The Everyday Politics of Confinement in Palestine
Posted on Apr 30, 2015
By Sandy Tolan, TomDispatch
This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction here.
The SUV slows as it approaches a military kiosk at a break in a dull gray wall. Inside, Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician, prepares his documents for the Israeli soldier standing guard. On the other side of this West Bank military checkpoint lies the young man’s destination, the ancient Palestinian town of Sebastia. Fellow musicians are gathering there that afternoon to perform in the ruins of an amphitheater built during Roman times. In the back seat, his wife, Celine, tends their one-year-old son, Hussein, his blond locks curling over the collar of his soccer jersey.
Ramzi is in a hurry to set up for the concert, but it doesn’t matter. The soldier promptly informs him that he cannot pass. “Those are the orders,” he adds without further explanation, directing him to another entrance 45 minutes away. Turning the car around, Ramzi then drives beneath Shavei Shomron, a red-roofed Israeli settlement perched high on a hill, and then an “outpost” of hilltop trailers planted by a new wave of settlers. Finally, he passes through a series of barriers and looping barbed wire, reaching the designated entrance, where another soldier waves him through. He arrives in time for the concert.
I witnessed the checkpoint incident, one of thousands of small daily indignities suffered by Palestinians, from the front seat of Ramzi’s SUV in 2010. We had met 12 years earlier when posters of Ramzi, pasted all over Ramallah, had captured my imagination. In a photo taken in 1988 during the first Palestinian intifada, eight-year-old Ramzi was hurling a stone at an unseen Israeli soldier. Juxtaposed behind it, on the same poster, was another photo taken 10 years later of 18-year-old Ramzi pulling a bow across viola strings.
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The poster was an advertisement for the National Conservatory of Music in Palestine and a metaphor for the hopes of many Palestinians at the time: that the era of the Oslo Peace Accords would bring an independent Palestinian state. In the story I produced at the time for National Public Radio, Ramzi expressed a double wish: to perform in the first national symphony orchestra of Palestine and someday to open music schools for Palestinian children.
“I want to see many conservatories opening up in all of Palestine,” he told me. A lovely dream, I thought, though an unlikely one for a teenager from a refugee camp who had been raised by his impoverished grandparents. Still, shortly thereafter, a determined Ramzi landed a scholarship to study the viola in France. A year or two later, we lost touch.
Then, in late 2009, in a chance encounter at a West Bank Italian restaurant, I saw Ramzi again. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “I thought you were still in France.”
“No, I’m back,” he replied. “I’ve opened a music school here in Palestine.” (It also has branches across the West Bank and in refugee camps in Lebanon.) In other words, exactly what he had told me he wanted to do as a teenager in the al-Amari refugee camp. Six months later, in June 2010, I began to document his dream—now a reality—to build a music school in occupied Palestine.
Now, his SUV bound for Sebastia is cutting through the West Bank, a land smaller than the state of Delaware but dotted with more than 600 checkpoints, earthen barriers, and other obstacles to normal travel. His detour and the incident that accompanied it are part of a system that hems Palestinians into ever more confined enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements over which looms Israel’s military presence. Yet this kind of everyday humiliation and confinement remains unknown to most Americans. Despite the torrents of press coverage here about Israel and its relationship with the United States, the daily reality of half the people in a century-old conflict is essentially off the American radar screen.
The SUV slows as it approaches a military kiosk at a break in a dull gray wall. Inside, Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician, prepares his documents for the Israeli soldier standing guard. On the other side of this West Bank military checkpoint lies the young man’s destination, the ancient Palestinian town of Sebastia. Fellow musicians are gathering there that afternoon to perform in the ruins of an amphitheater built during Roman times. In the back seat, his wife, Celine, tends their one-year-old son, Hussein, his blond locks curling over the collar of his soccer jersey.
Ramzi is in a hurry to set up for the concert, but it doesn’t matter. The soldier promptly informs him that he cannot pass. “Those are the orders,” he adds without further explanation, directing him to another entrance 45 minutes away. Turning the car around, Ramzi then drives beneath Shavei Shomron, a red-roofed Israeli settlement perched high on a hill, and then an “outpost” of hilltop trailers planted by a new wave of settlers. Finally, he passes through a series of barriers and looping barbed wire, reaching the designated entrance, where another soldier waves him through. He arrives in time for the concert.
I witnessed the checkpoint incident, one of thousands of small daily indignities suffered by Palestinians, from the front seat of Ramzi’s SUV in 2010. We had met 12 years earlier when posters of Ramzi, pasted all over Ramallah, had captured my imagination. In a photo taken in 1988 during the first Palestinian intifada, eight-year-old Ramzi was hurling a stone at an unseen Israeli soldier. Juxtaposed behind it, on the same poster, was another photo taken 10 years later of 18-year-old Ramzi pulling a bow across viola strings.
“I want to see many conservatories opening up in all of Palestine,” he told me. A lovely dream, I thought, though an unlikely one for a teenager from a refugee camp who had been raised by his impoverished grandparents. Still, shortly thereafter, a determined Ramzi landed a scholarship to study the viola in France. A year or two later, we lost touch.
Then, in late 2009, in a chance encounter at a West Bank Italian restaurant, I saw Ramzi again. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “I thought you were still in France.”
“No, I’m back,” he replied. “I’ve opened a music school here in Palestine.” (It also has branches across the West Bank and in refugee camps in Lebanon.) In other words, exactly what he had told me he wanted to do as a teenager in the al-Amari refugee camp. Six months later, in June 2010, I began to document his dream—now a reality—to build a music school in occupied Palestine.
Now, his SUV bound for Sebastia is cutting through the West Bank, a land smaller than the state of Delaware but dotted with more than 600 checkpoints, earthen barriers, and other obstacles to normal travel. His detour and the incident that accompanied it are part of a system that hems Palestinians into ever more confined enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements over which looms Israel’s military presence. Yet this kind of everyday humiliation and confinement remains unknown to most Americans. Despite the torrents of press coverage here about Israel and its relationship with the United States, the daily reality of half the people in a century-old conflict is essentially off the American radar screen.
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