UN-Truth

This is Part Two, a continuation of extended excerpts from Reema Hammami’s article (from the Spring 2010 issue [No. 41] of Jerusalem Quarterly, edited by the estimable Salim Tamari), on the growth and tightening of Qalandia checkpoint — which has now become a “border terminal” between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Her article continues: “But how was order created from chaos? … If we take just one small part of the organizing needs of the checkpoint – public transport on it’s northern [Ramallah] side – we might get a sense of what is involved. Walid, in his forties from the [Qalandia refugee] Camp, was a main transport organizer for five years on the Ramallah side of the checkpoint. Like many of the checkpoint workers, he had spent years working in construction in Israel before the checkpoints put him out of work so he began to operate a secondhand unlicensed van. He describes what happened when the checkpoint was made at Qalandiya:

‘In the beginning it was a mess, drivers would come, there was no turn, nowhere to stand, the strong one would eat the weak one. So in the Camp we decided that we should organize it, we made a subcommittee and decided to make a stand, you know for the vans and to try organize the situation of turns. In the beginning it was all voluntary, each day a group of guys from the camp would come down and try and organize. But it didn’t work – drivers didn’t get to know them or build a relationship because it was different guys from day to day. And there were problems happening everyday, you know people fighting for turns– you needed to enforce things. So we said, we have to make a permanent group – nine guys – and they’ll take ten shekels a day from the drivers to use the stand and for the other services – the money was equivalent of half a load of people. We’d pay some to the organizers and the rest we donate to the committee. We got the political organizations in the camp to come down and speak to the drivers, to give us some legitimacy. Abu Wagih the owner of the quarry donated gravel and we fixed up a stand on the empty land about 20 meters from where the soldiers stand. And we made a system, each location together, each one by turn, one of them breaks the rules, jumps his turn and we punish him – he can’t come for a day, he gets in a fight – that’s it, he misses a day two days or he harasses the girls passing we send him off for a week. But it didn’t last – the soldiers kept running us out. strong>The soldiers would come by and start shouting over the microphone and say that’s it all of you move out or we’ll shoot – and it’s a disaster – you can’t move all at once – two three hundred vans, and they’re firing tear gas into the windows, breaking windows. …

Walid’s testimony continues: “We kept going back and it kept happening until we said, enough. And found a place 60 meters away from them. Again, the quarry owner gave them the materials, and they made the next stand despite the army from time to time shooting at the tires of Abu Wagih’s caterpillar. Then after another stand-off they were finally kicked out again and were forced even further away (150 meters from the checkpoint). By the third time, they learnt to build a rubble mound at one end – to provide cover from the soldiers’ shooting. But the next stage took even more tenacity – when the checkpoint was closed completely to West Bank identity card holders and people were forced to smuggle themselves through the quarry that then became dubbed “Tora Bora”. When people had to smuggle through the quarry we moved down there and made a stand that was like a trench – so that it would provide cover for people – it was big enough for a hundred vans. We couldn’t get people all the way to the other side because of the terrain, but we could get them half way and pick those up who came through and run them back. You know they (the soldiers) were always firing randomly down there to stop people from crossing through the quarry. During that period we organizers were working like military duty. Soldiers always came down on hunting trips, on the lookout to stop people – and were always shooting randomly, lots of people got hurt down there – two people died. We had to do lookouts, one person posted on this hill, another one there, the one there calls the one here and says, okay – go it’s clear. We worked like ambulance workers too, carried the sick on our backs, from the ambulance coming from Ramallah over to the other side – that was the worst period when no one could cross the checkpoint, not even an ant could‘.

“In all from the beginning of the checkpoint’s imposition until the creation of the Qalandiya “terminal” in early 2006, Walid and the other organizers made a total of seven different stands within the area of the checkpoint. Each time was done in defiance of the army and always involved intense periods of cat and mouse, punctuated by short periods of relative stability. They also created two alternate routes (the quarry and Rafaat) that the army was unable to completely seal, until the Wall was built. And then for a long period, they became absolutely homeless within the space of the checkpoint – when the building of
the new industrial terminal crossing took all of the remaining land where it would be possible to make a stand. Only during that period, did the transport on the Ramallah side fall again into chaos – because organization was outflanked by the absence of space.

