Gendered Checkpoints
In my spare time, I volunteer with a recently formed
group called International Checkpoint Watch (ICW), and it is this volunteering
that I want to talk about now. The
purpose of ICW is to monitor and document the human rights violations taking
place at Israeli military checkpoints against Palestinian citizens.
'Checkpoints' are said to be in place to ensure the security of Israel,
though they often serve as nothing more than centers where soldiers humiliate,
detain, harass, and beat Palestinian civilians.
The checkpoints are very much representative of the inequality that
exists in power here, somehow these checkpoint symbolize the mentality of 'might
is right'. Furthermore, I am being
made aware that so much of these checkpoints, and this conflict in general, is
either sexualized or gendered in some way.
The following is what I heard and saw, as a foreign woman, a few nights
ago.
Myself and my ICW partner, who is a German woman and a
student, arrived at the Qalandia Checkpoint, which divides Ramallah and
Jerusalem, at around 6:30 pm. There
is a long fence at Qalandia that the Israeli army put up to keep Palestinians
out of the area they have assumed as their new military zone.
There is a cement wall at one spot in this fence and on it three soldiers
are standing. Like all Israeli
soldiers, they are dressed in green fatigues, big bullet-proof vests, helmets
and automatic weapons. They are positioned at the top of the fence with their guns
pointed out towards the people, ready to shoot at a young stone thrower perhaps,
or just pointing their guns so that everyone can be kept in-check by that
particular feeling that comes when you are aware of a gun being pointed at you.
These soldiers see us arrive and they wave to us.
Even from fifty meters away they know who we are and why we're there by
our blond hair. The blondness of
our hair, which is not common and generally draws considerable attention from
men in this part of the world, makes it clear that we are outsiders where ever
we go. Our hair seems to say here:
'We are western, we are easy, and we are fair game to any comment, or gesture,
or sometimes even touching, that any man here wishes to make at us.
These soldiers' waves are both surprising and in a way intimidating.
What did these waves mean? "We know that you're here watching us and
we don't care" is my best guess. We
know for sure, these waves are mocking us.
Within a minute of us arriving, the soldiers at the fence start shooting. I assume that this shooting was supposed to work as deterrence for some boys who had been creeping closer and closer to the fence, rocks in hand. It generally scared everyone into panic. We ducked behind a car, other women who were walking began screaming and running, many dragging their children behind them. Some more shooting and a few smoke and sound bombs later, the soldiers must have decided that the boys had backed up far enough, and the shooting stopped. The windshield of the car we were hiding behind had been shot out. Lacking much of the confidence that we had before, we emerged from our hiding spot, wrote down, with a shaky hand, what had happened and continued to watch what was taking place.
As we were observing, counting the number of soldiers,
jeeps and tanks present and counting the number of cars waiting to be searched,
one soldier approached us and told us to leave.
(This soldier was not one of the soldiers standing on the fence, he was
part of another group of soldiers who were searching the cars and questioning
the Palestinians wishing to cross)
"This is not your problem", he shouted, "Go
away"
We told him that we were just watching and that we were not
going to leave.
He shrugged, pointed to his chest, and said in a flat tone
that he was "just doing his job."
Pen in hand I asked him "Exactly what is your
job?"
"What is my job?" he replied. "None of your
business", and he turned his back.
When he said this, another soldier turned and walked
towards us.
"I'll tell you what our job is," he said as he
approached us. "Our job is to
look for sexy Arab women to make erotic videos with".
Disbelieving that I had heard him correctly, while at the same time realizing that he thought he was flirting with me, I repeated, "You're looking for sexy Arab women?"
"That's right", he laughed, and several of
the other soldiers around him also laughed.
You probably have to be here to understand the
pervertedness of what this soldier said. There
is nothing more grotesque than being hit on by a man carrying a machine gun.
Nothing that makes you sick to your stomach like having a soldier's gun
touch your body as he asks your name and where you come from.
Palestinian women know this all too well. Although it hasn't made the CNN news, women here live with
the constant threat of being harassed, humiliated, degraded and assaulted by
Israeli soldiers who think that they're funny.
In a Muslim environment, where a woman's 'honor' is valued above almost
everything else, many women are confined to their homes by their families from
fear of what the soldiers might do or say to them. Unfortunately, women here don't need this extra pressure to
limit them to their homes, their own culture provides enough obstacles as it is.
Palestinian women's freedom (of movement, from poverty, and from domestic
violence) within their society seems to be attached to a rope that has the
Israeli occupation on the other end. They
pull each other in opposite directions.
I asked this soldier how old he was, to which he replied
"Nineteen"
Disgusted, and still barely being able to digest my
disgust, I wrote in my notepad and read out loud so that to make it clear to him
that I was recording our conversation, "Nineteen year-old soldier with
automatic weapon is here to look for sexy Arab women to make erotic videos"
"Oh, you don't like my gun?" he questioned.
"Do you know why you don't need a gun? Because you have tits!"
I was shocked and somewhat confused. "We don't need a
gun because we have tits?", I repeated.
"Yes, that's why", he laughed.
Though the soldier was aiming to be vulgar, not factual,
there is some truth to his offensiveness. There
definitely is a correlation here between men and guns; in general, it is men who
have them, and men who fire them. But the connection between men with guns and women's suffrage
is ingrained. Indeed, just a few
days ago, on the news I saw a Palestinian man shooting a machine gun into the
air at the funeral of an assassinated Palestinian political leader.
When interviewed by the reporter, this man's statement was; "We will
make Israeli women widows as Israel has made our women widows!"
