UN-Truth

It really gets on your nerves, sometimes.

At a checkpoint this morning, the soldier took my passport, then barked: “Where are you from?” he asked.

“You mean where was I born? That’s different than where I am from. It’s written on my passport — New York”, I said.

[Huda reported that she was stopped at the Hizma checkpoint this morning and pulled over for questioning. It was her first day back from two weeks in Paris visiting her parents, and she said she was still feeling good when this happened. She, too, has an American passport. When asked "Where are you from?", she replied that she was born in Sudan. "Oh, is that why your skin is so dark?", she said the Israeli soldier -- apparently a Druse Arab -- asked her...]

The soldier at my checkpoing then barked at me: “Baggaaaaage”.

Ah, I said, “Baggaaaaage”.

Sometimes they also hit the car when they shout the order: “Baggaaaaage”.

Photo taken today from a car of graffiti [Ctrl + Alt + Del] on The Wall at Qalandia checkpoint

I got out to open the trunk. It was empty, like it always is. They can see this through the window of the hatchback. I go through this several times a day, sometimes. This is just down the hill from my house.

Yesterday, a woman soldier barked: “Baggaaaaage”.

She also said she had to see the spare [tire]. This is the rule, she said.

This morning, another woman soldier/border policewoman stepped forward. “We have problems with English at this checkpoint”, she said. “He meant to say the trunk”.

“It would be even better to say, Please open the trunk”, I said. “It’s empty, as it always is”…

There were four armed persons standing beside my car.

“You shouldn’t get angry”, said a third soldier, who I see regularly, and who usually lets me go through without having to get out of the car to open the trunk. “Or else we’ll make you open it every time”.

“So, why are you making me open it, then — for security reasons, even though there really isn’t any reason to suspect me of anything? Or are you doing it just to punish?”

“It was just a joke”, the woman soldier said.

But there is no joke possible when you are holding guns on people — then it becomes laughing at someone. It is deliberate humiliation.

“Oh, stop this bullshit”, the woman soldier said, in her good English …

Sometimes they also shout, in a derogatory tone, “Yella!” ["Beat it! Go on, get outta here!], and sometimes they just jerk their head to order me to go.

Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Japan, Journalism and Journalists, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians, UN Secretary-General, United Nations Agencies and Programmes