Qalandiya - Every day, they close the net, and every day we open it
First they took our lands, then they murdered us, now they’re fucking us –
That’s what a Palestinian told me when I asked why the road between the vehicle checkpoint and the rise to the bridge had been closed off.
They add fence to fence, barrier to barrier, close themselves off behind concrete and metal, and lead us to hell, lengthening the road there as they do to the suffering man who must cross the checkpoint on foot.
“Every day, they close the net, and every day we open it” said a man, and like in a well-timed theater of the absurd, just then the security guard came from the other side to lock whatever had been open.
(I’ll spare the readers the words we heard from the man in the picture).
Much talk is in the air about the school year about to be opened, much talk about the money that has to be brought home to finance this schooling, for here in the West Bank school is not free and is not mandatory – each person and the number of his children and his ability to stretch his means and pay the institutions of learning and the added expenses of books and notebooks and new clothes because the children need to be at least a bit more decent than in their old, ragged clothes.
I have 4 children, said Basel who lives in Bani Naim in the Hebron district. I have not been home for a month now - I stay here to make money for my children’s school.
One man is a resident of Kufr ‘Akeb. He said that because of his partnership in a Jericho business, and because much of the time is spent there and not at home, the authorities – that surveillance everyone – surveillance him too and when they realized the man does not spend all of his days and nights at home in Kufr ‘Aqeb, they denied him his Jerusalem resident status.