The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just one day before the deadly attack on the Tel Aviv bar Jan. 1, The New York Times published a glowing account of how people could spend 36 exciting hours in the city. The piece described an open and secular city, where the LGBT community “seems to take precedence over Israel’s complicated politics.” Among the advantages described in the article were 300 days of sunshine a year, great bars, exciting nightclubs, world-class restaurants and lively flea markets.

The article offered a very accurate picture of life in the city. Tel Aviv is, after all, an icon of liberal, progressive Israel, a place where normal life can go on in the heart of the pressure cooker that is the Middle East. The “Tel Aviv bubble” is a derisive term used by other Israelis to describe people who live in the city. It implies that they are detached from reality, self-absorbed and focused on having a good time. Yet all these things are marks of normalcy.

The perpetrator who killed two young people and wounded several others managed to escape. Unsurprisingly, the fact that he wasn’t shot or at the very least captured sparked a wave of criticism against the people of Tel Aviv, who failed to “neutralize” the shooter. In the flurry of media reports on the day of the incident and after, Tel Aviv residents were even compared to Jerusalemites, who would never have let a “fiasco” like this one happen. After being subjected to months of violence, many people in Jerusalem now carry a gun, as do all the security forces spread across the city as a matter of course. That is why after just about every attack in the current wave of violence, the perpetrator was “neutralized,” a popular euphemism for captured or killed.

This kind of criticism targeting Tel Aviv shows how jumbled and disordered the mood really is in Israel, which describes itself as a civil society.