From the Ground: The Real Israel-Palestine

The Myth Of The “Stressed Israeli”?

We met a wonderful Spanish woman on the bus to Tel Aviv this morning, and soon started talking with her the experience of being a tourist in Israel.

One of her more interesting statements concerned how some Israelis have been rude to her during her stay. We all speculated that this might be explained by how hard life here is.

“It’s a tense place, the constant conflict has made life very stressful,” we said, repeating a line we had often heard before.

The woman pondered this for a moment.

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s also just as stressful for the Palestinians, and they’ve all been very nice.”