The first and sadly only Jew I talked to in Israel didn’t actually want to talk to me.

I asked him where he was from. It was outside of the airport and it was obvious he also just landed. He was counting money. Am not mentioning this to invoke some anti-semitic trope. Maybe he had just exchanged currency, I don’t know, but he was counting a lot of money. Without looking at me he asked: ‘Are you Jewish?’

I said I wasn’t and no more word was said between us.

He did not owe it to me to talk to me and entertain me, it was most likely just a coincidence that the first traditionally clad Jew I ever met didn’t feel like talking to me. Who knows? Maybe he had just been on a plane for 8 or more hours, was dead tired and wanted to reach his destination asap without an inquisitive tourist badgering him… I didn’t see it like that at the time. I probably went: ‘Well, well, welcome to Israel, I guess. This is going to be tough.’

I remember a lot about my time in the West Bank, but unfortunately the chronological order of events has slipped away in my mind.

We spent time in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, Jeruzalem and Qalqilya.

We visited a lot of hospitals, but don’t ask me where they were located or what the names of the hospitals were. It’s possible I will at some point discover the notebooks I scribbled full at the time and this will refresh my memory. I took a lot of notes. Badr, Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, a dentist we became fast friends with, made fun of me and said I was always working. I was surprised, because back then work to me was only work when you were getting paid. To my mind what I was doing was actually crazy and irresponsible and since I was there anyway I wanted to soak up as much of the conflict as possible.

I talked to women who told me they had given birth at checkpoints because IDF soldiers arbitrarily decided they weren’t allowed to drive to the nearest hospital. I talked to a physician who told me IDF soldiers practice a shot called the femoral shot. I was told that if someone is hit by a bullet and it cuts the femoral artery there are only two outcomes: you bleed to death or you survive, but you end up paralyzed. The same physician told me about a boy shot by an IDF soldier while doing his homework.

Moshe doesn’t believe that this happened, but I believe it did.