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.