Standing at a bus stop, the bricks of the Old City hovering on the horizon and a deadly heat radiating off the highway pavement, I boarded a minibus that 20 minutes later had me face to face with the wall – yes, that wall – on the edge of Bethlehem. Disembarking the vehicle and walking (tentatively) toward the massive structure, complete with rusted barbed wire and ominous towers, I passed through the series of indoor turnstiles and ramps that landed me in a queue line. I knew these places existed, and equally knew the vitriol-strapped arguments surrounding them: security fence, separation barrier, land grab, open-air prison. Call it what you will because in this moment, standing in the stark reality of a hot-button issue, I’m not thinking about semantics.

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…