Reply #18: It's not all in the details [View All]

[Englander]

By Amira Hass

Each detail described here, every shred of reality, is liable to be considered as a whole, which would dim its severity. Detail: Hundreds of people gather each morning at three narrow steel revolving doors, and the gates do not turn because some unseen person has blocked them by pushing a button. The number of people crammed behind them grows and grows, and they wait for an hour, and the anger at another day being late for work or for school is piled on top of previous residual tensions brought on by anger, bitterness and helplessness.

However, it is not the crowdedness and waiting and anger that define the checkpoints and roadblocks, or in this specific instance, the new Qalandiyah checkpoint. Nor is it the crowdedness and compressed atmosphere of the rest of the inspection route, before the magnometers and the closed rooms in which the soldiers sit and inspect documents, or the other revolving doors. Or even the other "details": the cameras that make the soldiers and commanders seeing and unseen, the snarling voice in the speaker that issues commands in Hebrew, the terrifying concrete wall above and around, and the devastation left by Israeli bulldozers and planners outside the cage that Israel calls a "border terminal," in what was once, and no longer is, a continuous stretch of residential neighborhoods, soft hillsides and the Jerusalem-Ramallah road.

Nor are the 11 "detainees" at the inspection route's exit an adequate detail: nine teenage boys aged 18 and under, one adult, and a 23-year-old university student, all of whom committed a serious crime on Monday: After waiting in vain for the steel gates to turn, which would lead them to the inspection route, on their way to classes and work, they decided to jump over the fence - one hoping to get to an English test on time, the other fearful of being fired if he again arrived late to the printing press where he works. But they were caught. The student was handcuffed from behind, and was sat down next to a guard booth in the closed military compound. The other ten were placed outside the compound, in the mud that became thicker with every drop of rain. And the soldiers demanded that they sit down. They could not sit, because of the mud, and only went into a kneeling position. After half an hour, the bent knees begin to hurt more and more, and the pants are soaked with water and grow tight over the knee. The hands turn cold, but the soldiers don't change their tune: "Sit, I told you. Sit."

>snip

However, even the important matter - that is, the humanitarian deception - is only one detail in a full set of details in which no single detail is representative in itself. Isolated fragments of the reality are read as being tolerable, or understandable (security, security), or may make one angry for a moment and then subside. And among all the details, the reality of colonialism intensifies, without letup or remission, inventing yet more methods of torture of the individual and community; creating more ways to violate international law, robbing land behind the legal camouflage, and encouraging collaboration out of agreement, neglect or torpor.

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