Next, I opened a box of Turkish delight. "I'm not going to stop until you let me out," I announced as I began mashing the gummy cubes into the hinges of the iron door.
"OK, OK," said the soldier's voice over the intercom. "You can go now." The door buzzed.
I gathered my bags and walked out. A soldier was waiting for me on the other side. He gave me my passport and said I was free to leave. I called Kobi as soon as I was outside. He said it was the US Consulate that had helped get me released. The army claimed they were holding me because of the photographs I had taken inside the terminal. Interestingly, they hadn't bothered to delete the images from my camera when they searched my bags.
Kobi told me a story about his Palestinian friend, Sara, whom he'd met in Maryland. Sara would frequently travel back and forth between her home in Palestine and the United States, where she was studying. Each time she returned to Palestine, she was able to walk right through the checkpoints. She had enough confidence to just assert her will and go through, simply by the fact that she was used to being treated like a person. And each time, after a few months in Palestine, she would lose that ability.
In just a few hours I had gone from empowerment to craziness to submission to destructiveness. What would I become after months of such treatment? What about a lifetime of the even worse treatment that Palestinians experience?
It was dark outside the terminal as I hung up the phone. I had been held for 3 hours, and there were no more buses running. I could see the lights of a settlement on a nearby hill. I began walking in what seemed like the direction of Tel Aviv. I stuck my thumb out to the occasional passing car, and eventually a settler stopped. He moved his gun out of the front seat so that I could get in. Feeling lousy about it, I accepted a ride to the nearest bus stop from where buses were still running to Tel Aviv. I boarded the first bus out and cried the whole way back to the city.
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