TALLIE LIPKIN-SHAHAK is the former war correspondent for the daily Davar, where she covered the first war in Lebanon and the first Intifada. She is a radio personality and a regular contributor to Ma'ariv, writing on social issues, the arts, and politics.

The summer of 1967 was packed with adventures. In May, after we extinguished the Lag Ba'Omer fires in accordance with emergency regulations, we anxiously bit our nails, filled sand bags, and wrapped gift-packages for the waiting soldiers. In June, after the anticipation was broken by a short and successful war - which left some of my friends mourning their brothers, but secured our existence - we peeled the brown paper and the adhesive gauze from the windows and went on a trip.

I was a girl not yet Bat-Mitzvah age, and I joined one of the buses crammed with participants of the "Zimriyah," the annual international convention of Jewish choirs, directed by my father, to tour the areas that we called "liberated," to bask in the fragrances of the Middle East and of the occupation which awaited us across the Green Line. Beyond the bus windows lay a country scarred by biblical history and wars. In the alleyways of the Nablus Kasbah, peddlers eager to sell to us all sorts of made-in-China knickknacks welcomed us with tempting smiles. Intoxicatedly victorious, we walked into the trap and we fell deep.

The winter of 1987-1988 was riddled with incidents. The Intifada broke out in December when an Israeli truck driver unintentionally ran over a group of Palestinian workers on their way to labor in Israel. The Territories burned with fire-bombs and thundered with rocks, quivered under the volleys of rubber-bullets and the echoes of violence used by Israel's security forces in their war to quell the insurgence of a population after twenty years of occupation and despair. The merchants at the Nablus Kasbah no longer wore tempting smiles and we were already deep in the trap that these smiles set for us. I was the military correspondent of the daily Davar. I covered the ongoing war in Lebanon and now also the Intifada in the Territories.

Early in 1988, on a visit to the West Bank, I arrived at the military government building in Nablus. All these building in the Territories, just like our police stations inside Israel, are remnants of the British Mandate government, a trace of a shared Jewish-Arab history under foreign rule. I stood facing the large building. To my left was a large tent belonging to the General Security Service and a long line of detainees, mostly stone throwers caught in never-ending chases, were qeueing across the front, waiting to be interrogated. An annoying thin rain dripped from the gray sky. It was cold as February in Nablus can be cold. I stood there, watching. A soldier - one of those who live in rooms adjacent to the military administration offices - crossed the courtyard with a gray IDF-issued towel on his shoulder. Walking to the shower, he encountered a detainee standing by the tent, nonchalantly kicked him, and went on to shower. Another soldier crossed the courtyard, walked by the column of waiting detainees, gave one of them a blow and continued on.

I returned to the newsroom. I wrote a story describing what I saw and warning of what would come. The occupation corrupts. The boundaries between right and wrong blur. The accessibility to authorized violence - even endorsed violence - will eventually create a condemnable and dangerous habit of sanctioned brutality. The freedom to invade the life and the body of the other, to humiliate and oppress, will turn into second nature for a society that will corrupt itself and lose respect for the foreigner. The article was never published, but that's a different story.

Forty years after buying in the Kasbah pens with windows where you can see snow falling or a miniature car moving back and forth; Forty years after enjoying Arabic pastries that dripped their sugary rose-water on our chins while marveling at the sweetness of the occupation; Forty years after obtaining cheap labor and raising a race of masters that employs day-laborers at the settlements, occupying the army and costing in money and blood; Forty years after we turned from a small, threatened country into an empire of aggressiveness, we are still - today more than ever - a country with no borders, a country that knows no boundaries.

Where the border was not drawn, boundaries were blurred. Violence did not stop at the Green Line. The character destruction did not stop at the houses, the alleyways, and the roadblocks, where our nation's best youth had to police and oppress, awash with anxiety that begot hatred, which caused more violence and more anxiety and more hatred and violence, and so on and so forth.

We turned into a violent society at the entrance to the pub, at the mall, in the bedroom, at the schoolyard, in the corridors of power. We turned into a violent and mute society facing the intolerable crudeness of existence. The life of a woman abused by her husband is not worth more than the life of a homeless person freezing to death, which is not worth more than the life of a prime minister and defense minister who fights for his convictions, which is not worth more than the life of a pedestrian or a cyclist on the road, which is not worth more than the life of an adolescent hoping to grow up, which is not worth more than the life of a foreigner, whose sin is being an alien, whose life is not worth a penny more than the life of one whose crime is being weak or different. A sort of all-consuming, human Had Gadya in which everything is ultimately gobbled up - as if by a gigantic Pac Man - by aggression, the spouse of numbness, the neighbor of recklessness, the offspring of occupation.

Translator's notes:

• Lag Ba'Omer is a holiday which in Israel is usually celebrated by the lighting of bonfires.
• Had Gadya ("One Little Goat") is a song which is traditionally sung in Passover. It depicts a chain of events in which gradually larger animals and spirits consume one another. It has been compared to the English song, "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."