We hear about the West Bank less frequently than rambunctious Gaza. In the news, in our minds, a shared social consciousness it is the better behaved elder brother to Gaza, the "model Arab/Palestinian" protectorate. There is a whiff of old colonization and white man's burden to the West Bank, whereas in Gaza there is only violence. But the truth to this territory, this exemplary problem is far more complicated and far more violent than we would like to believe from our couches and lounge chairs.
I barely noticed going over the Green Line. There is no gate, no walls, no looming feudal castle or precise military base, just an increase in fences, barbed wire the ect. along the sides of the roads, slightly in the distance; but what are fences in Israel where playgrounds are shielded with barbed wire and entrance to a mall is contested by a man with a gun and the ability to search your person. Perhaps the most visible indicator that we were entering the West Bank was the change in physical territory. Mountains, and fertile fields of trees, greener than I have yet to see in the coastal plains of formal Israel sprung out of the land alongside our highway drive.
Gradually the increase in fencing is such that even the unperceptive would notice its profusion. The roads are well maintained and there is little traffic. Our guide tells us this is because this is a Jewish road. Arabs are not allowed on it except in yellow cabs. But what of the Palestinian villages lining the highway, their high minarets mark them clearly as such. How do they move about?
Do you see that road, he points as we fly by, a feeling that if we stopped something bad might happen lurks in the bus, a faint stench of fear and the sharp, pungent adrenaline. The road to which he speaks is blocked by rubble and dirt a mound blocking the village road from the highway. On the dirt road leading up into the mountain village a neat line of cars waits. When the Israeli Army declared this road for Jewish use only they bulldozed all of its connections to Palestinian villages, he explains. The only way out of the village is to drive down to the highway and wait for an approved yellow cab to pick you up and drive you to the next check point where you wait and than pick up another yellow cab.
But why would they do that we all want to know? To what purpose does it serve? Most people, he continues, don't realize that the checkpoints we speak of when we are referring to the West Bank are not only between Israel and the territory, but between villages and cities inside the land. The IDF cuts these people off, isolating them inside their villages. Some of them never leave.
To leave a village or city inside the West Bank requires the permission of the IDF. Previously to receive permission a Palestinian had to journey to a Settlement, for which the Jewish roads are allocated, and get a pass to leave. If someone in your family has anti Israeli leanings, or pro Palestinian National thoughts it is unlikely that anyone in that family will ever be allowed to leave their village. They've learned this, he says, and so they don't even try anymore.
We drive on for a brief while observing cities and gates, blockades and military vehicles. Parallel to our highway is a dirt road for Palestinians. I have never been to a place so clearly under military rule. It is shocking to the senses and offends all dignity and pretensions to humanity. Yet it is confusing. Israel has a right to protect itself for suicide bombers, Israel has a right or does it not to this land? Do the rules of military conquest not apply anymore? If so the United States should give back much of south western America to Mexico. What makes this place, this territory so different from all other wars, past and future? Why is it so important, and so unclassifiable? Visiting the West Bank does not ameliorate these questions, but instead compounds them.
Finally we role to a stop at the first check point we will visit. It is between two Palestinian cities. A sign proclaims JEWS ARE NOT ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT. I have to wonder, is it for our protection, or for IDF secrecy?
The checkpoint itself is unremarkable at first. The road, our guide explains, is partially open now, orders from the new Likud Government to increase economic flow inside of the territories, but he does not think it will last.
By partially open I mean that the cars have to stop and show passes to two bored looking soldiers loaded with gear who will wave them on with a lazy pass of their arms. One comes over to discover what we are doing looking at the old checkpoint kept ready to be opened in an instance, along with the pivoting yellow barriers in the road that could clang shut without warning. He glares at us with the self important superiority of soldiers on duty. We ignore him and concentrate on the checkpoint.
It is stationed by the side of the road, an airy creation of silver metals that strikes fear into my heart. The names of concentration camps from World War II come rushing into my head, Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka Aushwitz! Jenn and I clutch hands our minds of the same bend. How can they not see the similarities?! Lines of humanity shuffled through these metal corridors like so much cattle. Humiliation screams from the pores of this place. It is mechanical, precise, and cold. How can they not see it?
The procedure, our guide tells us, is much improved. Before there was no tin roof to keep the sun off the lines of hundreds waiting to pass. Before if you did not have a pass, or the soldier thought you suspicious they took you into a tent off to the side and beat you. Now they have a building to do it in. I worked here and at other checkpoints he says. There are things I have done that I am ashamed of. Things I have done here, that should not have been done.
I look at the soldier off to the side pretending nonchalance while glancing at us from under hooded lids. He is 19 or 20, my age, with a gun and the responsibility of a nation. I wonder if he knows the human rights violations he is committing? I wonder if he cares? Maybe this is the only way he can survive.
