By Christine Seisun

At first I didn’t think about it, but now I’m mildly alarmed that I was not alarmed. I didn’t really raise an eyebrow when my roommate and I went to the movies a week or two ago and we had to sit down behind a row of seven or eight young Israeli soldiers whose m16s clanked every time they moved in the dark theatre. I didn’t bat an eyelash when going through three different checkpoints to see the (in)famous Ibrahimi mosque in the West Bank. In fact, my friend Jo was even daring enough to take a picture of a soldier searching my bag at the second checkpoint out of the three. It would be rare for a week to go by when my Palestinian co-worker won’t be late in the mornings due to an unexpected checkpoint delay when coming from her house in the West Bank. When crossing into Ramallah from Jerusalem, I no longer stare mouth agape, eyes wide open at the nearly 30 foot tall ’separation barrier.’ And I’ve stopped doing a double-take when I see young men swaggering in their street clothes with a large handgun conspicuously tucked into the back of their jeans.

But then when my British friend Jo got pulled off a bus by a soldier at a checkpoint that had been arbitrarily set up less than 150 meters from the other checkpoint we had JUST passed through, I started to sit up and take notice of my surroundings once again. Apparently this process of normalization is….well, normal. When internationals first arrive here we are enraged, shocked and stunned to learn that this is daily life for both Palestinians and Israelis. That it’s normal to live in the Palestinian part of East Jerusalem but right next to an Israeli settlement. That it’s normal to see the kids from that same settlement ride on their bikes right up to the metal fence surrounding their government-sponsored neighborhood, almost close enough to talk to the Palestinian children playing soccer in the street less than 20 feet away, only to peddle back into their enclosure. That it’s normal to see a backpack lying on the floor of the central bus station and immediately call security even if it’s owner just walked away to buy some coffee. That it’s normal that I can’t text my friend living in a West Bank town an hour away because the company of my Israeli sim card doesn’t have any agreements with my friend’s Palestinian sim card. I can text my friends in Uganda but not in the next town over. We, as internationals obviously not from this area, don’t understand this way of life. Then slowly, without realizing, it becomes our way of life too.

This changed when my French roommate and I were waiting for Jo for 45 minutes while a simple visa issue had to be explained. It changed when I saw the same soldiers that were questioning Jo pull over an ambulance rushing to the hospital and ask for the identification documents of everyone including the person lying on the stretcher inside. I had heard that it’s common for people to die while in an ambulance and being detained at checkpoints, but since I personally could not fathom something like that happening, the enormity of instances like that only hit me when I saw it with my own eyes.

My time in the Middle East was unforgettable and a little more than eye-opening, but it’s shocking to think that only a few months here and already I’m normalizing the abnormal.