The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like most others, is adversarial. The issues involved raise a barrier between the two sides (sometimes metaphorical and ideological, sometimes very real and physical). We deal with the ‘enemy’ when necessary, but it’s always impersonal and generalized. It’s never ‘Walid’, always ‘the Palestinian from the village’, never ‘Tomer’, always ‘the soldier at the checkpoint’. No names, no faces, only uniforms and keffiyehs with an increasingly sinister expression. Epithets and stones are hurled over the barrier, and we shake our collectively clenched fist in a gesture of frustration and refusal to just go away…

Dusk approached cautiously as I steered myself

Carefully, down the steep, age-worn steps. As I walked,

I let my hand run lazily along the stones.

Their softness, testament

To the thousands who had made this journey before, many of them running

I was not enticed, per se, by birthright’s web pages inviting me to Experience Israel! adorned consistently with photos of youths huddling happily together, advertising how incredibly intimate they had become over the course of their ten days together – in fact I suspected these were amateur models posing to receive generous stipends from Taglit’s overflowing coffers. I was more attracted by the free airfare…

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…