If you want to get to Jerusalem (no longer the West Bank but Israel) from Ramallah (the West Bank), this is what needs to happen. (Back in the day Ramallah used to be a suburbs of Jerusalem, and the distance between the two places is a mere 6 or 7 miles). You catch the bus from Ramallah, you get to Qalandia checkpoint to get to Jerusalem. As you near the checkpoint, traffic increases and cars and buses are lined up and people slowly start getting off from the buses. The cars go to another line, where they are stopped one by one, the drivers need to get off, open the trunk and all doors so the entire car can be inspected. The passengers from the bus get off and they go inside the metal barred corridor, crowding and huddling together, standing in front of a turnstill. When they are allowed to go through the turnstill, they put all their belongings on the conveyor belt, go walk through a metal detector, stand in front of the soldier to show their id, they are questioned, when the soldiers are done, they then take their belongings, then walk through another turnstill, exit the metal barred corridor and get on the bus again, wait for it to fill up, and then drive adjacent to the Apartheid Wall and continue the drive to Jerusalem, another 25 minutes away.
The part from huddling together in front of the turnstill to getting through the turnstill takes the longest. 3 or 4 people max get through at one time, every 10 minutes. At least a 40 minute to an hour wait, depending on how many people had been waiting before you including all the people that came down with you from your own bus. Sometimes the soldiers don’t like how you walk in through the turnstill, so after that long wait, they might ask you to go back through the turnstill into the huddle of people, and came in again, to repeat the process.
I counted how many times the turnstill turned the last time the light turned green. Once..twice…three times..and stuck on the fourth. Sandwiched again are two more people. “Allahu Alam” one man says (God knows all), as he gets stuck in the turnstill. I look at my watch. It’s been 35 minutes we’ve been standing in this cage in front of the turnstill. I peek in front of the crowd to see a woman in a purple hijab and a mauve jilbab, who had gone through the turnstill the last go, now separated from us (the rest of the huddled crowd behind the metal barred barrier) who repeatedly has to go through the metal detector because it keeps on beeping. Someone from our side yells out, “maybe it’s your hair pin! Or maybe it’s a clip!”. She turns around to look at our direction, with an annoyed look. Finally she takes off her boots, and goes through. “She wore THOSE boots? Didn’t she know she was going through a checkpoint??? The problem is in us! The problems are in us that we don’t understand” said one man watching the woman take off her shoes and go through the metal detector, finally without it beeping. Impatience runs high. People are waiting. More people are spilling into this corridor from other buses, the huddled crowd gets larger. When the turnstill turns again, people start bickering “your bus came AFTER mine sir, I go in first!”. “Allahu akbar” someone else says. People push and shove because they want to be next to get through the turnstill. Another man says “I wish the tsunami would come and wash all of us away”.
Now it’s been 40 minutes that we’ve been waiting. The anxiety, impatience, irritability is palpable. And I feel myself getting angrier and angrier. The first 15 minutes had been fine as I chatted with people I knew, trying to ignore the metal bars. But after a while it gets to you, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to control your thoughts.
Last time I was here, in this situation, the soldier didn’t like how a group of us had come in through the turnstill. He wanted us to go back, into the crowd. “he wants us to go BACK?” I had asked my roommate, who was with me, in utter rage and shock. We had been waiting for over 45 minutes. The handful of people being given this order were all equally puzzled, including the elderly women carrying their bags of vegetables. The soldier, without flinching, picked up his m16 and pointed it at us. The gun pointed towards us to make us understand that he wants us to go back. Standing in front of a soldier, with a gun, who points it towards a group of people, knowing that he is not regarding any of the humans in front of him as legitimate human beings, I observed my thoughts become angrier and angrier and turn violent. Who did he think he was? How could he so easily point his gun at us? Does he know what he has in his hands? Why are his fingers on the trigger? It’s an automated gun! Why don’t all the people, all the Palestinians just storm the checkpoint and beat this asshole up? And point the gun in his face instead?
All of us quietly had gone back into the massive crowd of people behind the turnstill, to wait once more. My blood was boiling with rage, not being able to fathom how someone could use their gun, to point it at people without a flinch.
A year ago when I had gone through Qalandia for the first time, I didn’t have to get off the bus. I had remained on the bus and just had to flip my passport to the page with my face on it and the page with the Israeli stamp on it and that was it. I remember thinking “this is not so bad. It’s like a bad traffic jam, and you have to sit for a while, that’s it”. The last time I had to get off the bus and I was with my roommate, she told me “just pretend you’re waiting in line at an amusement park, like Disney land or something”. And I remember thinking, hmm yeah..it’s just like waiting in line. Like bad traffic, like a queue for something, anything else, something else that is normal.
The absurdity of the existence of checkpoints didn’t hit me until I had to look at it repeatedly, from the windows of my bus, after coming back to Palestine from somewhere else (Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh) and re-entering the situation, I would realize the abnormal and unnatural presence of this construction, the supremacist, revolting nature of this procedure that very few people in the world have to go through, where people’s worth are deleted, degraded and reduced. Human worth is reduced down to an ID. What color ID, what kind of ID, and the expiration date of the ID. You can pretend you are just in line for an amusement ride, you can pretend to sing songs to make the time pass, or chat about something else, or maybe peek at the encased video camera peering at everyone in the corridor, and just wait patiently, but the pointless 80/90/120 minute procedure to get from one city to another, having to face soldiers, an apartheid wall and going through security, to get to some place 6 miles down the road is outrageous to say the least.
6 miles. Boy is it going to feel weird to go home, back to the States, to travel from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Fayetteville North Carolina, 90 miles apart in probably less time than the time it takes me to get through these 6 miles from Ramallah to Jerusalem.
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