It's not all in the details. Amira Hass on checkpoints and their purpose

Tom Joad

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Fri Dec-30-05 09:58 PM
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It's not all in the details. Amira Hass on checkpoints and their purpose

From http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/663138.html

"...we Israelis have created and continue to create an economic, social, emotional, employment and environmental crisis on the scale of a never-ending tsunami."

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.

<snip>

What is important is that the army and the Israeli citizens who design all of the details of dispossession - and the roadblocks are an inseparable part of this dispossession - have transformed the term "humanitarian" into a despicable lie.

Through the checkpoints, road closures, movement ban, and traffic restrictions, through the concrete walls and barbed wire fences, through the land expropriations (solely for the purpose of security, as the High Court of Justice, which is part and parcel of the Israeli people, likes to believe), through the disconnecting of villages from their lands and from a connecting road, through the construction of a wall in a residential neighborhood and in the backyards of homes, and through the transformation of the West Bank into a cluster of "territorial cells," in the military jargon, between the expanding settlements - we Israelis have created and continue to create an economic, social, emotional, employment and environmental crisis on the scale of a never-ending tsunami.

<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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See the full article above in Haaretz Daily, link cited above.

Comment:
We in the US must work to make a difference. It is our money that pays for the checkpoints, the bulldozing of homes, the uprooting of crops. Our congresspeople support this, even though (with the exception of a very few), know little of the reality of how Palestinians live under military occupation. Most do not even have a clue as to how difficult it is to do the very ordinary things - going to work... going to a doctor... going to class... come next to impossible. That a grandmother may be told she cannot return to her village after a doctor visit, warning shots fired, even though her village is no where near Israelis, but far into the West Bank, simply because some 20-something says he has "orders". These orders make no sense unless you consider it is the reality of colonialism, and the work of dispossession.