At the mercy of a kid

So on the way back from Hebron on Tuesday, we had to pass another checkpoint. This time I was more careful, sort of. I put on the cross I had purchased in Bethlehem, hoping that I would at least not have my life threatened after the frightening experience I had last time.

The soldier got on the bus, stared straight at me, and I waved at him and gave him a sincere smile. He then started to approach me with his M16 raised higher and he told me to "Ta'al!"
Which apparently in Arabic means come here now. As I don't speak Arabic, I didn't do what he asked of me because I didn't understand. My friends who do speak Arabic were afraid for my well being so they started speaking loudly he doesnt speak Arabic!!! He walked up to me, and I said nice to meet you. Then he turned around and said have a great day you can go and got off the bus. My palestinian friends said that he must have liked me. He went over to his soldier friends and pointed in my area and said that I was crazy, as we could tell from his hand gestures. The reason they aren't used to people wishing them a good day as I did was that it is extremely risky for a Palestinian to do. My friends told me last year a guy was beaten and detained for several hours for smiling at a soldier like I did on the bus. Perhaps my Americanism did protect me. I was grateful not to have to wait on the bus for many hours again. However, my British friend from Oxford pointed out how horrible this experience was. I asked him why, and he told me it was because the last experience at a checkpoint I was treated as if I was threatened with violent action against me and this one the guy smiled and told me to have a good day.

He said that meant that the actions at checkpoints are completely unstandardized. This opens the door for crimes against human beings. A soldier who must stand in one place for 10 hours a day, and gets very bored, and who is a teenager most of the time, can simply say or do whatever they want to. They can hit you, let you have a good day, arrest you, hold you for hours, or do anything else they would like. We have heard stories about ambulances being held up at checkpoints for hours while the people inside the ambulance die because they do not receive treatment. They hold 80 year old women sometimes at checkpoints for hours, where they are not allowed to go to the bathroom and must sit in 100 degree heat, which can be fatal to soemone that old. Women have gone into labor at checkpoints and have had miscarriages because they were not allowed to go to the hospital. Are these deaths not murder? Who is responsible for their deaths? They would have lived if they had not had to experience the checkpoints, so whose fault is it? Should you blame the air, the conflict, terrorists, the soldiers, who? No one holds the soldiers responsible for the deaths that happen at these checkpoints. Are these not crimes against humanity?

Another observation. A checkpoint in the American way of thinking about them would be a place to check people, see if they are carrying any contraband, and to let ones that are not go through. However, I do not believe that this is the purpose of the checkpoints. It doesn't take hours to check people to see if they are carrying something. They claim it takes 3 hours to look at someone's passport, but there is no way that is the case. The goal of the checkpoints must be what their effect is: which is to make travel around the west bank a terrible, sometimes dangerous experience. It is to keep Palestinians from having contact with each other, and to prevent the formation of civil society necessary for statehood. The purpose must be to make the Palestinian economy come to a standstill. When you can't get your vegetables to market because of a checkpoint that prevents movement, why bother growing them. The estimate is that the Palestinians lose $2 billion from their economy because of the checkpoints, which by the way are illegal under UN law.

Governments are not stupid, usually. When security is involved, there are always deeper reasons to what people are doing. The fact that we made it through the checkpoint easily was not a reason to celebrate. It is a time to reflect and know that he could have just as easily made our life hell, just because of how his mood was.