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Editor’s Note:
I have been asked by many friends over the years, “why
do you spend so much time trying to understand the
Middle East?” The answer used to be complicated. But as
I got older, strangely, the answer grew simpler to
explain.
The Palestinian and the conflict between them and
Israelis is the crux of the problem, not only in the
Middle East, but the Muslim world at large yet it is so
misunderstood. So, I started Viewpoint 3 years ago to
bring information to YOU that you would not necessarily
find on the pages of the NY Times or on CNN.
I would like to share with you information that will
help navigate through the disinformation and
misinformation that surrounds the region. To that end, I
want to direct you to the ad in Viewpoint or the link
below. My book on the Middle East came out three weeks
ago and we are making it available at cost to all
Viewpoint readers.
Thanks for reading and check out the link if you wish to
take advantage of this special offer.
Chronicle of Passion and Politics
***********************************************************Where hatred and despair are fomented -by Gideon Levy
All of the Israel Defense Forces checkpoints in the
occupied territories are immoral and illegitimate.
Therefore, they must be removed unconditionally. There
is no place to discuss their security value. Even if
someone were to succeed in proving that a connection
exists between locking residents in their villages and
preventing terrorist attacks in Israel - which is highly
doubtful - that would make no difference one way or the
other. A law-abiding state does not adopt immoral and
illegitimate measures, whatever their value.
Equally irrelevant is the discussion about the physical
conditions that exist at the checkpoints. Disgraceful as
they are, improving them will add nothing to their
legitimacy. The only question is why checkpoints exist
deep in occupied territory? By what right? Only to
satisfy the settlers and abuse the Palestinians? The
question of whether the orders that IDF soldiers receive
at the checkpoints are legal is also irrelevant. Is the
soldier who let an injured boy go through the checkpoint
at Beit Iba last week, but prevented the passage of a
man who had a slipped disc moral? The answer is
unimportant. The very fact that he is posted there, and
the authority he is given to routinely deprive people of
their basic right to move about freely in their country
and in their village is immoral. So the IDF initiative
to post Arabic-speaking soldiers at checkpoints is
ludicrous. Depriving someone of his rights in Arabic is
hardly any more just.
A state that defines itself as a democracy and
law-abiding country does not imprison three-and-a-half
million people in their villages and towns, slice up
their country into strips, and declare roads for the use
of Jews only. In Israel, though, the illegitimacy of the
checkpoints is not enough to get them removed. The only
discussion one occasionally hears has to do solely with
their usefulness to security and the need to improve the
soldiers' behavior.
A special committee that was established not long ago by
the government coordinator of activities in the
territories is examining the actions at four different
IDF checkpoints. There is no need for a committee; all
that has to be done is to dismantle them. Another
initiative by Meretz MK Roman Bronfman, who last week
convened a group of MKs that will visit IDF checkpoints
and monitor events there, is praiseworthy. Like the
article in Haaretz by former Tel Aviv mayor and retired
major general Shlomo Lahat, who described what he saw at
checkpoints, this new parliamentary initiative will be
able to generate interest over what happens there. The
MKs will see with their own eyes and will report to the
public about the soldiers' behavior, the women in labor
who are made to wait endlessly, the women who are forced
to tell soldiers that they are bleeding so their hearts
will soften, and the boy who tries to persuade a soldier
to let him pass so he can visit his grandfather. But
this welcome initiative must not focus on improving the
conditions at the checkpoints; it must focus on getting
them removed altogether.
Since the dawn of the occupation, the Palestinians have
not been subjected to a harsher decree than the one that
deprives them freedom of movement. The dozens of
internal checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
have been augmented by hundreds of other obstacles:
concrete blocks, earth ramparts, locked iron gates,
fences, walls, surprise roadblocks, trenches and pits -
a whole array of imprisonment methods. There is no other
nation in the world today that is as incarcerated as the
Palestinians have been, by us, for years. However, the
majority of Israelis don't have a clue about the scale
of the incarceration. The confusion that exists between
the checkpoints on the 1967 Green Line, which are
legitimate because they are the gates of entry into the
country, and the internal checkpoints, which make up the
majority and have no other purpose than to make life
miserable for the population, helps blur the dimensions
of the wickedness. Far from the eye, at checkpoints deep
inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip an entire people is
being subjected to humiliation as a matter of routine.
This has nothing to do with security - or perhaps it
does: the checkpoints are the great hothouse of
terrorism. It is there that the hatred and the despair
are fomented. "Humanitarian officers at the
checkpoints?" That is a phrase that is as much an
unacceptable internal contradiction as "enlightened
occupation."
It's hard to imagine what it means to go through a
checkpoint day in and day out - between Ramat Hasharon
and Tel Aviv, say - with a foreign soldier who
humiliates you, a huge line, and a good chance of being
shamefully expelled back to where you came. In this
spectacle, even the most humanitarian soldier plays a
distinctly inhuman role. One day we will yet have to
answer the questions that are not even on the public
agenda now: Who gave us the right to control the fate of
another people? By what right have we imprisoned
millions of people for years? When that happens, the
question of whether the soldier allowed the woman in
labor to pass, or whether he knew Arabic, will become
secondary, as it should be.
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Gideon Levy writes for the Israeli paper Ha’aretz.
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