UN-Truth

The Spring 2010 issue (No. 41) of Jerusalem Quarterly, edited by the estimable Salim Tamari, contains a fascinating — though academic — analysis of the disgraceful Qalandia (Qalandiya) checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah (and the rest of the northern, middle, and western West Bank).

Salim, who has been teaching for a semester at Georgetown University, writes in his introductory that “Rema Hammami’s pioneering work on Qalandia (the Palestinian Tora Bora)[this is explained in Part Two of this story -- it refers to the stone quarry which is the only alternative route around when Qalandia becomes a real hell-hole] takes an ethnographic look at Israel’s regime of checkpoints and barriers within a global context of ‘policing inequalities’. In particular she examines the politics of security, which ‘creates myopia, blindness to the very facts it engenders’. Her essay also examines the creative forces of survival among its victims. In her work the carnavalesque atmosphere of market and circus that permeates ‘border’ zones like Qalandia (and Surda before it), both camouflage and underscore the misery created by the security regime behind it”….
Salim’s editorial can be read in full here.

Reema’s long analysis [Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality] tries — almost journalistically, though she probably wouldn’t like to hear it — to describe the infernal atmosphere.

You have to know the place to understand, however, that she is walking, and not driving, through the checkpoint, and that she is describing the passage going from the Ramallah side to Jerusalem –
“Heat, wind, dust, garbage. Cars stuck in line, jammed bumper to bumper – probably a two-hour wait. I squeeze through the few inches between an articulated lorry and the next car. On the other side is a porter shifting two television sets tied to his cart weaving in between the oncoming traffic. Ramallah, Ramallah Ramallah, the calls of a van organizer. I shake my head – and point toward the checkpoint. Up through the first set of blocks, the wind blows up white dust from the quarry, the peddlers clutch their sun umbrellas. I pick up my pace, it’s rush hour. Through the second row of blocks and I can see the crowd up ahead, spilling out from under the zinc roof and concrete pens of the crossing. I reach them and ask an old man, how long he’s been waiting: ‘From the time I was born’…

Reema Hammami’s article continues: ” ‘Open the way, I have children, where’s the women’s line?’ A mother is overwhelmed with a toddler, a baby and a heavy shoulder bag. ‘There’s no women’s line today, just chaos’, replies a young woman ‘Did they close it?’ A new arrival asks anxiously. ‘We can’t tell’. Comes the collective response. There are maybe 300 people here waiting to cross – too many to be able to see what’s happening up front and more people keep piling up behind us. ‘For God’s sake stop pushing’ – shouts a young woman, ‘it’s enough what we’ve got in front of us. Something sharp jabs my back and I turn – the man looks at me apologetically hugging the culprit – his briefcase. Slowly the crowd are becoming lines up to the turnstyles, but I can’t tell which one I’m in yet. I ask the man in front of me if he thinks this is the line for blue I.D.’s today. ‘You’ll only know when it’s the wrong one’. We’re close enough to hear the soldiers now. ‘Irja, Irja‘ – ‘go back go back’ the screeching voice of a woman soldier. ‘Ta’al, ta’al‘ – ‘come forward, come forward’. We finally get close to our turnstile and beyond it is a glum looking teenage soldier leaning against the side chewing gum. The man in front of me shows his orange I.D. card and the soldier says ‘tasriiich (permit). over there’, laconically gesturing to the last line. The man looks modest but respectable like a school teacher; he’s probably older than the soldier’s father. He starts arguing politely in broken English. The soldier, disinterested shakes his head – ‘Over there, permit’. The man’s shoulders slump, it means a lot of pushing and shoving across two lines. He moves closer to the turnstile and gives another try of patient explaining. The soldier snaps and lunges towards him, shouting ‘Itlaa, itlaa’ – ‘get out, get out’ – their [the Israeli soldiers'] third Arabic vocabulary word. The man backs -off, mumbling under his breath and starts to negotiate his way through to the next line”.
…

Then, a brief history –

[She writes that the checkpoint started in 2001, but I saw it start in 2000, with two Israeli soldiers and a little further north, towards Ramallah, two Palestinian soldiers, then that all changed, and the Palestinian traffic simply diverted up a dusty hill towards Qafr Aqab, and drove around through broken local streets around the Israeli soldiers, avoiding problems -- and the Israelis knew very well, but don't care, because the whole point was just to make things difficult for the Palestinians..]
“The checkpoint itself started in 2001 as a few soldiers behind sandbags and concrete blocks who intermittently stopped people traveling on the road. Over the next four years it became a continuous work in progress, as it expanded into an evermore stringent and permanent series of barricades. Until finally it has taken over a few square kilometres of the landscape where a fully-fledged high-tech [this, I would say, is an exaggeration, and I would have used the word claustrophobic] ‘terminal’ has been installed which is a main crossing point in the Separation Wall, that has been built across the original road. During that time not only has its physical structure been in a constant process of change – the rules of who, what and how to cross have been in a permanent state of flux. In the first period everyone could cross after an identity check, then only private cars and pedestrians could, and at times, only pedestrians. This was followed by the most
restrictive period when no West Bank identity card holders could cross south. Then they could only if they were a woman or a child under 14, or were over 60, then over 50, or 14 and had permits and on and on. And even within the overall ‘rule structure’ of whom or what could cross during a particular period – there was always the individual whim of the soldier – as suggested in my diary description at the opening of this paper. What checkpoints create is not pure immobility, but immense chaos. Although the IDF calls Qalandiya an ‘isolation checkpoint’ [???] and its often described as separating Ramallah from Jerusalem, it actually lies 10 kilometers inside the West Bankand sits across the main road artery that runs through the once continuous Palestinian suburbs that run from Ramallah all the way through East Jerusalem. But the main reason for where it is located is that it sits on a larger strategic crossroads – a point at which the main North South artery in the West Bank crosses the main East-West artery. Thus within the overall spatial regime (varying between 450 and 650 roadblocks and checkpoints), Qalandiya has not just divided East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterlands, but has completely isolated a number of surrounding communities from each other, while serving as a strategic bottleneck for the larger population needing to move from one side of the West Bank to the other’…