“On the Jerusalem side of the checkpoint, you have a parallel history. There too drivers and organizers over a period of four years engaged in daily battle of will and stealth against the relentless pressure of the military and the ever-dwindling possibility of securing the substance for their work and its organization at the checkpoint – space itself. In other cases, survival has meant making difficult compromises. Where the drivers and their organizers survived through ongoing defiance of the military, the porters’ survival at Qalandiya ultimately became dependent on compliance with them. The porters who arrived
at Qalandiya from the outset were confronted with a set of organizational circumstances in some ways more difficult than the drivers. Some of them had been porters in the vegetable market in the refugee camp, or at al-Ram, still others arrived after working at other checkpoints that had subsequently had been closed or overrun with too much competition. At one point at Qalandiya their numbers reached 35 – many of them kids from the camp coming to work after school. Because there’s little capital investment involved – anyone could get into the business, and since they don’t need space – regulating themselves and creating a system of ‘fairness’ can’t be done through a parking stand as with the vans. Too many disconnected and competing networks came in – and the camp community was not willing to stop the infinite number of its children trying to make some extra cash from it. It was an unsustainable moral economy: Abu Ammar, one of the older porters describes the situation: ‘There was no turn or nothing, only problems, a car would come and everyone would have to jump and whoever got those bags first, and whoever was clever was clever, it was no good. The kids with carts kept ruining us – they’d work for nothing. And so the prices were no good – the customer didn’t like what you asked there were always another three, four who
would give him a better price. But in the case of the porters, unlike the drivers, crises created by the army created the
opportunity to gain a greater measure of control. When they closed the checkpoint for that period – when no one could cross and everyone started to go through the quarry, we went down there. But it was hard, rubble, hills, not anyone could do it – the kids couldn’t do it and some of the others decided to stop. Some, a few of us stayed working there and then they opened the checkpoint and we tried to go back. We went back to the checkpoint but the soldiers sent us away, they said no porters
allowed, you know – security and all of that empty talk. They wanted to take our livelihood away and what do we have – nothing. So some of us, the married ones with kids we decided to go and talk to them – there was a soldier called Captain Ofer, an old man, speaks some Arabic. So me and the guys we got ourselves together about ten or twelve of us and we said
we want to sit with you, one of the guys speaks really good Hebrew so we let him do the talking. So Captain Ofer says, okay come day after tomorrow at 8:00 am – you know how they are – they even give birth at an appointed time. So we went and he said okay what do you want? So we say, listen we used to work here, we are all married guys with children, each one of us has a family to look after, we need our work back. So Ofer goes on about security and how a kid at another checkpoint, they’d found guns or something in his cart. So we said we’re all older, married we have responsibilities and the people need a solution. So he says okay married with children, but I’ll only take five of you. We were twelve – two were unmarried so he turns them away. And we say but we’re still ten and he gets stubborn and says no, only five – and then he picks out two, the one who spoke the good Hebrew and another one he’d remembered from before and he tells them to stand on the side. So he goes one by one – how many kids do you have, the first one says four, the next one says four, I say 7 – I could see what was happening, at the time I had four kids, but it was like the lotto, your going to live by the number. I decided he wouldn’t check it in my identity card and even if he did – I’d say I had my parents and brother living with me – I worked in Israel most of my life so I know a little. So he tells me to stand with the others’.

