On the first day after the delegation is officially over, some of us who are staying on longer take Palestinian public transit back to Jerusalem from Ramallah. Our delegation tour bus with the yellow Israeli license plates has breezed through with barely a glance from the soldiers at Kalandia checkpoint. On the Palestinian bus a soldier with an M-16 comes on board to check every ID. When he turns to look at my traveling companions' passports his gun is inches from my face.
(We foreign passport holders still get off easy. We get to stay on the bus instead of having to get off and walk through the cattle-chute-subway-turnstile-metal-detector-bored-soldier maze of Kalandia on foot.)
You may know that active-duty soldiers ride public buses in Israel. In Haifa there are soldiers everywhere. Boy soldiers with M-16s bouncing casually on their hips like man-purses. Girl soldiers giggling and texting on their cell phones, wearing their army fatigues slightly customized like prep school uniforms. Boy and girl seem appropriate designations for them, since not a one looks over 20. They could be at summer camp.
I think how sick it is to put soldiers on public buses. How it's a way of normalizing the extreme militarization of Israeli society. How ludicrous it is for the Israeli government to shriek about Hamas mixing combatants with civilians in Gaza when they themselves do it every day.
When my Palestinian traveling companion and I get on one bus in Haifa, we both look around and realize there is not a single open seat that's not next to a soldier. We both instinctively stand.
I always had a problem with this civilian casualties stuff because, besides the fact that the "missiles" themselves aren't very impressive (improvised rockets the size of your arm, without any kind of guidance system, or success record), if you go back to the older propaganda for Israel (before the love affair with America inaugurated under Meir and Nixon, when Israel's best friend was actually France), Israel doesn't have civilians as a matter of definition. Israel isn't a nation state or a geographical area, it's a tribe, a fully integrated thought system, a massive project dedicated to countering Jewish victimhood (under Christianity) with a great flawless fortress. The whole idea is, everyone's a soldier, everyone's ready to do their bit, that sort of thing; this is very clear in Israeli media products and philosophical arguments even now. They are literally contradicting themselves with each corner of their mouths (which is their norm).
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