Qalandiya checkpoint - surely one of the most depressing places on earth

A woman has been waiting from 5am to pass Qalandiya checkpoint. She has a special permit allowing her to pass every Friday, the holiest day of the week, during Ramadan. She applied and paid for this permit because she wanted to pray at Al Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and passing Qalandiya checkpoint is the only way into Jerusalem. Last Friday the soldiers allowed her to pass. Today they are preventing her from passing. She has been told they are only letting women over 45 pass. They give her no other explanation. She refuses to leave though, says you never know, the soldiers may change their minds.

Men and women are separated at Qalandiya. On the man’s side, I talk to a young man from Qalqilya, north west of the West Bank, a good distance from this checkpoint. He also has a permit for Fridays in Ramadan. The soldiers tore it up. He has a young son at home and says he wouldn’t have come all this way if he’d known they wouldn’t let him pass. ‘What was the point in them giving me a permit if they don’t let me pass?’ he asked.

The soldiers say they are only letting men over 50 pass. One man is 49 and 11 months. He is told to go home.

One man won’t talk to me. He said there is no point, no one can help us, it’s useless.

Another man tells me that yesterday he came to the checkpoint to ask about passing today. The soldier told him to come, that it would be fine, he could pass. Today he is not allowed through.

I learn from a woman from Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, a group of over 400 Israeli women who monitor different checkpoints across the country, that yesterday all the special passes were cancelled because of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana – New Year, starting this evening. Palestinians weren’t told about this. Today they are just told they cannot pass with the permit. No reason is given. I wondered if any of the soldiers felt the perverse irony of preventing Palestinians from marking their holy day because Israelis are marking theirs...

At 8.30 suddenly all Palestinians working in Aterot, a Jewish Industrial zone, are given permission to pass even if they are under 50. We are told the Jewish employers need their workers.

At 10.30 they start to let men over 50 through. Most have now been at Qalandiya for at least three or four hours. Some for longer. The sun is out in force, it is swelteringly hot. People are fasting so they can’t drink any water and there is no shade.

One of the soldiers is relentlessly shouting ‘ahoga’ – ‘back, back’. There is nowhere for people to go. From time to time they rush at the crowd forcing everyone to move back. They take people’s ID from them and instead of giving it back to them after they’ve looked at it, they walk away with it, forcing the person it belongs to, to run after them. Only they can’t get the other side of the barrier, so they can’t run after them. All they can do is push through the crowds of people trying to keep an eye on the soldier who’s taken it and wait for him or her to walk back to return it, which hardly ever happens. Meanwhile everyone is being told to move back or pushed back by force, and the soldier with the ID has disappeared from sight. This is often where the Machsom Watch women or other observers come in, helping get back people’s ID, without which the already excessive limitations placed on Palestinians become even worse.

For many men, their livelihoods often depend on their permits, they determine whether people can get to their place of work or not and so whether they can afford to feed their families. So it is vital that they don’t have their permit taken away from them. This gives soldiers immense power and forces many Palestinian men into resigned submission. Women usually move around less and many don’t work so their permits have less importance. Not being afraid to lose their permit means they can be braver, more dignified and more powerful in their resistance. As the Israeli soldiers look through Palestinians rather than at them, Palestinian women do the same, looking but not seeing.

A Palestinian man working for the UN agency UNRWA is under 50. He is not allowed to pass either. A health practitioner – a doctor or nurse, I’m not sure which, is not allowed through to go to work.

Unbelievably this is only the first stage of passing through Qalandiya. For men and women, there is another stopping point just about 10 metres away from the first, where they must show their ID again. Even if people have been allowed to pass the first, there is no guarantee they will pass the second.

Then comes the main area of Qalandiya, a three or four minute walk from these initial areas. It is a massive indoor cage with iron turnstiles and security conveyor belts which scan people’s bags. Today the queue wasn’t so long because they were refusing to let so many through the initial stage. There were about 15 people in front of me. As I approached the turnstile I heard a screeching voice from inside, which turned out to be a female soldier behind a window shouting orders ‘yalla yalla’ ‘come on come on’ to those both putting their bags in the machine, and standing directly in front of her at the window. As I waited at the turnstile a young woman was turned back because she wasn’t 45. She leant against the wall to steady herself and cried.

It is unbearable to watch the dismissive and remorseless way that soldiers turn Palestinians away. Hardly any speak Arabic, except for words of command – come, go, shut up, hurry up...

When it was our turn to pass they demanded to see my friend’s camera because they said, she had been taking photos. There are no signs forbidding the use of cameras at the checkpoint but it took a third party intervening to finally force the soldier to give my friend back her passport and her camera and let us through. It was a relief to be on the other side.

We spent four hours at Qalandiya. Some of the women we spoke to were planning to stay all day until the evening when they would face the direction of Al Aqsa mosque, and as a political statement and symbolic act of resistance, they would set down their mats and pray.

