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.
Dear Ms. Hazleton,
After watching your TED lecture yesterday I went to the library to see what books they had on the Baha’i Faith and found only one but right next to it was your book on the split of Islam. I was wondering if you have ever researched the stories of The Bab and Baha’u’llah?
Best, Frank
All too vivid, Lesley. It’s a life hard to imagine, where guns are part of simple everyday lives. I can count on one hand how many guns I have seen close up, in my 64 years. I am thinking it is probably just as hard for the people in your story to imagine my sheltered life here in the NW of the USA. You are a good go between to help us all understand … just a bit more.
Better than a picture or a thousand words. Painful, even, and true. So awfully true.
Not quite the same, but Paris in the winter of 85-86 was interesting. I was 18 when I got there, and had just enough for 1 night at Hotel Henry IV.
I spent the next 3 nights sleeping under Pont Neuf or one of the benches near the Musée de Sculpture en Plein Air. Then I had a brilliant thought: I should go to the American Embassy to see if they will let me make a phone call home to see if I could find someone to send me some cash. So, off I trudge, through the rain, feeling less than romantic. I find the embassy and ring the bell at the gate to the courtyard, which is locked. There are two US military men in full gear with machine guns. They don’t acknowledge me at all. Finally a well dressed diplomatic sort comes out and asks what I want.
I tell him I’d like to call home. Tell him about the bank that my money was supposed to be at that was telling me they had been affected by a bomb and couldn’t find any record of my money. He is uninterested, but tells me to wait in the courtyard and takes my passport. Then he tells the guy with the machine gun to “keep your weapon on him”. I didn’t think anyone was going to shoot me, but it was disconcerting to have someone actively point an M16 at me.
The well dressed diplomatic type came out, returned my passport and told me I couldn’t come in and told the Marine to escort me from the premises. And that’s about as helpful as the US government has ever been in my experience.
For some reason, that was more upsetting than when a French military (Paris was under martial law at the time- I never saw any normal gendarmes) patrol decided to do a full cavity search in the middle of St. Michelle Metro station a month or so later. They wer just French military bastards, and I wasn’t afraid they’d shoot me, but I was worried they’d club me, having seen them do a bit of that to other people who were living on the streets.
I’ve also had thugs point guns at me, but that wasn’t nearly as upsetting as the experience of having the powers that be, the people who are supposedly keeping the peace, point their weapons at me or others. It’s a greater betrayal. Or a greater proof that you are alone against a force that is vicious and malevolent and that owns both the guns and the farcical courts.
I am speechless with heavy heart reading your recount. Thank you for all you do to contribute to a deeper understanding of reality in Israel.
Your account was written well enough to convey the atmosphere brilliantly. I am sympathetic of the people that have grown up in this situation and must live the life head down and under the gun.
Reality is, all the people that live in that situation choose to live that way. They cannot see any other way to live or they would have chosen it by now. I have Arab and Palestinian friends that got out of that situation.
Looking at the Middle East purely from a geographical perspective without politics or religion, it would be a resort town and port like all the rest found in the area, nothing special or distinctive.
I fail to grasp why this area is important in the world today. I fail to see any compelling religious or political argument that would sway me.
Here’s a radical idea, how about more guns, arm everybody, that way you have equality of the gun and everyone will be speaking the same language.
At least that way you’ll reach a tipping point, a resolution of some sort, not the toxic status quo.
Dear Lesley,
Its really heart warming to come across articles like these which are objectively impartial and unbiased through your experience of only one crossing of occupationists dominating the region whilst the whole world just impassively watches on. Like you said,” Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying. “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
Will it end some day? This is the question one has to ask about the occupiers and the occupied??With US and Western support so strong and lavish and a great stock pile of nuclear armament, Palestinians do not stand a chance of one in a million to get the status of a free country and a free nation.
What all these people of Isrial & Palestine need is a big engineeriing project that they can all praticipate in. Like why can’t they build a canal from the Mediterain to the Sea of Galilee down through the Dead Sea, down to the Red Sea. This would bring compition to the Suez Canal,bring life & fresh salt water to the Dead Sea and keep a million people employed for a hundred years.Maybe they woud be so busy building the canal they they would not have time to kill each other.
Please excuse the spelling errors.
Just an idea.
Sencerely yours, P.A.Skillman