by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
According to the Israeli military, a total of fifty-six Israeli soldiers and border police officers have been killed at checkpoints and roadblocks since the Second Intifada began, in September 2000. In 2003 two were shot dead south of Jerusalem by a Palestinian man carrying a rifle rolled up in a prayer rug. In December 2004 members of Hamas and Fatah tunneled several hundred yards to place more than a ton of explosives beneath a checkpoint in Rafah, near the Egyptian border with Gaza. The attack killed five soldiers. And in December 2005 a Palestinian passing through the Qalandia checkpoint, right where I had walked, fatally stabbed a soldier in the neck.
Omer (the Israel Defense Forces let me talk to him on the condition that I not use his last name, or the last names of any of his soldiers) is a wiry, affable, red-haired man of twenty-six who commands a company of the elite 202 Paratrooper Battalion. His company consisted of about a hundred young army conscripts, and in the fall of 2004 they occupied a base camp atop a hill between Ramallah and Nablus, where I stayed for almost two weeks. The base is located just off a major highway known as the 60 Road.
The 60 Road runs north-south through the entire West Bank and is the main connection between the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In ancient times the route extended all the way north to Damascus and as far south as Beersheva. The problem with the 60 Road, Omer told me, is that it has become a thruway for terrorists. The security fence has yet to be completed in Jerusalem and many areas in the south—one reason, according to the military, that on August 31, 2004, ten days before my arrival in Israel, suicide bombers from Hebron were able to kill sixteen people in two separate attacks on buses in Beersheva. More recently other bombers have increasingly used the 60 Road to travel south from the politically turbulent cities of the north. So in addition to Hawara and the other permanent checkpoints along the road, the Israeli army deploys units like Omer’s to patrol it. “A suicide bomber traveling from Nablus to Jerusalem will have to go right past us—and we’ll try to stop him,” Omer told me. His company sets up flying checkpoints, conducts surveillance missions, and makes nighttime arrests in nearby Arab villages, usually acting on tips from the Shin Bet.
Omer has already served nearly eight years in the army. He still carries shrapnel in his leg from fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the late 1990s, yet he is nostalgic for those days, because in that job he was engaged in actual combat, which to him is real soldier’s work. “The Hezbollah warrior was like me, dressed up like me—he had a gun,” Omer told me one afternoon in his command trailer. “When one of our guys fell, it was like, hey, they were shooting, we were shooting. It was an army for us. It was sexier. And there was no question in terms of the conflict. There was Hezbollah, a clearly terrorist organization. But here the mission is trickier to explain to the soldiers—what you’ve achieved in terms of terrorism, how you buy time, buy intelligence, and at the end you will catch them.”
He continued the comparison. In the West Bank “the collateral damage is unbelievably higher,” he said. “In Lebanon the villages were either with you or against you—they’d fight alongside you, or else shoot back. Here the collateral damage in moral terms is unbelievably problematic, and that’s a serious problem in the long term.”
Innocent civilians, in other words, are inevitably damaged by the army’s work in the territories. “Searching a house, looking for a gun, taking in nineteen-to twenty-one-year-old kids and telling them it’s okay to turn the house upside down to find one gun. It’s bad for the guy’s four children in there—that’s obvious. But what’s not plain until the fifteenth time is that it’s bad for you.”
The United States invaded Iraq about eighteen months before my conversation with Omer. At the time, it was not clear that American soldiers would still be there years later. Nor did we know that among the duties of American soldiers in places like Tikrit, Mosul, and Baghdad there would be a lot of what Israeli soldiers had long been doing in the occupied territories: canvassing hostile neighborhoods, arresting people and pressuring them for intelligence, invading homes, worrying constantly about being killed. Except, of course, that the situation in Iraq was more combustible and lethal by several orders of magnitude. (In Iraq, roadsides are the most dangerous place for a soldier. Around 70 percent of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been caused by roadside IEDs.) When Omer referred to how occupation duty could mess a soldier up, it took me several months to begin to understand that this was what it was going to be like for American troops.
