Stranglehold

No, this isn't about the Ted Nugent song. This is a bit of a political rant--a long-simmering one. I'll try not to be too incoherent in my anger, though.

If you don't know about the wall around Palestine, the map to the right can give you a glimpse of the problem. This is actually an interesting problematic from a cartographic and geographic standpoint, because as you can see in the map's title, this one is four and a half years old. There are very few decent maps being made (that doesn't mean there aren't many maps, it just means that there are very few decent maps out there. I've seen some horrid examples of cartography relating to the West Bank, but that's a story for another post), but you can see on this map some of the results of fencing off a population of 2.5 million people. In urban areas, the wall is 8-meter high slabs of concrete, with pillboxes every couple hundred meters, and often festooned with concertina wire, like garland on a Christmas tree--but not nearly so festive.

Aside from the problematic route, the visual affront that is the wall, and the specially-built roads that Israelis get to use to bypass the wall, the wall is where the Israeli border becomes more than a location: it is a social institution, and crossing the border is a ritualistic humiliation, a negotiation involving bored Israeli teenagers armed with automatic weapons and complete authority over anyone who wishes to pass.

OK, enough preaching against the "Security Barrier" in general, and time for some talk about specifics.

Among other places in the West Bank, Bethlehem is being slowly strangled by the wall. I posted pictures of Har Homa, the (illegal)* settlement built on a hilltop opposite Bethlehem, one of the several settlements where "natural expansion" is non-negotiable--the Israeli government insists that settlements like Har Homa should be allowed to expand further into Palestinian land.

I haven't been brash enough (yet) to take pictures at the checkpoints, and the wall itself is so visually disgusting that I can't bring myself to photograph it, either. But my experiences at the checkpoints have been so infuriating that I've been tempted--and I'll be taking a short trip to Jerusalem before I leave, so I'll probably see about taking pictures then.

If it weren't for a sizable Christian minority in Bethlehem, and all the Christian significance of the city, Bethlehem would likely be dead, choked by the wall and Israeli settlements. If you're up for a hike across a hill or two, you can walk from the Old City of Jerusalem to the Old City of Bethlehem (including Manger Square) in an afternoon. Previously, I've posted a picture of the (modern) wall around Bethlehem, as seen from the (ancient) wall around the Old City of Jerusalem. Go look at it. But if it weren't for hordes and hordes of tourists visiting the city, there'd be no life there. Encircled by the wall and ever-expanding settlements, the place would die off.

But there is a booming tourist trade (and from what I've learned, about 99.7% of Italian citizens are right at this moment visiting various religious sites around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The 0.3% who are left are working in Italy's tourism industry, probably), and so Bethlehem survives. Other places in the West Bank aren't so lucky. I'll be visiting a couple of these places over the next few days.

Now, I've posted before about Ram'allah's economy and the construction boom. Don't be fooled into thinking that all is well, and that the wall is simply an ugly scar on the land. Ram'allah is the center of Palestinian politics, the headquarters for most international aid organizations, and since the 2000 Al Aqsa Intifadeh, the center of the Palestinian economy (the northern city of Nablus had been the economic center, but in 2003 the city's economy was effectively strangled to death). There's no shortage of stuff to buy in Ram'allah--that's the real trick to the border/wall: you can get in, but you can't get out.

Outside of the economic effects, the stranglehold takes on a personal significance each and every time one tries to cross into Israel--and sadly, trying to go from one part of the West Bank (e.g., Ram'allah) to another part (e.g., Bethlehem) often means going through a border checkpoint, transiting Jerusalem. Here's how traveling from Ram'allah to Jerusalem works:

I hop on bus #18 and pay 6.5 NIS (~$1.75) for the trip. The bus drives about 6 miles to get to the Qalandia checkpoint. At the checkpoint, all passengers have to get off, and the bus driver takes the empty bus through security. The passengers have to walk across the road, through a parking lot, and into what resembles a cross between an amusement park line-maze and a cattle chute--galvanized steel tubing encases us in a long tunnel until we reach a turnstile. Once through the turnstile, there are eight different "gates" to choose from. There is no indication of which gates are staffed, or who can go through where--there are some gates where they don't have the x-ray machine running, so anyone passing through that gate cannot have any bags, luggage, or packages. So the human cattle queue up, and wait for the green light above another galvanized-steel turnstile, so they can push through, put their possessions on the x-ray belt, walk through a metal detector, and then be berated by the IDF soldier behind a 1.5" thick plexiglas window.

Palestinians need to have identity cards indicating they're Israeli residents, or permission slips allowing them to temporarily visit the other side of the border. Foreign nationals need their passports, showing their current Israeli visas.

And this is a problem. Israeli stamps in a passport make a traveler persona non grata in Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon--these countries won't admit any traveler who has visited Israel (or the Palestinian Territories). Most European/North American passengers who arrive at Ben Gurion airport can opt to not have their passport stamped--the immigration officers simply stamp a piece of paper (that you keep with your passport) so you don't suffer the stigma of the stamp. This has become such a common request that the immigration agents default to stamping the piece of paper. When I arrived at Ben Gurion--and this experience is a common one, I'm told--after I was processed through immigration and went to pick up my baggage, another immigration agent took the slip of paper from me and ripped it up.

