The casual racism of war-time Israel
Israeli Border Police officers patting down a Palestinian man.
Edo Konrad writes in +972:
The bike ride along the outdoor platform of Tel Aviv’s central bus station takes about a minute north to south.
The area, long neglected by the city, has become home to junkies, sex workers, the homeless, asylum seekers, and Palestinian day laborers.
It’s also a hub for Israeli soldiers on their way to or from base. Old, half-shredded posters of Eritrean pop singers and fundamentalist Jewish religious figures warning of the End Times line the drab concrete wall that does full justice to the building’s brutalist architecture.
I usually take my time and walk through, out of respect for pedestrians trying to make their way to the sherut (“service”) taxis — yellow mini-buses that travel across the country to places as far as Tiberias or Ashdod whose drivers share a single common attribute: unyielding impatience.
This morning, however, I was late for work and couldn’t afford the time to saunter. I crossed the street and turned left on the platform, peddling past a group of soldiers standing at the northern entrance to the station.
Next to them were five female Border Police officers surrounding a man in his 30s in sagging pants and a gray hoodie. They were examining his green ID card — he must have been Palestinian laborer from the West Bank. I slowed down, weary from a sight that repeats itself ad nauseam only to see that they had returned his ID and let him go. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued on.