out of his cab, walking to the rhythm of gunfire, to help a very old woman to safety.

There is also a major concept in Judaism, summarized by the words “pikuach nefesh docheh kol” — “the risk to a life supersedes everything.”

The driver understood that in his soul. Gestures between individuals speak their own language and tell their own truth. I hope we take the time to notice that Jerusalem cabdriver, and the truth of his gesture. He wasn’t thinking about world opinion. It was just him, the woman and the gunshots. Either he helped her, or no one would.