So, according to my passport, I have never been to Israel. According to my passport, this research trip does not exist at all. For anyone who knows me, and knows how much I want to achieve my goal of filling up my passport with visas & stamps, you know that I would probably trade being blacklisted from Syria for the next five years (until I get a new passport) for another page of my passport filled. But no, I've got nothing in my passport to show for this trip. Of course, I'm in all the Israeli computers as having entered.

That doesn't do a lot of good, though. The IDF soldiers who work in the bullet- and bomb-proof bubbles at the checkpoint are all young--about the age of most of my students. If you didn't know, Israel has mandatory conscription--very few Israeli citizens are exempt from active service in the IDF, and even upon discharge from active duty, Israeli citizens have mandatory reserve service that lasts decades. So the young soldiers--most of whom I'm sure would rather be somewhere else, doing anything other than sitting in a glass-and-steel cage for hours at a time--hold complete control over (and responsibility for) the transit of thousands of people a day over a border that doesn't really even exist. I've experienced border guards who were obviously bored, but mostly they're sullen and hostile. I've been shouted at in Hebrew by a woman who looked like the daughter of an East German shot-putter, queried like I was a simpleton by a woman who looked like she was lounging on the beach as recently as that morning, and studiously ignored by a pudgy guy who was more intent on humiliating the Palestinian who was in line in front of me.

The common thread to all my troubles, of course, is the lack of any documentation in my passport that I'd ever entered Israel. "Feesa?" they keep asking me. I tell them, "No, I'm an American. I don't need a visa to enter Israel." "Stamp?" they reply. I tell them, "At Ben Gurion, they stamp a piece of paper." "Feesa?" is the moronic reply, "Where is paper?" I sigh, put on my best aww, shucks, I'm just a stupid American smile, and explain how they tear up the papers rather than give them to people. The East German shot-putter yelled at me in response. The beach bimbo chattered to her co-worker for a couple minutes--not about me, though, because she was sharing a text message on her cell phone.

The first time I negotiated the checkpoint, they called in to some immigration hotline and read off my passport number to verify that I hadn't snuck into the Territories for the nefarious purpose of sneaking into Israel. The beach bimbo took my passport and quizzed me on its contents: "What is your name?" Oh, please. Can't you see that the picture is me? And I have my Ohio State business card in the passport, too, so they can see I'm just a harmless academic. Where are you coming from? Where am I coming from? Ram'allah (I point behind me). No, where are you coming from? Where are you from? Originally? Oh, well, Ohio is where I started. She looked at me dubiously, then eventually decided her cell phone was more interesting. I looked at my passport as I left, and realized that she was looking at the place where it was issued--Illinois.

Once approved, I go through yet another turnstile, then out another cattle chute, to a parking lot on the other side of the checkpoint, where I can re-board the bus (or board another one, if it took too long to get through the checkpoint), and ride the remaining 8-10 miles to the Palestinian bus depot on the north side of the Old City, in East Jerusalem. It's a humiliating, frustrating, frightening experience... for a foreign national whose government hands over multiple billions of dollars of no-strings-attached aid a year to their staunchest ally outside of the tea-swillers in Ye Olde Englande. Now imagine what it's like to not have that carte blanche, to be restricted in your movements--to be subjected to a much more degrading process whenever you want to go pray at the holy site just a few miles from where you live, whenever you want to visit family or friends who live in East Jerusalem, whenever you need to purchase a good or service that isn't readily available in your hometown, etc.

The trucks rumble through the border unmolested, carrying Israeli goods for sale in the West Bank. Not too many Palestinian goods travel the other direction, because everything gets minutely inspected. There might be a bomb in that truckload of tomatoes. Those handicrafts might be concealing weapons. That van might be smuggling someone into Israel.

I'm getting negative and cynical, and this post has taken on a life of its own, well beyond the things I wanted to talk about. But you can't get away from that wall. You can't not notice it, be aware of it, be fearful and anxious about trying to get through it. And why is it there? To screen off Palestinians from land that was once theirs, from the settlements that are growing and metastasizing like melanomas on the face of the West Bank.

An ironic addition: this past weekend, I went on a road trip that included visits to Masada, the Dead Sea, the Negev Desert, and the Mediterranean. When we rented the car in Jerusalem, I wanted to double-check, as I was aware that most agencies prohibited renters from taking cars into the Territories. When I asked about this, I was answered with a confused look from the rental agent. The Territories didn't exist in her "geographic imagination." Of course you can't cross the border checkpoints with the car, but as long as you stay on Israeli roads, you never cross a border; there are bypass roads threading all through the West Bank, that are off-limits to Palestinians. So as long as we stuck the bypass highways, we could drive through the West Bank and down to the Dead Sea.

We went around, on principle.

I was going to post pictures from Bethlehem, but I'll have to do a separate picture-post for that. This one's already too long. And then photos from Masada, etc.

Oh, and a link to a blog post by a British doctor who visited Nablus a couple years back and had to deal with the ritualized humiliation of the border.