the passengers' eyes reflected a mixture of shame, oppression, anger and disapproval. They stared brokenly at the floor; silence was the new passenger they had taken on.
This simple, editorially well-placed story sets the tone for the reader's expectations and depiction of a lifestyle that includes multiple checkpoints per day.
In the ironically titled, "A Tragic Ending," Mahmoud Shukair titillates the reader with the tale of Hatem, a man in search of women. A kind of subplot sees his friend Muawiya, a local wannabe politician, going around "loudly pontificating about 'the nation' and 'the people' so everyone could hear." Politics are largely pointless in an occupied milieu, except for conning girls into believing in your 'power'. Dramatic tension is built into his suspicion that he's being tailed by an "informant," a possibility he might find useful as he runs for local office. A girl might like to shmortle a guy who is so unliked by the IDF he draws a peeping shadow. We get pictures of Hatem's hirsute next-door-neighbor girl who frequently comes on to him, lifting her dress to reveal her hairy but sensual legs. "He had never taken a liking to her, even though she was so kind-hearted that it verged on stupidity."
Instead, he's randy for a scantily clad Randa, who he has espied without drawing her attention; he comes to realize his love for her will be unrequited when she moves her talents to America after marrying her cousin. Aziza is a married woman with a surplus of sensual commodities with whom Hatem carries on an affair, until she is almost caught red-honeyed by her husband; Hatem, climbing out a window just in time, hears screams of torture coming from the honey pot. He moves to the city. In the end, he ends up with the hairy woman. Shukair's tale is a clever and comical suggestion of the idleness (and boredom) of men in Ramallah -- they're either getting laid or running for office. (In America, it often amounts to the same thing.) Shukair seems uninterested in promoting any seriousness regarding politics -- Palestinians have no power, and Muawiya is no resistance fighter. But the subtle humor suggests Boccaccio or 1001 Nights.
But there is no humor in the Occupation of the West Bank and the 'lifestyle' it imposes on Palestinians. The swisscheesification of the West Bank has led to communities separated by private Israeli roads with checkpoints everywhere, a situation making a two-state solution almost impossible. The Oslo Accords, on paper, provided more autonomy and self-rule to Palestinians, but such 'progress' is subverted by the infrastructure that connects Israeli settlements. As Al-Hayat notes in the introduction,
(Although Ramallah was designated an 'Area A', in the Oslo II Accord, meaning it had full civil and security control, and was out of bounds for Israelis, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) still dominate the network of roads surrounding it, many of which are bypasses that only Israeli citizens can use, servicing the many expropriated land settlements that have sprung up throughout the West Bank in the years since Oslo).
It is hard to grasp the accommodation required to make this situation palatable or even practical from the point-of-view of centralized governance.
The absurdity of this situation is brought out wonderfully in "At the Qalandiya Checkpoint," by Ameer Hamad. The reader is introduced to an irascible narrator who was born at a checkpoint, his father running in his underwear from Jerusalem to Nablus to get there for the birth. The father nicknames his son Salah al-Din, after the legendary anti-Crusader who defended the Holy Land from invaders. Salah al-Din grumbles and grouses about all the time he and others have spent at checkpoints. He tells us about checkpoints in other countries, such as Sweden, their relative humanity:
There they will try to force you to read, study, listen to music or do yoga for hours on end; someone has even opened a pop-up cafe' called 'Love at the Checkpoint'.
But for al-Din and his compatriots, anthropologists reckon they've lost years waiting at checkpoints.
Hamad reflects on time, one of the things people do while waiting, and trots in Samuel Beckett for a cameo tap dance about time:
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