Israeli soldiers are posted to checkpoints for anywhere from two to six months; three months is typical. Before its current assignment, on the 60 Road between Ramallah and Nablus, Omer’s company had spent a little more than three months at Hawara. Most of the Hawara posting, he freely admitted, had been exhausting and dispiriting. In rotating shifts the soldiers spent eight hours on duty, eight hours off, with few breaks. Every day five thousand Palestinians—a mass of humanity with whom it was difficult to communicate—passed through Hawara. Many of them were inclined to ignore, or even argue with, the soldiers’ orders. Against this backdrop Omer’s soldiers had to be ever on the lookout for the person in the crowd who might be wired to blow them up.
Fortunately for company morale, two incidents toward the end of their posting showed that hard work could pay dividends. In the first a female soldier, looking in the large gym bag of a ten-year-old boy, discovered a cell phone with wires attached, and beneath it a bomb. When questioned, the boy seemed to know nothing about the bomb. Apparently a man near the checkpoint just a few minutes earlier had offered him a few shekels to carry the bag through, presumably to move the bomb a little closer to Israel. But Omer said that soldiers also were taught to worry about the “default threat”: the chance that the bomber, once discovered, would set off the bomb when it was close to soldiers. (The life of the boy, in that case, would be sacrificed to the cause.)
This paratrooper’s T-shirt shows army rifles facing down a suicide bomber outside Nablus (notice the bomber’s explosive vest). “They promised me 72 virgins in heaven,” reads the shirt, “but instead I got the soldiers of August 03 at the checkpoint.”
The second incident came nine days later. A soldier of Omer’s named Doron, nineteen years old and from the city of Rishon Lezion, just south of Tel Aviv, had been in charge of a checkpoint line that morning. He told me what happened: “It was maybe two p.m., and the Shin Bet called me and said, ‘There’s a bomber in your line!’ And I said, ‘What do they look like?’ They said, ‘Maybe a girl, maybe a boy, maybe fourteen, maybe sixteen.’ “ The Shin Bet monitors cell phone transmissions in the area around the checkpoint, and had overheard the bomber making a call. Doron immediately closed down the checkpoint and ordered everyone waiting in line to stand back and then to approach the soldiers one at a time for a thorough pat-down. “Then a kid—we said, ‘Remove the jacket,’ and he didn’t want to; he was shaking,” Doron recalled. “But then he did, and we could see something under his jersey. So we said, ‘Lift your shirt.’”
Meanwhile, Israeli military officials had called an Associated Press stringer in Nablus and arranged for a television camera to tape the incident—they wanted to be able to show the world the dangers faced by soldiers in the Palestinian territories. The first frames of the video show the boy lifting his shirt to expose a vest wired with explosives. Soldiers’ guns are trained on him and he has been moved away from other people. Next, a small remote-controlled robot rolls up and delivers the boy a pair of scissors. He uses them to cut off the vest. Then he steps away from it and is arrested. Soldiers explode the bomb.
Omer said that once the boy was sitting down, reclothed, and eating yogurt in a debriefing room, he told intelligence officers that the militants had assured him that soldiers would inevitably kill him if he were caught—that they were, after all, Israeli, and all Israelis were devils. He seemed shocked to be speaking to human beings. Omer also told me that he believes the phenomenon of children carrying bombs and women “sui
ciding” with them is one his side unwittingly created, because kids fifteen and under don’t need IDs to get through a checkpoint, and women’s paperwork sometimes isn’t checked.
Afterward, as a souvenir of the episode, Omer’s soldiers had a T-shirt made with a likeness of the boy and a caption that read, “They promised me 72 virgins in heaven, but instead I got the soldiers of August 03 at the checkpoint.”
