MIFTAH
Friday, 29 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

Coming from West Jerusalem yesterday, I stopped to watch two Israeli female soldiers stop a minibus and make everyone get off with their children and their parcels. I stopped to watch. The soldiers were so sure of themselves. They gesticulated, they raised their voices, they made people move from one place to another, separated the men from the women, prevented them from waiting where they could sit down on steps. They produced a number of pages with God knows what information on them and collected all the IDs, ostensibly checking them against the lists.

There were about 15 people, most of them old men and women, a young couple, a woman with a small child and a young woman with an infant. The soldiers took time to confer with each other, to call for reinforcements, to look around. A jeep with a few young men came and left shortly afterwards. The females had total control of the situation. I stayed, and watched. It took them one hour and twenty minutes to permit people to go on with their lives. The last people to be given back their IDs were the old woman with the child, and the young woman with the infant. Coincidence?

Yesterday the Beit Hanina checkpoint was the site of unrest. Huge cement blocks had been sat up the day before in the middle of the street to divide it into two. Young Palestinian men came and pushed and shoved until they toppled the cement blocks, shattering some of them. Then the predictable happened: burning of tires in the middle of the road, arrival of soldiers, throwing of rocks, followed by tear gas and stun grenades. Then shebab running away, chased by soldiers.

In the evening, interminable lines at the checkpoint, both of pedestrians and vehicles. A teenage soldier, drunk with power, shouting at old men and women. Lecturing a middle aged man for a good three minutes, the soldier's index finger shaking a couple on inches from his face. The rage in me grew exponentially with each abuse. The weather was cold, children were whimpering, parents were soothing them. The teeager produced a cell phone and looking at the line of people, propped one leg on the cement block and engaged in a lively conversation for a good five minutes. Then he cleared a few people, after which he had to smoke a sigarette, and of course he could not check IDs and smoke at the same time. The rage in those around me was like the undertow in a river, invisible but present.

"If you lived here, you would get used to it" my friend says to me. No, I don't ever want to get used to it. But then I have the luxury of having an airplane ticket with a departure date on it to a place without checkpoints, without uniformed teenagers with rifles, where I can demand my civil and human rights and expect to be treated with respect and even courtesy.

 
 
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