Luke weaved between honking, fume-belching metal to catch the bus coming up the other side of the road. The bus stopped just after taking off from a bus stop to let Luke on.

The quizzical faces inside the bus facing Luke espoused: “Why did he get on here?! Him?!”

No tourist sights existed where Luke had boarded, where English was limited, traffic chaotic, crossing streets perilous, traders screaming out prices, pedestrians mixing with horn-blowing vehicles, everything just missing each other as if controlled by satellites.

The bus’s aisle separated foreigners from locals in an Apartheid-like divide, the air inside the bus fresh after frying-meat smell and fumes mixed with dust. Luke’s sweaty face and the sweat patches on his shirt contrasted with that clothes-pressed-to-perfection enclosure. One of Luke’s shirt collars was up, the other down.

Women wearing headscarves and coats and men in jeans and T-shirts occupied the bus’s non-foreigner side. The foreigners had crosses around their necks, a white-collared priest in black the only one sitting alone. The priest, having to put his backpack on his lap so Luke could sit, had dashed aboard before others to get a seat for his possessions.

When encountering religious individuals, Luke wondered how religious they really were – how much was delusion, expediency, family expectation or facade.

Grey walls in a valley below bordered a highway that entered a tunnel that ran under a hill. The bus was climbing away from the highway up a steep road. Luke knew they would eventually head down to that highway that led to Jerusalem.

The priest kept looking across Luke to look out the window. Luke, feeling uncomfortable with the priest staring across him, faced the priest who looked away. The priest didn’t want to sit beside the window due to space considerations, but still wanted visual satisfaction by observing the world, making Luke wonder if that the priest usually put comfort above ethics.

The bus, reaching the top, headed down past olive groves and granite walls – past a touch of ancient Palestine – granite lines across the slopes resembling the remains of ruined buildings. Many buildings had been destroyed in that land and most had been Arabic.

New settlements covered distant hilltops. The settlements’ houses were identical. Their occupants dressed identically. Unity inspires, magnifying unfounded beliefs that enhance group power, intellectual collapse yielding collective success. 

The road split into asphalt tentacles between dark-windowed cabins. Soldiers standing before the cabins clutched X95 assault rifles that fired 5.56mm bullets that defence experts had criticised because the bullets didn’t fragment when striking soft tissue as they were supposed to. The bullets passed through bodies, often not killing immediately, Palestinians therefore regularly dying unnecessarily slowly in expanding pools of blood.

White arrows on blue backgrounds directed traffic to a bus stop. A vertical concrete slab beside the stop reminded Luke of tombstones in Nablus’s cemetery of martyrs. The martyrs, all dying under the age of twenty-five, had made the ultimate sacrifice for a liberation they knew they would never see.

Upon the slab in English was: PLEASE GET OFF AND SHOW YOUR ID.

Luke found it curious that the sign was only in English. He presumed the Palestinians didn’t need to be told. They alighted, emptying half the bus. The confused, looking-around Westerners remained seated, despite the sign being in English for their benefit.

“Shall we get off?” a British man asked.

He had a reddish face, blonde hair and blue eyes, the Kingdom’s colours. He had voted for Brexit, believing border crossings were for the inferior – not for the British. Reality had struck the previous summer when he and his family had tried to leave Britain by car.

“You don’t have to get off,” the priest said. “Only Palestinians have to.”

The pleased lack of sympathy in the priest’s voice increased Luke’s suspicions about supposed priestly spirituality.

If we don’t have to get off, Luke thought, why is the sign in English?

He waited to see if more comments emerged from self-imposed moral authority; none came, so he asked the priest to get up. He wanted to see what was happening to the Palestinians. He had no power other than to give testimony to injustice.

He observed the Palestinians through the bus’s side-door windows. Because the priest stared out a window on the bus’s other side, away from the Palestinians, Luke felt that Palestinians were irrelevant to the priest. Probably because Palestinians don’t offer permanent heavenly solace, Luke thought.

People hoping improbability is probable place more hope in death than in life, eternal annihilation side-skipped by wearing fancy dress and undertaking bizarre rituals, logic crushed to fire the dream of eternal equanimity.

Luke observed the Palestinians lined up beside the bus. A seventy-year-old woman sat down against a metal fence beside the Palestinians’ right-hand sides. The woman was wearing a blue coat and a multicoloured headscarf. Being covered head-to-foot would have been uncomfortable in the sun, sitting down putting her in the bus’s shade.

A concrete tower’s black observation slits fifty metres away faced slits in a grey building’s aluminium walls that ran parallel to the metal fence, the building’s slits, with its roof raised above the walls, creating air flow.

The priest would love those comfort features, Luke thought. He’d give the building an architectural design award.            

The Palestinians faced soldiers whose black bulletproof vests matched the priest’s black attire. The Palestinians’ colourful apparel revealed aesthetic delicacy amid the black and grey the Israelis employed in that colourful world to propagate their war against facts.

