Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass is not simply a great journalist. She is a great human being.

Amira Hass, Disrupting the separation policy, Haaretz, September 25, 2007

Last Friday morning, the eve of Yom Kippur, Machsom Watch activists had to spend hours making frantic telephone calls and using their connections with high-ranking officials to enable three sick people to traverse the Qalandiyah checkpoint and reach Jerusalem for urgent treatment. Media reports had promised that despite the hermetic closure, humanitarian cases would be allowed through the checkpoints, but by noon, most of those cases had given up and returned home.

In other cases, Machsom Watch’s female volunteers try to alert commanders when soldiers are harassing people passing through the checkpoints. Months of correspondence and requests, reports in Haaretz and monitoring by B’Tselem resulted in two commanders being removed from the Taysir checkpoint. This did not stop a soldier from harassing people at that checkpoint a few months later, nor did it prevent similar abusive conduct at other checkpoints.

Danny Rubinstein, How many were arrested last night? - Haaretz, September 24, 2007

Shortly before his death three years ago, the sociologist Gadi Yatziv wrote that in the IDF struggle against terrorism, victory is part of failure. It is impossible to win because every raid, assassination, arrest and roadblock stir[s] rage and hatred and broaden[s] the pool of conscripts for terrorist cells. But it is also impossible to fail because the spokesmen of the Israeli security establishment will always claim that without these raids and roadblocks, terrorism will be much worse. It is an argument that cannot be refuted.

West Bank fragmentation - OCHA map 7 June 2007

Checkpoint checking

The army and the authorities will always be able to justify the tight security measures they use to keep the Palestinians at arm’s length, and so too will the Israeli public themselves. However, what they won’t, or can’t see is that it’s the daily humiliation and hardship that breeds the next generation of bombers, and guarantees the hatred is passed down from father to son and beyond.

Haaretz, September 6, 2007

Its noon on Thursday and Khaled, a lawyer, noticed immediately: The older soldier checking IDs at the Zaatra checkpoing - south of Nablus - is being nice to people. The soldier looked inside the car, saw the three children, smiled and gave them candy.

Khaled’s first impulse was to refuse the sweets. Later he decided to give the soldier a break and not explain that the candy and the politeness do not alter the reality: this checkpoint, at the foothill of the sprawling settlement of Tapuah, is part of the whole complex of fences along roads, obstacles in side roads and dislocation of villages from their land and often isolating Palestinians living in the northern West Bank from the south.

Gideon Levy, ethnographer of despair and rage, Haaretz
“For the first time in my life I see my mother suffering and I can’t help her. For 46 years, from the time I was born, such a thing never happened - that I couldn’t help my mother,” says the son sadly, after he tried in vain to take his mother from their home in east Barta’a to the government hospital in Jenin, a 20-minute drive during ordinary times, which haven’t been ordinary for a long time.

It’s possible that it was his mother’s time to die in any case, but why did it have to be such a humiliating death, on the floor of a van at the checkpoint? How many more such articles will still be written, and how many times will the Israel Defense Forces explain that “humanitarian cases” are allowed to pass through the checkpoint, an explanation that repeatedly contrasts with reality? On Monday three weeks ago, Kamela Kabha, 78, died that way at the Reihan (Barta’a) checkpoint, while her son Tawfik pleaded for her life.

A meeting at Qalandiyah - Haaretz 

The Web site Mahsanmilim - Reports from the West Bank (www.mahsanmilim.com) - grew from a 31-second video clip in which Palestinian teacher and poet Hatem Hushi stands next to the Ofer Blockade, a roadblock erected by the Israel Defense Forces on Al-Khader Road, at the entrance to Bethlehem. He stands in front of the camera reciting a poem, in Hebrew, that speaks of his longing for the city of Holon (tinyurl.com/2awa3t). When he finishes the last line of the poem, he smiles self-consciously, and the clip ends.

“There is something in that scene that is so absolute. It sheds light on everything, unravels everything,” says Aya Kaniuk. She and Tamar Goldschmidt, who filmed the scene, have been running the site for about two years.

“It was at one of the blockades. Hatem was carrying a cane, and he suddenly came up to us and said, ‘I am the only Palestinian poet who writes in Hebrew.’ He wanted to read us a poem, a love poem to Holon. Later, we discovered he was a cancer patient, and he was on his way to chemotherapy treatment. But he didn’t want to talk about the fact that, because of the blockade, he couldn’t get to his treatments. He wrote a poem and presented it to the outside world.”

The clip about Hatem Hushi is only one of the films, pictures, and texts that comprise the Mahsanmilim (word warehouse) site. It is one of the most interesting political sites in Israel. There are provocative scenes, like the one documenting soldiers abusing peddlers in Qalandiyah (tinyurl.com/32xsba) or the young girl bursting into tears in front of a soldier at the Hawara checkpoint (tinyurl.com/2eugss). But the site does not promote sensational documentation of one type of event or another.

B’Tselem - Publications - Ground to a Halt: Denial of Palestinians’ Freedom of Movement in the West Bank , August 2007

Btselem, Ground to a Halt, Denial of Palestinians’ Freedom of Movement in the West Bank, 2007

Levy, there are students and teachers, doctors and patients, children and the elderly, the sick and the healthy, 2002

Avnery, A Nightmare Come True, 2004

Azulay, Checkpoints as Breeding Points of Terror, 2002