Apartheid Looks Like This

The old man heads off purposefully down a parallel but empty lane
reserved for vehicle inspections. A young soldier controlling the
human traffic spots him and orders him back in line. The old man
stops, fixes the soldier with a stare and refuses. The soldier looks
startled, and uncomfortable at the unexpected show of defiance. He
tells the old man more gently to go back to the queue. The old man
stands his ground. After a few tense moments, the soldier relents and
the old man passes.

Is the confrontation revealing of the soldier's humanity? That is not
the way it looks – or feels – to the young Palestinians penned in
behind the concrete barriers. They can only watch the scene in
silence. None would dare to address the soldier in the manner the old
man did – or take his side had the Israeli been of a different
disposition. An old man is unlikely to be detained or beaten at a
checkpoint. Who, after all, would believe he attacked or threatened a
soldier, or resisted arrest, or was carrying a weapon? But the young
men know their own injuries or arrests would barely merit a line in
Israel's newspapers, let alone an investigation.

And so, the checkpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine's
grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.

I observed this small indignity – such humiliations are now a staple
of life for any Palestinian who needs to move around the West Bank –
during a shift with Machsom Watch. The grass-roots organization
founded by Israeli women in 2001 monitors the behavior of soldiers at
a few dozen of the more accessible checkpoints ("machsom" in Hebrew).

The checkpoints came to dominate Palestinian life in the West Bank
(and, before the disengagement, in Gaza too) long before the outbreak
of the second intifada in late 2000, and even before the first
Palestinian suicide bombings. They were Israel's response to the Oslo
accords, which created a Palestinian Authority to govern limited areas
of the occupied territories. Israel began restricting Palestinians
allowed to work in Israel to those issued with exit permits; a system
enforced through a growing network of military roadblocks. Soon the
checkpoints were also restricting movement inside the occupied
territories, ostensibly to protect the Jewish settlements built in
occupied territory.

By late last year, according to the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 528 checkpoints and roadblocks
were recorded in the West Bank, choking its roads every few miles.
Israel's daily Haaretz newspaper puts the figure even higher: in
January there were 75 permanently manned checkpoints, some 150 mobile
checkpoints, and more than 400 places where roads have been blocked by
obstacles. All these restrictions on movement for a place that is,
according to the CIA's World Factbook, smaller than the tiny US state
of Delaware.

As a result, moving goods and people from one place to the next in the
West Bank has become a nightmare of logistics and costly delays. At
the checkpoints, food spoils, patients die, and children are prevented
from reaching their schools. The World Bank blames the checkpoints and
roadblocks for strangling the Palestinian economy.

Embarrassed by recent publicity about the burgeoning number of
checkpoints, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, promised the
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in December that there would be
an easing of travel restrictions in the West Bank – to little effect,
according to reports in the Israeli media. Although the army announced
last month that 44 earth barriers had been removed in fulfilment of
Olmert's pledge, it later emerged that none of the roadblocks had
actually been there in the first place.

Contrary to the impression of most observers, the great majority of
the checkpoints are not even near the Green Line, Israel's
internationally recognized border until it occupied the West Bank and
Gaza in 1967. Some are so deep inside Palestinian territory that the
army refuses to allow Machsom Watch to visit them. There, the women
say, no one knows what abuses are being perpetrated unseen on
Palestinians.

But at Huwara checkpoint, where the old man refused to submit, the
soldiers know that most of the time they are being watched by fellow
Israelis and that their behavior is being recorded in monthly logs.
Machsom Watch has a history of publishing embarrassing photographs and
videos of the soldiers' actions. It showed, for example, a videotape
in 2004 of a young Palestinian man being forced to play his violin at
Beit Iba checkpoint, a story that gained worldwide attention because
it echoed the indignities suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Machsom Watch has about 500 members, reportedly including Olmert's
leftwing daughter, Dana. But only about 200 actively take part in
checkpoint duties, an experience that has left many outspoken in
denouncing the occupation. The organization is widely seen by the
Israeli public as extremist, with pro-Israel groups accusing the women
of "demonizing" Israel.

