Principled Perseverance

Walking down King George Street one Sunday morning in January, the Jerusalem air invigorated my sleepy steps. As the call to prayer echoed behind me, I realized that life never ceases in this contested capital. By half past five I arrived at my destination, headed into an awaiting car and the two other passengers and I began our descent from Jerusalem into the West Bank.

I had been to Israel twice before but had never traveled over the Green Line. My personal views on the region still evolving, I wanted to learn more beyond the stories that I read in the news. At the J Street U Conference I attended. in October I received a packet with a section on organizations to contact for tours of the region. Suddenly, such a trip seemed possible.

My first foray into the territories began  three days prior to that Sunday on a Breaking The Silence tour of the South Hebron hills. The following day I joined an Ir Amim (City of Peoples) tour of East Jerusalem. These experiences and the questions they fostered led me to join several aging women of Machsom Watch to observe their checkpoint monitoring efforts.

Machsom Watch is a group of Israeli women peace activists who  have monitored conditions at checkpoints and worked to improve the day-to-day mobility of Palestinians since 2001. They recognize the uncomfortable realities of the checkpoint issue; one of the women expressed the confusion she feels about her work when she hears stories of Israeli soldiers attacked by Palestinians at these crossroads. Their identification as both a human rights and a political organization is difficult to reconcile with a conception of human rights as an apolitical matter. Yet the principled perseverance of the women—their engagement with the complexities of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict—was  most inspiring. Each woman I met expressed a deep love for her country and considered this active engagement a critical component of their Zionist identities.

We drove through the winding roads of the Area A (under Palestinian authority) part of Bethlehem, and parked in front of a cluster of cars and taxis. We walked toward a line of men selling tea, coffee, and small amounts of food (Palestinians can only bring a limited amount through checkpoints) and approached the beginning of the checkpoint line; between two metal-caged walls stood hundreds of Palestinian men enclosed in rows about three people wide. It was six o’clock, and most had arrived here at four. The dirt floor was littered with trash and as we stood off to the side in a line reserved for women, children, the sick, and (to my surprise) tourists, our guide explained that these men were the lucky ones—they had been able to receive coveted permits for jobs or medical treatment in Israel. Now all they had to do was wait.

We drove around the separation barrier to meet these men as they arrived at their destination — entrance into Israel proper through the Israeli-controlled section of Bethlehem. Large groups of men awaiting the arrival of their employees lined the sidewalk, which led to a building strikingly different from the checkpoint. White cement walls and flooring enclosed a space intended to look like an international terminal. The streams of men, some still putting on belts and shoes removed during the routine inspection, approached a soldier behind a booth, produced a permit for entrance, swiped a magnetic ID card and scanned their fingers.

The word checkpoint to me has always sounded foreboding but that morning I witnessed no obvious violence. The majority of people I saw were men who form a critical component of the Israeli economy between five in the morning and seven at night, when the checkpoints close. Some women streamed in too, many with children, presumably sick and in need of the intensive care that Israeli hospitals offer. Yet most striking to me was the psychological effect of this system that distorts the distinction between appropriate security measures and unreasonable control. These are normal folks trying to make a living but they’re made to feel like their animals in a cage. Israel, like all sovereign nations, has the right and the duty to protect its borders, and is not the only country that grapples with how this security can be best assured. But we cannot disregard the treatment of Palestinian civilians who cannot and should not be marginalized by these military means.

If a two state solution is the solution then we cannot shy away from confronting the daily realities and complexities of the occupation. Walking back through Jerusalem that Sunday, I felt encouraged by the commitment of the Machsom Watch women in their pursuit of a more sustainable situation, and empowered by the freedom in both Israel and America to engage with the ensuing confusion.

Miriam Berger, a guest blogger for J Street U and New Voices, is a senior at Wesleyan University