Huwwara South

HUWWARA SOUTH, Sunday, 28 November PMObservers: Noa P., Naomi L. (reporter)Guest: Zamira colour=red>Throughout most of the watch we were harassed by three male settlers who stuck so close to us that we couldn't breathe. We called the police and lodged a complaint. One of the settlers lodged a counter-complaint saying that we were bothering the soldiers. On the way to the checkpoint we saw more unannounced checkpoints than we'd seen for a long time, including one in the village of Huwwara. Lines of cars were held up everywhere, and people were waiting alongside the vehicles. Rumour among the Palestinians held that the Israel army was setting up all these checkpoints in order to be able to say later that they were "removing" them in time for the elections to the Palestinian Authority, something which could be touted as an "improvement" for the local citizenry. 14:00 - We arrived at the checkpoint to find a queue of about 50 women and 20 men crowded around the entrance gates We were greeted with shouts of "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" mostly because of an article by [a well-known columnist ] Yonatan Gefen in a mass-circulation weekend supplement [the article quoted extensively from comments by a Machsomwatch woman which were scathingly critical of the behaviour of the soldiers at the checkpoints]. Before we could respond, three skull-cap-wearing settlers approached from the direction of their hitch-hiking stop and began yelling at the soldiers: "Why don't you throw them out?" A soldier asked them to stop all the commotion, because it was disrupting his work. In the meantime, a new women's line of women had formed outside the turnstile, and they moved through it quickly. Throughout the shift there were only few people, and they went through without any special problems, barring a small number of detainees who were waiting for their documents to be checked.[Detainees are, typically, men aged from 16 to 30 or 35 who have no passage permits; recently, young women, too, have been detained. The detainees' ID details are phoned through to the General Security Services (GSS, also known as the Shabak or the Shin Bet, the Hebrew acronym for the GSS) for checking against a central list of security suspects and the answers are then relayed back to the checkpoints. This cumbersome process can take considerable time, and that can be prolonged even more if the soldiers wait to accumulate a batch of ID cards before passing them on to the GSS , or if they behave in a similarly tardy manner at the end of the process, waiting until they have a batch of GSS clearances before they release individual detainees. Meanwhile, the detainees are virtually prisoners at the checkpoint where the soldiers retain the ID cards until the entire process is completed]. The settlers stood just a few centimeters from us and didn't let us move. They stuck their noses into the notebook where I was writing my report. We couldn't move. We asked them to move back, but they closed in even more. When I raised my arm to create some space between me and one of the men, he began to shout: "She's raising her hand against me; she's pushing me; look at her, soldier, you be my witness." When we made a telephone call he said, "You're calling your whorehouse," then, "Go back to your whorehouse." (He later told the policeman, "I didn't curse them.")After about 15 minutes of this, we called Dan G. [an aide to Knesset Member Roman Bronfman ] and also the police . The settlers burst out laughing and threatened us: "We've already summoned the police for you, they'll be here any minute." They were in constant telephone contact with someone who instructed them how to proceed. One presented himself as a security officer and demanded that we show him our identity cards. We refused, unless he could prove that he was a member of the police force. We asked him by what authority he was demanding our ID cards, and he said: "I am authorized by the security commander of our settlement and by the police." The minute the police van arrived, he vanished. The others stuck near us even next to the van, and we asked that we be allowed to lodge our complaint, and identify ourselves to the police, without them standing there. The policeman asked them to stand back, promising to hear their version later.We gave the policeman the Machsomwatch information sheet and told him we had army permission to stand at the checkpoint, and that nobody could tell us to leave. While we were speaking, the policeman was told over the radio that Bronfman had lodged a complaint about the settlers' harassment of Machsomwatch. The settler's explanation was as follows: "As a law-abiding citizen, it upsets me that they disturb the soldiers. Tomorrow I'll be doing reserve duty, and they will be bothering me." The policeman told him to leave the checkpoint at once, as he was creating a public nuisance . He also threatened to give him (one of the lords of the land) a ticket for parking inside the checkpoint. The settler complained about discrimination , claiming that he, too, was part of an organization with legal advisors, members of the Knesset, the Women in Green; they operated only within the law, he insisted!!! He then showed the policeman some paper that we were not allowed to see and offered him a deal: If we left the checkpoint, they would also leave. We reiterated our right to stand at the checkpoint and stressed that we had no intention of leaving before the end of our watch. We also said that we would be back the next day. When their spokesman promised the policeman that they would stop harassing us, the settlers were permitted to stay there with us. They were immensely curious about what we were writing, and we suggested that, to make things easier for themselves, they should look at our website. For the rest of the time it became a matter of honour for them not to leave before we did. When we spoke to a soldier about a sick young man who had been detained for over an hour, the settler yelled, "You don't have to listen to her, she's keeping you from your work." The soldier replied, "I don't have to listen to her or to you either, and you are keeping me from my work." At 16:30 they left because of the freezing cold.We still had time to meet a 63-year-old man with a Jordanian passport which was devoid of any stamps; he had been born in Nablus. The soldiers refused to let him into Nablus, where he has been living with his daughter for the past seven years. He had no place to go. We called R., the head of the local District Coordinating Office (DCO) [the army section that handles civilian matters; it generally has representatives at the checkpoints ostensibly to alleviate the lot of the Palestinians] who explained that officially he would have to send a police van to take him directly to the Allenby Bridge, where he would be deported to Jordan because he was living illegally in "Eretz Israel" [the Land of Israel]. What about unofficially? we asked. And R. sent a DCO officer, who let him into Nablus without any fuss.R. told us there were 60,000 "illegal" citizens who should be deported to Jordan. None of them was able to take out a Palestinian ID card, even though they had been born here, were Palestinians, owned houses here and had lived here all their lives.16:45 – One man, a resident of Nablus whose wife was from Jerusalem, came up to us in great agitation. His wife had not been allowed to enter Nablus (she'd gone back to Jerusalem), and he was not allowed to enter Jerusalem. He opened his briefcase and showed us a stack of money, business cards and other documents proving that he was a respectable businessman. He had no idea why he was being refused a magnetic card [the first prerequisite for the granting of any other permit, and in itself a sign of some minimal security clearance] or why he couldn't be reunited with his wife. We gave him the card of the Center for the Defence of the Individual, the telephone number of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and the telephone number of a lawyer who deals with his type of case. Perhaps one of them will be able to help him.