It is the kind of criticism painfully familiar to Nomi Lalo, from Kfar
Sava. A veteran of Machsom Watch, she is the mother of three children,
two of whom have already served in the army while the youngest, aged
17, is due to join up later this year. "He has been more exposed to my
experiences in Machsom Watch and has some sympathy with my point of
view," she says. "But my oldest son has been very hostile about my
activities. It has caused a lot of tension in the family."

Most of the women do shifts at a single checkpoint, but I join Nomi on
"mobile" duty in the central region, moving between the dozens of
checkpoints west of Nablus.

She wants to start by showing me the separate road system in the West
Bank, with unrestricted and high-quality roads set aside for Jewish
settlers living illegally in occupied territory while Palestinians are
forced to make difficult and lengthy journeys over hills and through
valleys on what are often little more than dirt tracks.

Machsom Watch calls this "apartheid," a judgment shared by the liberal
daily Haaretz newspaper, which recently wrote an editorial that
Israeli parents ought to "be very worried about their country sending
their sons and daughters on an apartheid mission: to restrict
Palestinian mobility within the occupied territory … in order to
enable Jews to move freely."

We leave the small Palestinian town of Azzoun, close by the city of
Qalqilya, and head directly north towards another city, Tulkarm. A
trip that should take little more than a quarter of an hour is now all
but impossible for most Palestinians.

"This road is virtually empty, even though it is the main route
between two of the West Bank's largest cities," Nomi points out. "That
is because most Palestinians cannot get the permits they need to use
these roads. Without a permit they can't get through the checkpoints,
so either they stay in their villages or they have to seek circuitous
and dangerous routes off the main roads."

We soon reach one of the checkpoints Nomi is talking about. At Aras,
two soldiers sit in a small concrete bunker in the center of the main
junction between Tulkarm and Nablus. The bored soldiers are killing
time waiting for the next car and the driver whose papers they will
need to inspect.

A young Palestinian man, in woollen cap to protect him from the cold,
stands by a telegraph post close by the junction. Bilal, aged 26, has
been "detained" at the same spot for three hours by the soldiers.
Nervously he tells us that he is trying to reach his ill father in
hospital in Tulkarm. Nomi looks unconvinced and, after a talk with the
soldiers and calls on her mobile phone to their commanders, she has a
clearer picture.

"He has been working illegally in Israel and they have caught him
trying to get back to his home in the West Bank. The soldiers are
holding him here to punish him. They could imprison him but, given the
dire state of the Palestinian economy, the Israeli prisons would soon
be overflowing with jobseekers. So holding him here all day is a way
of making him suffer. It's illegal but, unless someone from Machsom
Watch turns up, who will ever know?"

Is it not good that the military commanders are willing to talk to
her? "They know we can present their activities in the West Bank in a
very harsh light and so they cooperate. They don't want bad publicity.
I never forget that when I am speaking to them. When they are being
helpful, I remind myself their primary motive is to protect the
occupation's image."

Nomi sees proof in cases like Bilal's that the checkpoints and
Israel's steel and concrete barrier in the West Bank – or fence, as
she calls it – are not working in the way Israel claims. "First, the
fence is built on Palestinian land, not on the Green Line, and it cuts
Palestinians off from their farmland and their chances of employment.
It forces them to try to get into Israel to work. It is self-defeating.

"And second, thousands of Palestinians like Bilal reach Israel from
the West Bank each day in search of work. Any one of them could be a
suicide bomber. The fence simply isn't effective in terms of stopping
them. If Palestinians who are determined enough to work in Israel can
avoid the checkpoints, those who want to attack Israel can certainly
avoid them. No one straps a bomb on and marches up to a checkpoint. It
is ordinary Palestinians who suffer instead."

The other day, says Nomi, she found a professor of English from Bir
Zeit University held at this checkpoint, just like Bilal. He had tried
to sneak out of Tulkarm during a curfew to teach a class at the
university near the city of Ramallah, some 40km south of here. Nomi's
intervention eventually got him released. "He was sent back to
Tulkarm. He thanked me profusely, but really what did we do for him or
his students? We certainly didn't get him to the university."

