The dirty white van sputtered and stalled as it approached the Gaza checkpoint. The driver looked harried. He leaned forward and tried to start the van quickly. The engine caught, turned over, and stalled again. He glanced in his mirror and ahead of him at the other traffic.

One of the Palestinian guards watched the driver out of the corner of his eye as he waved two more cars through the border checkpoint. The van was about to block the morning's commuter traffic -- the thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Israel every day to work the menial jobs the Israelis didn't want.

The Israeli soldiers on the other side of the border were much more serious about the traffic crossing into Israel. Exhausted from unending vigilance coupled with interminable boredom, they imagined a bomb in every car. They carried their loaded M-16s in their hands and sweated under their bulletproof vests. To them Gaza was just a large Trojan Horse.

The van had created a gap; only a lonely Fiat stood between it and the checkpoint. The Palestinian guard glanced toward the checkpoint and walked to the van. The van lurched, then started to move, inching along. It sat with its engine chugging reluctantly, waiting for the Fiat, now thirty feet in front of it, to pass through.

The rusty Fiat was waved on and the van was next. The van shuddered and the engine quit. The driver turned the key and the starter noisily cranked the engine. It wouldn't catch. Again and again he tried, without success. The Palestinian guard approached the window angrily. "What is the problem?" be asked gruffly in Arabic.

"I've had some engine trouble" the driver replied, also in Arabic. "Move it or we'll push it into the ditch! You're blocking the way!" The road into Israel was crowded. The bright morning sun was low in the eastern horizon, shining into the eyes of the Palestinian guards.

"Yes, yes. I'm trying..." The driver leaned forward as if lending his own energy to the van. He turned the key with his right hand, and reached subtly under the dash with his left and flipped a switch. The van chugged to life with half its cylinders working. The driver smiled at the guard apologetically and the vehicle began moving slowly toward the checkpoint. It was clear it would take the van a long time to make it.

"Get this thing off this road!" the guard finally yelled, exasperated with the slowness of the stupid white van that was now blocking the entire checkpoint. The Israelis watched and waited with concern. Anything out of the ordinary received humorless, intense scrutiny; any problem, any angry outburst, anything. It could be someone about to do something dramatic, or a diversion for someone else.

The driver nodded, surrendering, and began a Y-turn to go back the way he had come. The Palestinian guard, his rifle in one hand, watched in disgust. The van turned around, now headed toward Gaza City, the driver apparently abandoning any hope of getting to Tel Aviv. He reached under the dash again, and the van's engine coughed and died once more. The guard, barking obscenities, angrily advanced toward the window on the right side of the van. The driver suddenly raised an enormous handgun and fired, the bullet penetrating the man's bulletproof vest, throwing him back onto the side of the road, where he lay silently, his legs jerking involuntarily.