Qalandiya Checkpoint
When I went through the Qalandia checkpoint in Palestine a week or two back, I kept thinking, Anyone who lobbies for Israel in the U.S. should be forced through this checkpoint. All the congressmen should come here too. What upset me was the banality of humiliation: experiencing the draggy line that took 20 minutes, and the cattle car/industrial buzzings and lights and automatic gates; seeing a dapper middle-aged guy forced to go back for who knows what reason; seeing the fingerprint reader; and then watching a matronly woman whose papers weren’t perfect standing in paralysis or fear or helplessness before looking around with a redfaced childish expression of dauntedness. Observing her humiliation angered me. Then I went through and the young Israelis barked, "Open it, open it," at me as I held up my passport.
A few days after that I went through again, this time on a bus with a group of Americans, but with one Palestinian who had been issued a permit for the wrong days by Israeli authorities. We had worked it out so that a few of us had our passports and a few of us had them in our bags in the trunk of the bus, and she was in the back of the bus, all this so the Israeli soldiers would come on the bus, see a few American passports, get a story about the rest, not see the Palestinian woman, then wave us through. I sat across from her and saw her rounded shoulders. Everything went to plan. Two soldiers came on the bus, but only for a minute or two. When we got through the Palestinian sat back and said she had almost had a heart attack. Then someone on our bus told a story of the time she went through and they forced an elderly Palestinian man to lift his caftan over his head, showing his underwear.
One more Qalandia story. Here is Joseph Glatzer at the Cal State Northridge newspaper, reporting on his trip to Israel and Palestine:
In trying to leave Ramallah for Jerusalem, I got stuck in the Qalandia checkpoint for two and a half hours. Palestinians in Ramallah aren’t allowed to enter Jerusalem without rarely granted written permission from Israel.
Inside the checkpoint’s cage, I met Osama Jamil M. Al-Bast, a Director General in the President’s office of the Palestinian Authority. He showed me his one day permission slipfor Jerusalem to attend an official meeting with European Union diplomats. I was next to him when the call that he missed the meeting came in.
He told me that once you’re in the second cage of the checkpoint you can’t go back. So, he had to wait another half hour before he could go through just to turn around again….Upon finally making it back to Jerusalem, I took a taxi to the bus station. I was still fuming from my checkpoint ordeal, and the Israeli driver told me, “The checkpoints are there to make the Palestinians leave Palestine…"
link to mondoweiss.net
This link above is in one of your ‘Related Posts’.
Another checkpoint-story. Anyone know if there are movies/etc. centered around the checkpoint experience for Palestinians? These tales of dehumanization are important. Communicating them to people who are told that Israel does this for security, undermines the hasbara.
That would be really valid, a movie, and it would need a Shakespeare. Someone that can show there is comedy in tragedy.
Admittedly I have always been fascinated by the way William used comic relief to make the cruel and tragic sequences hit even harder and deeper, e.g. in King Lear.
Youtube has the 60 minute doc by Yoav Shamir called Checkpoints. Its in six 10 minute videos – no dialogue, just a camera on different checkpoints
link to youtube.com
There’s a new animated film, based on a true story, in which the Gaza crossing plays a central role. The treatment of the Palestinians is the same as at Qalandiya.
link to fatenah.com
“No Way Through” is a very good 5 minute video for inpatient:
link to youtube.com
You can also watch Divine Intervention for a more abstract depiction of Palestinian life and checkpoints
link to en.wikipedia.org
Here is a youtube of a checkpoint scene in the film
link to youtube.com
Sounds worse than the TSA at US airports. Do you have to take off your shoes at the checkpoints? Can you bring liquids? Have you been across the border checkpoint at Tijuana?
That means you, AM. While you’re at it, you might want to (re-)read this.
When I first went to Palestine over the Allenby bridge route in 1978, I was forcefully shown the sheer nastiness of the Israelis.
We were kept waiting on the bridge itself (nearly the lowest point on earth, and bloody hot) for more than an hour. Israeli soldiers confiscated a Jordanian orange from my 9 year old son, while we sat in the heat, overlooked by an Israeli machine-gun nest. Then we were let in, and divided into two streams; foreign passports to the left, and Arab passports to the right.
We got out relatively quickly, but I witnessed, for example, the complete destruction of the careful packing of an old lady’s suitcase. She was left to re-pack, weeping.
This is a very small example, but shows how the ill-treatment of Palestinians has been going on for 3 decades at least.
Bearing this in mind, I don’t see how sending Israeli lobbyists through the Qalandiyah crossing would do any good at all; they would go through the fast stream.
RP: I don’t see how sending Israeli lobbyists through the Qalandiyah crossing would do any good at all; they would go through the fast stream.
But they might see a thing or too, as you did. At the very least they might stop comparing the situation to American airports.
They should go through wearing a keffiyeh
Maybe a sequel to Yoram Binur’s My Enemy Myself experiment. A lot has changed since the ’80s.
I often think all US apologists for Israel ought to be thrown into Gaza wearing a keffiyeh or hijab, with no passport.
Not directly related to this thread, but here’s a rendering of “by way of deception” that’s hard to beat:
link to pulsemedia.org
“Upon finally making it back to Jerusalem, I took a taxi to the bus station. I was still fuming from my checkpoint ordeal, and the Israeli driver told me, “The checkpoints are there to make the Palestinians leave Palestine…”"
I think this is the correct interpretation–for the checkpoints and for the entire web of permits to marry, to work, to live in Jerusalem, etc. If Israel can persuade the most educated 20 percent of Palestinians to leave, the rest will be easier to control. I would think it’s the kind of policy for which there would be a record in the Israeli ministries, minutes of meetings, that kind of thing. So it awaits historians, or more to the point, Israelis of conscience who are willing to leak.
link to btselem.org
It’s all there.