Resignation’s mat lacquer covered the Palestinians’ faces, their ID’s a form of branding issued by invaders who believed they had a birthright to impose discriminatory laws on indigenous peoples in places where the invaders had not been born. The racism required for that, Luke thought, is maybe unparalleled in the entire universe.   

Excluding the elderly woman, the Palestinians were all under the age of thirty. Forced off transport to show their documentation to invaders had coloured their lives.

The driver entered the bus and said: “Everyone has to get off.”

The Palestinian’s driver’s pink shirt went beautifully with his black sunglasses, Luke delighted that the driver’s announcement shook the priest’s credibility, while confirming the logic of the sign being in English. Luke wanted to get out to experience what the invaders made the Palestinians experience – to reinforce his power of testimony.

He got off behind the British man and the British man’s wife and daughter. Luke felt the priest’s heatwave of embarrassment as soothing warmth.

Everyone queued behind the Palestinians, the priest yelping: “He lied to me!”

The aggrieved priest’s vanity magnified his self-indulgent sense of victimisation. His anger, fired by a lack of perspective by ignoring what the Palestinians experienced constantly, indicated he was oblivious that he was offending the locals.  

Luke didn’t know who He was.

God?

The other foreigners seemed to know who He was.

“He said only Palestinians had to get off!” the priest howled, oblivious that the Palestinians would be furious with him believing that he was the victim.

The priest’s “sanctity” had been rocked by a “liar,” not by someone who may have just been mistaken. Luke knew that sometimes the soldiers checked foreigners’ passports on buses after the Palestinians had got off. But pressure to avoid accusations of racism sometimes meant that everyone had to get out, the priest feeling that his reputation’s questioning came from a transgression way above the abuses inflicted upon Palestinians, a smeared reputation dreadful for someone seeking eternal consolation above, this potentially catastrophic for those tasked with promoting universal goodliness.                

Accusing someone of lying lessened the blow of misleading the uninformed, while reinforcing victimhood.

A soldier ensured that nobody was hiding inside the bus. Everyone had got out.

The Palestinians’ heads’ shadows on the asphalt beside the fence epitomised one-dimensional Assyrian art. The soldiers saw no art, just shadows of one-dimensional “animals,” empiricism dismissed to glorify stories spouted by their masters, who made fortunes from building on stolen land.

“Maybe they wanted to check to see if a bomb was on board?” the priest said, searching to ease his discomfort.  

Luke thought: Do Palestinian put bombs on buses to kill Palestinians? Not likely. Would a Zionist do the same to kill Europeans? Not really. They can satisfy their bloodlust by killing Palestinians with impunity, so why bother with Europeans? Israel is where Americans, Australians, Brits, Canadians, Ethiopians, New Zealanders and Europeans can shoot innocent people without facing punitive action, like an international hunting club that accolades psychopaths for killing an “inferior race.”

“That’s my bag,” Luke heard the priest shout. 

A Palestinian had picked up the priest’s bag and had sat down where the bag had been.

That Palestinian, Luke thought, must be making a statement. 

The priest had wanted to keep his seat. But, surely, someone taking your seat must be God’s work, HIS arcane ways beyond our tiny perceptions? Could the man of the cloth not see this?

The priest’s trepidation shook his faith in higher values. While he fretted, the Palestinian in front of Luke was asked for his ID. The Palestinian mumbled incomprehensibly, hoping pretentious ignorance could save that mumbling man from scrutiny.

Luke stepped left to enter the shade. That enabled the priest to pass him. The priest hadn’t asked for permission, but Luke was in no hurry. He wanted to observe the unusual from close range. The need for firsthand knowledge, while magnifying his authenticity, took him to places that most people avoided.       

The priest’s passport was open on the ID page. The priest held it out that page, impatient to shove it into a soldier’s face, his jumping of the queue revealing his graceless obsession for a quick bus return, Luke thinking: Comfort above ethics. The predominant religion.

The priest had left his bag on the bus to guard a seat and now panic had arisen. Muslims’ “questionable” attitudes disturbed the priest’s well-being. His bag may have been relocated to a position of inferior preference by a potential suicide bomber. A bomb could have been put inside it!

The mumbling Palestinian was instructed to step aside. The priest, delighted that the Palestinian was now out of the way, thrust his passport into a soldier’s face, while another soldier photographed the mumbling Palestinian. The armed, Russian-looking photographer had blonde hair and blue eyes. The deceased photographer, Gary Winogrand, would have loved to have been able to take close-up shots of people without asking and not get attacked as he often was during his risky, illustrious career.

The Palestinian had short black hair, a short black beard and olive skin. No doubts about where he was from. But circumstances suggested he was the intruder.

