An Israeli company has a 'counter-terror boot camp' attraction for tourists

Israeli soldiers training.
(Image credit: MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)

Tourists, mostly American, visiting Israel's Gush Etzion settlement in the West Bank territory have a controversial attraction available to them, Reuters reports: a "counter-terror boot camp" offering participants a two-hour training in how to respond to a terrorist attack in a marketplace. Tourists are armed with mock weapons which they use to play out intense hypothetical scenarios in the experience arranged by a company called Caliber 3, which was founded by an officer in the Israeli army reserves:

Taking in the scene of a simulated fruit market in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, a group of tourists ponders whether a poster-size figure of an Arab man holding a cellphone is a threat and should be shot. [...] Admission includes watching former Israeli commandos take down an "attacker" and other means to thwart assaults, including the use of an attack dog. Adults can shoot live rounds at a firing range. [Reuters]

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.