I thought I had learned the drill at the infamous Qalandiya Checkpoint, having been through once before. When the busses from Ramallah (or anywhere else in the West Bank) to Jerusalem arrive at the checkpoint, they pull over and let everyone off. The dispatched passengers then make their way across a parking lot full of Palestinian drivers with Israeli license plates crying “al-‘uds, al-‘uds!” (“Jerusalem”) and over to a mammoth hangar. Temporarily incarcerated, the travelers fall into a snaking line up to a wall of metal bars. The line bunches up around the one entrance, which is barely as wide as a man’s shoulders and squeezes the crush of people into single file as they pass through a tunnel to a body-length turnstile like the New York subways. The turnstile opens long enough to let a few dozen people through, then locks again.
When you finally get past the stile, you find yourself in an inner chamber with walls twenty feet high and a new wall of bars, this time with six turnstiles in separate compartments. You join one of the crowds of Palestinians pressing up against the bars and wait again. The turnstile allows three people through at a time, then locks shut. Nonetheless, the fourth person invariably tries to lunge through as the stile clicks locked and rattles their bodies back to stillness. The rhythm of the door’s three-turns-and-a-lock – shlick . . . shlick . . . shlick . . . ka-CHUNK – establishes a ruthless regularity as you inch forward. No single file here – it’s each man, child and little old lady for him or herself, although there does seem to be a consensus that the little old ladies should be given right of way when they are noticed underfoot.
Sometimes inexplicable pauses arise between openings and people begin to mutter. But their stunning powerlessness has become a default state of being. Those waiting with friends and family chat, gossiping or planning their errands on the other side. Children weave between bodies until a parent’s hand reaches through to snatch them back. Teenage girls lean inside the stile, each with a foot on the lowest bar. They swing mindlessly back and forth as they chatter. Then it clicks open and they tumble through giggling, place their purses on a conveyer belt, and step up to a double window with their travel documents (Palestinians do not have passports – depending on whether they live in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, annexed in 1967, they carry varying levels of residency papers).
After showing documents, you pass through yet another turnstile to freedom, which begins with a second parking lot where the busses wait to recuperate their passengers. You show your ticket, board, and wait for the bus to fill. Then you go the remaining few minutes to Jerusalem. Total distance: about 12 kilometers. Total time: an hour and a half.
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I had been warned that the morning crowds of commuters could make for longer lines at Qalandiya, but my traveling companions, a British Quaker couple, and I arrived with plenty of time to get to the tour agency in Jerusalem. It was their first experience with Qalandiya, and they were adamant about toughing it out. This time, there was no waiting at the first turnstile, but the antechamber before the actual checkpoint teemed with at least two hundred people. It occurred to me that the “system” I thought I had witnessed a few days before may not have been a system at all, but merely one random manifestation of how the checkpoint is run on any given day. The grim reality of arbitrary rule chilled the blood even more than a predictable system of control. I warned the couple, Alan and Elspeth, that there was no telling how long the checkpoint would take and that perhaps we should consider getting a car from one of the eager drivers outside, who enter Jerusalem via one of the known holes in the “Separation Wall.” But they demurred, claiming that we had plenty of time, and reminding me that our governments were responsible for funding and allowing this monstrosity in the first place.
A fair point. We waited.
For fifteen minutes, no one moved, but people kept coming in from behind and surging past us. I tried to urge Alan and Elspeth to relinquish their politesse and push forward with everyone else, but eventually the tide of bodies separated us. We pressed into the same turnstile line at least, and waited. No one was going through. People began to mutter, then complain, then shout and press the “call” button into the office on the other side. No response. The gate remained locked.
After another twenty minutes, it began to allow one person through at a time, then lock again for unpredictable intermissions. “One at a time!” indignant shouts rose. Perhaps this was unnatural even for Qalandiya. A few announcements came through in blaring, staticky Hebrew: first they closed the window we were standing at (bodies stampede to the right), then reopened it five minutes later (bodies stampede back to the left). Well-dressed Palestinians bypassed the line and barged in front with minimal comment from the monotony-dulled crowd. One man did grumble as a suited, sun-glassed man swept from the back right into the turnstile. The newcomer screamed back that he had been there the whole time and pushed through. People started crowding into the stile two and three at a time.
At last my turn came. Dazed after an hour and a half in a mob of oppressed, angry humans, I walked through the turnstile in front of me and turned right towards the busses.
But on the right was a wall topped with spikes. To the left was a corridor leading through a turnstile into another parking lot, disconnected from the busses. I had gone through the wrong gate.