Anata Checkpoint

Whenever I go into Jerusalem, which is most days, I have to pass the checkpoint in Anata. I always go by bus, the number 54, it picks me up in Anata and drops me at Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem. Each time as I approach the checkpoint my heart starts to beat and my pulse starts to race... it’s not a good experience. Usually there is not much traffic as I travel during the day not in rush hour. When I have travelled at the more busy time of day the bus can sit in the same place maybe for up to half an hour. At the checkpoint a soldier with his or her gun poised, gets on the bus to check everyone’s ID. To pass people must have a blue ID, this means they have the right to travel into Jerusalem. If they have a green ID they cannot pass. I have experienced elderly and obviously sick people trying to get to hospital in Jerusalem being forced off the bus and told to go home. Usually people have the passes and are allowed through.

Usually for some reason the soldier that gets on the bus at this checkpoint is female. She moves from one of the bus to the other taking people’s ID out of their hands, looking at it, never at them and usually returning it, except when it’s a West Bank green ID, then she takes it with her while she moves up the bus – un-necessarily as she is going to make the person leave the bus anyway, and then returns it once they are off the bus. The person I saw her do this to was elderly – they could hardly walk, the soldier didn’t need to hold onto the ID. She did this because she could and in this situation, under this Occupation, at every checkpoint the soldiers play with their power because they can. The soldier always has the same look on their face. Emptiness and disgust at the same time, like they are not seeing human beings in front of them. He or she doesn’t look up, or engage with anyone, just silently and deliberately moves from person to person – the only reason he or she will speak is if someone is sleeping, to demand their ID, or to ask a question about their ID or to tell them to get off the bus and go home. They always speak in Hebrew, never in Arabic. Someone told me that a soldier told him that he should speak in Hebrew because ‘this is Israel’. He was in the Occupied Territories at the time trying to pass a checkpoint. No he said, this is not Israel, this is Palestine.

I can’t express how much I hate passing this checkpoint, and yet I know that this, in comparison to others such as Qalandiya, is nothing. Though I know I have a British passport, an in date visa, and they will always let me pass, still I find it one of the most humiliating experiences I have ever had.

Guns and humans go together hand in hand here. Soldiers, as well as carrying them on duty, on the checkpoints, in the old city (particularly during Ramadan there was an increased presence of soldiers in the Muslim quarter in the old City), also carry them casually slung over their shoulders off duty, walking on the streets, getting on the bus to go home, sitting in a cafe, walking with their friends. Settlers are also allowed to carry guns and they do so very visibly. I was sitting having a coffee a while ago in West Jerusalem. I looked up and at the entrance of the same cafe was a man, a Jewish orthodox man in his fifties I would say, with one handgun in a holster strapped to the back of his belt and a large rifle slung over his shoulders. This is not an unusual sight here, I have seen the same thing many other times. To my left were two Israeli men having a coffee in the same cafe. One had a similar rifle over his shoulder which he held with such carelessness that I moved my chair because the direction it was pointing in frightened me. Palestinian police on the other hand, aren’t allowed to carry guns.

I see so many guns that I am no longer afraid of them, even though every time a soldier gets on the bus I do watch their gun and the direction it points in. For all of them it seems like an extra appendage, like it’s part of them... Today the soldier who checked our ID’s – a male this time – actually held the gun stiffly poised in front of him while he walked up the bus, as if he might need to use it. The angriest reaction I have ever heard from Palestinians in all the times I have passed through this checkpoint, is a loud tut. That was when the soldiers made the elderly woman get off the bus.

I am treated in much the same way as Palestinians at this checkpoint, presumably because I have crossed the line. The soldiers look at me with the same disdain, the same disgust and handle my passport in the same way they handle Palestinians ID.

Earlier today a Palestinian friend told me that both Palestinians and Israelis are suffering under the Occupation. I have heard this many times but I wanted to know specifically what he meant. He told me that each time an Israeli is told to lift his arms at a checkpoint to pass a security check, he suffers. He agreed that the two minute experience of an Israeli security check is different to the three or four hours Palestinians often have to wait to cross Qalandiya checkpoint for example when passing from Ramallah to Jerusalem, but still he said, Israelis are suffering.

Passing through the Anata checkpoint isn’t a physical act of violence, not so far. But the experience is a violent one – mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Every time I leave the checkpoint I feel violated and angry. I always watch the faces of the soldiers as they move up and down the bus, hoping to see something other than emptiness and disgust in their eyes. But I never see it, male or female soldier, it is always the same. As the bus drives away from the checkpoint, I always think the same thing – where is the compassion of these people and their humanity? And then I think of the 450 Palestinian villages that were erased in 1948 and I wonder if it was destroyed with them.