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SARRA and BEIT IBA, 21 January 2004, pm MY FIRST MEETING WITH THE CHECKPOINT By Ada R. We reached the Sarra checkpoint (about half an hour's smooth drive byvan from Kfar Saba on broad and virtually empty roads) at 13.15. Forpart of the way we travelled along the "apartheid" roads -i.e. theiruse is restricted to Israelis. Palestinians, caught daring to use theseroads which run through their homeland, either have their cars impoundedor are subject to detention for several hours, arrest and.... The area around Sarra is empty, at the start of the checkpoint arehillocks of earth. At the top of the first hill that faces Nablus thereis no one-- no soldiers, no civilians. Nor are there any taxis waiting.We drive on from the point at which Palestinians approaching thecheckpoint are required to proceed on foot at the top of the hilltowards the opposite side of the checkpoint. Here the proper road endsand dirt tracks and a deeply pitted road lead into the hillside andtowards Nablus or into the fields. A dusty junction: on a hill abovestand armed soldiers, weapons ready trained, scanning the surroundingslest anyone try to evade the checkpoint by walking across the fields.There some more, but very few, soldiers at the junction itself, alsowith weapons at the ready. At a distance of about 50 metres away from the junction, at the top ofthe road which leads into the hillside, a figure comes into view. Thesoldier lets out a shout at the silver-haired, carefully -dressed man:"Come here!" he yells beckoning with his finger peremptorily. The manwalks hesitantly down the hillside, looks somewhat bewildered , and thesoldier, raising his voice again, asks what he thinks he is doing onthat particular road. The man apparently does not give the answer Iwould have given -- that this is the nearest route since he is notpermitted to use the apartheid roads of the West Bank settlers -instead he makes some other reply and is told that this is the last timehe will be allowed to use this route, and on foot, of course. After heis allowed to proceed, we ask him if he is from the area. Yes, he comesfrom Nablus where he is a judge in the local court. Some of our team go up the hill to the spot where those coming fromNablus approach the checkpoint. There they find students from theel-Najah university, men and women who work in the town and want to gohome to their villages after the short work week. Some of them explainthat because it is impossible to get home and then return to work nextday, they stay in Nablus throughout the week.The soldiers are not permitting them to come down towards thecheckpoint. With guns cocked and pointed at them, they order them away. We notice a very gentle-looking young woman, she is frightened and, likeso many of the young women we are to see her, expression constantlychanges from one on the verge of tears, to one of barely confined fury.Her clothes are tight-fitting (the significance of this will immediatelybecome obvious) and she has a black scarf closely wrapped around herhead. She came from Nablus with the judge and is now walking towards usdown the hillside (at a distance of more than 50 metres). A student atel-Nahaj, she wants to return home to a place that is very close to theother end of the checkpoint. The soldiers order her to move forwardsslowly, but all our pleading and entreaties that they should let herthrough the checkpoint are met by their stony faced refusal. She willnot be allowed to pass, because she is suspect. No, it is not personal, her clothes are so tight fitting that even if she wanted to she wouldnot be able to conceal any explosives on her person : no, the point isthat all educated women and women students have become suspects as weare to see later on too. She is sent, as are all the others, to make along and dangerous detour that has to take about five or six hours. Onfoot at this point. And along the line all sorts of serious or lessaccidents can befall her. Some of the men are over the age of 35 areallowed to pass, But according to the army, this is the last day thatthis will be allowed. Two children, aged around six to eight, areplaying at the top of the hill in the direction from which thoseapproaching the checkpoint come. The soldiers shout at them to moveaway. Yallah! Yallah! Get the hell out of here right now! Two more youngel Najah women students approach the checkpoint, one from Kefar Hillekand the other from Kefar Sanir -- they want to return homer-- but thesoldiers forbid them to proceed. When I query the soldiers' actions they tell me that they are not actingon any specific orders or written instructions. One of them makes thepoint that had he been down at the junction when we arrived he wouldhave gotten rid of us long ago. The closure of the junctions, the prevention of even minimal movement,not to speak of any equality with the Jewish residents of theterritories, and their opening under these very stringent