Giving birth at a roadblock

by Hagai Segal
Ynetnews
Natural growth among settlers took place Saturday night near the Hizme roadblock north of Jerusalem. A young mother who lives in Rimonim gave birth on the road. She was en route to hospital, but the chronic traffic jam on that route forced her to give birth in the car. Considering the pace traffic commonly crawls at near Hizme, it wouldn’t take much for the newborn girl to celebrate her bat mitzvah on the road as well.
The next day, the father of the child was interviewed on the radio. He was overjoyed more than he was bitter, but he did complain of the suffering endured by tens of thousands of settlers, who regularly get stuck at the same roadblock.
The interviewer couldn’t hold back and uttered a biting remark: Well, now you understand your Palestinian neighbors, who are stuck at roadblocks all the time?
As a radio listener who spends plenty of time at Hizme, I would like to offer a response. Indeed, our neighbors are also stuck at roadblocks. On occasion they even give birth there. We certainly understand their suffering, yet we see no room for comparison between us and them.
Their suffering is the misery of aggressors, while our suffering is the anguish of victims. Just like is no moral symmetry between the distress in Sderot during Operation Cast Lead and the distress in Gaza, there is no symmetry between the distress suffered by Jewish motorists in Judea and Samaria to the suffering of Palestinian motorists.
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