“Over time, the porters were able to negotiate their numbers up to nine with the Captain. However, the price to keep working in this case, was that the porters inevitably became beholden to the army for continuing to work – they had to pass security checks (which one of them didn’t pass because of a brother in prison), they had to number their carts so the soldiers could differentiate them, they had to keep a good relation even with ‘problematic’ soldiers. At least, they could keep working and they made even more money because they now constituted a monopoly on porting. Worse still was they got a reputation for being collaborators with the military and for a while were relatively shunned by the other workers at the checkpoint. But to compensate for this situation, to buy some moral capital in the community, without jeopardizing their pact with the military they found a compromise – which was to subcontract the longer distance hauling to others up to the actual crossover point where only they could pass. In this way, another six porting jobs were created for men who couldn’t join ‘the army imposed union’. Checkpoints are also a magnets for peddlers. Shopkeepers from communities who could no longer sustain them; villagers selling seasonal fruits from back home; out of work young men trying their luck with some goods on assignment from a merchant or simply starting a stand from scratch with whatever small capital, idea and skill they have.

“Checkpoint environments are de-regulated; there are no municipal vending laws and no fees to pay for stands as in organized market areas in the cities. At the same time, there are literally thousands of potential customers – those stuck idly in cars, those walking in or out of the crossing, or waiting for transport to fill up on either side. There is also an all-day group of customers – the checkpoint workers themselves. At its checkpoint worker apogee, you could eat three meals at Qalandiya – sesame bread or sweet pastry in the morning with your tea and coffee. Sizzling kebab at lunch – but no falafel since its possible for a cook to run from soldiers with a charcoal grill but too dangerous with a pot of boiling oil. For dinner, it was better to go home – unless you like grilled liver and stuffed spleen. And snacking was possible all day. At one point waiting in the hellish pedestrian line to cross – it struck me that almost everyone was chomping on roasted peanuts as if they were at the cinema – the whole area where the soldiers stood was enveloped by the smell of three nut roasters steaming away at the entrance.

“The major problem for peddlers is akin to the drivers – space. A meter, a few feet in a strategic place (that commuters have to walk through, or at a drivers stand) is what fundamentally determines viability. Beyond that is whether vendors can satisfy existing consumer needs or create new ones. But wherever you stand there are risks, benefits and losses. The best side for business according to most peddlers is the exit, or Jerusalem side, based on the psychology of crossing; as one peddler put it,’who wants to buy when they’re about to face hell (the soldiers), but once you pass you want to celebrate’. The
Jerusalem side became so popular – that on the big commute days (Saturday and Thursdays) you’d have up to 200 peddlers operating during good weather. But although Qalandiya is a military zone, the army would call in the Jerusalem municipal police to clear out the stands, making lightening raids, confiscating goods and imposing fines. Thus, on the Jerusalem side peddlers learnt to keep their goods on stands that could be hauled off in a moment.

“On the Ramallah side, it was always safer because the Jerusalem municipality couldn’t be bothered to cross the checkpoint, but it was also less business. But on the plus side there was space for a full-scale exposition on open tables. Peddlers do not need collective systems at the checkpoint like the porters and van drivers; although on the Ramallah side – longstanding relationships built over a few years of peddling there developed into long term forms of cooperation – saving each others stand space everyday, collectively evicting a ‘trouble maker’, and collectively defying the army trying to move them out. But peddlers, though perhaps not contributing to the ‘organization’ of the checkpoint contributed something as important – an atmosphere of normality. In the midst of barbed wire, concrete blocks and guns stood a perfume stand, lingerie flailing in the wind, books to look at, shoes to try on, the smell of coffee, a pile of green almonds, and strawberries, Tupperware, toys and plastic bouquets – all of the sights and smells of a lively urban market, a public space full of the happy diversion of popular consumerism and the social interaction that goes with it. Whenever interviewing commuters about what made them laugh at Qalandiya – it was almost always the same answer – the craziness of the peddlers.

…

“At Qalandiya there was an ideological framework sustaining individual and collective actions – national survival. But what primarily motivated checkpoint workers was necessity – the quest for dignity in the face of the destruction of their regular livelihoods. Thus through daily tactics of survival they crept into the spaces of opportunity that existed between the whims and violence of the military and the various needs of the community. They could not overthrow the checkpoint but they could
‘poach’ it back from being a space of pure brutality and oppression to one in which their own dispossession could be redressed while creating a means to sustain the entire community.