conditions isall ordered by telephone communication alone. The legal chain of commandfor such actions carried out against the local civilian population isquite unclear as its significance in international law. What is inquestion here is not a one-time military action, but rather the dailylife of the local civilian population--the legalities of the situationand of the chain of command are from clear. One can only assume that there is policy of deliberate cruelty againstthe local population when one realizes the callousness and inhumanityinvolved in failing to announce in advance that passage through thecheckpoint will not be permitted. Getting here is almost impossiblydifficult -- and those trying to use the checkpoint include many elderlyand sick persons and many tiny children. No possible claims of securityneeds can stand up to the imbalance presented by the continuing anddaily acts of cruelty carried out against the local population of morethan three million people. The little junction of Sarra is virtually empty-- apparently news thatthere is no passage here has already taken wing. We move on to Beit Iba where we expect to find traffic heavier thanusual because of the closure of Sarra and the fact that all those deniedpassage there are told to take themselves off to Beit Iba. We travel along the apartheid roads and reach the checkpoint which liesgeographically mid-way between Jenin and Nablus. The situation there isterrible-- nothing dramatic, it is true, just the awful daily routine ofcruelty and inhumanity. The checkpoint itself stands by the side of a working limestone quarrywhose activities cover the surroundings and anyone in the vicinity withfine white chalky dust that also chokes up their lungs. Hundreds of women and scores of men coming from the direction of Nablusline up alongside the checkpoint, herded into narrow roped off corridorsby the side of the road. At the other end of the checkpoint wait therelatives of those trying to cross through. At this side there is atent-- in my naivete I thought this was to provide some shelter forthose waiting. I was to find out that it had quite other purposes.In the middle of the checkpoint is watch tower. Here too soldiers standready for action on a small hilltop overlooking the junction and thecheckpoint. On the opposite hill sits a Palestinian. There is a paththat leads from the nearby village to the junction. Any Palestiniancaught trying to take the natural route along this path from the villageto either Jenin or Nablus will be forced to spend the rest of the daysitting on a stone behind the barricade as a punishment -- and this , ofcourse, is in the best possible case and only after all thePalestinian's documentation has been checked and it has been foundimpossible to find him or her guilty of any other offence. We saw menand women, teenagers and children who were allowed to go only atnightfall after spending hours on end sitting on the stones, in deepfear, with no water, no lavatories, no food, and no medical attention. From time to time an armoured patrol car took off on a wild 20 metresweep around at great speed, its tires screeching, raising clouds ofdust over the waiting crowd, and with no apparent purpose other thanperhaps as a cruel mockery. The situation grows worse as the hours dragon. The number of women waiting to pass from the direction of Nablusgrows all the time, among them are several in the advanced stages ofpregnancy, many elderly women with huge sacks on the shoulders and manymothers with small children and crying infants in their arms on theirway back from seeing the doctor, there are also a number of crippled andparalyzed people. Hundreds of people, waiting here for hours alreadywith no water, with nowhere to sit and no possibility of a seat, with nolavatories, no food. A long line of lorries and cars from the westernpart of the territories has built up, there are also several busesletting off passengers who need to go through the checkpoint. Those inthe line are funnelled through one at a time, and quite slowly, towardsa metal-detector (are they about to board a plane!) and a check of theirbelongings. Between the line of people and the metal detector stand twosoldiers in full battle dress, weapons at the ready, screaming all thetime at those in the line and especially so at the women. From time totime they will give someone a shove backwards with the butt of theirrifles. Another soldier, weapon at the ready also, stands by the metaldetector watching those being checked and again screaming at them. Aseach Palestinian emerges from the detector (and heaven help the one whohas a penknife to peel an orange!), they place their belongings on thetable next to the concrete blocks where there is also a window fromwhich gazes out a woman solider with a stony stare and yet more shoutingand screaming. They show their identity cards -- which she barelyglances at, take their belongings out of their bags and put them on thetable, pick