Dror Etkes picked me up in front of the bank, next to the convenience store, on a normal Jerusalem street where nothing slows the morning commuters except normal traffic jams. I wanted to visit the Palestinian village of Silwad. To that, Etkes added a couple of other stops on our tangled route through the West Bank.

The day's task was to examine how to take someone's land for settlement -- via stealth, strong-arm tactics, or legal maneuvers. Only at the day's end would I understand what my real goal had been: to remind myself that the main street, the bank, the apartment buildings, the buses taking kids to summer day camps -- the whole normal city day flowing according to sensible rules -- is an enclave of illusory sanity.