How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road to vengeance
"If we can get past the “Israeli” checkpoint at Kfar Darom, they'll let us through the checkpoint at Gush Katif," Khalil announced to me. I was on my way to Khan Younis from Gaza City, from one end of Yasser Arafat's little garbage tip to the other. And when we joined the end of a mile-long queue of shimmering cars and trucks and buses in the midday heat, Khalil whose yellow Mercedes taxi turned into an oven every time he stopped slapped his right fist into his left hand and uttered a familiar Arab curse. It involves the desire to do something obscene to the sister of one's antagonist.
It is always the same. In an Arab society, man is all-powerful, his potential humiliation not far from death itself. And at an “Israeli” checkpoint, his gradual descent from potentate to grovelling serf is a terrible thing to observe.
At the back of the queue north of the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom, Khalil was still a "pasha". But thanks to Mr Arafat's acceptance of the now-dead Oslo agreement, “Israeli” troops have the right to "control" the lateral roads in the Gaza Strip at three separate locations. By means of designated Area A (Palestinian- controlled), Area B (jointly controlled) and Area C (“Israeli”-controlled), the “Israelis” can keep the roads open or if someone has fired home-made mortars at their illegal Jewish settlements (built, of course, on land belonging to Khalil and his fellow-Palestinians) they can throttle the roads. Today was a throttling day.
At the back of the queue, Khalil was a nisr, an eagle, threatening eternal damnation on his “Israeli” tormentors. A few hundred metres later, he was an assad, a lion, demanding to know why the “Israelis” were ever given the right to occupy his land.
Around us, in taxis and clapped-out family cars, babies screamed and old women sighed and young men glowered and older men the wise and the revered in the Arab family called down the curses of God upon their enemies. It grew warmer. Flies moved slowly through the taxi, sunning themselves on the boiling plastic seats, bathing in our perspiration.
In a fog of exhaust, we crept another hundred metres towards the “Israeli” checkpoint. "Don't look at the “Israelis” or they might stop us and ask who you are," Khalil said carefully. Europeans are outnumbered 5,000 to one on the road to Khan Younis. Khalil was no longer an assad. Now he was a hissan, a horse, noble but potentially obedient, ready to be someone else's servant. This is what occupation is about.
I've sat through this outside Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, and through 22 years along all the roads of southern Lebanon, between Beirut and Sidon and Sidon and Tyre and Tyre and Nabatea and between Moukh-tara and Jezzine. Miles and miles and miles of little mobile human bakeries, filled with the smell of hot plastic, sweat and cigrarette smoke, while the occupiers, an “Israeli” sergeant or corporal or captain, turn a whole male-oriented society on its head.
At a place called Bater Bridge in Lebanon, civilians were kept for two days and nights in the miles of queues, “Israel’s” grotesque proxy Lebanese militiamen sometimes propositioning lone females in return for a quicker transit through “Israel’s” checkpoints, as they tried to return to their homes.
Far away through the heat haze, I could see an “Israeli” armoured personnel carrier. The red roofs of Kfar Darom hid behind watchtowers and the stumps of palm trees cut down by the “Israelis”. Khalil lit a cigarette, moved in his seat, repeatedly cut the engine and restarted it. He was no longer a hissan. Now he was a pseini, a pussy-cat, a quiet, frightened creature awaiting his fate.
The “Israelis” were now only 50 metres from us. Khalil threw his half-smoked cigarette out the window, then lit another. "Remember what I told you," he said. "Don't look at them." I slid my Arab press card from my shirt pocket and gently replaced it with an “Israeli” press card, the hannaka candle gleaming at the top left.
Now Khalil was turning we were all turning into those most despised creatures of the Arab world, hamir, donkeys, obedient, ready to be whipped and to obey. Please, please, please, let us through, let us go.
Two bored “Israeli” soldiers slid up to the left windows, the car bouncing in the dust-bowls of the road. One of them told the truck-driver in front to open the back doors of his lorry. There were large cardboard cartons inside. Crisp packets or rocket-propelled grenades? The “Israeli” stared, then told the driver to close the doors. Khalil looked straight ahead, unblinking, foot hovering over the gas. Now it was our turn, sarasir, cockroaches, ready to be crushed. The soldiers paid no interest. Khalil gunned the taxi. "Mish mishkl, habibi," he shouted. No problem, my friend. And he reverted to his original curses about the sister of his enemies. He had become a nisr again, an eagle.
So what are these checkpoints for? Why did the people of southern Lebanon have to wait two days in such conditions? A few weeks ago, I was stopped by an “Israeli” army checkpoint north of Nablus, en route to Jenin. I was the only motorist on the road, driving myself. "You'll have to wait," the sergeant said on that occasion. So like the refugees in Casablanca, I had to wait. And wait. And wait. Palestinian cars queued behind me. After an hour and a half, I played an old Lebanon trick.
The Palestinians stayed where they were but I drove back down the road, found a farm track to an old village and within 10 minutes returned to the highway on the other side of the checkpoint. The “Israelis” must have known I could do this. So why did they stop me? For "security" reasons? Or because their checkpoints are not about security at all, but about humiliation?
On the way back from Khan Younis, we were pulled up before the “Israeli” checkpoint at the Gush Katif settlement. It was the end of the day and now the Palestinian men cut each other off to reach the checkpoint, jumping the queue, swerving on to the dust and hedgerows to pass their fellow citizens, cursing not the “Israelis” now but each other.
That wonderful “Israeli” journalist Amira Haas may she receive a thousand press awards for her eloquence and moral courage has described this process, the embitterment of a whole people, the humiliation of the Arabs as they watch impotently while ambulances are turned back, expectant mothers ignored or allowed to die, decent people treated like animals.
Khalil stopped for a minute while car-loads of Jewish settler men, kippahs on their heads, rifles poking from the open windows, raced across in front of us to one of their exclusive settlers' roads. Then we growled through. Khalil was not cursing now. He was tight-lipped, aware that his impotence had been made manifest, his patriotism turned to self-loathing, no longer an animal but a thing. And around me, young Palestinian men sat in cars with equal loathing cast like a mask over their faces, humiliated in front of their fathers and mothers and sisters and wives. And it occurred to me that one or two of them would be just angry enough to retrieve their dignity in self-immolation against their tormentors, without discrimin- ation between soldiers and civilians to leave the world of animals to become what the Palestinians call "martyrs". And what the “Israelis” call "terrorists". That is what occupation is all about.
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Independent, 14-4-2001.