To be fair, this checkpoint has its advantages, most notably the fact that waiting here makes you experience time in its purest form. As Samuel Beckett famously observed, it doesn't get purer than this. Indeed, to quote Ronan McDonald in his Cambridge Introduction, Chapter 3, page 67, second sentence: 'Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in the hours he spent at the Qalandiya checkpoint between 1948 and 1949 while he was teaching Absurdist Literature at Birzeit University.'
The Palestinians, too, are waiting absurdly for their Homeland to arrive and pass time aimlessly. For Salah al-Din days at the checkpoints have become theatre, full of dramatic tensions. He let's a woman cut in line and processed, only to see that line closed a minute later when it's his turn. He observes "jetsetters" in town for a tan, given priority processing.
Salah Al-Din (even the name suggests noisy pointless prayers) enters into a revealing dialogue with a checkpoint guard, a Russian Jew emigre, who takes a liking to al-Din's wit, but who is an unshakeable bureaucrat. Al-Din refuses to tell the guard about his past but is invited to project the future:
'I am the one who will free Jerusalem, and bring the sun back to Haifa. I'm the one who will demolish this whole damn checkpoint and bulldoze it over your grandfathers' graves. I'm the one who will single-handedly bring back all the refugees, and deliver self-determination to the entire Arab world, I'm the one -'
'But you're Kurdish. Why are you bothered about the Arabs?'
'And you're Russian. What do you care about Palestine?'
Pasts and futures merge into a frictional present. But mostly diaspora Jews come from everywhere to settle in the Promised Land -- at the Palestinians's expense.
Americans aren't all that keyed-in or motivated to "help" the Palestinians fight the Israelis in courts and at the United Nations to secure their native homeland. People seem to have forgotten that the area of occupation -- the whole region now known as Israel -- was once, not long ago, on the map as Palestine. As mentioned earlier, settlers to West Bank have ruined Palestinian society and self-governance with their settlements, which expropriate Palestinian lands by armed and often-fanatical Zionists, who divide the West Bank with private roads. According to a 2015 Newsweek piece, Americans Jews are "over-represented" as settlers and, since the Oslo Accords in 1993, have helped grow the settler population from 110, 000 to 400, 000 and "helping make the two-state solution impossible." "Why are so many US citizens moving to the West Bank?" is a recent and brief interview with settlers worth watching for its exploration of motivations:
What's left out of those interviews is the hypocrisy and unmitigated evil some of these settlers bring with them to the West Bank. These Americans could not do, and would probably fight to make sure it never happened, what they do in the West Bank -- bulldozing homes, creating barriers, and jigsaw private roads that cut off Palestinians from each other and require hours spent at checkpoints. A lot of these settlers go to Palestine (Israel) because the land is cheap, they are welcome, and it's beautiful where they are going. But they are helping participate in an Apartheid system to obtain and sustain a contradictory lifestyle. This seems to be a facet of ugly Americanism that is common throughout the world -- American lower middle class expats going to other countries, living often rent-free, high off the hog (as it were), and lording over the locals, enjoying the privilege of hiring the locals as servants for paltry wages, etc. Then blithely back to democracy and good behavior. Oy!
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