Checkpoint Racism

I've never seen racism as clearly and as concretely as in Palestine. Here, it's like racism is a tangible thing that you can reach out and touch, because you see so many examples of it every day. It's not just an abstract concept, it's an actual physical thing that can take on many different forms. You look out your window in Ramallah and see the Wall. Racism. You walk down the street in Hebron and pass a group of Israeli soldiers with M-16s. Racism. You drive down the highway and around the bend you see what used to be the main entrance to a village, which has now been sealed shut with boulders, isolating the village (see the picture above - the sign says "Jaba Welcomes You"). Racism.

In addition to all these examples, one of the most blatant forms of racism here are the hundreds of checkpoints that are scattered all around the West Bank. Palestinians can be denied crossing these checkpoints for a myriad of reasons, or they can just be forced to wait at them for hours. I've heard stories from people telling me that a trip from Bethlehem to Ramallah, which used to take about half an hour, can sometimes take two and a half hours because they're forced to wait at checkpoints. If Palestians are on a bus crossing through the bigger ones, they all have to get off the bus and walk through the checkpoint on foot, then go catch the bus again on the other side of the checkpoint. Only Palestinians have to do that though, not internationals. I've seen a few things myself at different checkpoints that I think really illustrate the discriminatination that happens here every day.

A few weeks ago I went to Bethlehem with a few other people, and when we were coming back to Ramallah, we crossed through one of the big checkpoints (see the picture below). In front of us was a woman with her newborn baby. This checkpoint was like airport security, where you put your bags through an x-ray machine, and then walk through a metal detector. So this woman put all her stuff through the x-ray and walked through the metal detector carrying her baby. The metal detector went off, and the soldier yelled something at her. So she went back and took off what might have set off the metal detector, and tried to walk through again. And the alarm went off again. So the soldier yelled at her, and the woman went back and tried a third time. Same result. And this continued for a good 10-15 minutes, with the soldier screaming louder and louder at the woman in Hebrew, and the woman all the while carrying her baby, frantically trying to figure out what was setting of the machine. Finally, it turned out that the baby's diaper had been done up with safety pins. So the woman had to take every single safety pin out of the diaper, put them through the x-ray, and then walk through the metal detector. Then of course she had to find a place on the other side to put her baby down so she could do the diaper back up again. This is the kind of humiliation that the Palestinians have to go through daily.

Another checkpoint story came when I went olive picking with a big group of internationals and some Palestinian students. We had rented a bus and were on our way back to Ramallah when we came to a checkpoint. The Palestinians were sitting in the back of the bus because if they sat in the front, the soldiers would see them first and would immediately give us a hard time. So anyhow, the bus stopped, a soldier got on, looked around, and saw that there were Palestinians sitting at the back of the bus. So he walked straight to the back, without saying a word or looking at anyone else, and made all the Palestinians give him their ID cards. He took them, checked them in his computer, didn't find that they had a record or anything. After 10 minutes or so, he gave them back to the Palestinians and sent us on our way, without so much as a glance at the mostly white skinned, blond haired Europeans who made up the majority of the bus passengers. He was only interested in Palestinians, since of course, they're all "security threats" and you can never be too careful with them.

Maybe 20 minutes later, we came to another checkpoint. A soldier got on, but rather than looking around for himself, he just asked the person sitting in front if there were any Palestinians on the bus. The person said no, the soldier didn't bother to check, and just sent us on our way, saying "have a nice day!" And that was it. No Palestinians, no problem.

My last checkpoint story involves myself. I was with a couple of people going from Ramallah to Jerusalem, and we had to cross through a big checkpoint called Qalandiya. So I went through the metal detector and show the soldier my passport. She was still a little suspicious of me I guess, so she said something to me in Hebrew. I told her I only spoke English, and she turned and said something to a second soldier who was next to her. The second soldier hadn't been paying attention to me, so she didn't know I was Canadian. She looked at me, assumed I was Palestinian, and started yelling at me in Arabic. The first soldier quickly told her to stop yelling because I wasn't Palestinian. When the second soldier understood the situation, she calmed down and asked me in English how old I was. I answered her, and she waved me through.

Again, this is the type of thing that Palestinians go through day in and day out, but for them it's 1000 times worse. At least I have the privilege of having a Canadian passport. They live through the constant humiliation and frustration of having soldiers stop them and question them when you're traveling through their own land. They have to endure the soldiers looking at them with such an air of superiority, like they're dealing with animals and can do anything they want. It almost makes you sick to your stomach to see it. To live under occupation like this, there are no words to describe the injustice. Yes, racism is alive and well in the holy land.