Two soldiers emerged from the concrete tower and took the Palestinian away as the priest fled back on board. The Palestinian’s fate would depend upon his captors’ level of grace. Because his captors were likely to be true-blue racists, the Palestinian was likely to get fried in a hellish nightmare of accusation, then detained indefinitely without charge or trial. They called that procedure administrative detention, a beautiful name for a process illegal in real democracies. Assuming the captors’ usual level of spineless sadism, the Palestinian would at least get used as a punching bag.

No doubt some bored soldier will also have fun mocking the poor bastard as well, Luke thought. Occupation can be very boring for the occupation’s cogs.

The priest was now happy. He didn’t have his preferred seat, the Palestinian bag-mover having silently expressed anger, but the bag had not been tampered with. The priest, breathing again, re-entered faith’s tranquil sea. The feeling resembled that vibrating resonance one feels when a deep truth is revealed. Faith in a higher power’s discretion had wobbled, but finally the Lord had protected a faithful follower from the unpredictability of the faithless human rabble, that, incapable of making death a blessing, was as irrelevant as the mumbling Palestinian.

The British man collected his wife’s and his daughter’s passports and handed them to chief passport inspector. CPI checked the documents and handed them back.

The wife’s “thank you,” conveyed with obsequious gratitude, angered Luke. CPI didn’t even bother to say: “You’re welcome.”  

You don’t thank Apartheid cogs, Luke thought. You might feel sorry for such cogs for believing fantasies, but….

He suddenly cooled down: Many people can’t have my knowledge because for me logic and curiosity are questions of pride. I refuse to crush that pride to obtain a deluded excuse for clarity even if such delusions yield vast financial rewards that most people can only dream about. If you tell a lie consistently and you get many people to repeat that lie for mutual benefit, it becomes unquestionable for those who lack the pride necessary to empirically analyse. They prefer having their intelligence insulted. Hence temples, whose existences real archaeologists haven’t confirmed, existed.

The Brit said: “He didn’t have the right ID:”

Luke spun and said: “Imagine if you needed to have the right ID to go from London to Newcastle and you had to show that ID to an invading army.”

Luke was standing beside the bus’s side doors near the Brit.

“Yes,” the wife acknowledged, a little embarrassed.

“Incredible,” her daughter said, with the conviction her mother lacked.

“Pardon me,” Luke said, to the wife, “but you don’t thank Apartheid cogs. And especially in front of these people,” he added, pointing at the Palestinians.

The daughter smiled proudly. She had had a disagreement with her parents about Zionist Israel having “the right to exist.”

Luke turned back to look out the side-door windows. Observation was medicine for him because it aided authenticity-creating empiricism.

The mother sat wide-mouth stunned, furious that she had no legitimate response to Luke’s comment. It had been ungracious of her to so graciously thank a cog who represented a mechanism that repressed half of the passengers on the bus, and to do it in front of those passengers. Her face reddened as she struggled with uneasy self-analysis, annoyed with Luke because she had no reasonable retort. Her daughter’s smug smiling magnified her bitter shame.     

The arrested Palestinian didn’t show the soldiers any ID. His ID was useless. It could not get him anywhere, fresh air more valuable than his documentation. Even citizens of the world’s poorest countries get passports. All that Palestinian could get was a card with his photograph and name on it that was actually a barrier to travelling. His desire to see the old city of Jerusalem was unlikely to ever be satisfied.               

The priest, now relaxed with spiritual balance, started reading the works of Luke while looking forward to seeing what most Palestinians would need a miracle to see.

The other Luke stared through the side-door windows at red tiles upon white walls that topped peaks that stood before a wall that slithered like a concrete snake across the land. The people living under that red had much more compassion for literary figures than for people with no country, no passports, and no future, whom they repressed. But those repressors were good because their God placed them above all other creatures in the universe.

The desire for comfort, Luke thought, moulds behaviour more than ethics, perfect conclusions created by eliminating logic. Destroying empiricism guarantees rich lives before receiving perennial reassurance in death. And death is much longer than life.       

The priest knew that you didn’t have to be a saint to apply for that.

Now angered enough, Luke turned from the bus’s side-door windows and approached He In Black.

“What do you think is going to happen to that Palestinian the soldiers took away?” Luke asked.

The priest looked up with a kind of stunned curiosity.

“Well?” Luke insisted.

“I don’t know,” the priest replied.

“The Luke you’re reading would have asked himself that question,” Luke said. “It’s called sympathy!”

“Why are so upset?”

“Because of people like you pretending you give a damn! You couldn’t care less. And that applies to most of you!”

Luke swung his right arm around while staring at the foreigners who looked in different directions, their crosses inspiring Luke’s distaste. They all looked away except the daughter who looked at Luke. The Palestinians, by staring at the foreigners, thickened the now tense silence.

It’s time to stop giving people room to delude themselves, Luke thought. The time for action has come.

“All your governments are a disgrace,” he said. “I bet you voted for those Tory bastards, didn’t you?,” he added, pointing at the Brit, who pretended he hadn’t heard a thing.

The daughter looked at her father with hard, accusing eyes. 

– Kim Farleigh