Rose Asaf
Occupied Palestine ’48
Zochrot
Oftentimes, opponents to the movement for Palestinian liberation will use legal theatrics and well-crafted propaganda to claim that Israel is not an apartheid state. They point to the Arabs in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), the fact that Arabs can vote, or some convoluted argument about the denotation of apartheid in legal standards. But if we want to understand apartheid in simple terms, we need to look no further than what the word itself means: separateness, and separate legal systems for different peoples.
I went to Qalandiya Checkpoint with a women-led Israeli activist organization called Maschom (“Checkpoint”) Watch. The group of mostly older women go to checkpoints early in the morning to monitor soldier behavior and ensure that no flagrant violations, beyond the existence of the checkpoint itself, occur. Their presence also serves as a form of pressure on the soldiers working at the checkpoints because they know their behavior is being monitored. The women who run Maschom Watch also have connections with the military and have high-ranking contacts who they can call if soldiers behave inappropriately.
The architectural aspects of occupation and domination feel almost exaggerated at checkpoints. Palestinians looking to enter Jerusalem must cram into narrow caged rows while the soldiers operating the checkpoint are housed in a closed building. Qalandiya is the quintessential checkpoint. Its design has been compared to a slaughterhouse.
On the day we went, it was a “good” day there, meaning that the soldiers were not artificially creating extended wait times. They were letting Palestinians in and out of the militarized cages without much conflict. By comparison, on bad days, the wait can extend to four hours.
When we were leaving Qalandiya, though, we ran into trouble. My mom and I had brought only our US passports. Even though we entered Israel with our Israeli passports, we did not have the necessary entry visas in our US passports, and we were denied entry back into Israel proper from Qalandiya Checkpoint, where they are especially strict.
If this had happened to a Palestinian, they would have been stuck for hours, if not interrogated. My mother and I simply had to wait ten minutes for the women from Machsom Watch to come with a car so we could exit the territory through a settler checkpoint reachable by a Jewish-only road. At the settler checkpoint, they saw that we were all white women in the car and did not even ask to look at our documents. We drove through seamlessly.
This is how apartheid functions. The ability for my mother and I to exit and enter Palestinian land as we pleased through checkpoints that are barely regulated and that exist only for Jewish people demonstrates the separateness that defines the situation in Palestine. In my next post, I will write about another experience at a different checkpoint that similarly depicts apartheid.