After Nomi's round of calls, Bilal is called over by one of the
soldiers. Wagging his finger reprovingly, the soldier lectures Bilal
for several minutes before sending him on his way with a dismissive
wave of the hand. Another small indignity.

As we leave, Nomi receives a call from a Machsom Watch group at Jitt
checkpoint, a few miles away. The team of women say that, when they
turned up to begin their shift, the soldiers punished the Palestinians
by shutting the checkpoint. The women are panicking because a tailback
of cars – mainly taxis and trucks driven by Palestinians with special
permits – is building. After some discussion with Nomi, it is decided
that the women should leave.

We head uphill to another checkpoint, some 500 metres from Aras,
guarding the entrance to Jabara, a village whose educated population
include many teachers and school inspectors. Today, however, the
villagers are among several thousand Palestinians living in a legal
twilight zone, trapped on the Israeli side of the wall. Cut off from
the rest of the West Bank, the villagers are not allowed to receive
guests and need special permits to reach the schools where they work.
(An additional quarter of a million Palestinians are sealed off from
both Israel and the West Bank in their own ghettoes.)

"Children who have married out of Jabara are not even allowed to visit
their parents here," says Nomi. "Family life has been torn apart, with
people unable to attend funerals and weddings. I cannot imagine what
it is like for them. The Supreme Court has demanded the fence be moved
but the state says it does not have the money for the time being to
make the changes."

Jabara's children have a checkpoint named after them which they have
to pass through each day to reach their schools nearby in the West Bank.

At the far end of Jabara we have to pass through a locked gate to
leave the village. There we are greeted by yet another checkpoint,
this one closer to the Green Line on a road the settlers use to reach
Israel. It is one of a growing number that look suspiciously like
border crossings, even though they are not on the Green Line, with
special booths and lanes for the soldiers to inspect vehicles.

The soldiers see our yellow number plate, distinguishing us from the
green plates of the Palestinians, and wave us through. Nomi is using a
settlers' map she bought from a petrol station inside Israel to
navigate our way to the next checkpoint, Anabta, close by an isolated
settlement called Enav.

Although this was once a busy main road, the checkpoint is empty and
the soldiers mill around with nothing to do. An old Palestinian man
wearing the black and white keffiyah (head scarf) popularized by
Yasser Arafat approaches them selling socks. There are no detained
Palestinians, so we move on.

Nomi is as skeptical of claims she hears in the Israeli media about
the checkpoints foiling suicide attacks as she is about the army's
claims that they have been removing the roadblocks. "I spend all day
monitoring a checkpoint and come home in the evening, turn on the TV
and hear that four suicide bombers were caught at the checkpoint where
I have been working. It happens just too often. I stopped believing
the army a long time ago."

We arrive at another settlement, comprising a couple of dozen Jewish
families, called Shavei Shomron. It is located next to Road 60, once
the main route between Nablus and the most northernly Palestinian
city, Jenin. Today the road is empty as it leads nowhere; it has been
blocked by the army, supposedly to protect Shomron.

"Palestinians have to drive for hours across country to reach Jenin
just because a handful of settlers want to live here by the main
road," observes Nomi.

A short distance away, also on Road 60, is one of the larger and
busier checkpoints: Beit Iba, the site where the Palestinian was
forced to play his violin. A few kilometres west of Nablus, the
checkpoint has been built in the most unlikely of places, a working
quarry that has covered the area in a fine white dust. "I look at this
place and think the army at least has a sense of humor," Nomi says.

Yellow Palestinian taxis are waiting at one end of the quarry to pick
up Palestinians allowed to leave Nablus on foot through the
checkpoint. At the vehicle inspection point, a donkey and cart stacked
so high with boxes of medicines that they look permanently on the
verge of tipping over is being checked alongside ambulances and trucks.

Close by is the familiar corridor of metal gates, turnstiles and
concrete barriers through which Palestinians must pass one at a time
to be inspected. On a battered table, a young man is emptying the
contents of his small suitcase, presumably after a stay in Nablus. He
is made to hold up his packed underwear in front of the soldiers and
the Palestinian onlookers. Another small indignity.

