Nidal works two jobs. Each morning he crosses Qalandya en route to Ram where his computer/high tech office is located. Around 2pm he leaves that job, comes back through the checkpoint to East Jerusalem, and ends up on Al-Hariri by 4 pm. Sunday, Nidal did not show up for work.
On Monday, Najat and I were chatting, as we usually do throughout the day, when she stopped suddenly and remembered to tell me, "Nidal was arrested yesterday at the checkpoint, we don't know if he's coming to work today because we don't know where he is."
During late morning, the phone rang and Marwan picked up. Najat could overhear Marwan talking on the telephone, made out it was Nidal on the other end of the line, and said, "Nidal is not in jail, that was him calling for Marwan."
I asked Najat if she knew what happened. She told me we'd ask Nidal later on when he came to the office. Nidal came in around 4pm, the usual time, looking a little tired, but as always with a half-smile of amusement on his face.
I had to leave the office because Sammy Blumberg and I had an East Jerusalem shawarma at Al-Shu'leh-followed by a visit to the Kotel date. However, we finished around 5:30 so I headed back to the office to talk to Nidal about what happened.
At 3:20 p.m. Sunday, Nidal and a large crowd of people waited at the checkpoint turnstile for the light to turn green so they could pass through. Finally, the light switched red to green. The people pushed through to the other side of the turnstile. Suddenly, over the intercom a soldier's voice instructed everyone to go back through the turnstile to the other side. As Nidal speaks fluent Hebrew, he heard the soldier making the announcements also say, "you aren't humans you are animals."
"This thing really made me crazy, Heidi," Nidal said.
As Nidal passed by the soldier he said to her, "You are the animal, you don't know how to treat people."
Once again, the crowd of people were permitted back through the checkpoint. When it was Nidal's turn, the soldier took his identity card and told him he would not get it back. Nidal stopped and said he wasn't leaving until he had his identity card, what was he going to do without it?
She told him to step to the side and pointed him to a room of dimensions one meter, by one meter and a half. There he was told to stay without any other information. He asked the soldier to give him back his card and why was he being held? She gave him no response and so he started calling her names. In kind, she responded by calling him names and making obscene gestures like flicking him off, things like this.
With his phone, Nidal photographed and recorded the soldier in her fury, directed at him. Nidal then told the soldier that he wanted to see her supervisor, "someone bigger than her."
The soldier disappeared and Nidal waited another 45 minutes without any news.
"My legs were really freezing now," Nidal said.
He couldn't move, he couldn't get out and he didn't know when the requested supervisor would appear, if at all.
Finally, another soldier, a male, appeared and asked him what happened. Nidal told him his side of the story. The higher-up soldier told Nidal he had to delete the pictures of the soldier making faces, gestures, and calling Nidal names. Nidal refused and the man informed Nidal he was going to be arrested. He also told Nidal he wasn't allowed to eat, drink, smoke, or talk on the phone while being detained. Nidal was then taken outside and made to wait, minus his phone battery, which the soldiers confiscated after deleting the photos for him.
After an hour and a half, allowed only to move within a few meters of space outside, he was taken to the Makom HaKera, what I understand to be a detention center. In tow was the female soldier, Nidal and the supervisor. Arriving at the detention center Nidal was informed that he would be arrested for 24 to 48 hours, and was he in contact with a lawyer? Nidal replied that he had a lawyer and wanted to speak with him immediately.
The woman processing his case at the detention center asked him why he hadn't already called the lawyer to which Nidal responded, "Are you kidding? You told me not to eat, drink, talk on the phone, and my phone battery was taken. How do you expect me to make a phone call to my lawyer?"
Nidal was allowed to call to his brother, his lawyer, who came immediately to help. Once his brother arrived and established that he was in fact a lawyer, Nidal was informed that because he has a lawyer, he would be released but he may be called in a few days to appear in court. Nidal asked for the name of the soldier with whom the incident transpired. They refused to give him her name and asked why he wanted it. Nidal responded that if he had to go to court he wanted to know her name to make his case and to identify her. Again, the soldiers refused to give her name.
Before leaving, Nidal looked at the young soldier and said, "I have one question for you. Do you treat people like this at home?"
The soldier responded, "No".
Eight hours and ten minutes later, at 11:30 p.m., Nidal and his brother left and went home.
Nidal looked at me and said, "Heidi, I don't want to have a problem. Usually, this doesn't happen. When a soldier at the checkpoint says, 'good morning, please may I see your id., thank you, have a good day,' I respond in the same way: thank you, have a nice day. This girl is sick in the head. I know I am not the problem, she has a problem. What can I do? This is our life here, there is occupation, sometimes it affects my life, sometimes it doesn't. I was so angry, but I don't want to have a problem."
Nidal continued, "they put these kids at the checkpoints who don't know who they are talking to. At the checkpoints are women, children, engineers, doctors, lawyers, professors. I don't want to start a problem. I want to go through the checkpoint and go home or go to work because that's what I have to do. These people want to do the same thing. It's not right, what's going on here."
