Palestinian life at the checkpoint By MARGARET WENTE Thursday, February 6, 2003 – Page A17 BIR ZEIT, WEST BANK -- Confusion reigns at the checkpoint that separates the town of Ramallah from Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. There's a rumour that the Israeli soldiers are temporarily confiscating taxi drivers' IDs. This would be a major complication, because taxi drivers without IDs are not allowed to do business, and many students rely on the taxis to get to school. To travel from Ramallah to Bir Zeit, you take a car or a taxi to the checkpoint, then walk a kilometre across to the other side, then take another taxi to the campus. It used to be a seven-minute trip. Now it takes 40 minutes, maybe more. Sure enough, as soon as we've found a taxi on the Bir Zeit side, the driver's ID is confiscated, along with those of the male students we're riding with. We all get out and start over. Welcome to the West Bank, where daily life revolves around the checkpoints. They are a nuisance, a humiliation and, for Palestinians, a constant, inescapable reminder of the occupation. The infuriating part about the checkpoints is their randomness. You never know how long the lines will be. Sometimes, cars can go through, sometimes not. Sometimes, a checkpoint is sealed for hours or days, and no one can get across. Sometimes, the young soldiers smile at you; sometimes, they snarl. At Bir Zeit University, I have a long talk with Izzat Ghazzawi, a writer and English literature professor. He's a poetic, soft-spoken, chain-smoking man of 51. He's about as close as you can get to a Palestinian moderate. "This is a checkpoint that has nothing to do with anything," he says. "We have to walk it when it's rainy, cold, hot. The only reason to have this checkpoint is for humiliating us." Last week, Mr. Ghazzawi was crossing the checkpoint when he saw two handcuffed and blindfolded students sitting against the wheels of an army jeep with its engine running. He complained. "Well," he was told, "if you are not happy, you will be with them." Then he was handcuffed, too. A few minutes later, an Israeli officer came along and noticed his white hair. The officer asked a polite question or two, then let everyone go. Every Palestinian I've met has these stories -- of random slights and humiliations, and deeper family wounds that go back to 1948. That was the year Israel became a nation and many Palestinians fled or were kicked out of their homes. Mr. Ghazzawi's parents left their village after Israeli soldiers warned they were going to shell it. His grandmother refused to leave, and was killed. He was born in a refugee camp. Fortunately, his mother had squirrelled away some money, so they were able to leave and start over. But their acquaintance with rejection wasn't over. The Palestinians in their new village looked down on the refugees as cowards. And the Jordanians looked down on all of them. When Mr. Ghazzawi grew older, he fell in love with a Jordanian girl. But her father turned him down because he was a Palestinian. In the late 1980s, Mr. Ghazzawi joined the Palestine Liberation Organization and became active in the first intifada. Even then he was a moderate, arguing that Israeli public opinion could be a powerful weapon in the fight for a Palestinian state. "It was so clean and so noble," he recalls nostalgically. "It got lots of support." Even so, he was eventually arrested and served two years in jail. Then, in 1993, he suffered the worst blow of his life. His 17-year-old son Rami, who attended a school near one of the Jewish settlements, was caught in an outburst of violence. He was trying to help a wounded classmate when an Israeli sniper shot him through the heart. "There are two ways to deal with your suffering," Mr. Ghazzawi says. "You can let it torture you, or you can use it for healing." He joined a group of bereaved parents from both sides of the conflict, and spoke publicly for peace. "My son was killed by the system. Not by the Israelis or the Jews, but by a system." Last year, he and an Israeli mother won an international award -- the Sakharov Prize -- for their work. He obtained permission to travel to the ceremony in Europe via Tel Aviv, but, before he got anywhere, he was stopped at the checkpoint. By the time the confusion was cleared up, he had decided -- as a form of protest -- not to go. Respect and honour are powerful ideas in Arab culture. And so the checkpoint harassments are felt by Palestinians as almost a primal humiliation. At the checkpoint returning to Ramallah, we pass streams of people on foot lugging their shopping. The checkpoint is a great leveller, making pedestrians out of all -- rich and poor, university professors in coats and ties and ancient grandmothers in traditional dress. On the Bir Zeit side, the street vendors have set up shop in case people have forgotten to buy something in town. They're hawking produce, peanuts, shish kebab, flowers. On the Ramallah side, our taxi driver, Yusef, has had his ID confiscated.
