'Are You Jewish?' the Israeli Soldier Asked the Journalist - Opinion - Haaretz.com
When photographer Alex Levac wanted to get out of the car for a moment, the soldier asked him: "Are you Jewish?"
There's no place on earth where this question is legitimate. It crosses clear, acceptable boundaries of privacy and racism. There's no place on earth where a man is asked what his origin, birth or nationality is, in order to know how to treat him. Only here, at Einav checkpoint, laying siege on Tul Karm, this question was legitimate. Only when an IDF soldier asks this galling question, it appears to everyone that he has a right to ask it, just as he has a right to imprison, abuse, detain and sometimes shoot for no reason.
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This happened on Monday this week, at twilight. A few hours earlier that same soldier stood at attention in memory of six million of his people. On Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's hard to know what went through his washed brain during the siren, perhaps he was thinking what he had been taught to think in these moments. It's hard to assume that he saw any connection between what he had been taught about the Holocaust and his "meaningful service" in the IDF: standing at a checkpoint in the West Bank, opening and closing, closing and opening, arbitrarily, more often than not according to his decision or mood.
Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian man during a military operation in the Palestinians town of Deir al-Ghusun, near the West Bank town of Tulkarm, Saturday.Credit: Majdi Mohammed,AP
The dozens of "non-Jewish" drivers waiting for hours in despair didn't hear the siren or think of the Holocaust. They only wanted to get home safely. And the Israeli soldier asked us if we were Jewish. He knew we were journalists, on the basis of the documents we showed him, but he wanted to know if we were Jewish. Perhaps he had trouble believing that Jews could leave Tul Karm in one piece. This wasn't what he had been told about Tul Karm. Levac replied, "Would you like to check?" and got back in the car.
We were on our way back from Tul Karm, where we investigated the killing of a boy riding a scooter, who had been shot by the soldiers from a distance. Since the war started, Einav checkpoint has been open only a few hours a day. Open, closed, now it's closed. There's almost no other way out of Tul Karm save for this checkpoint. In the morning, driving into the city, we bypassed the checkpoint, which had been closed then too, and drove on a winding gravel way between the villages and olive groves. But in the afternoon, when we made our way back through the same path, the Palestinian drivers coming in the opposite direction gestured to us: "Mamnua," forbidden. The soldiers had closed the exit gate from Shufa village at the end of the path through which we had entered in the morning and it was no longer possible to leave Tul Karm. Routine.
That is the reality of life in the West Bank, which nobody talks about: life in constant semi-curfew, with no way of knowing what the day will bring. Israel decided to increase the abuse under the guise of the war. If a person can travel on bumpy dirt paths and reach the same place as he would on the main road, it has nothing to do with sacred "security." Now it's merely abuse for abuse's sake, with no mask and under the war's guise.
The traffic jam at the Qalandiyah checkpoint.Credit: Emil Salman
This abuse doesn't interest anyone in Israel, it isn't reported and isn't troubling. Nobody thinks of its repercussions, as long as the settlers are kept happy. That's the IDF's main task here, to keep the settlers happy. Now they'll have a settler brigadier general as well. But life in the West Bank in the past seven months is already a life no Israeli Jew knows. The West Bank's roads are half desolate. Apart from the settlers, hardly anyone can reach them.
Two soldiers and an officer stood at Einav checkpoint on Holocaust Remembrance Day. A long convoy of trucks stood by the wayside, its drivers waiting in vain, hopelessly. One of the common aspects of life in the West Bank is that one can never know anything. When it will open, when it will close. Those drivers' time, like their dignity and lives, means nothing. The officer and two soldiers told us the checkpoint was closed. How will we get back? They didn't know.
Then they asked us if we were Jewish.