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, no larger than the
small US state of Colorado.
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 fulfillment 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 behaviour 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 “demonising” 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 Qalqiliya, 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 centre 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 woolen 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 northerly 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 kilometers 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 humour,” 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
soldier’s behaviour, 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 traveled 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 complicit
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 license, 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
license 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?
Writings 
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. 
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 behaviour of soldiers at
a few dozen of the more accessible checkpoints (“machsom” in Hebrew). 
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