After doing their time at the Hawara checkpoint, Omer and his company spent a few high-adrenaline months in Nablus, a city roiling with politics and rebellion. The Israelis considered it to be a major source of terrorism. Their experiences were both terrible and, to hear Omer tell it, thrilling. Under cover of night they would slip into town—sometimes in an armored vehicle, sometimes on foot, occasionally disguised—to arrest suspects. They drove through the impoverished Balata refugee camp, on the southeast edge of Nablus, attempting to draw fire from insurgents in order to discover their hideouts. They demolished the dwellings of Palestinians who, according to intelligence reports, had engaged in attacks against Israel. In one incident a Palestinian boy threw a stone that broke Omer’s nose. In another Omer’s second-in-command was ambushed, and Omer himself, coming from behind an ambulance that had been called to the scene, walked right into a boy who was holding a lighted Molotov cocktail. Omer shot him reflexively fourteen or fifteen times “in the legs”—“but he died.”
Omer and some of his soldiers also recall having to drive into Nablus, in broad daylight on a number of occasions, to rescue buddies whose vehicles had become trapped or disabled. During some of these missions residents on rooftops assaulted the vehicles with an assortment of heavy objects, ranging from cinder blocks to an oven. I asked one of Omer’s drivers, a dark-humored man named Adam, which parts of Nablus were the most dangerous. Which were the bad spots? “All of Nablus is a bad spot,” he muttered.
One day Omer drove me up the hill overlooking the Hawara checkpoint, past an Israeli-only road leading to Bracha, a Jewish settlement of 400 to 450 people (checkpoint soldiers have barracks there, too), and, a little higher up, through an ancient town of Samaritans. (Famous for helping strangers, as in the New Testament’s parable of the Good Samaritan, the group practices what they claim is the true religion of the Israelites, one different in various ways from Judaism. Samaritans are now Israeli citizens.) The hill, which is called Mount Gerizim, is mentioned in the Old Testament; Abraham, having just received the promise from God “I will make of thee a great nation,” had brought his tribe to set up camp in the oak grove between Gerizim and Mount Ebal, a hill to the north. Out of that camp grew the biblical city of Shechem, which today is Nablus, home to 300,000 Palestinians. It’s an affront to many of them, and illustrative of the problems facing this region, that Israeli road signs refer to their city not as Nablus but as Shechem.
My mental image of Nablus, based on the descriptions of soldiers I talked to, was of a large, foul-smelling slum. So I was surprised to see gleaming white buildings, many of them tall and invitingly perched on either side of a valley. At least from a distance, Nablus was beautiful. But to Omer the view was less glorious. He pointed out one landmark after another where bad things had happened to him and his company. As we made our descent, he pointed out a building that the soldiers called the Disco: it was a Palestinian party hall that the paratroopers had taken over during the tensions of 2002 in order to provide the settlers with additional protection. One night, as the soldiers slept, two Palestinian militants attacked, killing a sergeant and a lieutenant before they themselves were killed. Losing those two soldiers seemed to be Omer’s most painful experience, and yet I could see that some part of him really wanted me to know what had happened in Nablus. It had been his idea to come here. Weeks later, when I met up again with Omer and told him I had gone back to Nablus alone, he seemed amazed—and also a bit envious.
Israeli civilians are forbidden by military order to enter Palestinian towns; indeed, it would be dangerous for most of them to do so. But I’d been told it wouldn’t necessarily be dangerous for me, as a non-Israeli and a non-Jew. It felt very strange to cross sides, but I was spending a few days on one side and then a few days on the other. I wanted to understand the checkpoints around Nablus from a Palestinian point of view. One way to do this, I thought, would be in the company of a Palestinian commuter, and I found one in the person of Abdul-Latif M. Khaled.
Abdul-Latif, a hydrologist, is a tall, well-dressed man in his late thirties who was educated in the Netherlands. He lives not in Nablus but in Jayyus, a village about twenty miles to the west, a literal stone’s throw from Israel. His daily commute had once been an easy thirty minutes, he told me. Now between home and office loomed two permanent checkpoints and as many as five flying checkpoints, and the trip often took more than two hours each way. I met Abdul-Latif in his office in Nablus and attended his presentation at a nearby hotel to officials from more than two dozen local villages on the subject of water conservation. At day’s end, we boarded a shared “service taxi”—an aging yellow Mercedes station wagon typical of the semi-public transportation available in the West Bank—for the journey to his house in Jayyus.