Warped strategies of adaptation –
Reema Hammami’s article continues: “But this description barely begins to address what Qalandiya has accomplished. Manuel Castells has called modern societies ‘network societies” – they depend on complex networks of information, people and goods that connect through space. Thus, the checkpoint created not simply a problem of movement for people and goods, but was akin to a tectonic explosion that caused a massive web of ruptures across infinite networks of social and economic relations all across the West Bank. As such, more important than the finite impact of goods not reaching their markets or students their schools was the wider devastation caused by the ruptures of the complex circuits through which the host of social relations flow and circulates that make among other things, commerce and education possible. An immediate response to the imposition of this devastation by checkpoints is therefore attempts to re-organize those shattered circuits that make the operation of regular life possible. And the place to begin this is at the very epicenter in which they were shattered and where chaos is most concentrated and emanates from. Thus the main thing that is needed is new ways to try and re-impose order from chaos – new systems to re-organize those shattered networks in systematic and regularized types of ways – either enabling people and goods to go through the checkpoint or around it. The official Palestinian authorities cannot do this, because their criminalization is part of what the checkpoint geography represents. Thus throughout the occupied territories it has been informal networks that have stepped in to fill the breach – either of informal sector workers or of local communities. At checkpoints everywhere this happens at first spontaneously and in piece meal ways, then over time what I have called ‘checkpoint workers’ build more sophisticated ways of organizing themselves to create order for the larger populace. At Qalandiya this was an immense challenge because the magnitude of chaos was so much greater due to the sheer scale of the population needing to cross and thus the diversity of needs that had to be addressed. It was as if overnight you have to create an urban infrastructure for a constantly changing socio-scape of more than 20,000 people”…

Qalandia checkpoint as creator of a humanitarian crisis –
“Though of similar scale, it is a much more complicated project than what confronts aid agencies in a ‘humanitarian crisis’, because here you must create an infrastructure to actually sustain a population’s mobility at the very site in which a powerful system has been imposed in order to block it. Thus this immense project must be done subversively because if it is done in direct confrontation – it will simply be defeated. [Here, the author seems to suggest that the Israelis don't know what is being done to try to circumvent the chaos at Qalandia: but this is simply not true. They know, they watch, they tolerate the efforts to overcome all the humiliation and indignity, until they suddenly stop tolerating it, without warning. Reema Hammami seems to ignore the fact that the creation of uncertainty, and the lack of information, is one of the intrinsic hallmarks of this occupation...]

“Everywhere, the first chaos a checkpoint creates is in public transport systems. The backbone of Palestinian public transport is ten-seater predominantly owner-operated vans [these are privately-owned Ford Transits, if you ever saw the film of that name by Hany Abu Assad] that are licensed to work a prescribed route under a local taxi office. When routes are cut, the logic of standardized destinations and who can ply them completely breaks down. At Qalandiya, overnight, vans could no longer cross and continue their old routes – to more than thirty destinations on either side of the checkpoint thus creating a choke point where drivers were forced to drop passengers and leave them to seek a way to finish their journey on the other side. Soon [often, and daily] the roads on either side were clogged in the chaos of transit vans and cars unable to go forward and unable to turn. Then the disorder worsens as transit vans from all over the area move in to try and help commuters finish their journey from this sudden point of blockage. While anger and frustration reigns for all, for transport drivers their very livelihoods become threatened. Thus, a few months into the imposition of the checkpoint, in an attempt to restore order so as to guarantee their livelihoods, informal networks from the [Qalandia] refugee camp and among transport workers stepped in to organize what had now became a major transport hub – or in fact to create dual hubs – to deal with each side of the checkpoint. The next group who stepped in were porters. Either because vehicles couldn’t cross, or it took too long waiting to cross by vehicle, porters with three wheeled wooden carts came to move everything from travellers luggage, to commercial goods and even the entire mail of the Ramallah post office across the checkpoint. [n.b. - I'm not sure Palestinian mail crosses in or out of Israel anymore, only via private companies like Aramex...]

And simultaneous with these first two groups mobile vendors entered onto the scene. The first were those who made canteens for the other checkpoint workers, kebab and coffee sellers for drivers and porters. And then other opportunities were spied and new niches created. In the summer: water, sunglasses, sunhats and ice-cream for pedestrians, in the winter umbrellas, woolen hats and hot drinks. And soon enough you had hundreds of vendors plying an infinite variety of goods at what was affectionately called – the ‘Qalandiya Duty Free’. These were the occupational networks that moved in, but the surrounding communities, either collectively or individually also played their role. The camp community played host – to hundreds of released prisoners dumped at the checkpoint by the military in the middle of the night miles away from their homes. From its ranks came doctors and first aid workers to treat the sick and injured. Every forty days of Ramadan, camp youth distributed water and dates to commuters stuck in line during the breaking of the fast. And the community even provided a final resting place in their cemetery – for a young woman whose family couldn’t get her body back home to Tulkarem because the checkpoint was sealed shut. The owner of one of the quarries, continually donated gravel and the services of his bulldozer to keep creating a stand for the 300 odd transit vans that needed a stand. And the al-Ram community twice received hundreds of commuters into their homes when they became stuck on that side of the checkpoint under a sudden curfew”….

To be continued…

Reema Hammami’s article on Qalandia can be read in full here.

Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians, Register of damages due to The Wall