Why checkpoints exist

Editorial

Israeli checkpoints – makeshift security stations through which Palestinians routinely have to travel to get from one part of the occupied territories to another – have become one of the most despised realities of daily Palestinian life. They are also becoming viewed worldwide as an example of Israel's heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians.

Critics of Israel condemn the checkpoints, whose long lines have resulted in the effective loss of mobility for many Palestinians and a parallel increase in unemployment among a people who literally cannot make it to work.

The checkpoints are among a small number of issues (along with the "right of return" and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza) that are viewed as barriers deliberately put in place by Israel to preclude discussion and peace.

In John Pilger's anti-Israel film Palestine is Still the Issue, a Palestinian tells the camera that a young Palestinian who sees his mother humiliated at an Israeli checkpoint in the morning will be a suicide bomber by the evening. The underlying assumption of statements like this is that Israel is ultimately at fault; that occupation is so humiliating and Palestinian desperation so deep that one could hardly blame people for killing themselves and taking Israeli civilians with them.

The touchy-feely Oprah attitude that all feelings, and the actions that follow from such feelings, are valid allows critics of Israel to use the checkpoints as another example of Israeli cruelty. Yet an article from an unlikely source suggests the anger over checkpoints may be merely a case of Israeli actions inadvertently triggering pre-existing bigotries among Arab males.

In a widely distributed article that is available at www.palestinemonitor.org, among other places, Robert Fisk writes from Gaza that the humiliations of the checkpoints disturb Palestinian men in particular, because the checkpoints are the only thing that challenges their assumed masculine supremacy.
In the article "How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road to vengeance," (even the title evokes animalistic unpredictability) Fisk describes travelling with a Palestinian named Khalil as they slowly make their way through the line of cars at an Israeli checkpoint.

"At the back of the queue, Khalil was a nisr, an eagle, threatening eternal damnation on his Israeli tormentors," Fisk wrote in 2001. "A few hundred metres later, he was an assad, a lion, demanding to know why the Israelis were ever given the right to occupy his land."

As they came closer to the Israeli soldiers, Fisk wrote, "Khalil was no longer an assad. Now he was a hissan, a horse, noble but potentially obedient, ready to be someone else's servant. This is what occupation is about."

The car reaches the checkpoint: "Now Khalil was turning – we were all turning – into those most despised creatures of the Arab world, hamir, donkeys, obedient, ready to be whipped and to obey. Please, please, please, let us through, let us go."

"Man's indignity is a theme throughout the Middle East," Fisk continued, reflecting on the observations of the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who, according to Fisk "described in his book on the Shah of Iran how Iranian men were dictators in their homes, masters of all they surveyed, treated with unquestioned obedience by wife, sons and daughters – but grovelling servants the moment they encountered the Shah's brutal policemen."

Fisk suggests that Israeli checkpoints are culturally offensive because it is in the nature of Middle Eastern men to dominate the other people around them.
Are we supposed to be charmed by this quaintly medieval concept of civility? Are we supposed to view the checkpoints as an affront to the rightful subjugation of women and children?

Is it fair to question the behavior of soldiers who work at the checkpoints? They are trained fighters who, because of the nature of the intifada, find themselves acting as border guards dealing with civilian Palestinians and others. There are power differentials and, inevitably, civil rights trespasses. But consider why the checkpoints exist. The entire Arab world, we are told, is seething with a barely restrained rage at the Jewish state and its American allies. Thousands have died in two years of the intifada. Under such circumstances, who can expect unfettered mobility?

Until the terrorism ceases and the Palestinian leadership proves it has the capability for even rudimentary statecraft, the checkpoints are a necessary evil.

On the other hand, if Israeli checkpoints are the only things that challenge the medieval view that men have the right to be "dictators in their homes, masters of all they surveyed, [and] treated with unquestioned obedience by wife, sons and daughters," then maybe the checkpoints do serve a moral purpose.

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