One last thing: I don’t agree with your notion that IsraeliNurse is attempting “to convince the HP audience that she’s the only one with her finger on the national pulse.” She clearly writes for herself, often sharing personal experiences, and while I don’t know her or who she is, I can tell you for sure that among my family and friends, there is not a single one who wouldn’t look at her views and experiences as reflecting a very authentic mainstream Israeli perspective.
I don’t see any need for you to go into a contest with her about who of you has more claim to having the “finger on the national pulse”, as you like to put it. It’s a contest you loose by a devastating margin. But it’s a contest you yourself set up, without any reason.

Firstly, by no means do I think I am ‘the only one with her finger on the national pulse’. Petra, Fabian, Lbnaz and many other non-Israelis here seem to be able to count the heartbeats very well without my help. But it is patently clear that I am counting a different pulse to you, and the question is why.
The obvious answer would be political outlook, and whilst I rather suspect that deep down we have more in common than not on that subject, there are obviously some pretty big chasms of disagreement too. These, I suspect, are based on age and experience -and no I’m not ‘pulling rank’ here, I’m just pointing out that experience colours one’s views. There is experience which comes with time and there is experience which comes with things happening to you and around you.
I too was a new immigrant from the UK, Alex, and when I look back now at how my opinions changed as time progressed and my Hebrew improved to the point where today it is my first language before English and I even learnt a little Arabic and was able to absorb more and more of the myriad of personal stories which make up Israel, I know that the comforting absolutism of my initial youthful opinions was often superficial and naive.
I say this in the friendliest possible of manners, Alex, (this is the bit I didn’t want to write) – you can’t come to the ME with 20-odd years of experience from another part of the world, which to be honest may just as well be another planet, and without the language skills to comprehend fully the nuances of what is going on and expect to be able to bypass the long learning process.
Of course your political opinion is as valid as the next person’s: at the ballot box there is no difference between your vote and mine, but don’t you sometimes ask yourself why more people do not think like you? I’m sure you don’t think it’s because they are stupid or wicked -could it be that the majority in Israel have a legitimate opinion which is different to yours because their views are coloured by different experiences to your own? And could it just be possible that in 20 or 30 years time your own opinions may be a little less entrenched, a little less black and white than they are now?
I hope so Alex -not for political reasons, but because the secret to sucessfull absorbtion into Israeli society -which is what I wish you – is to be able to gradually cast off what one was before and to begin to think not like an Englishman living in Israel, but like an Israeli.

I’m not surprised to see you patronise me with the new immigrant stuff, it’s par for the course as far as you are concerned. I also have friends who have been involved in terror incidents, as the story above shows, not that I need to prove anything, and I’m also more than aware of the circumstances in which the left has collapsed – I was here for the year before the intifada, a year in the middle of the intifada, and then I made aliyah the year after disengagement. Either way, I won’t be patronised like that, and I object to Israeli nurse’s attempts to convince the HP audience that she’s the only one with her finger on the national pulse.

Gabriel, you’re welcome to doubt Btselem figures — sometimes they are really not accurate. I made the point about the 1.7 percent in a specific context, which you could have realized if you bothered to read other people’s posts — but then, you perhaps find it more important to type up your own. So I guess there isn’t much point in once again responding to your post — just go ahead and write what you wanted to write anyway.

Alex, bit strange, frankly — I asked your views about Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinian state would be demilitarized, I asked what you meant by darkly hinting at an “endgame” pursued by successive Israeli governments … no response — which is fine if you don’t have the time/inclination; but you’ll understand that I don’t have the time/inclination to give you details about when, why, and with whom I go to the Westbank.

Many years ago a suicide bomber drove a car bomb into a bus in the town where I was working at the time. Most of the dead and injured were teenagers on their way home from school. When the injured were brought to A&E, we initially thought that they were all Ethiopian children. They weren’t -they were just so badly burned that their skin was black. One of my colleagues was trying to get an IV line into one of the victims when our manager came over and told her to let another nurse do it. She didn’t understand why he insisted that she hand over the patient to someone else. He took her aside and explained to her that the youth she had been treating was her own son. He was so badly burned that she hadn’t even recognised him.
He lived, but that family went through years of hell, and there are thousands of other families in Israel who have lived through and are still living through that same hell.
So I’m really sorry if it takes 4 hours to get from Schem to Ramallah, but that’s the price the Palestinians will have to pay until they renounce terror and we can be sure that no other schoolchild will have to suffer like my friend’s son did.
And you know what Gabriel, I find it commendable that you can find the empathy for a Palestinian stuck in a road block, but exceedingly strange that your empathy does not not extend to an Israeli child burned beyond recognition.