Shalom
and Salaam,
It's
about 2:30 in the afternoon, and we just got back from the Surda
checkpoint. So here's an update on that before lunch. We may go
back for the afternoon and then a vigil tonight defying curfew
with Palestinians.
Four
of us arrived late this morning at Surda and found the standard
APC with five soldiers doing arbitrary I.D. checks (almost though
not exclusively of men). At some moments they make everyone show
I.D., then they'll forget or get distracted and check no one for
a while. For totally unclear reasons, they detain large groups
of men, who are forced to stand in the REALLY hot sun without
water and wait indefinitely while the soldiers take their IDs
behind large cement blocks and make phone calls to "check"
on the individuals.
In hassling
the troops, we were able to speed up the release of the detained
Palestinian men and getting their IDs back to them.
On the
Jewish side of things (ha), I have been repeatedly telling all
the soldiers I come into contact with that the international Jewish
community does not support Israeli state violence, that they are
making many of us ashamed. I had a pretty decent conversation
with a couple of soldiers, asking them if their family had been
survivors and talking about it for awhile, and then getting to
all the parallels between their treatment of the Palestinians
and Nazi treatment of Jews. From that place, they were actually
really hearing this, looking like they wanted to cry and so I
told them "this isn't about protecting Jews and you know
that, you know this is wrong, you’ve got barbed wire everywhere,
curfew like in the ghettos, etc..." We're going to begin
bringing information from the refuseniks to share with soldiers
who we can get through to at all.
Anyway,
I digress...
So one Palestinian man was being handcuffed (remember soldiers
are not allowed to make arrests) and we surrounded the soldier
with cameras and demanded he explain to the man what crime he
was being accused of...as they led the man handcuffed to the APC,
I blocked the door to it and told them if they were doing nothing
wrong they must let two of us come with them with cameras. At
this point the soldiers claimed they could no longer speak English
and would only yell at us in Hebrew (they kept trying to get me
to speak Hebrew with them, which I refused to, but conveniently
it meant they were afraid I understood them when they talked to
one another about us). After another minute the commander on site
threw me off the tank, fortunately all on tape. They drove away
and two of the detained men told us the soldiers had taken their
ID cards and car keys with them. So we waited for about an hour
and a half with the detainees, meanwhile contacting an Israeli
human rights organization, which reprimanded the IOF. The APC
then returned and the soldiers (out the top hatch) yelled and
swore in Hebrew, and threw the IDs and keys down on the ground,
and drove away.
Though
theoretically the checkpoint is open until curfew at 6, Palestinians
were passing "freely" for the time being. After lunch
we plan to return for few hours, to see if the soldiers come back.