“The strategies and experiences of commuters is another part of the picture – but one too large to be addressed here beyond some basic comments. At checkpoints commuters and informal sector workers are united by the need to survive and mutually depend on each other to do so; workers make livings from providing the means for commuters to keep going; and commuters by continuing to cross create jobs for the workers. But while workers can create systems to help commuters cross – - the experience of crossing itself is beyond organization because of its innate arbitrariness and potential for violence. Who can or
cannot cross, ‘the mood of the soldiers’, an eruption of violence around or in front of you, the inability to predict anything, including the time it will take. As such commuters when facing the checkpoint ultimately face it in a situation of extreme powerlessness, as individuals without the possibility of a collective strategy.

“What people bring to this situation then are individual psychological strategies. Some of these have become part of collective popular discourse, and others remain as discrete individual strategies that vary according to character, as well as gender, age and status. In terms of popular discourse, although people cross by necessity in order to go to work, school, or simply continue with their lives, they imbue this act of survival with a sense of agency and defiance. ‘The checkpoint is not going to defeat me’, ‘the checkpoint is not going to stop me from reaching my work’, ‘I refuse to let the checkpoint control my life’ –
these are the constant statements people make about crossing. This individual reaction has generalized to become the rallying cry of this intifada – al hayat lazim tastamir – life must go on. There is a collective understanding that the checkpoints are there to stop life, to destroy livelihoods and education and ultimately defeat the will of a nation. Thus, simply continuing to cross them becomes encoded not as an individual experience of victimization but as part of a collective act of defiance and ultimately national resistance. Where the much more individualized psychological strategies come in is at the moment of actual interaction with soldiers – at the identity card check. This is the extremely charged moment when as a single individual you are confronted with the bare face of the occupation and it becomes embodied in a person, a soldier who has immense power over your immediate destiny. It is here, in this moment of interaction between pure power and powerlessness that we see individual subjectivity at play in attempting to recode the dynamics and meaning of the interaction and take back some sense of control and its correlate – dignity.

” ‘I never take out my I.D. card – I always make them ask for it’, or ‘I take my I.D. card out before they have a chance to ask for it’: These two opposite micro-strategies to each person means the same thing – they have set the dynamic of the unfolding of the procedure, thus taking ‘control’ of it away from the soldier. Similarly, we have different strategies in terms of verbal interaction with the soldiers; ‘I never get into a conversation with them – if they’re asking about anything other than my I.D. card, anything above what their supposed to be interested in– I shrug or tell them it’s not their business’. And again, you get its opposite, ‘I always take the opportunity to argue with them, tell them what they’re doing is inhumane – I don’t want them for a moment to feel that what they’re doing is right or normal’. But these particular micro-strategies of agency, are one’s that only people with a certain symbolic capital can undertake – all of them with Jerusalem identity cards, who in principle (though not always in fact) can always cross. And in terms of the obviously assertive strategies, it is mostly older professional women (and some men) who can risk them.

“Those who don’t have the right papers don’t have this luxury – people whose only way to cross is to negotiate with the soldier, because they don’t fit the current rule requirements. In these cases the strategy cannot be anger, or reticence, or coldness because you have to elicit pity, or empathy, or credulity, or you have to simply wear them down by not giving up. And in the process of bargaining you must to exert the maximum amount of self-control – not to lose your temper, not to react in anger at being subject to a situation which is the essence of humiliation. When people in these circumstances
describe what they do, they tend to re-code the humiliation of the encounter as a consummate act of bargaining – the skill of outsmarting the soldier. ‘The occupation forces us all to be liars’, is how one person described it — meaning that since the point of the checkpoint is to make all normal human activities illegal – one has to invent extraordinary stories in order to convince a soldier to let you through.

