Six queues were waiting to enter the first turnstiles. David sat on a bench. He wanted to see how quickly things were moving before deciding to cross or not. Each queue faced a closed turnstile. The queues thickened with arriving people. The Israelis opened and closed the gates unpredictably.
Some people drifted forwards, using the spaces between the queues to create new conditions of "place ownership". Occupying a place made it yours, so people congregated at the turnstiles, blurring the queues.
A green light appeared above a turnstile. Three men in a neighbouring queue pushed in in front of a woman who screamed. Decency, as a guiding force, is only useful if it gives rewards.
Green lights appeared above the other gates. People who had drifted up the sides of the queues bolted into the queues as others forced their way through clicking, rotating vertical and horizontal bars that seemed to be marking limited time. No one knew when the Israelis were going to close the gates again—and for how long—so the people pushed and shoved, bellowing out frustrations.
The turnstiles stopped clicking. A man who had been waiting in one of the queues without pushing in, started shouting, peeved by the "unconscious drifters" who never spoke. Stealth, nerve, calculation, and pragmatism were used by the "unconscious drifters" who ignored the screaming, because there were no physical threats.
The screaming man had been doing business in Ramallah. His name was Yasir Ali. He believed in co-operation, concerted group effort, constructive organisation—in unity. His hopes were high. He was appalled by how the cheats took advantage of the inability of the majority to behave as one. He was hoping that there would be a general recognition of the values inherent in justice. His eyes shone like brown-silver fires. He tapped a man on the shoulder and pointed to the old woman in front of him and said: "You're not going through before her."
David noted Yasir's disgust. The woman in front of Yasir waved her hand at the man who had been tapped on the shoulder, her voice heard over the chatter—such was her anger.
David noted that the "unconscious drifters" relied on physical proximity to test the nerve of those who were abiding by the unwritten precepts. The cheats slowly crept up and occupied unoccupied spaces, establishing new considerations, accumulating status through presence, testing the probity of the well-behaved, as if benign adherence to the obvious rules was a weakness to be exploited.
A man ahead of Yasir told a "drifter" that he was "going in ahead of you. I don't care what you do behind me, but I'm going in ahead of you." The man spoke with the determination of the resolved. The "drifter" said nothing. He was pleased, however, that his adversary had only wanted to debate the issue of who was next, and nothing else; hence, an agreement, based on mutual expediency, was created, thereby avoiding ethical considerations that may have created thorny inconveniences for them both. Their own small world was constructed to eradicate outside threats, to increase gain by stripping others of significance.
But Yasir was determined to get people to adhere to unwritten principles. He felt the shock of someone who was seeing the sacred being profaned. He yelled at a "drifter": "You're not going in front of those people in front of me." The "drifter" being addressed by Yasir had impressed David with his gall. I bet he gets more out of life than most people, David thought. Maybe, David contemplated, his sense of freedom is so acute that he's even rebelling against established norms of probity? Perhaps he might find it tough though when confronted by people prepared to be "unreasonable" for the sake of a principle. But he doesn't have to worry too much because rife disorganisation is the norm.
The "drifter" didn't respond to Yasir's comment; but two women in front of Yasir tapped the cheat on the back and pointed to the end of the queue. The cheat refused to turn around. David felt that it was likely that the only thing truly sacred for this "drifter" is what he wants. And maybe, David thought, liberty for him means: "What I want is the only sacred thing;" therefore, David concluded, total liberty is undesirable because it is the law of the powerful, hence repressive and divisive.
Yasir stood between the "drifter" and the women who had tapped the cheat on the shoulder. Yasir had decided that it was time to be a buffer, to take a stance that reflected a principled attitude. There is peace is positive indignation.
When the turnstile opened, the women went through, followed by Yasir. The feeling of justification that this act provoked in Yasir had the glory of authenticity, as if he had struck a blow for virtue. But it was a feeling devoid of vanity, an act that supported his hope of seeing a revolution of good; he would have been happy to have seen his name get lost in a benign whirlpool of propriety.
The "drifter" forced himself into the queue, knowing that the people just behind him weren't going to complain because they were going to make it through the turnstile as well, the cheat assuming that everybody else was as selfish as he was, and that most people were too lazy to react. This guy, David thought, relies on percentages—on callous logic free of ethics; his shamelessness is based on accurate predictions of general reactions. If he had power his crimes would be based on desire and rationality—not on passion. All his acts of self-indulgence are probably callously premeditated.
Often, arriving families occupied two queues at once to hedge their bets. Expediency dictated for some people that "reservations" could be made in the queues, as if the queues were theatres or cinemas. Selecting when and where "reservations" could be made reflected your disdain towards the majority. A man who had previously complained about someone joining his queue in front of him, because the other man had wanted to be with someone whom he knew, got angry when two of his friends joined him in the queue and someone behind him had had the audacity to complain, exactly as the angry man had done only minutes before himself. The hypocrite's face flashed with furrowed astonishment when it was suggested that his friends should go to the end of the queue. An exchange of livid words only made the hypocrite even more determined to get what he wanted. He felt justified, for it looked as if disturbed, psychotic forces—that had been let loose inside other people's twisted minds—were trying to victimise him. David thought: It takes something special to be that hypocritical, as if our ire has evolved to enable us to see every event in isolation so that rewards can be maximised, like an evolutionary development in indignant preservation.
