NOVANEWS

When A was forbidden to return home 

The soldiers don’t see their faces.
If they saw them – as persons, their humanity, their names – differentiated and uniquely individual – not as the general principle ‘man’, if they would not view them through a racist prism that situates the Palestinian at a greater distance from ‘the human’, as a reduction of the traits of his or her so-called race – they would not comply, would not keep silent, they would not choose not to know.
Because then they couldn’t.

It was a Wednesday, at Qalandiya Checkpoint, when A., too, was prevented from going home.

Qalandiya Checkpoint, like most checkpoints in the Occupied West Bank, is situated in the heart of Palestinian territory and fragments the lives of the local residents most of whom are not entitled to move freely in their living space but for a mere few, and by criteria that keep changing and are not fixed, as a system.

A. has not lived here for the past few years, and it is evident.
He ventured out of his hometown Hebron to travel to Ramallah, another town in his homeland Palestine, and not for lack of choice.
He is not dying or needy of hospitalization in Ramallah, nor is his mother hospitalized, nor does he work or study there.
He went for reasons that have no criterion in the kingdom of occupation and oppression. They do not exist in the language. He went just so, because Ramallah is a city in his homeland and contains extended chunks of his own life. He went because he wanted to go. Reasons, which for the residents of Occupied Palestine are considered luxury that hardly anyone would venture forth on their behalf – just to be humiliated at the checkpoint, with slight chances of being let through, and had he been let through it would be because he pleaded, or because the soldier had decided that every third person does not cross, and every tenth does, and he was tenth. To go and visit another town is not something anyone would take a risk for if they don’t necessarily have to.

But he, the outsider, ‘infected’ with the habits of freedom, did go and on his way back home was stopped – to his amazement, scolded, pushed, yelled atin Hebrew which he doesn’t understand, and under threat of pointed weapons and pushes, ordered in ways he did understand to turn back. Surprised, amazed, he clung to a rock with all his might, and did not budge.

He held on to the rock against all sanity, as he might have lost his life or health to that ‘malignant’ ease with which soldiers fire or ‘merely’ strike.
But he clung to the rock with all his might, against all odds and reason, defying the soldier who ordered him to leave and go away, turn his back to home and reason, merely because these are the diabolical orders he received, merely because the soldier could give them.
And this was not because A. is particularly courageous or political, or as a subversive act that says ‘I do not accept your laws, they have no moral validity, do whatever you want with me, I refuse to be refused’. He simply wasn’t able – conceptually – to comprehend that a young man perhaps two years his junior, who looks like him, a human, not a robot – so he thought – stands there with a rifle and a unfathomed authority and prevents him from doing the simple and obvious thing which is to go home.

Why should he not get home?

We were there, privileged women, we saw him clinging to the rock, we saw the pointed rifle, and hurried to create a buffer between the young man and his young oppressor who – for all the wrong, racist reasons and as another symptom of the same malady, since we were ‘his own’ people with the ‘right’ face and identity – for once, stopped cold, did not cross the line we created with our bodies, and only continued to scold and threaten and say in Hebrew ‘No, the man must turn back’ and point towards a vague direction which he called Surda.

In other words, to cross the checkpoint, the soldier demanded of this young man the equivalent of driving from Tel Aviv through Haifa on his way to Jerusalem.

And if security claims are the pretext to forbid this young man to tread between the walls of his life and be victim to that adolescent power-monger in uniform, and if one even accepts conditions allowing cruelty towards people a-priori merely because of their identity, how could it be that the very same soldier who forbids him – by the book – to cross the checkpoint, recommends he travel via Surda to reach the other side of that very checkpoint, twenty meters away from where they stand, but after a journey of hours, and much money spent, which we assume he does not even have.

We tried to help him this way and that, to use and implement our visibility, our validity, all in vain of course, for such needs as the desire to visit Ramallah are life ideas that have no word or space or right… They are outside the sea of possibilities of ‘judgment’ or ‘humanitarian cases’ acceptable by Israeli society (and merely as a fig leaf to maintenance evil). Such a need has no criteria… It is outside the language… And the soldier has no conceptual system that can identify this need just as he has no system of concepts that would attribute this young man facing him a name and identity as tangible as his own.
For if that young man and others of his people would seem to the soldier to be humans, with blood as red as his own, who ache no less than he does, he probably would not be able to stand there and exercise a policy of abuse not matter for what cause.

I learned that A. is a third-year law student, in Palestine to visit his family, and intends to seek his fortune in Canada upon graduating. In bashful wonder he told me that in Morocco, where he studies, he goes out for coffee with a Jewish friend. ‘Who is Jewish’, he adds

I noticed he kept looking at his watch the whole time.

This all took place during some Jewish holiday, naturally meaning that the right to life for Palestinians is even more narrowly exercised than usual, and I was worried that perhaps under such circumstances he will not be able to make it home even by taking roundabout trails through the hills and hiding from the soldiers’ trigger-happy hands. Perhaps the fact that I was trying to help him do what was obviously doomed to fail,, that I was only holding him up or jeopardizing him somehow, and he had better go back and travel via Surda, as absurd and maddening as that is. And he was evidently worried and concerned… Finally I couldn’t help myself and asked him why he kept checking his watch.

There’s a basketball game at five thirty, Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Munich, and he’s dying to get home in time to watch it, he explained.

I have no idea whether he made it in time. Probably not. He said that if I ever get to Morocco I’m most welcome, and left his phone number.

Aya Kaniuk. Translated by Tal Haran.