Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [23]
I’d met this family back in 2002, when Nablus was under Israeli closure and we’d had to drive a twisting, dusty path through the olive groves, hiding from the Israeli tanks, to reach their house. I hadn’t seen the family since then, and I had no particular errand with them now. But I wanted to visit this town, whose name Palestinians spoke with soft smiles, asking if you’d tried the honey-dripping kanafeh, if you’d visited the olive oil soap factories.
And now I found myself in Kfar Saba, spinning around grassy traffic circles and trolling the back streets, sense of direction scrambled, in the absurd position of looking for the West Bank in Israel. Understand: Kfar Saba is right next to the West Bank. Imagine driving around El Paso discovering that nobody knows where Mexico is. It seems logically impossible, except you keep slamming into it, this blank unknowing. I pulled over and asked some kids on bikes. Empty stares. Suspicious frowns. An old man at the roadside shook his head. The mechanics at the gas station weren’t really certain, either. If you lived in Israel and weren’t a settler, you could block the West Bank out of your mind. You’d have no business going there, and so you could simply remove it from consideration. Looking for the crossing in this sleepy Israeli community was like hunting for a gap in time and space, the gateway to another dimension. In the end, somehow, I found the checkpoint that marked the line between Israel and the West Bank. The soldiers let the armored car through. Except the road didn’t go the way the map suggested. And soon I hit another checkpoint.
By now I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields of dead grass. I let the car shudder to a stop and took in the scene before me. About twenty Palestinians stood listlessly in a neat line, waiting their turn to be searched and interrogated so that they could continue along the country road. They stood on a line to nowhere, all spiffed up because they had someplace to be. They were mostly old men, their patched polyester blazers and stiff shoes coated in dust from walking the dirt trails out of their villages and scrambling over sand berms. They stood there like something out of an absurdist painting, as if they were queued up at a turnstile or ticket office. As if they’d been cut out of a city block and pasted over these golden fields.
A small cluster of Israeli soldiers in olive fatigues administered the checkpoint. They were in their teens or just out of them; they sneered at the Palestinians and horsed around among themselves. One of them sauntered over to the car, gun in hand. I shoved open the heavy, armored door; the shatterproof windows didn’t roll down. The soldier looked like a child to me.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I’m a journalist. I’m trying to get to Nablus.”
“You can’t go down this road.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t go.”
“Is it a closed military zone? Because if it’s not a closed military zone, I can go.”
He just stood there and smirked.
I felt like informing him that I was an American taxpayer, that my family and I had been compelled to pay for his guns and tanks and jeeps, for his salary, to the detriment of schools and homeless shelters and other miscellaneous things for our own country. That his country would surely have been overrun by hostile Arabs long ago without the billions of U.S. tax dollars pumped into the Israeli military. That I understood that’s what we’d collectively chosen to do with our money and I didn’t expect him to thank me. But that he could at least wipe the smirk off his teenaged face. Because every time I went to Gaza or the West Bank and saw his colleagues harassing old, sickly Palestinians with the same youthful vigor with which old, sickly Jews had been tormented in Europe, I wanted to burn my notebooks and join a Buddhist monastery someplace. That I didn’t want to be staring at