RAMALLAH - I rode in an Israeli taxi with Palestinian journalist Sufian Taha from the American Colony Hotel to the Qalandia checkpoint on the road to Ramallah, capital of nascent Palestine, in the hills of the West Bank over Jerusalem. We had to take a taxi, and we had to switch to a Palestinian taxi after we reached the other side. “You do not want to drive in the West Bank with Israeli plates on your car,” he said.
In the northern suburbs of Jerusalem you can see both sides of the Green Line at the same time. The West Bank is right there. Everything is piled on top of everything else.
“That’s an Arab neighborhood on the left side of the street,” Sufian said. “Israelis live on the right side. They live so close, but they hate each other. They are like cousins fighting over their grandfather’s inheritance.”
Then we hit the wall.
Another brilliant diary, Michael. Folks, you need to be reading this. Michael's stuff is a cut above the so-called "professional" media, and always interesting.
Mr. Totten hails from a Blue-voting area (Portland, Oregon), and has shown a liberal bent personally. I would say that his perception that Americans don't "have a problem with people like you just because you're a Palestinian" may be skewed because he simply doesn't ever come in contact with a majority of Americans.
I'm quite cheerfully prepared to allow the Palestinians to starve to death, to shoot each other, to blow each other up ... whatever it takes that will cause them to lay down their dynamite belts. I have watched them for decades now strip off layer after layer of their humanity - lying and cheating and stealing and murdering and swaggering - to the point that I really think anyone who names him or herself "Palestinian" probably grows fangs and hair on their hands under a full moon and reverts to something prehistoric and animalistic when no one is watching. In other words, I want nothing to do with them, will not support them in any way, and prefer not to have to breathe the same air.
On a different note, the other thing that struck me about Totten's piece was the comment that Americans "walk" a different way. I've never seen that before, any where. Maybe it was just a tactful comment on the part of Totten's companion.