Twilight Zone / Death metal
Gideon Levy; 7/9/08
The middle of nowhere. The narrow highway that crosses the desert was recently widened in order to enable passage of the heavy equipment needed to build the separation fence. But the highway ends suddenly and turns into a gravel road. We keep on driving, raising a long trail of dust. Occasionally we encounter an encampment, occasionally a camel. There is no desert in Israel as arid as this one, the Judean Desert, between Hashem al-Karem and Hashem al-Daraj, on the way to the Dead Sea. Here and there you see a child in a blue school uniform crossing the yellowish expanses on his way from nowhere, where his school is, to nowhere, where his encampment is. One child flees in panic when we try to ask him about the tent of Mukhtar Yussef.