Territorial Ruminations

Tonight/tomorrow is my Hebrew birthday, so the Be’er Sheva birthday dinner was on again. I prepared my stuff for a long weekend (Shabbat in Beit Shemesh, details to come), walked to the bus stop and got on the 3:00 bus to Be’er Sheva. Again, the bus’s cloudy bulletproof windows were nauseating, but I managed to sit by a relatively clear one. The bus shot nearly straight down through the West Bank, stopping at various yishuvim along the way. We stopped in Kiryat Arba by Hebron, a built-up, well-kept enclave in the middle of a barren, rocky desert, with trees, nice buildings, and lots of children. Army soldiers get on and off. The guy sitting next to me got off at Otniel. We stop at Haggai and Shim’a, turning off the highway, driving the winding roads up the mountains, entering through the electric gates by the security checkpoints. Inside are carefully paved streets, rows of houses, a cluster of trailers, and kids mulling about. Outside are crumbling cement walls littered with broken refuse. Those are Arab homes.

Who are these people who live such cloistered lives in towns enclosed by barb wire, surrounded by desert, among scattered Arab towns? Where do they work? Where do they buy their groceries? What spirit moves them to effect their destiny in the desert, create ex nihilo communities of civic-minded citizens, dedicated to the future of their children? It’s inspiring to see what can be achieved through sheer determination. It’s also striking how weirdly normal they all seem. I stop to wonder what will happen to these oases of civilization should a Palestinian state be founded here. A soldier playing loud Israeli pop in the row behind me interrupts my philosophizing.

I eventually made it to Ben Guiron Univeristy, no thanks to the bus driver who wouldn’t tell me which stop was mine, and we went out for an Indian birthday dinner. We walked through campus to the student center. It’s sleek and modern and collegiate. What a place that builds its dreams with stone and steel and constructs the future it sees for itself.