Hass, Candy at the checkpoint, Haaretz
September 6, 2007 8:52 am Amira Hass, Israel's Separation Wall, Checkpoints as Breeding Grounds of Terror, Israeli-Palestinian conflictIts 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.