The hypocrite's fury manifested itself in a look of such beguiling savagery that it made David think: That's it! These situations give certain individuals the opportunity to show their hatred towards the law-abiding mass, while increasing their status within their own malignant groups. They're like boyish men who chase women to look good in the eyes of their peers without having any interest at all in women or relationships. And because their modus operandi will never be accepted by the whole, they just create conflicts, dooming us to fighting.
"You complained when he joined the queue," a "complainer" said. "And now it's all right for people to do it, heh?"
"Do you think I'm just going to leave my friends at the back of the queue?" the man asked. "Especially when he's just done the same thing. If he can do it, I can."
He was indignant that his "good will" was being misinterpreted.
"You could take your friends to the back of the queue," his tormentor suggested, "and perhaps you might end up getting rewarded in some other way . Perhaps for your kindness towards humanity?"
"If you had been ahead of me," the man replied, "and your friends had come along, I wouldn't have complained. I would have understood."
"Ha! I saw you complaining when that guy did exactly the same thing as you've just done."
"That was different. I heard them talking. They're not friends. He convinced him to let him in."
The other man laughed. The laughing man had seen his land slowly being stolen by settlers. He had heard similar ad-hoc absurdities being used to justify robbery. Grey walls had halved the size of his orchards.
"I wish," he said, "that I could bring myself to thinking that any crime I commit has an honourable inspiration. How free I would feel. Born with the spoon of perennial innocence in my mouth."
The other man ignored him. It was convenient to just think that his tormentor was a trouble-maker, out for a fight, a frustrated loser incapable of putting things into reasonable perspective. And this was the attitude to take, for it reinforced the primary attitude of unjustified victimisation.
On the other side of the turnstiles, Yasir was in a narrow space, hemmed in by grey, steel bars. Six narrow, parallel channels were facing the next set of turnstiles. People were jammed into single files in the cage-like channels. One by one, they went through the turnstiles, like human drips, to join more queues waiting to go through more gates. The hemmed-in channels stopped people from arguing, from pushing in—from creating their own convenient rules. This strictness created an ant-like homogeneity of conforming units of a sedate whole, magnifying the wishes of the ordinary soul, for the channels eliminated advantage. The possibility of individualistic rebellion was zero in the narrow channels that looked like thin tubes packed with humanoid chickens waiting to be thrust into the factory of identification.
Yasir went through the next turnstile. He joined a queue waiting in a wider space. Due to this space's intimacy, it was difficult to break the unwritten rules, to challenge the rule observers, as if intimacy heaves up the risks for those continually dissatisfied with the rules. But it didn't stop an elderly woman from slowly wandering to the top of Yasir's queue. "The wanderer" had a pretentious expression of bewilderment on her face, as if she was either lost or overwhelmed or both; clearly, through no fault of her own, she was oblivious of the transparent rules. The people in the queue watched her as she wandered forward as if she was in a profound daze. She looked like she had been hit over the head, as if she didn't have a clue where she was. Her eyes had a spaced-out glare of tentative uncertainty. When she tried to slip into the top position in the queue, as the turnstile clicked, a woman stopped her and said: "You have to go to the end of the queue."
The elderly woman's mouth opened and her head turned. The pretentious glazing in her eyes disappeared. Her insincere surprise didn't illicit any sympathy from the queuing people. She started wandering back down the line, stealthily trying to observe ambivalence or weakness or sympathy in the queuing people's eyes. She tried to enter the queue in front of Yasir who said: "The end of the queue is there."
"But this was the end when I got here," she said.
"You've just arrived," Yasir replied. "In future, if I was you, I wouldn't waste my time standing over there first. The end of the queue is now over there. I suggest you join it."
"You're just a typical man," the woman said. "You get all the advantages and we get none."
"I wish I had as many excuses as you've got," Yasir replied. "If I did, I'd be Allah. Or maybe even an Israeli."
The woman tried to extract sympathy from the woman behind Yasir. But this woman didn't want to be held up by someone who may not have had the right to enter Jerusalem. The fact that she had tried to cheat may have had wider implications and the woman behind Yasir didn't want to take the risk of finding out that her suspicions were justified. She had already had had the experience on another occasion of having to wait much longer than was necessary because someone ahead of her in the queue had spent half an hour arguing with the Israelis. People in the waiting queue had screamed and screamed, demanding that this person step aside. Eventually, the Israelis started letting others through, but this person had kept on arguing with the soldier who had been sitting behind the bullet-proof panel where documents had to be shown.
"No," the woman behind Yasir said. "Just wait like everyone else, please."
Yasir felt appeased: punishment occasionally existed for people who tried to get more than they deserved. These attempts to slip unscathed through the labyrinth of unwritten norms only create confusion, he thought, an inability to understand other individuals, stirring up the already confused mass of will, guilt and conscience that storms around inside our heads, making planning difficult. You can't build and rebel intelligently from a base of petty cheating. You must be organised as a whole.
"Extraordinary," the woman behind Yasir said. "These people must think that every one is completely stupid."
"Or," Yasir replied, "too placid; and, unfortunately, they're right."
