and yet i still have no plane ticket home!

I’m currently staying at the Judaean Hostel in Jerusalem with all the remaining members of OTZMA (we’ve lost a few for various reasons) for the final days of my program. We spent a few days hiking in the North and now we have all these fabulously boring seminars, and the whole year finally climaxes with a pool party tonight and a banquet in Tel Aviv tomorrow. But as the Hallmark saying goes, “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” In other words, the trip up here from the kibbutz is more noteworthy than my actual arrival in the capital city in one piece… kind of.
For those of you unfamiliar with Israeli geography, Jerusalem is surrounded by this cancerous, kidney-shaped mass known as the West Bank. Everyone knows that the friendlier way of getting from Eilat to J-Ru is by going around the Green Line, but the more efficient direction is straight up Route 90 and through the Jordan River Valley. I’m usually more opposed to the latter approach for reasons that are incredibly boring and idealistic, but when it comes right down to it, Route 90 turns an entire day trip into barely more than a morning commute, and that’s always OK by me. We left Kibbutz Ketura at 6:30AM last Wednesday and commenced our journey up the Dead Sea coast in a cab paid for by OTZMA.
I’d like to take a moment to fill you in on the significance of color in the Holy Land, specifically OTZMA's color-coded license plate policies in Israel and the territories.
Red = Government vehicle. Try not to do anything illegal.
Yellow = Israeli vehicle. Never, under any circumstances, get into one of these cars.
Green = Palestinian vehicle. Take cover because it probably belongs to a suicide bomber.
When you drive up Route 90 through the West Bank, the road pretty much connects the various Jewish settlement towns and not much else, so, as you can imagine, most of the license plates are yellow.
Anyway, we’re just driving along, perhaps 30 kilometers from the checkpoint at the entrance into Jerusalem, and I open my eyes from my nap and see that a line of cars is stopped up ahead. The only problem is, we don’t seem to be slowing down. So our cab plows into a yellow van in front of us, my knee collides with the glove compartment, and I realize that this is no ordinary vehicle that we’ve violated from behind, but a van with a green license plate.
Never mind asking my backseat companion if she’s still alive, and forget checking to make sure I still have feeling in my lower hemisphere. I peer through the windows of the van and notice that it appears to be completely full of terrorists in head coverings, staring right back at me with their suspiciously beady eyes and probably concealing their WMDs under their dresses. Our driver doesn’t speak a word of English, so he’s muttering something in Hebrew and fumbling through the glove compartment to locate his insurance information; meanwhile, I’m on the phone with my program director and whimpering something along the lines of, “Yeah… so I think we’re going to be a little late…”
You’d think that with thousands of car accidents occurring every day in Israel, people would get used to the site of mutilated vehicles – but this does not appear to be the case. Every bus slowed down enough so that everyone could take pictures and gape at us through tinted windows while I covered my face with oversized sunglasses and a book. I mean, seriously. I understand the no hitchhiking policy in my program, but when you’re not even safe in a hired cab, the traffic situation here starts to look a little bleak.