Occupation 101 - Checkpoints

Inside the Qalandia checkpoint

Movement of people and vehicles in the West Bank “will be free and normal, and shall not need to be effected through checkpoints or roadblocks.” Oslo Agreement, Annex I.

The quintessential nonsensical expression of the Israeli occupation. A checkpoint is generally located between a Palestinian town and the next Palestinian town, where cars and buses are stopped. People are generally asked to step out of the car/bus, line up, show their IDs to a pre-pubescent soldier with a machine-gun and an Ipod. Then back in the bus.

Besides the checkpoints, there are numerous roadblocks: mounts of rocks, or sand, that the army uses to block a road, forcing people to do all sorts of monkeying around to find alternative routes. Pointless.

There are, as of Feb 2008, 580 checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank alone. I took the Ramallah-Jenin road and was appalled to have seen 3 checkpoints on a silly 60km road - and I was told that I was lucky but there can be 6 checkpoints easily on this road.

A checkpoint every 10 km. that’s ridiculous.

Checkpoint on the Bethlehem/Jerusalem road. The ambulance was there for the 45 minutes my bus was waiting, with the paramedic frantically trying to talk the soldier into letting him through.

The security purpose of these controls is frankly incoherent. Their real purpose, however, is control: Israel can decide that, for instance, all males under the age of 40 will not be allowed out of the city. For two months.They really do this. No young men will be allowed out of their village. And still do all over the country when there’s an occasion - an Israeli holiday, for instance - or not.

The biggest, baddest checkpoints are, I think, the ones that go from the West Bank into Israel, or into East Jerusalem (which Israel considers not only occupied but also annexed).

Take the Qalandiya checkpoint, for instance, which is the one between East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

We have to get out of the bus, walk to the checkpoint, get through a very tight metal turning door, then another one, then a metal detector, then show our IDs to the kids-with-machine-guns hiding behind bulletproof glass, then another two turning metal gates. Average time: 30 minutes.

And this is actually one of the easy ones. Other checkpoints essentially put people into a series of cages - literally, cages - separated by metal gates, then more cages.

I mean, WHAT THE FUCK???

The immense majority of the checkpoints serve no security purpose WHATSOEVER, I can assure you. They are just there to piss off the Palestinians. They are insanely damaging to the economy - perishable goods can easily go bad if they’re stuck at a series of checkpoints for 15 hours each, which is not uncommon at all - and I’m not even talk to export/import of finished and intermediary goods from Palestine to Israel or other; to people, who take 2 hours to get through 30 km (ask my officemate, who commutes from Bethlehem to Ramallah everyday) and can’t get to their jobs on time if a soldier decides to physically search everyone in the bus (which they can do); to morale, because it’s frankly, really, really humiliating to be treated as a criminal or a suspect at best every single day, and seriously irritating to see your elderly mother have to get off the bus to show her ID to a barking soldier who has no right over her whatsoever; and to peace prospects, because when Israel decides that the only Israelis it will show Palestinians are the trigger-happy teenagers with machine-guns, talk about building positive relations.

I went to Jordan twice this past month - and when were driving around, I found it fascinating that we hadn’t been stopped by any checkpoints. I am turning into a real local...

(all photos are mine - and free to distribute with citation. Let the world know!! I'll try to upload some more soon...)