As the two of us settled into the taxi, he chatted with the other passengers about the evening checkpoint situation, trying to assess what lay ahead. It was the Palestinian version of a radio traffic report. There was no alternate route, but at least he would know what to expect.
After passing through a flying checkpoint inside Nablus, we disembarked from the taxi at Beit Iba, a dusty neighborhood on the city’s northwestern edge, and walked to a terminal-style checkpoint similar to the ones at Qalandia and Hawara. With roughly 250 people massed in front of us, Abdul-Latif predicted that it would take us about half an hour to get through, assuming all went well. When I sighed, he told me just to be glad we weren’t there on a Thursday afternoon, when the students at nearby An-Najah National University headed home for the weekend. Their numbers, he said, usually swelled the queue to several hundred.
After fifteen or twenty minutes the tides and currents of the crowd separated us, and I found myself pushed up against a man in a checked shirt—or, rather, pushed up against his satellite dish. Apparently he planned to hand-carry the waist-high dish through the queue. This seemed absurd at first, but it soon occurred to me that he probably had no other choice, and so I did what I could to help. Others did too. Before long the crowd had deposited me at the turnstile just ahead of him.
As I waited in a short line to reach the soldier who would examine my papers, I heard a clanking and saw that the satellite dish was stuck in the turnstile. Undeterred, the man in the checked shirt managed to dislodge the dish and started sliding it through a set of vertical bars next to the turnstile. When the job was almost finished, I reached over to help steady the satellite dish against the bars on my side.
Big mistake. The soldier in whose queue I was waiting stood up and shouted at me, demanding that I come directly to the front. His English wasn’t good, but he made it clear that I had broken the rules and that he was not happy about it. I was very apologetic; it was my first time through this checkpoint, I said, and I hadn’t realized I was doing anything wrong. When he took my passport and Israeli press pass, I thought I was going to be okay. But he pointed to the back of the sea of humanity in which I had recently been adrift and declared, “End of line!” Startled by this punishment, I tried to stall, promising it wouldn’t happen again. Abdul-Latif, who was in front of the next soldier over, began to argue on my behalf. For his troubles he was sent away to the holding pen, a small area of hard benches behind a clump of bushes, which was filled with eight or nine other men who, for whatever reason, had run afoul of the authorities. Still I dug in my heels. “End of line!” screamed the soldier.
As I started to turn back, a silent alarm seemed to go off among the soldiers: something had gone wrong toward the back of the line. My tormentor and five other soldiers picked up their M4s and ran outside the shed, quickly disappearing into the crowd.
The checkpoint was now officially closed.
Twenty minutes later the soldiers returned and slowly resumed their duties. No explanation was offered, and the crowd was so big that I couldn’t see what had caused the ruckus. The soldiers were uniformly young and dull-eyed, their burnout showing through and through. I approached my soldier again, and he began to reexamine my passport with an air of studied indifference. Abdul-Latif could see me from the pen and started shouting at the soldiers. They ignored him.
The soldier called over his commander, who asked me questions for fifteen minutes or so before deciding to let me pass. Abdul-Latif, however, had to stay. I walked past the soldiers and took up a position at the far end of the terminal to wait for him. The indignity of the regimen was hard to watch, but somehow it was especially unsettling to see a person of Abdul-Latif’s stature treated disrespectfully: it was like a slam at Palestinian social structure. Several times he pointed at me; I feared that for championing my cause, he might get himself beaten up.
But after about twenty minutes the soldiers decided to let him go. Abdul-Latif was red in the face when he told me that his detention would have continued had he not been able to point at me and tell the soldiers about the bad publicity they were creating for themselves. When I blamed myself for his problems, he brushed it off. Before they would release him, he said, he had been forced to say, “I am namrood.” He asked if I knew what that meant, and I said it sounded like “nim-rod”—“idiot”? “troublemaker”? Yes, he said, though in Arabic it was more like “naughty.”