(Fwd) At Nablus roadblocks a day before the holiday, by Victoria Buch,

[Gush Shalom]

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Date sent:      	Tue, 3 Feb 2004 03:50:27 -0800 (PST)
From:           	Victoria Buch <vvbb54 at yahoo.com>
Subject:        	Please consider posting on your e-mail net (from 
MachsomWatch)
To:             	info at gush-shalom.org
Copies to:      	nmayorek at zahav.net.il

At  roadblocks around Nablus a day before the holiday,
by Victoria Buch, MachsomWatch

Friends,

This Sunday was a big Moslem holiday called the Feast
of Sacrifice. I should like to tell you about what we,
the MachsomWatch women, observed on Saturday, the day
before the feast, at roadblocks around Nablus. The
roadblocks separate Nablus from the surrounding
villages. The official raison d'etre of these
roadblocks is prevention of terror. I happen to think
that turning holiday shopping into a string of
humiliation and misery, for masses of people, is more
likely to increase the level of terror. Please judge
for yourself.

Our shift consisted of six women, plus a French TV
team.

At the Huwara roadblock, we encountered a large angry
crowd of people who needed to get to Nablus to shop,
get money from the bank etc., for the holiday; and an
army unit that could not handle the pressure. An
officer who used to be quite decent when we first saw
him a few weeks ago, was displaying the usual "who is
the boss" ego trip: "The checkpoint is closed until
everybody moves back into line!!!"; and meanwhile more
and more people were  streaming into the CP, desperate
folks were pushing from all the sides, and extending
towards the soldiers medical referrals and whatever
pieces of paper they could muster for the purpose. At
some point the crowd broke through the barrier.
Luckily the soldiers were not the worst lot, but it
was scary enough.

We kept calling frantically the DCO (District
Coordinating Office) for help. Finally, a DCO officer
showed up. On the scale of this horrible place, this
was a significant improvement. The officer was doing
his best in this difficult situation, standing at the
top of the line, looking at referrals, trying to
expediate things, passing women and elderly quickly.
Most importantly - the queue was moving forward. 
However he was carrying out the usual orders - men
aged 16-35 could NOT pass into Nablus without a
permit. Why should not an Arab villager go to an Arab
town? Army logic: "He may come back with explosives!"
Many men in the "dangerous" age range who approached
the checkpoint got detained for "ID checkups". That
is, a person's ID is confiscated and its number fed
via phone into some unbelievably slow General Security
Service (Shabbak) computer. Then the "culprit" has to
wait for hours, until the security clearance arrives.
And GSS is very busy these days - it services some 700
roadblocks. Two teenage boys who tried to pass again
and again without documents, were detained by
soldiers, with hands bound behind their backs, as a
punishment.

A second roadblock which we visited is in the middle
of nowhere, near a village of Sarra. It was quite
deserted, with two very unfriendly soldiers on a hill
top above the road, pointing guns. They tried to order
us off, then to scare us off with improvised
conversations about nearby terrorists. This is "Wild
West", a soldier is a king here and hates infringement
on his authority. A middle-aged Arab couple were not
allowed to meet their son, who happened to have an
Israeli ID; the son was waiting in a car downhill with
some money - a present for the holiday. The soldiers
looked so hostile, that we did not even try to help.
Too easy to cause damage, instead.

A third roadblock which we reached, at Deir Sharaf, is
much more populous. A bitter elderly man on the way to
shopping said "This is my 3-rd checkpoint this
morning". The queue was waiting at a large distance
from a metal cage - the ID checking station, which
services two queues incoming from both directions. A
person waiting in the Nablus direction does not see
the soldier inside, so he or she has to guess: "Did my
turn arrive?" and risk approaching at a danger of
being yelled at. Inside, a very rude (female) soldier
was checking people's IDs at a rate of one per 5-15
minutes. We saw her throwing a plastic ID into a face
of a man who approached her "out of order". Quite a
few male soldiers hung around, talking to each other,
and checking passing cars at a leasurely pace. Our
appeals to post another ID checker to expediate
things, to help people with medical problems, etc.,
met with stony silence, or threats to call the police.
We did not manage to elicit any human response from
these soldiers. 

A sizable group of detained included a man with two
pregnant wives and a pile of shopping bags. They
arrived from a side road, which - unbeknownst to them
- has become forbidden. Three male detainees were sent
downroad (withoud IDs, to guarantee obedience), to
guard this road against new arrivals! We could do
nothing, help from DCO was promised but never arrived,
phone calls to human rights  offices and to
politicians did not avail. Finally, a TV camera seemed
to help. The French TV crew arrived with the second
MachsomWatch group, and started filming. The
confiscated IDs resurfaced, and a soldier returned
them with a most humanitarian and benevolent of facial
expressions.

We returned home thorougly depressed. In the evening,
desperate phone calls arrived from the Huwara
roadblock. Again, hundreds of people were stranded
there and the queue was not moving.























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