"something else is going on here..."

"you see these things and you realize, something else is going on here.  this is not about security." 

-- hannah

hannah, a 72 year old jewish israeli grandmother, speaks of the incredulousness of the bureaucracy that exists in regard to the operations of the checkpoints that litter the west bank and access to permits.  she met with our group as a representative of machsom watch (machsom is hebrew for barrier, though the group's name is generally translated as checkpoint watch).  she is one of 500 jewish israeli women (the majority of whom are her age, give or take a few years) who go out twice a day to monitor some 40 checkpoints within the west bank to observe, document, and assist with the interactions that take place between the soldiers and the palestinians.  her stories are incredible in nature, with the potential to cause us to laugh until we cry due to the ridiculous nature of it all, until we reconnect with the fact that these are not simply ludicrous stories but real life occurrences impacting real people.  

her fiery spirit and hutzpah (in the sense of her willingness to take risks for others) made me think i wouldn't want to mess with her even if i were a member of the IDF.

__________     __________     __________

"the cheese doesn't have a permit to cross"

one of hannah's stories had to do with a palestinian who delivers milk to a hospital in the west bank along with milk and cheese to some other areas.  he has been traveling the same route for numerous years, and she has gotten to know him over time.  regardless of the fact that he has a routine, the soldiers who operate the checkpoints frequently change.  so one day when he reached the first of a series of checkpoints on his way to ramallah, he faced a different soldier, who reviewed his permit that allows him to travel into these areas and his permit that allows him to take his car across the checkpoints, and was told he was not allowed to pass.  

"why not? i have the correct permits?" he asked.

the soldier replied, "you have a permit for yourself and you have a permit for your car, but the milk and cheese do not have a permit to cross."

after some time of going back and forth and involving hannah, he found another palestinian who had a specific permit for goods and began transferring all of the milk and cheese onto this man's truck.  they crossed to the other side of the checkpoint and then moved all of the milk and cheese back to his vehicle.  i should mention that this was on a summer day with the temperature in the upper 90s.

he set off and came to the next checkpoint, where he was told he could not pass and that he had to take a different route to a different checkpoint.  he did as he was told, coming to the assigned checkpoint and was told that he could not pass here; rather, he would need to return to the checkpoint from which he was just rerouted and pass there.  while these points are not all that far apart, can you imagine the complication of being shifted around this way and that for no apparent reason?  he tried to argue that the milk would spoil if he had to continue to go around and around, but to no avail.  hannah described that in her experience the israeli soldiers are never in a hurry or concerned for the time constraints of the palestinians: "they [the soldiers] are working an eight hour shift; they have all day for whatever will transpire.  there is no sense of urgency."  

eventually, he passed through one of these checkpoints and made his way to the hospital in ramallah.  he delivered the milk and continued to his next stop.  once again, he faced a checkpoint where "the cheese does not have a permit to cross."  he once again went through the trouble of transferring the goods to another man's truck to move it the 100 yards to the other side of the checkpoint and reload it in his own vehicle.

you must remember that each of these little disruptions is a major ordeal that takes a good deal of time (and sadly, you are missing hannah's elaborations and jewish idioms tossed into the story).

the story ends with the cheese going bad before reaching its final destination after an entire day to complete a transfer between towns that are less than an hour apart.

this was the mildest story she told.  

the most ludicrous was her attempt to help a family get a leg that had been amputated from an older family member to their town for burial.  it's a tradition in both the muslim and jewish faiths for body parts to be buried in the same place as the actual individual.  this fiasco required an official letter from the hospital documenting the amputation, the i.d. of the man who's leg it was, an inspection of the leg on three occasions to ensure it was a leg and not a bomb, which "stinks to high heaven" according to hannah, getting a doctor to come to the checkpoint and verify that the leg was in fact a leg of an old palestinian man and not the foot of an israeli (apparently there was an israeli who lost his foot and at one point the soldiers were convinced that this was the missing foot -- are you laughing yet?  don't forget this is real... so bizarre).  after something like eight hours, the leg continued on its journey.

the saddest story she shared was about a boy who had eye cancer who could not get to the hospital for treatment until her group intervened.  the details of this story are too many to recount here, but the father was never allowed to travel with him to the hospital for his treatment or his surgeries (he's had two) despite the fact that hannah came up with an elaborate plan to get permission for the father to accompany his son to the hospital which entailed handcuffing the father to her, using her personal car driven by someone from the israeli authorities, and ensuring that he would not bomb anything along the way... the israelis would have none of it.  eventually, permission was granted to the grandmother; she was given a one-day permit from 5:00 am to 5:00 pm to get the boy to a doctor.  the first hospital was not equipped to handle the cancer at the level to which it had progressed; the second hospital requires full payment from palestinians prior to treatment, which was an impossibility for the family; the third required that a parent, and not a grandparent, be present to grant permission for the boy to be treated.  all of this, and the rest of the story, occurred with an endless number of phone calls, extended permits, faxes, etc. etc. orchestrated by hannah to help this family deal with their child's terminal illness.

with each of her stories, hannah repeatedly stated that in her view, this occupation has nothing to do with security and that if you witness any of the realities facing palestinians, you can't help but see that something else is going on here...