‘Will we have to change our way of life?’

Martin Fletcher Correspondent • Profile

LONDON — London woke up Friday to the “day after” of what has been called the worst assault on British soil since World War II.

As the British cope with the tragedy of Thursday's terror attacks, they will also have to confront what the attack means going forward and how it will or will not affect their daily lives.

NBC News Correspondent Martin Fletcher, based in Israel, has spent years living through and reporting on terrorist attacks.

In an interview with MSNBC.com, he talks about the differences he sees in the British and Israeli responses to terror.

Can you describe the mood in London?
The population of London is somewhere around seven million, so to generalize is totally impossible. But what I’ve noticed from the media coverage is how proud the British are of their stiff upper lip.

Everyone is congratulating themselves about how everyone is carrying on, and on how life continues as normal. Saying things like, “We are not going to let the terrorists change our way of life,” and all these kinds of proud statements. [They're] comparing London today to the Blitz and saying that nothing can phase London.

What you see in the streets is a completely routine scene. I’m sitting now in a café just down the street from Russell Square, where there are still bodies down inside the tube that have not yet been taken out. But here where I’m sitting, you wouldn’t know that anything was happening there. Everything seems completely normal.

That’s the way it normally is in Israel or anywhere else. Within, say, half an hour of a bomb happening, in Israel anyway, the streets have been cleaned up and people continue to travel again.

One thing that is definitely different here is that there are far fewer people and far less traffic than normal because so many people have been told to stay out of the center of town if they don’t need to come here. 

Unfortunately, you have an inordinate amount of experience with terrorist attacks from your experience living and reporting in Israel. How is the British reaction to the terror attacks similar or different from the reaction in Israel?
I’d say it’s very similar, to be honest. As I say, you can’t see a big difference. Presumably, there is more awareness of security. At the British Museum they were searching people’s bags, but I don’t know if they do that normally or not.

But at most places here, it is wide open to terrorism. There is no attempt to search people’s bags as they go into busy shopping malls or stations or buses. The awareness of the dangers of terrorism here — in practical terms of what they are actually doing about it — is close to zero. London proudly says that they have more surveillance cameras than any other city in the world. Apart from that, though, there is really no way here to stop a terrorist from attacking.

Whereas in Israel, a bag that has been left by itself in the street for more than two minutes, someone will report that bag to the police, and then the bomb squad will come and close off the area and investigate the bag and maybe blow it up. And all of that happens within minutes, literally within minutes. Whereas here, it is just wide open.

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