New Kids on the (concrete) Block

Here in the occupied West Bank people and cultures are separated by concrete blocks. The West Bank is still 90% Israel. A few key towns were given back by the Israelis as a minimum part of the Oslo Accords but they are surrounded by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) who enforce an oppressive blockade. Part of our task here is to mount a Check Point Watch. Palestinians are daily beaten and provoked by the IDF and the thugs of the Border Police. The point being to create a constant state of tension at these check points. Violence occurs suddenly, a woman is pushed a little too hard, tempers flare and the Israeli response is sudden and deadly.
We spent yesterday watching the chaos of the Ramallah check point. We rang our contact to be
given a job. ‘Go to the check point and just be there’, she told us. We took the service cab with a dozen Palestinians. 200 yards from the check point we stopped in a chaotic traffic jam. Some vehicles are allowed in, others must drop their passengers and move on. The Israelis provide no traffic lights, no traffic police and no turning space. This is traffic calming IDF style. A deliberate bottleneck to cause chaos. Tempers are already hot as some vehicles have passes and others not, some trying to turn around, some hoping to get through, others confident they can get through. Occasionally an ambulance needs to get in. All of this surrounded by watch towers and guns. As it got dark we reaslised that the last 2 sets of street lights were switched off and there was no floodlighting. So here we were in no-mans land with hundreds of vehicles, hundreds of people on foot, only 9 IDF on the ground and it was pitch black. The check point itself had no real physical structure, just some concrete blocks with people wandering around them, soldiers shouting at us to stop, grabbing some of us and looking at documents, letting others just run through. As it got dark these 9 conscript troops were increasingly nervous as Palestinians pushed to get through. Three days ago they had just opened up on them, killing one.
This chaos was not accidental. It is a military strategy, designed to oppress and murder.
Our being here meant that this strategy could not work. We mingled with Palestinians, each wanting to shake our hands and talk about, well, anything from Manchester United to ‘current world events’. Kids spend a few hours after school provoking the IDF, or now, new fun, running circles around the strange Inglishhh. The IDF keep ordering us back, but there’s too much going on, so we stay, in the middle of no-mans land, taking photos, video, the piss. One of our new friends sends some food up to us, a Hamas man warmly thanks us. Two of us have wrecked an army’s strategy, but only for a few hours.
Photo of Kids at Ramallah check point.
Photo of Israeli fortress at Bethlehem.