them up again and are gestured onwards to the exit by a soldier. An illustration of the all-pervading fear here: as one group wentthrough, there was a degree of confusion and the solider whose job itwas to direct them to the exit after their belongings and documents hadbeen checked, made a mistake and instead directed them in the oppositedirection. The Palestinians, without a word of protest, followed hisdirections to the letter. Only after we had drawn his attention to hiserror and had said two or three times that "they've just come fromthere", did he finally ask them where they wanted to go, and, withlowered eyes, they then said they wanted to go in the direction of Jenin, whereupon he directed them to the exit.Women leave the checkpoint in tears of rage and humiliation. "And it allstarts all over again, tomorrow!" they tell us. A mechanical engineer from a nearby village who spends a great deal oftime at the checkpoints these days and who speaks good Hebrew (hisbrother is married to a Jewish woman) tells us that the checkpointsbreed 1000 she'heedim [men and women prepared to die in order to killthe enemy] each day. Just a few minutes later a father and his six or seven year old son comethrough. The child is justifiably terrified by the soldiers with theirrifles aimed, shouting and screaming commands, humiliating people, and,as they go through the metal detector, he lets go of his father's handand ruins back into the waiting crowd of hundreds of women. Thehard-faced woman soldier screeches -- "Get the kid back here! Where'sthe kid?" An armed soldier wades into the crowd of waiting women andemerges a few seconds later with the child who is quietly sobbing. It isnot clear to us whether or not the soldier hit him. The father pointedto a red mark on the child's head, but refused to talk and moved offquickly. What we can see is that the child is having difficulty copingwith his anger and his pain, he is crying from shame and fear. He is sofrightened that he wets his pants and thus has the additionalhumiliation of everyone --- woman and soldiers alike -- being able tosee that his trousers are all stained. What an example of just how theshe'heedim are bred by the checkpoints! True, nothing dramatic, noquestions of life or death, just the banality of evil, of endlesshumiliation, of deathly fear. I enter the line of hundreds of women in an attempt to locate the sisterof a young woman who is crying because she went through the checkpointand now cannot find her sister. The women crowd round me wanting to tellme of their awful lot, all wanting to ask for something. Theirhelplessness, the way they are being victimized for something of whichthey are guiltless, brings a huge lump to my throat. I find the veryyoung girl I am looking for in the first lines; she is weeping and I askthe soldier to let her through quickly because her sister has alreadygone through and is waiting for her and the two of them have beenwaiting at the checkpoint for four hours. He tells me he won't allow herthrough . Young girls come last in the line. First come the elderly andthe sick. Sounds good ? But this is not really the way things work. Ourwhole group has the impression that it is the women who are the chiefvictims of today's impossible hold-ups. I make my way out again toreport my failure to the waiting sister and to try to keep her spiritsup. As I move through the crowd I begin to feel more and more helpless,more and more angry and upset. I burst into tears myself. The sisterwhom I have come to console tries to comfort me: "Don't cry. Because ifyou cry, no one else will be able to control themselves!" A Palestinianman comes up to us :"I want to thank you for crying, as an Israeli,together with us" A lot of Palestinian men are standing around us,asking for our help. In the middle of it all there comes a woman inlabour being helped along by relatives: "Yallah, yallah! Get back there,get back!" the soldier shouts at her.Suddenly there is an upsurge of pressure-- passage of the women ishalted totally, the reason being that "they have been behaving badly.They haven't been standing in tidily ordered lines and they have to bepunished!" --and this after four or five hours continuous standing,without water, lavatories, let alone food of any sort. After a lot ofpleading and pressure, the progress of the line is resumed, at a veryslow pace. At 15:30, when I am inside the checkpoint alongside thewomen, the commander, Eli, comes up to me and insists that I leave. Iask what is his authority to make this demand of me and he answers thathe has received warnings of an imminent terror incident at thischeckpoint and that therefore we have to leave. DB comes up to him andtells him that for her part she feels very safe among the Palestinians.I again ask him by what authority he is ordering us to move on. Hisanswer is that if we don't go along quietly, then he will call thepolice. We in turn say that that is just fine by us because the