I'm fairly indifferent. I just get tired of the constant squawking by Palestinians that somehow makes it to the mainstream media. The quickest way to end it is to end the Palestinians, so someone should just get on with it. Letting the same problem drag on for 50 years is just ridiculous. You'd think someone could come up with some sort of final solution by now.
When you are there? So you actually live in the US and visit there.
Yes. I haven't been for two years, but I hope to go again once I have my bachelor's degree. I'm usually there for 2 months in the summer. I hold a green, "Palestinian" identification card, and the US passport I got for being born here. My parents are naturalized US citizens, my father is a 1948 refugee, my mother's family is from Bethlehem. I often have to travel from Ramallah to Bethlehem, and the change in the journey over the past 15 years has been quite noticeable. It used to take 15 minutes, and a nice chat with an Israeli policeman, who usually let us by in a Palestinian vehicle, after noticing that we were a family visiting family, or even Jerusalem. Now it takes two hours, and involves some unsavory interactions with the border patrol and IDF. One of the conscripts was nice once, he had an American pack of Marlboros, and was very :biggrin: about it, stopping cars, and making the smokers hang out and enjoy "some good cigs." Guy spoke fairly fluent Arabic as well, and was way too happy to be working a checkpoint.
Most of the time, the soldiers staffing the checkpoints within the West Bank are dicks. Thankfully, from what I can tell, I've only had to deal with the "moderate ones." The women at the border crossings (between Jordan and the West Bank) are usually extremely nice. Hell, the whole staff is. They only get riled up at the more, old-fashioned travelers, with tons of bags, fresh food, etc. I travel light, they push me through in <1 hr.
They're so rich that their womens' dresses (no doubt made of mink fur, diamonds and other enormously expensive materials) aren't even normal sized, but extended at the tops and bottoms to cover their hair, face and legs! Talk about conspicuous consumption! Freakin' Palestinian 1%ers.
Your bigotry is showing.
Jesus christ, why do we even HAVE a no-fly list if we're going to let people like that fly?
If it makes you any happier, I get randomly selected for a search fairly frequently. I also get strip searched in Tel Aviv. Once I got strip searched by someone who could have only been Ben Stiller's distant relative. Same height, facial expressions, face, voice, accent, just a little older and balder. I didn't bring it up with him, well, since he had his hands in my pants, kind of hard to make small talk in that situation.
Yeah he's serious.