I ran back to the turnstile I had gone through. Of course, it was locked. The trickle of travelers coming through inform me that that gate was only for the post office (yes, Palestinians have to go through the Qalandiya checkpoint to mail a letter). I run back and forth in the corridor in a panic, eying the walls and trying to imagine myself vaulting over them. Impossible. I would be shot. Oh shit. I pressed the call button again and again and finally earned a stream of screaming Hebrew, then silence.
A couple of Arabs finally came through the corridor that had become my prison. They told me I would have to go out and back around through the checkpoint again. No! My spirit fluttered fiercely against the bars of my trapped body. Then I saw an Israeli guard outside. I leaned against the stile and called to him in English, and he came over. A tanned, rugged middle-aged man with a white-blond ponytail.
“Hi, listen, I went through the wrong gate,” I panted, trying on a disarming smile over my tensed muscles. “Is there any way you can put me back through?”
He sized me up and chuckled. “Where you from?” he asked.
“American,” I sighed with relief for a change, handing over my passport. “New York.”
He nodded and smiled, flipping through the pages. “Ah, New York . . . Welcome to Israel. Why you come through this gate, girlie?”
“I didn’t know it made a difference. I can’t read Arabic,” I lied, offering a rueful shrug.
He raised his eyebrows, amused. “There was no one there to direct you?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he handed me back my passport and said reassuringly, “I’m going to call and see if I can get you through. Don’t worry – just be patient.” He disappeared.
It is impossible to be patient and not to worry when you are stuck in a walled corridor in heat approaching 90 degrees facing an empty parking lot and a huge army complex into which your sole chance of escape has vanished. I pushed against the first gate again, recalling my yoga teacher’s frequent reminder: the definition of madness is to attempt the same thing the same way over and over again and expect a different result. Then a man appeared on the other side and magically let me through, then vanished. My body melting in relief, I charged at the gate to the busses.
Ka-CHUNK. Locked.
I ran back to the turnstile into the checkpoint window and called out. No reply. Were their windows soundproof? Probably. Why let explanations and excuses be even a remote possibility? A man passing through informed me that this gate was now closed for travelers to Jerusalem, and was open only for the post office. Now made reckless with fear and frustration, I stamped back through the post office gate, out into the deceptively open parking lot and into the complex, where I found the kindly Israeli guard at the desk.
“Ah, they send you back to me. Why you not wait? I tell you be patient. Okay, I see what I can do."
A languid phone call in Hebrew ensued, out of which I distinguish only the word “Amrikai.” He hung up and grinned.
“Come with me now, I’ll take you back over there and someone’s gonna let you in. So relax!”
Two Palestinians were coming out of the turnstile as the officer buzzed me back through. The look of shock on their faces confirmed that such an exception would never have been made for them. At the next stile, two Israeli soldiers, a boy and a girl barely more than teenagers, had materialized, in fatigues and heavily armed. I showed them my passport and they smiled at me and shook their heads.
“Why you go through this gate?” the boy asked, his voice teasing, with an almost flirtatious twinkle in his eye.
“I couldn’t read the sign, sorry!” I stuck to my lie. Their smiles widened and they buzzed me in.
“Hey, you be careful, okay?” the girl warned. “It’s dangerous over there.” She cocked her head back at the swarm of waiting Palestinians (along with poor polite Alan and Elspeth) as she buzzed me through the final gate to freedom.
“Yeah I will, thanks.” I gave my captors-turned-saviors a real smile. “You should make some signs in English!” Somewhere in the mixture of relief to be escaping and to be suddenly joking with peers rather than trying to talk sense to a screaming intercom, I liked them.
As the 18-bus rolled on towards Jerusalem, the aftershocks of my brush with Palestinian reality crumbled my thoughts and opinions into an indecipherable mush. Images sparred and splattered against one another: the hunched old ladies in traditional Palestinian embroidered dresses smashed into turnstiles, the high spiked walls, the Arab men smoking and pressing up on all sides, the grinning Israeli soldiers with whom I immediately felt a shared cultural bond, the conveyer belts, the guns, the teenage girls swinging against on the gates, the fatherly Israeli guard, the indecipherable Hebrew screeching on the intercom, my own voice in English saying, in so many words, “Hey, I’m American, we’re allies, buddies, friends! You don’t have to treat me like you treat them! My country funds this whole operation, so it’s cool, I’m not upset. Just new here, sorry!”
So it’s less obvious than I would like to dictate my gut responses to these conflicting encounters. But I also realize that as a foreigner I enjoy a tremendous privilege that few West Bankers or Israelis enjoy: being able to see humans on both sides of that checkpoint. Interaction in the netherworld of Qalandiya forces both Israelis and Palestinians to see one another as animals.
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