A few years back, I was returning to Jerusalem from Ramallah via the Qalandia checkpoint. “Checkpoint” is a euphemism. This isn’t merely a couple of Israeli soldiers checking your ID. Instead, you pass through a series of turnstiles, concrete barriers, barbed-wire tunnels that act as elongated cages, two-way mirrors, and of course X-ray machines. You are surveilled, re-surveilled, and surveilled again. No words are used. You are waved on not by hand, but by gun — a semi-automatic at groin level, indicating this way or that.

Halfway along the barbed-wire tunnel, I heard a gun being cocked close by, to my right. Startled, I looked over.

The gun was in the arms of a female soldier, flushed and giggling as a male soldier embraced her suggestively from behind, his arms around both her and the gun. She caught my glance and held it. “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying. “We could strip down and have sex right here in front of you, and there’s not a damn thing you could do about it.”

And she was right.

This was, I knew, the most trivial of events. It was nothing compared to what I’d already seen, and not even worth noting to Palestinians, who have to put up with far worse. Yet it stays with me because I cannot forget that look. I might as well have been a dog.

“The humiliation machine,” Ben Ehrenreich calls it in his new book, The Way To The Spring: Life And Death In Palestine. And it indeed works with machinelike effectiveness. “How do Palestinians stand it?” I kept asking later. “How do you stay human in the face of those who see you as inhuman?”

These are the very questions Ehrenreich answers in this rare book of reportage from inside the Palestinian experience of occupation. And he does so with truly amazing grace and control.

There’s a hint of how he does it when he mentions a European solidarity activist newly arrived in Palestine and “still sparkling with outrage; it would mellow, I knew, into a sustained, wounded simmer.” Ehrenreich opts for calm instead of outrage, the simmer instead of the boil. And that makes his writing all the more powerful. He doesn’t indulge in his own righteousness — or in anyone else’s, for that matter. “My concern is with what keeps people going when everything appears to be lost,” he says in the preface, “what it means to hold on, to decline to consent to one’s own eradication, to fight actively or through deceptively simple acts of refusal against powers far stronger than oneself.”

What he is not doing, he emphasizes, is trying to “explain” Palestinians, or to speak for them. Instead, living on and off in Ramallah and Hebron from 2011 to 2014 — from just after the “Arab spring” through to the devastating bombardment of Gaza — he allows people and events to speak for themselves, and the Palestinians he lives with are striking not for their anger, but for their determination; not for their despair, but for their resilience.

“People in Hebron use the word ‘normal’ a lot,” he reports. What counts as normal there? Being shot at; the screaming of someone being beaten by soldiers; having settlers throw Molotov cocktails at your house; schoolchildren being tear-gassed; “administrative detention” (no charge, no trial); having your ID taken by a soldier at a checkpoint who keeps it for hours just because he can; having urine and feces thrown at you by settlers. Day in, day out — indeed hour in, hour out — a ceaseless barrage of harassment at best, outright violence at worst.

The details are all here. It’s worth knowing, for instance, that “rubber bullets” are in fact rubber-coated steel bullets, each one the size of a marble, capable of breaking bones and gouging flesh (and increasingly replaced by live bullets anyway). Or that a tear-gas canister fired in your face will kill you. But these are only part of “the almost infinitely complex system of control” exercised by Israel over the West Bank — ” the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession, and humiliation which… has sustained Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities, and frequently the duration, of Palestinian lives.”

In punitive raids, random doors are burst open in the middle of the night, belongings ransacked, the contents of the pantry poured out on the floor, anyone offering so much as a word of protest beaten and arrested. The purpose? A clear message: this house is not yours, this land is not yours, your person is not yours.

As a community-center volunteer held (and tortured) for three months put it: “If they could take the air from us, they would.”

The statistics are here too if you need them. Forty percent of Palestinian males have been in Israeli prison at least once, and even those sent to trial were at the mercy of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate. The same military has an indictment rate of 1.4% against soldiers accused of misconduct. And all the while, “settlements” — huge suburbs and townships — have been expanded; construction more than doubled in 2014, and jumped another 40% last year.

