Palestinians delayed, humiliated at checkpoints

ShareThis

HAWARA CHECKPOINT, West Bank -- Under the supervision of an Israeli soldier clutching an M-16 assault rifle, Qassem Saleh begins his daily disrobing.He lifts his bright orange shirt so the soldier can see there's no bomb strapped to his torso. Then, after passing through a metal floor-to-ceiling turnstile, he undoes his belt and hands it over for examination by a second soldier, along with his wallet, mobile phone and cigarettes.The second soldier peruses his documents and asks his reason for travel. The answer is a simple one: he is returning to his family after a day's studies at An-Najah University in Nablus. It's a process Israel says is necessary for security, but one that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians consider their daily humiliation.With a curt nod, Saleh's documents are returned and he is allowed to pass. The whole process takes an hour and half, turning what would normally be a 15-minute commute each way between An-Najah and his home in the nearby village of Beeta into an ordeal that often sucks up a quarter of his day. "If a person was carrying anything (illegal) do you think he'd pass through here?" the 23-year-old media student said. "They just do this to humiliate us, to annoy us into leaving this country."Tensions run high at the Hawara checkpoint roadblocks set up by the Israeli army inside the West Bank. Along with two others, it cuts off the 177,000 residents of Nablus from the rest of the West Bank.Few cars are allowed to pass Hawara, and there are three more checkpoints before a Palestinian from Nablus could reach East Jerusalem, ordinarily an hour's drive to the south. Israel can close the checkpoints for hours or days at a time for Palestinians while Israeli traffic flows freely to and from the nearby Jewish settlements of Bracha and Yitzhar along roads Palestinians are barred from using.A report released last week by the International Committee for the Red Cross singled out the checkpoints and the isolation of Nablus as key parts of a system that denies Palestinians "normal and dignified lives."Another report, commissioned by the Israeli military, found such places are rife with physical and verbal abuse, as well as humiliations, gratuitous delays and bribe-taking. Checkpoints are acknowledge as automatically building up anger.Removing some of the checkpoints that carve the West Bank up into disconnected pieces is a key demand of the Palestinian negotiators taking part in peace talks with Israel, which restarted last week after a near-seven-year lull. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called for all checkpoints and roadblocks to be lifted so that Palestinians could have freedom of movement and trade inside the West Bank.Although Hawara separates Palestinian cities, rather than Palestinians from reaching Israel, the Israeli military says the post is necessary for security. According to the Israeli military, soldiers at the checkpoint have prevented the smuggling of 31 explosive devices and 27 other weapons so far this year. Those numbers are the highest of any checkpoint in the West Bank.Lieutenant Nir Balzam, commander of the Israeli military unit overseeing Hawara last week, said that roughly 25,000 people a day pass through Hawara via one or two "fast" lines for women and children and three longer lines for men.Lt. Balzam said as he watched perhaps 100 Palestinians wait in four long lines on a sunny afternoon last week. Many were carrying large bags -- gifts bought ahead of this week's Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha -- but the vast majority were simply heading for jobs or school or home. There are flare-ups of anger and violence on both sides. The Israeli military report released on Sunday found that of 1,000 soldiers interviewed, 25 per cent said they had witnessed or taken part in the abuse of Palestinians at a checkpoint.Lt. Balzam said his soldiers are specially trained on how to treat Muslims, and that all soldiers spoke at least some Arabic. After the release of the report, the army said it would increase instruction for soldiers stationed at checkpoints. "Every half a year, a report like this comes out, and every half a year, people pretend they're surprised," said Mikhael Manekin, director of Breaking the Silence, a group made up of Israeli reservists that has collected hundreds of checkpoint-abuse testimonies from soldiers. "Checkpoints breed abuse. That's an axiom."On the afternoon that Saleh and his classmates headed home through Hawara under the supervision of Lt. Balzam and his soldiers, two middle-aged Israeli women stood to the side taking notes. They were members of Checkpoint Watch, an all-volunteer, all-women Israeli organization dedicated to reporting the nitty-gritty of daily life at places such as Hawara.Their reports are unpleasant reading. One report from Hawara said, "The sight of people undressing and dressing publicly -- men in front of young women -- the scornful behavior of the soldiers, the smoking and eating in the presence of those fasting in these days of Ramadan, the never-ending standing in queues, the fear that you will not be able to cross -- all of this recurs and reveals itself to us on a daily basis as we stand at the various roadblocks, and we are unable to do anything about it."Even well-intentioned observers who have studied the checkpoints for years aren't sure they do much good, but, after waves of suicide bombers struck Israeli cities between 2000 and 2005, most Israelis credit the checkpoints -- as well as the 700-kilometer barrier under construction that weaves through the West Bank, walling off Israel from most of the people it occupies -- with the drop in violence during the past two years. Few want to see the strict security measures lifted.And despite the hopeful talk at last month's peace summit in Annapolis, Md., few Palestinians expect anything to change either. Seven years after checkpoints were built, most Palestinians do not expect the system to change or get any better.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)