Why does women's pain become such a focal point in conflict?
Why are words like widowed, refugee, raped, starved, and dishonoured
bonded to images of women?
At this point the soldiers had been so busy justifying why
they have guns and talking about our 'tits' that they had not let a single car
pass through the checkpoint for over fifteen minutes. There were over fifty cars waiting to be let through, one of
them honked, and this started the rest honking too.
Remembering that my job was to remind these soldiers that it is illegal
to be detaining people in this way, and knowing that most of these cars
contained fathers who just wanted to get home to their families, I asked the
soldiers if they would please let some of these cars through.
One of the soldiers nodded, "I'll tell you what"
he grinned. "If they have tits
we'll let them through".
He then waved for one of the cars to pull up next to him,
where he then stuck his head into the driver's window, looked directly at the
chest of the man driving, then stepped back away from the car and let him drive
through.
"No tits", he yelled to us with a shrug as he
waved for the next car to pull up towards him.
When this car approached he asked the man inside if he
spoke English. The man nodded and
the soldier asked him "Do you have tits?"
The man, clearly not understanding what the soldier had
said, answered nervously in broken English "I have, I have".
This caused all of the soldiers to bend over with laughter,
and two of the soldiers even gave each other a high-five. The soldier who had
questioned the man was laughing so hard he couldn't speak to tell the man to go,
so he just waved until the man drove away.
I imagined what it would feel like if my father was the
man in that car who was asked if he had 'tits'. If it were my father who had to tell a nineteen-year-old boy
with a gun that he had tits before the boy would let him come home after work.
Writing this now, thinking of this again, fills me with such shame,
embarrassment, and a secret relief that none of my family is here.
It had gotten dark. The
soldiers' game went on for a few more cars, then we heard shooting.
We turned and saw that the three soldiers who had been by the fence had
been joined by about twelve more, and they were lined up along the fence at the
top of a hill shooting at a group of boys whose number had also grown
considerable since the last time I looked.
When the soldiers would shoot the boys would hide behind big rocks or in
ditches, then when the shooting stopped they would stand up and continue
throwing stones at the fence.
Before I continue I should explain that stone throwing is
a boy thing, much like football was a boy thing in Canada when I was growing up.
I think that some of the girls here would like to throw stones, but
little girls aren’t allowed out alone like boys are, and the general timidness
that is expected of females just doesn't have room for rock chucking.
We left the checkpoint where we were standing, the soldiers
calling and teasing after us (the shooting apparently didn't warrant their
attention). We walked towards the
sounds of the shooting so that we could more closely observe.
However, we had only walked about 20 meters when the soldiers fired
several canisters of teargas down the hill to disperse the boys, and we were
forced to turn back for a few minutes because the gas was so strong.
My partner began coughing and waving her hands in front of her eyes.
I leaned her back and flushed her eyes with water from our water bottle
and after about five minutes the air had cleared enough that we could again
begin walking towards the hill.
With the gas clearing, the group of boys had also started
to congregate again at the hill's bottom. Again
there was shooting. We crouched
down. When I looked up I saw a boy,
not older than 13, running from the hill towards the road.
In his arms he was carrying a much smaller boy, and that boy was limp in
his arms. People started yelling
and shouting, and an ambulance, that had been waiting around the corner incase
someone was indeed injured, raced into the main street, opened the back doors,
and pulled both of the boys inside. The
ambulance sped away, and we tried to ask the other little boys what had
happened. They all told me that the
younger boy had been shot, but they all were unsure where.
Several told me that the bullet had hit the boy in the head, but I had no
way of knowing for certain if this was true.
What can I tell you besides that this was the lowest
moment of my entire life? What can I tell you about how it feels to watch a
child be shot and be able to do nothing? At
that very moment, I thought about what the soldiers had said to us, the
sickening irony, and wondered if whether that boy wouldn't have been shot if
only he had 'tits'. What is the
connection between what those soldiers said and this boy?
How do these two images relate in my head?
It took me three days to find out what had happened to that boy.
Finally I managed to track down the doctor who treated him who told me
that the boy had indeed been shot in the head by a rubber-coated metal bullet.
The boy was alive, he told me, though it was unclear how much he would
recover. The doctor did not tell me
the boy's name.
I am so grateful that his boy has not been added to the
list of child martyrs, that his mother has not been added to the long list of
mourning women. Truthfully, I am
relieved that I do not have to live knowing that I once saw a little boy
murdered. But, I'm still dealing
with an overcoming sadness over what I saw, that this boy is now among the
thousands injured and disabled, and that his mother is among the thousands of
women who will spend the rest of their lives caring for those who have been
disabled and disfigured by this violent occupation.
I am saddened because I know that the family of this boy, everyone who
knows the family of this boy, and all of those who saw him shot are now filled
with a new sense of anger and hatred, and that this anger and hatred will lead
to more shot little boys.
My ICW partner and I were the only women, among many men,
who had witnessed what had happened. It
is only because we are foreigners that our presence is in any way acceptable.
We stayed hidden behind another car for quite a while, asking for
information from men and boys similarly hidden behind cars near by.
Once the situation had calmed considerably, we decided to head home,
hitching a ride into Ramallah's downtown.
Now away from the checkpoint, our clothes are covered in
dirt, our hair filled with dust, and we were tired mentally and physically.
We walked down the streets, separating to go in our own directions.
As I walked alone, absorbing in my mind everything that had happened, men
honked and whistled at me from their cars up until I reached my front door.
-By Sky McLaughlin