The whole occupation exudes transience. One cannot spend time in the territories of 1967 without feeling every day, every minute that ‘things cannot go on like this’, with Benjamin. And yet there seems to be no end in sight. Checkpoints cannot ruin people’s lives forever, but they will certainly continue to do so tomorrow, and the day after that. It is this impossibility, this combination of the transitory and the inexorable, of ricketiness and absolute inertia, that makes life under the Zionist enterprise so torturous.

As for the fossil economy, we know for a certainty that it will end. Physical nature preordains it. And yet in the meantime, new coal-fired power-plants, oil rigs, pipelines, airports, highways, suburban shopping malls are erected over the green planet of ours. Things cannot go on like this: and they do. It is that experience, which can make a person want to blow herself up, that inspires the culture of sumud.