Safe, anywhere? Not in Paradise hotel in Mombasa, Kenya by Kelly Hartog

A Paradise lost
Kelly Hartog
Dec. 5, 2002

If ever I thought for a moment that Israel was "not a safe place to be", that all changed on the morning of Thursday, November 28.

Fate and fate alone declared that I and a hundred other people would survive one of the most audacious attacks ever on Israeli civilians and that Albert de Havilla and Noy and Dvir Anter would not. Fate, too, decided that dozens of others would bear the physical and psychological scars of the attack.

My brush with that fate did not take place in the dusty streets of a West Bank village or the cobbled stones of downtown Jerusalem. It took place at the Paradise hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, which, before it was turned into a smoldering wreck of black smoke, flying debris and bloodied body parts,truly was a paradise of high green grass, beaches that seemed carved out of cut glass and exotic birds courting in the treetops.

But the paradise aspect of Kenya concealed an uglier side. What the media didn't tell you is that, unlike in Israel, where we are sadly so well prepared for terror attacks, no such protocol exists in Kenya. No medics, no counselors, nobody to tell us what to do. Ambulances took three hours to arrive on the scene, there was no bottled water for over two hours, there was no one to take charge. Those of us left intact had no choice but to tend to the wounded as best we could.

Only later did the questions begin to surface. It took us under an hour to drive from Mombasa airport to the Paradise Hotel. What took the medics so long?

The answer, in part, is fear. Fear of more attacks - particularly in light of the attempted missile strike on the Arkia flight we had just disembarked.

Why did we spend six hours in the broiling sun at the site of the attack?

Why did it take so long to evacuate us to another hotel? Because nobody wanted us.

It took another hour to bring in the Kenyan army because we refused to be transported on buses to another hotel without proper security accompanying us. When we finally reached the Indiana Hotel and I approached the manager - a tall be-turbanned Muslim man - to ask him for a phone line,he told me we should be honored because he was risking his job and his life and doing us all a favor by taking us into his hotel.

Why did we sit from midnight until 5 a.m. on the steps of the Indiana hotel?

Because the manager eventually decided it was too risky to keep us in the rooms overnight. He wanted us out of there as fast as possible.

Why did the army come and get us in the end? Because no one else would. No commercial airline was willing to take us anywhere. We didn't care. We would have flown to Europe - anywhere to get out of Kenya but no one but our own came to rescue us.

Seeing the IDF was an extremely emotional, even schmaltzy experience.

I bet my last Kenyan shilling that there'll be a glorified mini-series about it all someday. So while it may sound kitschy that many of us reacted to our rescue with the line "Wow, it's just like Entebbe," the parallel did not escape us. That despite the passage of time, we were still regarded as a foreign people in a foreign land where no one wanted us and nobody was prepared to help in our time of need.

What you also didn't hear through the world's media was the attempt by one couple immediately following the attack to leave the country. They left the hotel, jumped in a cab and went straight to Mombasa airport where they bought a ticket to Nairobi. They were stopped by the authorities before they got any further.

We may well have been back in Nazi Germany with doors slamming on us all around the world. In the days following our rescue - and make no mistake, it was a rescue - these are the images that have haunted me the most.

This is why I live in Israel.

My experience in Kenya has taught me that no matter where we Israelis may find ourselves in trouble, our government and our army will always come and rescue us. We will never be abandoned. Time, it seems, has not changed people's attitudes toward Jews. People are still trying to wash their hands of us around the world and it's 2002. The only nation that always has and always will care about the Jews is the Jewish nation itself.

Nobody should have to be the victim of a terror attack, but given the choice, if it had to happen all over again, I'd rather take my pigua here.

In my homeland.