Palestinians have now been pushed from nearly 60% of the West Bank. With effective leadership systematically broken up, assassinated, or imprisoned, leaving only the venally corrupt Palestinian Authority, that percentage seems destined only to increase as Israel asserts “complete and irrevocable” control. And yet, as Ehrenreich shows, “ordinary” people stubbornly refuse to submit.

There’s no pontificating in this book — no offering of blandly confident “solutions.” I have none to put forward either, especially in this US election season when even Bernie Sanders’ mealy-mouthed statement that ” we need to be able to say that Netanyahu is not always right” is regarded as a daring political stance, a marvel of honesty and insight.

What I can say is this: if you really do want honesty and insight, read The Way to the Spring.

———–

From a column in today’s Ha’aretz by former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg, speaking directly to Israelis focused entirely on three yeshiva students kidnapped in occupied territory:

All of Palestinian society is a kidnapped society. Like many of the Israelis who performed “significant service” in the army, many of the readers of this column, or their children, entered the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night by surprise, with violence, and simply took away the father, brother or uncle, with determination and insensitivity. That is kidnapping, and it happens every day. And what about their administrative detainees?

What is all this if not one big official, evil and unjust kidnapping that we all participate in and never pay the price for? That is the fate of tens of thousands of detainees and others under arrest, who stayed, or are staying, in Israel’s prisons – quite a few of them for no good reason, falsely imprisoned on false pretexts. The vast majority of them have been exposed to the appendages of military justice, and none of us cares a whit.

All these things have turned the topic of the prisoners into the main subject in the lives of the occupied society. There is not a single household without a detainee or prisoner. So why is it so difficult to understand their joy and our pain, fears and worry notwithstanding? It was, and can still be, otherwise.

However, as long as the Israeli government shuts all the gates of freedom, flees from all real negotiations that could solve the conflict, refuses to make good-will gestures, lies and blatantly violates its own commitments – violence is all that remains for them.

I’m usually no fan of the Oscars.  The “Academy” seems to have an unerring bias toward the showy and the obvious.  But this year I’m excited.  Not only because the stunningly un-showy and un-obvious Amour has a decent chance for the big Best Picture award (see my take on it here), but even more because the documentary section has two nominees that I really really want to see (yes, double really):  5 Broken Cameras, and The Gatekeepers.

The five broken cameras belong to the occupied:  Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat.  He got the first one the week his sixth son was born, and began using it as a kind of record for his children.  Over the next five years, he documented life in his village of Bilin, the focus of weekly demonstrations against the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier,” aka The Wall (another excellent documentary than never got such recognition, despite an unforgettable long opening shot of the last concrete panel being put into place, cutting off the landscape).

One by one, Burnat’s cameras were smashed — by an IDF teargas canister, by rubber bullets, by angry Jewish settlers.  Each time, he found another and went on filming, then teamed up with Israeli co-director Guy Davidi, who managed to partially fund the movie with a government grant — money, in suitably Middle Eastern irony, from the same government that broke at least two of Burnat’s cameras.  (See the trailer here.)

The gatekeepers are the occupiers:  six retired heads of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet (the acronym of sherutei bitahon — security services).  It’s a talking-heads movie, yes, but these six are unprecedentedly candid about their actions and decisions, including torture and targeted assassination.   Faced with the consequences of their actions as the Israeli right-wing becomes more intractable than ever, they wrestle openly with doubt and conscience, and this wrestling adds up to biting criticism of the occupation from deep within Israel’s defense establishment.  (TimeOut New York has an interesting interview with director Dror Moreh, and you can see the trailer here.)

But the Oscars are still the Oscars, where “American” wins out over “foreign” and sub-titles are considered an undue tax on the moviegoer’s mind.  So I doubt that either of these two will win the documentary award, which will probably go to Searching for Sugarman, a movie about trying to track down a Detroit singer-songwriter who dropped out of sight years ago.