“In general, men, especially young men are less capable of negotiating than women – as evinced by the case of the young man in my opening description. On the one hand, they start from a position of being the most vilified of all Palestinians by Israel, thus the distance they must close in terms of convincing soldiers to let them pass is the greatest. At the same time, their masculine selves are often at odds with the patient, subservient dispositions necessary to close the gap. One of the worst experiences standing in line, one that everyone mentions because it is so ubiquitous, is of the young man refusing to move and being beaten. But what is also extraordinary is how often the young men hit back. Women are the most skilled at bargaining their way through, or patiently wearing soldiers down. On the one hand their gender identity is a form of symbolic capital they can exploit (especially as mothers and grandmothers) but also because living in a patriarchal society – everyday female agency is very much about patience and tactical bargaining in order to get around male power.

“Ask any soldier what he is doing at Qalandiya and you are likely to get one of two answers: ‘I’m just doing my job’ or ‘I’m protecting the state of Israel’.

“The second reason reflects the logic of any security regime, be it protecting a wealthy neighbourhood from crime, a border from infiltrators and drug smugglers, or a nation from suicide bombers. It doesn’t ask why – why do people steal, infiltrate or bomb but naturalizes them as part of human existence and generalizes them onto the population they are trying to police. It inevitably turns who you police, the whole population, into a spectre of criminality – people who cannot act like you, feel like you or have the same needs and longings.

“If we return to Qalandiya, what we see in the military’s reaction to the van drivers, the peddlers and even the porters – is the active criminalization of their basic livelihoods. In terms of the commuters who were ‘breaking the rules’ by smuggling through the quarry, we are talking about students and teachers trying to get to school, fathers trying to make a living and probably in some cases, young men simply wanting to see the wider world. People are forced to ‘misbehave’ to get around arbitrary and unjust systems and then the fact of their misbehavior becomes the justification for the system itself.

Postscript:
“In early 2006, Qalandiya checkpoint was reborn as the Qalandiya ‘Terminal crossing’, one of eleven high tech [sic - this is a relative concept] crossings Israel has constructed at various points across the West Bank Separation Wall. The ‘Terminal’, which from the outside looks as innocuous as an aircraft hangar and bearing signs with uplifting ditties in Arabic like, ‘Our Hope Together’ is touted as more humane and efficient by Israeli government and military propagandists in contrast to its dusty ad hoc predecessors. Inside it is a showcase of every conceivable form of Israeli high and low security technology exported around the world including: magnetic spindle gates, high speed x-ray machines, and biometric scanning devices.

“Now crossing involves navigating through a warren of cage-like pens, between turnstiles that automatically shut or open by remote control, all to the disembodied din of soldiers screeching through a pa [public address] system. Multiple public and private security personnel run the ‘Terminal’ including the usual suspects such as the Israeli military police and border guards, but also private security firms and the Israel Airports Authority. Dozing soldiers now ‘process’ you while gazing at computer screens sitting in booths behind bullet-proof glass – and what communication is possible takes place through remote speaker systems. Indeed, if the ‘Terminal’ has been more humane for anyone, it has been for the soldiers manning it.

“The configuration of the ‘Terminal’ as well as the re-routing of traffic in relation to the Wall, all brought to an end the huge informal infrastructure that had developed to deal with the old checkpoint system. Peddlers cannot get near their once lucrative positions on the Jerusalem exit side from the checkpoint; the narrow cages and turnstiles inside the terminal are barely wide enough for a human body – let alone a porter cart. And with the rerouting of West Bank traffic through the Jaba Road, and Israel’s re-imposition of old East Jerusalem bus companies on Palestinian public transport in and out of the city, even
the main transport stands have returned to their natural homes in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

And despite the overwhelming power of the new system, people continue to find ways to get through and around it”.

Rema Hammami is Professor at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Birzeit University and on the Advisory Board of JQ [Jerusalem Quarterly]. Her article can be viewed in full in the Spring 2010 issue of Jerusalem Quarterly here.

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