As for the young, female soldier, "they probably moved her so that if I see her again I can't get her name and the whole thing will never have happened."
Nidal is alright. I felt infuriated and ashamed, on my own behalf.
In response to this incident, I have heard a collection of other thoughts and stories from the office.
Marwan told me of a time he was at the checkpoint with his car. He showed his license, his registration and his identity card. The soldier inspecting his license told him his papers had expired and so he had to be arrested. Marwan, who also speaks Hebrew insisted that the soldier read the dates wrong, everything was current. The soldier repeated that he was under arrest and the car would be taken. At this point Marwan started yelling, which drew the attention of another soldier, again, a higher-up/supervisor type. He asked what was going on to which Marwan explained the misunderstanding. The supervisor took the papers from the soldier, gave them back to Marwan, and told Marwan to leave, everything was fine.
The soldier mis-read the dates on the license and registration.
Marwan says, "It's not that they're stupid, these people at the checkpoints, but they are very young, many do not even read Hebrew, they are immigrants. The smart people they send to the other parts of the army, but the most impressionable they send to the checkpoints. There is something wrong with these people, they are not normal and that's what we have to deal with."
This morning Mira told me she's had experiences with checkpoint guards that don't read Hebrew. "They take your id in their hands and then they ask you: where are you from, where were you born?"
These are the more recently arrived perhaps from Ethiopia or the Former Soviet Union. They still cannot read the language and yet they are responsible for verifying documents in the Hebrew language that determine the fate of thousands every day.
With regard to Nidal, Hillel believes that the authorities won't follow up on this case. Most likely, it's in the best interest of the checkpoint guards not to bring Nidal to court.
Najat believes this case isn't over, that Nidal may be called to court and find himself in a situation with little evidence to defend himself.
Knowing that a friend of mine experienced having an Israeli soldier, in uniform, representing the State of Israel and in theory, the Jewish people -- call him and his people animals -- is immensely upsetting for me. I feel a personal sense of guilt and embarassment and a helplessness because I have no answers and no way at this moment to improve the situation. All I can do is state that this was wrong and awful. It is a practice that I cannot understand.
It is a face of the army that is difficult to reconcile with the other faces I have encountered. My contemporaries that I have befriended, like my friend Eitan, who serves in the army as an engineer, ensuring the safety and efficiency of weapons and technology that the army utilizes, who welcomes me into his home every weekend and shares with me his life as a peer, and as an Israeli.
It is in sharp contrast to my reaction to the following story I read in Haaretz yesterday. IDF troops took into custody two Palestinian youths in possession of explosive devices inlcuding a bomb weighing 7 kilograms, a gas balloon and spraying material, "apparently intended to be used in suicide bombing", at the Beit Iba checkpoint in the Nablus area. The youths were detained and questioned by Shin Bet security service but it is not clear whether the individuals intended to carry out the attack in Israel or in the West Bank.*
In isolation, the outcome of this story comforts me. The IDF is doing its job to protect the safety and security of Palestinians and Israelis by preventing an act that could incite yet another cycle of violence. However, it is one part of the bigger picture which must be examined in its entirety. There exists a cause and effect dynamic to the violence here. Questions around cause and effect for me arise.
What are the psychological effects of occupation on societies, that of both the occupied and the occupier?
What aspect of human recognition and compassion shuts off or compartmentalizes when one is required to follow orders without question, as those at the checkpoints?
What is the balance between maintaining security and respecting humanity?
If this is a Jewish State, how is it upholding or denigrating the more noble principles of the tradition? How does it violate those through security measures, through prolonged conflict that has forced a country and its people into constant fear, defense, and now offense against an enemy that has been characterized and dealt with as monolithic and separate from the daily lives of most Israelis?
Can I trust the media? This story was in Haaretz but I found no reporting on explosive devices found on Palestinian youths in any of the Arabic publications that are in English. What do I need to learn about Israeli media when Palestinians feel that it is sometimes complicit with the government in keeping certain abuses and human rights issues out of the mainstream publications?
How much of this is simply human nature, human conflict, the way the world works, not unique to this region, just in focus because this is where I choose to be and what I feel the need to focus upon?
Najat, Mira and I sat at breakfast this morning eating ka'ek, zatar and cheese, discussing Nidal's situation. I looked at them and said, "you know, people just don't care. If it doesn't affect their lives, they don't want to be involved, for the most part. This stuff is happening all over the world, it's a problem throughout, it isn't just here, this is the world."
They both looked at me but didn't respond. In that moment I realized that while I believe what I said, I also believe that there are people like Najat, Mira and myself who don't want this to be the world. We want it to look, feel and be different, and so that's how we'll spend our days.
* "IDF Soldier wounded when bomb explodes near jeep in Nablus," www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=839030
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