And there’s a far tougher reason why neither 5 Broken Cameras nor The Gatekeepers is likely to win:  Both lead to the same place, which is the urgent need to end the Israeli occupation, and find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist.  Oscar voters are doubtless terrified of taking such a basic political stand, let alone of recognizing either movie over the other and thus be seen as “taking sides.”  Politics at the Oscars?  The horror!

So in the spirit of both movies, here’s an idea:  Give a joint award for best documentary this year, Oscar voters!  5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers together.  Wouldn’t that be a terrific statement?

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[Note:  both movies are scheduled for general release in the US in the next few weeks.  I have no idea why the delay.]

In the Middle East, it’s sometimes the small moments that stay with you longest.  Not the bombs, the injuries, the deaths – the things that make the headlines – but almost inconsequential moments, so small that they slip past the mind’s defenses and haunt you.

I’ve written here (and here) about such moments.  This is another.

It happened one evening in the fall of 2005, at the Qalandia crossing between Ramallah and East Jerusalem.  I’d spent the day traveling in the West Bank with two Palestinian archeologists and a German NGO worker, whose car we used.  We drove on ‘Arab’ roads (as distinct from ‘Jewish’ ones, which are reserved solely for Israeli settlers – in this part of the world, even roads have ethnicity) and went through so many military checkpoints I lost count.  Since the car had a large German flag painted on the hood, we were waved to the front of the line to wait a mere ten or twenty minutes at each checkpoint instead of three or four hours like everyone else.   As we eased with bad consciences past the long lines of ‘Arab’ cars and trucks, companiable talk gave way to a tight-lipped, eyes-straight-ahead silence.

The language of guns is a language all its own.  Israeli soldiers with mirrored sunglasses hardly speak.  They just gesture this way or that with their guns.  You don’t look at their eyes;  you look at the guns.  The guns do all the speaking.

Since I was in the front passenger seat, it fell to me to hand our passports and papers through the open window.   When he saw my American passport, one soldier broke his silence.   “Why you go with them?” he asked me in English, pointing his gun at my companions.  He dragged his finger across his throat: “They do this to you.”    When another asked where we were heading and I said Nablus, he leaned in to me with a loud stage whisper:  “Nablus? You want to die?”

I swallowed hard and kept my mouth shut, knowing that if I opened it, it wasn’t me who would pay, but the Palestinians I was with.   It struck me how hard it must be to keep your mouth shut under this kind of provocation every day, and yet the two archeologists seemed more embarrassed than anything – for me, and for the soldiers.

Now, as the sun was setting, I approached Qalandia, the largest checkpoint of all, on foot.  My companions had dropped me off from Ramallah, but could not cross.  I’d pick up a shared taxi to Jerusalem on the other side.

Two tunnels formed of wire-mesh and barbed-wire ran the length of the crossing, with well-guarded turnstiles either end.   I was halfway through when I heard a gun being cocked just a few yards away.  I looked over in alarm and through the wire saw two soldiers, a boy and a girl.  She was holding the gun, and he was pressed up against her from behind, his arms around her and his hands over hers on the gun.  They were both flushed and laughing.

She looked directly at me, and I could see the arousal in her eyes.  And then scorn as she registered my existence as what she doubtless called “an Arab-lover.”   She didn’t look away;  still in the embrace of the boy behind her, still cradling the gun, she held my eyes as though defying me to say a word.  “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying.  “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

I felt demeaned, dehumanized, even as I realized I was over-reacting.  It was such a little thing, after all.  Nothing really, not compared with everything else that was happening.   Just horny kids horsing around.  In public.  With loaded guns.  In a position of absolute power.

I wanted to break the moment, to shout something in protest, but I felt a gentle hand in the small of my back — a head-scarved Palestinian woman behind me gesturing me onward.  “Quietly,” her eyes indicated.  “Don’t start an incident that’ll only make trouble for us all.”  And I walked on with my mouth shut, full of the bitter taste, for just a moment, of the sheer, god-awful insult of life under occupation.