policewill have to have a real reason for evicting us, while in fact ourpresence is only helping to alleviate the situation somewhat. The policedid arrive later and warn us that we must not disturb the soldiers.Suddenly a chase was in progress, with soldiers on foot and in jeepspursuing some poor family that had tried to by-pass the checkpoint andget onto the road by crossing the field. We didn't manage to find outthe end of that story. A woman of about 40 comes and asks us for help-- she has been standingat the checkpoint with her daughter and her daughter has been turnedback. Another couple of hours go by and the daughter emerges from thecheckpoint to the mother's relief. It takes them between two and fifteenhours to get to and from work by foot and by car, and this a journeythat we ourselves can do in half an hour at most. I go and get Machsomwatch material and begin distributing it to the lineof waiting cars and to the people standing on line to cross thecheckpoint. Strange: the fact that I consider them important enough togive them a letter in Arabic (! Well done, DB!) raises the level oftheir humanity in their own eyes and they so grateful for this. AGnotices the smiles of happiness on the faces of those passing us afterso many hours of suffering.By the side of the road opposite the checkpoint, tucked away behind thebarricades so that no one can see what's going on there, sits a group ofmen, women and children who dared to try to go on their way withoutgoing through the checkpoint. They are not to be released untilnightfall. Punishment. Standing with them is an el-Najah student ofarchitecture, Man'el. A good looking tall young woman, now veryfrightened and not quite understanding what is happening. She comes thisway every day on the way home. Today, they have confiscated her identitycard and told her to wait her. She is here since the morning when shewas on her way home. Her very worried mother calls her from time to timeon her cellular phone. She asks for our help. I go up to the one soliderthat it has proved possible to talk to -- Sami, the one in charge ofso-called "humanitarian" problems. He checks (of course not losing theopportunity to tell us off and say we should leave them alone to get onwith their work) Then he tells me that the identity cards will bereturned soon and then we'll know why she was detained. Time passes, the soldiers begin releasing those detained on the stonesbehind the barricades. But our young woman is not released. She beginsto get very frightened, and I feel frightened for her. Our entire groupbends all its efforts to helping her. One by one, in turn, we go up toSami and exert pressure. It is getting ever darker and Man'el and afamily with two children are the only ones remaining behind thebarricade. We, too, have to leave. AG asks Sami for a farewell presentto mark our departure-- that he release them all. I give Man'el mycellular phone numbers and tell her that if she is detained for thenight, she should not hesitate to call. We all take her phone number andthat of the father of the family. On the way home, just as we are nearing the Green Line, we ring Man'elvia OB's husband and a friend of D B's (the companies from which we rentour cell-phones cannot connect to phones in the territories): to ourgreat relief we hear that she has been released. We did not manage tocontact the father of the detained family and can only hope that theytoo were eventually freed to continue on their way in the pitch-blackdarkness. All the army achieved was to frighten Man'el, to imprison herfor a full day on the stony hillside. As we were about to get into our car, a young lad came up to us askingfor water. He was very pale and very thirsty, his hands were shaking andhe seemed on the point of fainting. D gave him a bottle of water and Ngave him some coffee. We try to get him to take some biscuits and fruit,but he said he didn't want anything, just water. D. explained to himthat sugar would revive him and that this was important after such along time without food or drink. But he didn't want to take anythingfrom the occupiers. Only when I said, half in joke half in earnest, thatif he ate he would have the strength to take on the Zionist occupiers,did he finally agree to take something. As we leave Beit Iba on a our way home it is getting really dark, dozensof lorries and cars are still waiting to pass through the checkpoint.Hundreds of Palestinians, and especially women, are still on line,waiting to get home , only to go through all this again tomorrow. Thank heaven that we live in a country where at least the master race(ourselves that is) can still do what Machsomwatch does. Our presence atthe checkpoints apparently does something to prevent even worse fromhappening, and it does seem to make the endless lines move a triflefaster. The army does nothing to cooperate with us, quite the contrary,whatever little they allow us to do stems from one factor alone -- thewitness that we bear.