Here at least the Palestinians wait under a metal awning that protects
from the sun and rain. "The roof and the table are our doing," says
Nomi. "Before the Palestinians had to empty their bags on to the ground."

Machsom Watch is also responsible for a small Portakabin office
nearby, up a narrow flight of concrete steps, with the ostentatious
sign "Humanitarian Post" by the door. "After we complained about women
with babies being made to wait for hours in line, the army put up this
cabin with baby changing facilities, diapers and formula milk. Then
they invited the media to come and film it."

The experiment was short-lived apparently. After two weeks the army
claimed the Palestinians were not using the post and removed the
facilities. I go up and take a look. It's entirely bare: just four
walls and a very dusty basin.

How effective does she feel Machsom Watch is? Does it really help the
Palestinians or merely add a veneer of legitimacy to the checkpoints
by suggesting, like the humanitarian post, that Israel cares about its
occupied subjects? It is, Nomi admits, a question that troubles her a
great deal.

"It's a dilemma. The Palestinians here used to have to queue under the
sun without shelter or water. Now that we have got them a roof, maybe
we have made the occupation look a little more humane, a little more
acceptable. There are some women who argue we should only watch, and
not interfere, even if we see Palestinians being abused or beaten."

Which happens, as Machsom Watch's monthly reports document in detail.
Even the Israeli media is starting to report uncomfortably about the
soldiers' behavior, from assaults to soldiers urinating in front of
religious women.

At Beit Iba in October, says Nomi, a Palestinian youngster was badly
beaten by Israeli soldiers after he panicked in the queue and shinned
up a pole shouting that he couldn't breath. Haaretz later reported
that the soldiers beat him with their rifle butts and smashed his
glasses. He was then thrown in a detention cell at the checkpoint.

And in November, Haitem Yassin, aged 25, made the mistake of arguing
with a soldier at a small checkpoint near Beit Iba called Asira
al-Shamalia. He was upset when the soldiers forced the religious women
he was sharing a taxi with to pat their bodies as a security measure.
According to Amira Hass, a veteran Israeli reporter, Yassin was then
shoved by one of the soldiers and pushed back. In the ensuing scuffle,
Yassin was shot in the stomach. He was then handcuffed and beaten with
rifle butts while other soldiers blocked an ambulance from coming to
his aid. Yassin remained unconscious for several days.

We leave Beit Iba and within a few minutes we are at another
roadblock, at Jitt. This is where the soldiers shut the checkpoint to
traffic when the Machsom Watch team showed up earlier. Nomi wants to
talk to them. We park some distance away, behind the queue of
Palestinian cars, and she walks towards them.

There is a brief discussion and she is back. Meanwhile, one of the
soldiers takes out a megaphone and calls to the taxi driver at the
front of the queue. He is told to leave his car at the wait sign and
approach the checkpoint 100 meters away on foot. "They are not happy.
Now they are punishing the drivers because I have turned up. It's
exactly the same response as this morning." Nomi decides Machsom Watch
should retreat again. We leave as the queue of cars starts to build up.

The notorious Huwara checkpoint, guarding the main road to Nablus from
the south, is our next destination. Early in the intifada, there were
regular stories of soldiers abusing Palestinians here. Today, Machsom
Watch has an almost permanent presence here, as do army officers
concerned about bad publicity.

It is a surreal scene. We are deep in the West Bank, with Palestinians
everywhere, but two young Jews – sporting a hippy look fashionable
among the more extreme religious settlers – are lounging by the side
of the road waiting for a lift to take them to one of the more
militant settlements that encircle Nablus. A soldier, there to protect
them, stands chatting.

"There used to be a taxi rank here waiting for Palestinians as they
came through the checkpoint," says Nomi, "but it has been moved much
further away so the settlers have a safer pickup point. The
convenience of the settlers means that each day thousands of
Palestinians, including pregnant women and the disabled, must walk
more than an extra hundred yards to reach the taxis."

