Checkpoint misery epitomizes a Mideast divide

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"The journey to Jerusalem, for tens of thousands of Palestinians, begins in a dank, trash-strewn hangar.

They move through cage-like passages and 7-foot-high turnstiles to be checked by Israeli soldiers from behind bulletproof glass. The soldiers often yell at them through loudspeakers. They are supposed to work in pairs to speed the lines through, but sometimes one of them is asleep, his feet on his desk.

The Qalandia crossing, say the Israelis, is where potential attackers are filtered out before they can reach Jerusalem on the other side. Palestinians say it's a daily humiliation they must endure to reach jobs, family, medical appointments and schools.

This main checkpoint between the northern West Bank and Jerusalem is one of the rawest points of friction between Israel and the Palestinians, a symbol of the day-to-day bitterness that grinds between the two sides as the U.S. struggles to relaunch peace negotiations."

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Why all Israel lobbyists should be forced to go thru the Qalandia checkpoint

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"When I went through the Qalandia checkpoint in Palestine a week or two back, I kept thinking, Anyone who lobbies for Israel in the U.S. should be forced through this checkpoint. All the congressmen should come here too. What upset me was the banality of humiliation: experiencing the draggy line that took 20 minutes, and the cattle car/industrial buzzings and lights and automatic gates; seeing a dapper middle-aged guy forced to go back for who knows what reason; seeing the fingerprint reader; and then watching a matronly woman whose papers weren’t perfect standing in paralysis or fear or helplessness before looking around with a redfaced childish expression of dauntedness. Observing her humiliation angered me. Then I went through and the young Israelis barked, "Open it, open it," at me as I held up my passport."

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[ConsAreLiars]

1. Entering through a most paranoid totalitarian state, I went through "commie" East Europe

hitch-hiking during the height of the cold war. Got one ride with a Romanian trucker who let me get a night sleep at his very modest family's dwellings, and then onward with a couple curious GI's, and crossed toward Bulgaria with a Passport that said I entered via car but without a a car. A couple hours and some phone calls. Compare this treatment of me by the Cold War monster Ceauşescu's state apparatus to what is being done every hour to totally innocent Palestinians at checkpoints and through blockades,

I'm pretty certain a citizen of an enemy state (me) got far more just and fair treatment by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes of that era than Israel gives to Palestinians.

Of course, there is an important difference. The monsters ruling Romania did not believe that brutalizing and slaughtering non-citizens would work, while the Israeli government assumes that is 'a really good idea.'

(edit out one stray keypunch, fix a near miss, and one spelling that spellchck missed)

[Duckhunter935]

2. They also

were not attacked in the past by all of the sorrounding states. They were probably were not having to deal with suicide bombers and rockets and morters on a daily basis as happened in the recent past. I do not agree with what Israel is doing but buth sides need to grow up. It is just not one sides fault.

[shergald]

3. I would agree with you but for one point....

The Palestinians are not interested in confiscating Israeli land, but the opposite is not true. We lack peace today precisely because the right wing Israeli government is intent on colonizing ever more of the West Bank, and is doing so through expansion of over 120 settlements, i.e., cities, towns, and villages it built in the West Bank, and the maintenance of over 100 so-called illegal hilltop settlements, which it refuses to remove. With Netanyahu now claiming that no settlements will be removed, the entire Jordan Valley, which is still being actively ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, East Jerusalem, the Jordan River borders, which is required to maintain a military presence, what we have here is the making of a group of Palestinian bantustans, and the next phase of this conflict: Apartheid.

Ehud Barak, the war criminal of Gaza, even claimed at the recent Herzilya Conference, that Israel has a choice: peace with the Palestinians or Apartheid, his words. We don't know what peace means in this context, but everyone knows what Apartheid means.

So the checkpoints continue because Israel's colonization of Palestine continues, and that is the only reason for their presence.