-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,718940,00.html
}}}>Begin
Jerusalem dispatch
Bound in by red tape
Israeli bureaucracy seems designed to cow the Palestinian population into docility,
but mostly has the opposite effect, writes Brian Whitaker
Brian Whitaker
Monday May 20, 2002
The Guardian
CRACK! A noise like a distant rifle shot echoed around the stone walls of Arab east
Jerusalem.
I had spent the evening working on a story about the latest suicide bombing in
Netanya and had gone to bed wondering if the Israeli forces would strike back
overnight and - if so - where.
Halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I was not sure at first if I had imagined the
sound. But then there was another, and another. I went downstairs to the hotel
reception. The woman on night duty was hunched over her computer, reading the
latest news on the internet.
"Did you hear a noise outside?" I asked. "No," she said, and turned back to the
internet.
I decided to take a look around and soon found the source of the commotion. It was
a lot closer than I had thought, but it was not gunfire.
In the next street there is a grim, fortress-like building with security cameras,
floodlights, iron bars on all the windows and a 7ft-high revolving cage for a door.
It is what the Israelis call the "population administration" office - the place where
Palestinians from east Jerusalem go to get birth certificates, renew their identity
cards and collect all the other bureaucratic necessities. Needless to say, when the
office opens in the morning the queues are interminably long.
The noise I had heard came from a dozen or so Palestinian youths in front of the
building who were smashing up wooden planks. Since they would be queuing all
night and the weather was chilly, they were making a fire in the street to keep warm.
The intriguing twist to this tale is that the youths were not themselves in need of new
ID cards or any other paperwork. They queue for a living.
Other Palestinians who want to avoid the wait and can afford the privilege, pay them
to stay up all night outside the office and reserve a place at the front of the queue.
By seven in the morning, other little enterprises swing into action outside the office.
Three men with clunky typewriters arrive and set up tables on the opposite
pavement. They already have stacks of application forms, which they fill in for people
and save time by making sure the questions have been answered correctly.
This sort of thing is part of the normal, daily grind for Palestinians. Foreigners may
hear about it and read about it, but that is not the same as actually experiencing it.
Sometimes I get a feeling that the real purpose of Israeli occupation is to turn the
West Bank into a theme park where tourists will flock from around the world to
discover what life was like in the old Soviet Union.
In Blairite Britain we have gone to the opposite extreme. All branches of government
are now required, on pain of punishment, to deliver service with a smile. Even the
social security offices try to lay on a friendly ambiance and government employees
spend millions of hours on performance reviews, quality control and efficiency
measurement.
But the whole point about Israeli bureaucracy, at least where Palestinians are
concerned, is that it is designed to be inefficient, with the rules changing
frequently,
so that nobody can ever be quite sure where they stand. That way, the Israelis show
who is boss.
The theory, I suppose, is that eventually this will produce a cowed, docile population
who are willing to do whatever they are told. But a lot of the time it just makes them
more angry.
On the short drive between Jerusalem and Ramallah - previously a 20-minute
journey - there are at present two Israeli checkpoints to be crossed. The main one is
at Qalandiya, a remote spot in the countryside with an array of high metal fences,
floodlights and waist-high concrete blocks resembling Lego bricks.
Nowadays it is a noisy place because apart from the revving of lorry engines in the
queue there's often a crane adjusting the floodlights or a bulldozer rearranging the
Lego bricks.
The only real function that Qalandiya has, so far as I can see, is to waste people's
time. The soldiers look at people's identity papers but they do not check the names
against a "wanted" list. They search some bags, rather cursorily, but not most of
them.
I have passed through eight times in the last five days with a computer case over my
shoulder and nobody has ever asked to look inside. For all they knew, I was carrying
a kilogramme or two of Semtex. Possibly they let me through because I am a pale-
faced blue-eyed foreigner, but it seems to be the same for the vast majority of
Palestinians who make the crossing.
As at the population administration office in Jerusalem, long queues create business
opportunities. At busy times, Palestinians set up stalls selling snacks, drinks and
cigarettes from dubious sources. There is nothing more surreal than the sight of an
ice cream trolley, topped with a gaily painted sunshade plying its wares among the
coils of razor wire.
It is always difficult to judge to the nearest hour how long the crossing will take,
so if
you have an appointment in Ramallah you either take a chance on arriving an hour
late or set off early, with the possibility of having to hang around in the town for an
hour before the meeting.
Nobody attempts to take a vehicle through the crossing unless it is absolutely
essential. The quickest and surest way is to get a minibus or taxi to the checkpoint,
walk through, then catch another minibus or taxi into Ramallah.
Last week, when Yasser Arafat gave a major speech in Ramallah, lots of foreign TV
crews drove their equipment through the checkpoint. They got into Ramallah without
too much trouble, but getting their urgent film back to Jerusalem was another matter.
Some were convinced that the Israelis delayed them deliberately.
Crossing on foot, people are channelled into queues between the concrete Lego
bricks. There is one queue for men and another for women - or "girls" as some of the
Israeli soldiers address them in Arabic.
At the front of the queue is a dusty patch of no man's land and, on the opposite side,
piles of sandbags with two or three soldiers behind them checking documents.
The men's queue is almost always several times longer than the women's queue,
and sometimes there are shouts from one or other queue that it is not getting a fair
turn.
One morning, with extraordinarily long queues, and in a heavy shower of rain, one of
the two Israeli soldiers on duty disappeared from his sandbags - apparently to go to
the toilet. That left just one soldier checking the documents. There were protests
from the crowd and, for several minutes, all checking of documents stopped.
Often, such small incidents lead to arguments among the queuing Palestinians.
Some are in a hurry and just want to get the whole tedious process over as quickly
as possible, while others insist on their rights even if by doing so they add to the
delays.
That, in microcosm, is the nub of the Palestinians' wider dilemma. They know the
intifada is not working but disagree on the reasons: too much militancy say some, too
little say the others.
Sooner or later at Qalandiya, you get to the front of the queue. Then, one at a time,
you step into no man's land and head for the sandbags, watched by soldiers on high
ground at the side.
I have timed the walk and it takes, on average, 20-25 seconds. Many Palestinians try
to speed this up a bit by starting their walk just before the previous person moves on
from the sandbags.
"Go! Go!" people from behind urge the person at the head of the queue. But the
timing is an art. Set off too early and you can be sure that the person ahead of you
will be kept an extra long time at the sandbags, leaving you stranded in the middle.
Set off too late or walk too slowly and the people in the queue will complain that you
are delaying them. Hurry towards the sandbags and the soldiers may get jumpy.
Yesterday, returning from Ramallah, I was in the queue behind a Palestinian boy with
a large sports bag. Halfway across no man's land, the soldiers told him to put it on
the ground and open it. The boy did so and it did not explode. The soldier beckoned
him to move forward again, took a quick peek inside, then sent him on his way.
Usually, no words are exchanged in these encounters with the military. You hand
over your papers, they flick through them and hand them back. It is much worse if
they speak.
One day, the soldier who greeted me from behind the sandbags was an overweight
man with dark glasses - so dark that you could not look him in the eye.
"Good morning," he said, affecting an American drawl. "How are you today?" That is
the dreadful moment when you are tempted to say something rude, but you know
that he has the power and - if he wants to - he can keep you there for hours.
"I'm fine," I replied meekly, "but rather delayed".
A smirk flickered behind the sunglasses and he waved me on.
"Have a nice day," he said.
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{
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