Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
Israeli Checkpoints and walls — colonisation tools
By Mazin Qumsiyeh
Jordan Times, Monday, October 27, 2003
I HAD to witness first hand what Palestinians travelling in the occupied areas go through to really understand what this conflict is about and our role in it. On Oct. 8, we were going to leave from the West Bank town of Beit Sahour to get to the bridge connecting Jordan with the Israeli occupied West Bank. The normal driving distance for such a trip would normally be less than an hour. It took more than 10 hours and it had nothing to do with security. We started at 4:00am and at the first checkpoint, cars were being turned back. We lucked out and the soldiers decided to randomly let our taxi through to the section of East Jerusalem illegally annexed by Israel. No search of the car or of our documents was done. Hence, this random selection of cars to pass had little to do with security.
We arrived at the checkpoint between the Israeli controlled area of the West Bank and Jericho (a city under nominal Palestinian control) at 5:00am. We had to wait until 5:30am when the soldiers arrived. In the interim, a huge Israeli Merkava tank approached. The tank revved its engines, rotated its gun turret and pointed it at various groups of taxis, busses and people on foot lined up at the checkpoint. The tank came closer and repeated this manoeuvre twice. To most people in the lines, this was routine and they patiently waited. To me it was a horrifying experience.
Cars were called one at a time and one at a time were told they could not pass and had to turn around. No one passed. When our turn finally came, our taxi driver tried valiantly to explain to the soldiers in Hebrew that he needed to get his passengers to the borders, that we had all the required papers and permits, and that even some of his passengers were Americans. He was at first lied to, by being told that the border was closed. The driver explained that he was in cellphone contact with a colleague who had delivered a load of people from the north and that the bridge to Jordan was open. The soldier abruptly told him that that checkpoint was closed and he cannot pass.
We had to turn back. We tried an “alternate route” through the desert (no roads). Again this shows that the checkpoint has nothing to do with security since it was guarding an entrance to a Palestinian area and searches could be easily done. It has everything to do with making life so miserable and unpredictable for people that they decide to abandon their native land. Already thousands of Palestinians emigrated, but millions remain trapped. Usually, those who manage to leave are the well to do, pragmatic, modern and connected Palestinians. These are precisely the moderates needed to make peace.
There were many other checkpoints where we lined up like cattle, not knowing our fate. Meanwhile, we could all see the “other” roads, where settlers and soldiers could travel freely on highways unobstructed by checkpoint or walls or fences. These were the roads off-limit to Palestinian Christians and Muslims and open to cars carrying the Israeli yellow licence plates. It was a poignant and living example of the increasingly violent apartheid system being implemented in the colonised areas.
Everyone who visits and sees where these checkpoints, and now the apartheid wall, are and how they function knows they are not there for security. The Zionists themselves admit in their newspapers that denial of basic human rights is intended to achieve capitulation to classic Zionist objectives: to drive what remains of the Palestinians out of their homelands or restrict them to unconnected bantustans following the South African apartheid models. As early as 1974, the Allon plan set up this scenario of limited “autonomy” for the Palestinians on minimal areas of Palestine while Israel retains the fat of the land for the ever expanding Jewish colonisation project. All human rights organisations have condemned these colonisation practices and now this so called “security barrier”.
The “barrier” is a system of walls, fences, ditches and fortifications built not along the ceasefire lines of 1949 but snaking deep inside the Palestinian territories Israel occupied in 1967. International law considers occupation illegal, it considers settlements and colonies illegal, and it considers the action of preventing people from travelling within their own country (going to school, work and even hospitals) war crimes. This we are all clear on. As Bishop Desmond Tutu pointed out, it is not clear why we allow a foreign lobby to pressure our Congress to give unrestricted funding to racism, war crimes and grave breaches of basic human rights. What will it take for more Americans to wake up to what is being done in our name and using our tax money?
The writer is associate professor at Yale and co-founder of AcademicsForJustice.org. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
 |
| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
 |
| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
 |
| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
 |