Yesterday I posted the first of four pieces from my friend Jonathon about living and working in Palestine. Each piece is about a different part of daily life inside the fence: Camps, checkpoints, settlements and villages. Today, he shares with us about checkpoints.
Jonathon on Checkpoints:
CHECKPOINTS
Trenches and walls, blocks and barriers and gates, or Hummers parked askew across the road—almost three-quarters of the roadways inside the West Bank render travelers victims of the dreaded Israeli checkpoints. A seemingly short trip between cities can often take up to two hours, and other times people are simply refused entry and sent home, usually without explanation. For tourists daring enough to visit the Palestinian Territory, the checkpoints are an eerie and unfortunate inconvenience in an otherwise pleasant place, but for residence, the ever-present Israeli army is a complete life-changer.
Checkpoints are typically a duo of lookout towers, shacks with hordes of teenaged soldiers lazily wielding AK-47s and a hell of a lot of power, and line of cars hoping that this time they get through. Over 600 separate checks currently infest the highways, lives, and businesses of Palestinians. A commuter can wait in line for hours, be questioned about their destination (within the West Bank, not Israel), and/or removed from their car to be frisked, scanned, searched, and many times, following all of this, denied passage for no discernible reason. Consequently, maintaining appointments, going to classes, or just visiting one’s family can be an ordeal that makes LAX airport look vanilla.
Aside from the mass artillery, the unpredictability of checkpoints is probably the most troublesome quandary. A simple drive from Nablus to Ramallah, two of the West Bank’s most bustling cities, could yield seven different checkpoints along the thirty-five kilometer route, or one check every five kilometers. On the other hand, the Israeli soldiers may just wave on lines of cars as that idly chat their shift away. The problem is that you just never know. Scheduling anything with any sense of certainty is ridiculous.
The issue furthers when emergencies are taken into consideration, or more accurately, because emergencies aren’t taken into consideration. Ambulances garner no special amnesty from the rigors of the checkpoints, and each year a dozen or more babies are delivered while awaiting permission to pass through to hospitals. Almost half of these children have died due to this complication, not to mention the suffering that mothers, would-have-been mothers, and families have undergone as a result. Let us not forget run-of-the-mill heart attacks, farming accidents, strokes, and broken bones.
Generally, checkpoints open at six a.m. and close at eight p.m., making travel outside these times forbidden. However, the points can be closed for various reasons—to find “wanted” people, Christmas, Jewish holidays, an Israeli or Palestinian death—and pedestrians, cars, taxis, buses, and emergency vehicles are then blocked completely from their destinations. Without warning, roads can be inoperable for days at a time and, in times of intense political strife, have been shut for years.
These checkpoints are not crossing international boundaries or even passage from the West Bank to Israel, but in fact, these are blockades inside the boundaries granted to Palestine from international authorities and various “peace” agreements. In other words, what is being done is completely illegal and against UN sanctions. This issue isn’t a debatable entity like that of the U.S.-Mexico border, but more so, they are an all out occupation. It would be as if the U.S. sent troops into Guadalajara to monitor every person that came in, went out, or traveled across it.
As an impermanent resident, I have found myself fearful of going to the communities around Nablus because the checkpoints loom on all roads in and out. Most likely the worst that would happen to me is a few hours of interrogation followed by deportation and the infamous “red stamp”, denying any possibility of returning to Israel or the West Bank for a term no less than five years. For being in the West Bank (a completely legal right) and taking a taxi ride, I could wind up tagged as a security risk. But, that’s me, and I’m an American with some clout pinned to by passport and the means to go elsewhere. Palestinians risk a lot more:
–One student told me a story of being taken off a public transport bus, along with all of the other young men, being forced to stand in a line to nowhere in the rain for three hours, until the whole group was ultimately sent home without explanation.
–A student from a nearby village smiled as he explained that the road from his home, nine kilometers from Nablus, to the city had been closed for six years (2000-2006), and people who needed to get to the city had to do so over a mountain by foot, donkey, or horse.
–A woman experienced a similar, more recent blockade, when the road from her house to the city was closed for three days due to a “bomb scare” that, of course, never culminated.
–Personally, I watched my taxi driver’s license be taken by a soldier who was upset that we had gone in the wrong line and sent us back with the stipulation that the license would be returned when we did, which it was, after a new, more amiable soldier (mandatory military service) asked his angry colleague for it.
These are but a drop in a massive well of worries. Ask any resident of the West Bank, and the tales will flow forth and amass into a book of horror stories to massive to ever recite them all: a brother arrested, blows to the head, held at gunpoint, grandfather dead in an ambulance . . . all for moving inside a land, a territory, that has rightly, wrongly, or however you see it been given to them.
Consequently, living in the West Bank is not unlike what I imagine a prison to be. You are granted rights, not inalienably given them. Moving from one place to the next involves lock and key and assault rifles. You can be sequestered in or out of a village at the whim of the guards who surround it. Of course, in a prison, guards can’t prevent food from reaching the inmates—that would be illegal.
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