Yesterday at the lovely hour of 4am, Rebecca and I headed to the Bethlehem checkpoint to do checkpoint watch with a friend of hers, Debs, who is from South Africa and is here for 3 months working with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, which has been monitoring checkpoints for eight years. Every morning two individuals from this NGO monitor the checkpoint, both by counting how many people go through and how quickly (stats which are then sent to the UN), and by intervening when problems arise between soldiers and the Palestinians attempting to go through. Most of the individuals going through the checkpoint are men who work in Israel. The checkpoint opens at 5am, however there are over 2500 people that go through everyday, so people start lining up at 1am every morning and sleep on cardboard boxes in the jail-like queue they have to stand in - there are usually 800 already lined up by 4:30am. There is a "humanitarian" queue for the elderly, women, emergency workers and tourists, which means that they don't have to stand in line with the men and generally get through faster. To go through any checkpoint into Israel, one must have a permit, however only 15 000 of the four million Palestinians living in the West Bank have been able to obtain one.
The checkpoint is set up as follows: there are two lines, one with the men (who are in a surrounded by a long metal gate on the sides and top, with openings only at distant ends), and the humanitarian line. Beginning at 5am, a soldier lets only a few from each line go and will then close the turnstyles (which are significantly smaller than international standards) abruptly, often causing the hurried men to crash into them. Once the individuals do get through, they literally run over to the next terminal where they again wait in lines to go through a metal detector, even though most of them were only carrying their lunches. The solider patrolling the metal detector that I went through was asleep. There are three metal detectors present, but only two were being used, as is apparently normal and sometimes there is only one in use. Because some had missed morning prayers because they were crammed in the earlier metal gates, many men pray in the terminal. We watched as a soldier patrolled the area, often on beams overtop the Palestinians. In this terminal there are no bathrooms - one must either go back and have to wait in line again, or wait until he or she finally makes it out. Once through the metal detector, they must again wait in line to show another soldier their permits and be fingerprinted. Beside them in this third line are Israel tourism posters reading such things as "Israel - where it's vacation time all year round." I found the irony amusing and nauseating at the same time. Debs said that at this point permits are sometimes taken away for hours for seemingly no reason, being given back eventually with no explanation.
While Rebecca and I were talking about what we were seeing, she said what I was having trouble putting into words - Israel can put a checkpoint in place if it were a border crossing and Palestine was an independent state, or if Palestine is supposedly part of Israel, then the crossing should be without restrictions. But to have the checkpoint as-is is dehumanizing. At times I felt like I was on a cattle farm, watching the cows be herded. People should not be treated like this.
I slept until early afternoon and then finally did some touristy stuff - I walked the walls of the old city and saw the Wailing Wall. After dinner we saw an open air performance of Rent which was amazing, especially since a friend I've met here choreographed it. We then went to the best drag show EVER, which was made even better by the fact that it's Pride week in Jerusalem and the crowd was out in huge numbers. Pride is a very controversial subject in Jerusalem, so I'm really looking forward to the parade on Thursday.
Today I bussed across the city to Yad Vashem, or the Holocaust museum. The thought that such hatred can exist in the world was hard to take in, and to comprehend how such a thing was able to take place was impossible. The paranoia and fear of another Holocaust taking place is what fuels a large part of Israel's need to "defend" itself, and seeing this museum helped me to better understand the thought process of those committing modern day crimes against Palestine. And while nothing compares to what happened to the Jews and so many other groups under the Nazi regime, a few times it struck me - do they not see the similarities in what is happening today? The talking of random shootings and ghettos and systemic violence - isn't this what is happening now? In one of the videos a man, after talking about not stealing bread and then going hungry during the Holocaust, said "I will never again make the mistake of being moral. This is the jungle, and in the jungle, only predators survive." I really thought that spoke volumes to what so much of the current conflict is based on. I know that my opinion on comparing the Palestine/Israel conflict to the Holocaust is controversial, and I by no means think that they are of nearly the same magnitude. But I do truly believe that some of the similarities cannot be ignored and am surprised that they are not recognized by more people.
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