The Qalandia Checkpoint

First, some context: it’s been nearly a month since I’ve last posted, during which time much has happened in Egypt (elections, street violence, etc.) that I will try to write about in due time. For this post, however, I am skipping all of that in order to chronicle an experience I had last week as I was traveling in Israel and the West Bank with my friend Trevor. To all readers of the blog, Merry Christmas (belated), Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year (in advance).

The ride from Jerusalem to Ramallah is short. In less than hour, after zipping through the Qalandia checkpoint that separates Israel from the West Bank, Trevor and I found ourselves in the heart of Palestine. After spending two and a half days in Nablus and Ramallah (with quick trips to Bethlehem and Taybeh, a small village southeast of Ramallah that is home to the Arab world’s only microbrewery), we decided it was time to go back to Israel.

The ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem is long. After about 25 minutes, we arrived once again at Qalandia, where everyone on the bus jumped from their seats and clamored to get off as fast as possible as if their lives depended on it. Bemused, Trevor and I took our time exiting and had to retrieve our bags from underneath the bus. We had heard about the difficulties that Palestines faced in trying to pass through Qalandia, but we assumed that there would be some other way for foreigners like us to bypass that messy process and waltz back into Israel. There was not.

We assumed our place in line behind the rest of our bus in a space that can only be described as an animal pen built for humans. Metal bars on both sides of the corridor hemmed us in, and a revolving metal door at the end regulated the flow of traffic into the security area. No official was in sight, nor were there any guardrails that might have enabled us to line up in an orderly fashion. In the absence of supervision, jostling and pushing soon resulted in the formation of a giant blob of humanity pressed up against the walls and the gate.

The Qallandia Checkpoint (photo: www.holylanddispatches.blogspot.com)

Five people were allowed into the security area at a time. When they passed through, a buzzer above the gate emitted a prison-esque beep and the red light turned green. The revolving doors unlocked abruptly, and the blob pushed forward in an effort to squeeze through. This cattle carousel came to an abrupt end after five more people made it through, and there was often one unlucky person who found himself literally stuck in between the revolving metal doors and the bars on either side. Each prisoner stood with a forlorn, distant look in his face for a few minutes until the buzzer sounded again to let five more through.

We inched forward ever so slowly, and the congestion worsened significantly as we approached the gate. An older woman behind me clucked disapprovingly to her companion: “mithla hayawanat ihna!” (It's like we're animals!). In front, I watched through the bars as an old man was refused entry because his papers were not in order. He gestured angrily at the border guards (who were invisible from our vantage point), but finally threw up his hands in resignation and began to look for a way to return to the Palestinian side. There was no side door. Everyone waiting in and next to the metal gate had to move back to let him pass back the way he came, head down and cursing to himself.

After some time – I don’t remember how long exactly – we finally made it through the gate. As we were walking the several feet from the gate to the x-ray machine, an old woman walking between us didn’t see a piece of concrete sticking up on the ground, tripped over it, and fell onto her knees. The contents of her bag spilled onto the ground, and she looked up at me with a desperate, exhausted look that I will not soon forget. She picked herself up – no time to nurse your wounds in the no man’s land between the gate and security area – and shuffled forward.

We put our bags through an x-ray machine, walked through an unmonitored metal detector, and handed our passports to two Israeli soldiers sitting behind soundproof glass. I handed them my passport with stone-faced stare, mirroring the one I was receiving from the soldier. After flipping through it with a few cursory glances, he handed it back and waved me away dismissively. As I walked toward the bus that would take us from the checkpoint to Jerusalem, I was serenaded with one last buzzer sound and creak of the metal gate as five more humans – mithla hayawanat – pressed through.

Emotion Trumps Rationality

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 18-day Egyptian uprising in January and February was that the protesters were focused almost exclusively on the internal issues plaguing Egypt: unemployment, rising prices, corruption, etc. External issues that long played a major role in Egyptian political consciousness, primarily the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, were put on the backburner.

Any illusion that the Arab Spring would magically cure Egyptians’ dislike of Israel and lead them to focus more on fixing internal issues than settling external scores, however, was just that: an illusion. What little tolerance Egyptians had for the continuation of the status-quo in their country’s relationship with Israel after the revolution was reduced to nothing last month. In an effort to hunt down the Palestinian militants responsible for attacking a bus near Eilat, Israeli helicopters accidentally killed five Egyptian security officers in Sinai. That led to an outpouring of rage and serious protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, and the protests reached a new peak last night as protesters broke down the security wall and stormed into the embassy. Israel pulled out almost all of its diplomatic corps in Egypt in the middle of the night.

From a vantage point on our roof, we saw large groups of youth sprinting down the main street near our house towards the embassy. Ten minutes later, some of the same youth came sprinting back the other direction, just as a large group of riot police departed from the police station next to our house in the direction of the embassy. Smoke was rising in the distance from the embassy area, and sirens blared throughout the night. Rumor has it that Prime Minister Essam Sharaf and his cabinet may tender their resignations today.

Today, life on the streets is pretty much back to normal. In my personal opinion, however, the outbreak of these protests could not have come at a worse time. Elections are coming up in November and the electoral laws are still muddled and in need of urgent reform, serious fissures have emerged between the Islamists and the liberals, and dissatisfaction with the ruling military council continues to grow. Every ounce of energy spent engaging in Quixotic missions to break into the Israeli Embassy is one less ounce of energy spent focusing on the real problems that plague Egypt right now. There will most certainly be a time for Egyptians to have a serious debate about how they think their country should deal with Israel, but it is not now!
Furthermore, the last thing that Egypt needs is to give the military council an excuse to crackdown on dissent, which it might very well try to do in response to last night’s events.

Egyptians feel like their government has allowed Israel to run roughshod over them for more than thirty years, and the pro-Palestinian sentiment on the Egyptian street has always been strong. Currently, however, emotion is blinding rationality. Nothing productive can come out of the sort of raw expression of rage that Cairo witnessed last night. I just hope that the consequences are not too serious, either.