Jonathan Kraft

We are driving through the West Bank, on a road called Highway 90, trafficked by Israelis only when it is safe. Of course, safety is relative, and if more of my classmates were awake on the bus instead of napping, the mood might be tense. But Israel is a country in which one is not afraid unless there is reason to be afraid at that moment, and for the moment, all is well.

There are barbed-wire fences on either side of the road. Beyond these fences lies some of the poorest land I have ever seen. The arable, irrigated land in Israel proper is non-existent here, replaced by vast, undulating desert. Jordan is off in the distance on one side. On the other, we pass by the occasional Palestinian village. The small towns look much like their Arab Israeli cousins, except much, much poorer. The level of poverty here is not surprising, but it is striking to see in person.

We just passed a sign for Ariel, the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank, with almost 20,000 residents. Ariel, like every other Jewish settlement here, is considered illegal by international standards. But even if Israel agreed to define its borders as those determined after the war in 1967, Ariel, firmly inside what would become the Palestinian state, would have to remain, because of its entrenchment and its sheer size. Think about this, and the implications it has for the peace process. Whatever your ideology, the fact is that settlements are a very significant roadblock towards the resolution of the conflict.

Yesterday, we drove from Rosh HaNikra, a beautiful set of grottos where the Mediterranean meets the border between Israel and Lebanon. At Rosh HaNikra one can see the border fence with Lebanon. Except it is a mirage, because as far as the two countries would have it, the fence is not a separation between themselves, but the end of the world. Unless one is driving a car with a United Nations decal on it, one does not begin to approach the border, and certainly not cross it. As far as these two nations would have it, the fact that their two landmasses touch is deliberately forgotten, except when security conditions dictate otherwise.

From Rosh HaNikra, we drove to Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz located almost directly on the same border. Before we arrived at the kibbutz, we drove through Kiryat Shemona, a town which bore the brunt of the Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon during the conflict between the two nations several years ago. Kiryat Shemona had 2,000 rockets fall on it, half the total number fired at the time. Yet Kiryat Shemona was far different from Sderot, the town two kilometers from Gaza which I visited last year. In Sderot, which is regularly bombed by Qassam rockets fired by Hamas, the mood of the town was a place on edge, unpleasantly tense. But here, though shelters are omnipresent, no such mood hung in the air. Even at the kibbutz, closer yet to the border, though shelters stood between every bloc of houses, the mood was normal, or whatever normal is there. But then, while visiting a nearby cemetery, we came across the remnants of a Katyusha that had exploded with force, killing twelve Israeli Defense Force reservists who were preparing to deploy into Lebanon.

In Israel, all is normal. Until it is not.