As I am photographing the checkpoint, a soldier wearing red-brown
boots – the sign of a paratrooper, according to Nomi – confronts me,
warning that he will confiscate my camera. Nomi knows her, and my,
rights and asks him by what authority he is making such a threat. They
argue in Hebrew for a few minutes before he apologizes, saying he
mistook me for a Palestinian. "Are only Palestinians not allowed to
photograph the checkpoints?" Nomi scolds him, adding as an
afterthought: "Didn't you hear that modern mobile phones have cameras?
How can you stop a checkpoint being photographed?"

The pleasant face of Huwara is Micha, an officer from the District
Coordination Office who oversees the soldiers. When he shows up in his
car, Nomi engages him in conversation. Micha tells us that yesterday a
teenager was stopped at the checkpoint carrying a knife and
bomb-making equipment. Nomi scoffs, much to Micha's annoyance.

"Why is it always teenagers being stopped at the checkpoints?" she
asks him. "You know as well as I do that the Shin Bet [Israel's
domestic security service] puts these youngsters up to it to justify
the checkpoints' existence. Why would anyone leave Nablus with a knife
and bring it to Huwara checkpoint? For God's sake, you can buy swords
on the other side of the checkpoint, in Huwara village."

We leave Huwara and go deeper into the West Bank, along a "sterile
road" – army parlance for one the Palestinians cannot use – that today
services settlers reaching Elon Moreh and Itimar. Once Palestinians
travelled the road to the village of Beit Furik but not anymore.
"Israel does not put up signs telling you that two road systems exist
here. Instead it is the responsibility of Palestinians to know that
they cannot drive on this road. Any that make a mistake are arrested."

South-east of Nablus we pass the village of Beit Furik itself, the
entrance to which has a large metal gate that can be lock by the army
at will. A short distance on and we reach Beit Furik checkpoint and
beyond it, tantalizingly in view, the grey cinderblock homes of the
city of Nablus.

Again, when I try to take a photo, a soldier storms towards me barely
concealing his anger. Nomi remonstrates with him, but he is in a foul
mood. Away from him, she confides: "They know that these checkpoints
violate international law and that they are complict in war crimes.
Many of the soldiers are scared of being photographed."

Faced with the hostile soldier, we soon abandon Beit Furik and head
back to Huwara. Less than a minute on from Huwara (Nomi makes me check
my watch), we have hit another checkpoint: Yitzhar. A snarl-up of
taxis, trucks and a few private cars is blocking the Palestinian
inspection lane. We overtake the queue in a separate lane reserved for
cars with yellow plates (settlers) and reach the other side of the
checkpoint.

There we find a taxi driver waiting by the side of the road next to
his yellow cab. Faek has been there for 90 minutes after an Israeli
policeman confiscated both his ID and his driving licence, and then
disappeared with them. Did Faek get the name of the policeman? No, he
replies. "Of course not," admits Nomi. "What Palestinian would risk
asking an Israeli official for his name?"

Nomi makes some more calls and is told that Faek can come to the
police station in the nearby settlement of Ariel to collect his
papers. But, in truth, Faek is trapped. He cannot get through the
checkpoints separating him from Ariel without his ID card. And even if
he could find a tortuous route around the checkpoints, he could still
be arrested for not having a licence and issued a fine of a few
hundred shekels, a small sum for Israelis but one he would struggle to
pay. So quietly he carries on waiting in the hope that the policeman
will return.

Nomi is not hopeful. "It is illegal to take his papers without giving
him a receipt but this kind of thing happens all the time. What can
the Palestinians do? They dare not argue. It's the Wild West out here."

Some time later, as the sun lowers in the sky and a chill wind picks
up, Faek is still waiting. Nomi's shift is coming to an end and we
must head back to Israel. She promises to continue putting pressure by
phone on the police to return his documents. Nearly two hours later,
as I arrive home, Faek unexpectedly calls, saying he has finally got
his papers back. But he is still not happy: he has been issued with a
fine of 500 shekels ($115) by the police. Nomi's phone is busy, he
says. Can I help get the fine reduced?