They Hate So Much that They Can't Think

One Ted Conover has a piece in The Atlantic Monthly. It deals with checkpoint life for Israeli soldiers which, he writes, is dull, alienating, and stress-inducing. For the Palestinians it is frustrating, humiliating, and anger-provoking. Yet it’s the human face of the occupation — and as close as some Israelis and Palestinians will ever come.


And here are the opening paragraphs:-

We in the modern world are used to waiting, and the first time one passes through a checkpoint in the West Bank, one thinks, Oh, this looks kind of familiar. This won’t be so bad. I will just need to stand in line a bit.

But then one sees that rather than a simple queue, this is more like a funnel—wide enough where it begins for thirty people to stand side by side, at the end of an open-air shed with a corrugated tin roof, but narrowing a few yards farther on, where everyone is pushing toward two tall turnstiles. One afternoon in the fall of 2004 (but it could as well have been today) it took forty minutes to reach the front at Qalandia, the checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. It was an exercise in gradual compression: I went from having some choice of movement (I’ll head for the left turnstile) to having none at all, as my footsteps were foreshortened by the people in front, my arms were pinioned by the people beside me, and my shoulders were bumped by the people behind.

Doesn't he realize that these people do not suffer the fear of being blown up by a Jewish suicide bomber unlike kids waiting on line outside a nighclub or a supermarket or a restaurant?