We move on, parallel to the check point we paused beside. Towers covered in army camouflage dot the landscape, one beside each fenced checkpoint. Everywhere the swinging yellow metal barriers, open for now but the promise of their blockade lingers in the air.
Along the road a Palestinian village sits nestled in the side of a mountain. It is white, as are most, a minaret or two rising above the skyline. On top of the mountain a cluster of red roofed buildings sits. Those are settlements, the guide points out, they always build above Palestinian villages, on mountain tops. They hold the strategic positions.
We stop at the next checkpoint, a smaller affair, no metal apparatus just the yellow gate. Beside it are Palestinian fields separated from their village up mountain, by a trench, dirt piled high in a purposeful manner. An officer, 20 years old, decided a few years ago to separate the village from the Jewish road and so brought in bull dozes to dig the trench, inadvertently or perhaps not, parting the village from its fields. The Palestinians are not allowed the heavy machinery to rectify the situation, and so the decision stands. Not handed down from the government, or the generals of the IDF, but decided on by a young officer and never corrected.
Back at the checkpoint our guide tells us stories about this station, where he was posted some years ago while the current soldiers watch and even search our van interrogating the one Muslim woman we have with us. When the adults aren't watching they motion flirtatiously for Jenn and I to come over. We ignore them.
Do you see those stone in the road, our guide begins. Every 4 months the unit on duty here rotates out with another unit. The new men need to prove that they are bigger and stronger than the last unit so they commit atrocities on the population and get away with it. Officers set arbitrary curfews in town with orders that anyone out between the hours of 2am and 4am on some days and 1am and 3am on others are to be shot on sight.
Those stones in the road are named New Jersey. They were set there by a new unit to block the road. Not as the checkpoint, just to block the road. Every night Palestinian children from the village would come and try to move the stones, and every day the unit would put them back. The 20 year old officer in charge became so angry that he ordered his men to shoot the next person to touch New Jersey in the leg. His men thought he was joking, but that night he drove his car out beside the stones and waited for a child. As soon as one touched the stones he got out intending to shoot him in the leg. He missed and instead hit him in the stomach. The child died.
This isn't just a tragic mistake, this is the normalization of atrocities inside the West Bank. The Israel army is in full command and takes advantage of its position. It steals from the people and cars it stops at checkpoints, it kills children and digs ditches on the whims of its teenage officers. When a unit needs to move through a town but is afraid of snipers it comes into houses and blows out the walls connecting them to create a "safe path." (the US army does this too). And the sad thing is that soldiers giving testimony about this policy said that they were not as bad as some who wouldn't even take the family out of the house before blowing the hole, and who did not hesitate to take whatever struck their fancy.
Soldiers, like our guide, who give testimony to groups attempting to keep a record of these events are threatened with jail time and if they refuse to serve their next tour (Israeli men serve 3-4 years in the army and than are on reserve duty called up every year for duty) in the West Bank, they are thrown in jail.
I cannot find it in me to blame either side for the escalation of these events. There have been wrongs done on both sides. But visiting the West Bank has erased any lingering sympathy I had towards Israel. How it cannot see the hypocrisy in its situation amazes me. How can a country founded on principles of refugee and in the wake of the Holocaust continue to subjugate a peoples so wholly. But more than anything being in the West Bank has opened my eyes to the inflated role the Israeli Army (IDF) plays in this countries policy and every day life. The balance of Military, Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches needs to change before any real reform can happen in Israel.
As we left the West Bank my mind was abuzz with all of these thoughts. I argued with myself for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, trying to justify both sides, or one over the other, and unable to come to a black and white solution. One thing that was clear was the damage being done to both peoples by these policies and the possession of the West Bank. Israelis must serve in the army, and a large percentage of them serve in the West Bank. They normalize hatred of Arabs, atrocity and humanitarian violations out of fear and for the purpose of survival, but they take those experiences back to Israel when they leave their army tours, creating a culture of hatred and fear that is passed down through the generations.
On the way out we were stopped by a car that had just exploded. It was sitting in the middle of the road blazing with flames, looking for all the world as if a grenade had been thrown into it minutes before we arrived. The army and the police were all there, and on the roof of a building in a Palestinian village behind barbed wire above the highway sat three young men looking down onto the scene. It was all so horrifying on top of what we had seen today, but the Israelis in the bus (all who have done their service in the military) took it normally. It might have been an ambush, it might have been nothing, but they had already put it out of their minds.
What kind of people are being created by this conflict, Israeli's drenched in fear, bravado and mindless racism, Palestinians saturated with anger and hatred. How can there be an end with such violent emotions only getting stronger?
 |
| West Bank |
No comments:
Post a Comment