The Human Rights Organisation "Machsom Watch": Israeli Women Challenge Soldiers at the Checkpoints

Among my Israeli friends were several members of the women human rights organisation "Machsom Watch", which is the subject of the article below. I am, professionnally, a writer of documentary plays and fiction and have been used, in the past, to "rearranging" facts in order to give a more precise and complete account of the situations at hand. In the story that follows, I want to point out that all the quotes are genuine and that 90 % of the facts are the result of direct personal observations and experiences. However, in order to keep the article a reasonable length, I combined several visits to the checkpoints into a single one. In addition, the quotes of Aya Kaniuk are taken from an interview that is published on the website of Machsom Watch. I unfortunately did not meet Kaniuk, but her words are so important that I made her appear into my story, like a character of one of my plays. I apologize for this. I believe it makes the story all the more authentic and "true".

I met many other courageous members of Machsom Watch not mentioned in this particular feature (as well as activists of other human rights organisations, e.g. Physician for Human Rights). I have written elsewhere about them, including in the comprehensive diary I wrote in French about my journey. This will eventually be turned into a book.

The following article was written after the withdrawal from Gaza, but before Ariel Sharon's stroke.

Ruth Kedar drives like Schumacher on the straight, empty road that cuts through the barren Palestinian landscape: nothing but hills, rocks and dry bushes. “We call them 'Araber-frei'!” shouts the Jewish woman now in a derisive, angry tone — a black-humoured reference to the Nazi slogan “Juden-frei”, describing regions where the Jewish population had been eradicated in World War II. “Only Jews can drive on them, they are built for the settlers.” We have already crossed the Green Line which divides Israel from the occupied territories, and are racing through the no man's land created by the erection of a separation fence (sometimes a wall) deep inside Palestine.

Suddenly Ruth Kedar points out in the distance: “there it is: that's the checkpoint!” At 76, this tiny, bony woman of indomitable energy has gone back into active life: appalled by the misery imposed on the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation, she joined the women's human rights organisation “Machsom Watch” and stands vigil twice a week at one of the innumerable military road-blocks restraining movement in the land. No Palestinian can walk more than a few miles without reaching one of these check-points. To pass them, one needs an authorization that must constantly be renewed. Even with the right permit, crossing the barrier can take hours and is subject to the discretion of the soldiers in charge. More often than not, the Palestinians are denied passage. No explanations are given.

Yet, when they are watched, the soldiers more often than not restrain themselves. The women's presence, and sometimes their intervention, moderate the brutal scenes and shorten the hours of humiliation. Also, they are the only Israelis Palestinians ever see who are not in uniform, the only ones who exhibit human kindness. As an elderly Palestinian school principal who just crossed the checkpoint says: “knowing there are Israelis experiencing what we experience, if only for a few hours, eases my suffering and gives me some hope for a different future.”

Machsom is Hebrew for checkpoint. The first Israeli Machsom Watch groups were formed in January 2001 in response to press reports of abuse of Palestinians at the road-blocks. The founders were three Israeli women who set out three goals: to monitor the behaviour of Israeli soldiers and police, to ensure that the human rights of the Palestinians were protected, and to record their observations and make them known to the widest audience possible. Now there are over 400 members working three to a shift on a daily basis, standing twice a week for several hours at one of the check-points. They make notes, take photos, and sometimes address the soldiers directly to remind them of basic principles of ethics and human rights. They are all women and all Israeli, from a wide range of backgrounds. Most aren't young anymore: they are often called the “grandmothers of the checkpoints”.

“It is completely arbitrary” says Ruth Kedar. “In fact, arbitrariness is the rule. The point is to have no system: a Palestinian never knows whether he will reach on any particular day his destination, be it a school, a hospital, a workplace or his relatives. This effectively paralyses life. The aim is to force the residents to leave, so Israel can annex their land. In Qalqilia, 4000 have already left and gone East.”

There are a few veteran officers in charge but most of the guards are teen-agers, floating in their wide uniforms: several layers of green cloth topped by a bullet-proof jacket. Will they ever grow up to fill their costume? One of them is a girl that seems too small for the gun she is pointing at a traditionally dressed Palestinian woman who carries a huge basket on her head and a baby in her arms. A queue of Palestinians waits behind blocks of concrete. The soldier in charge whistles and waves his hand to call the next person in line and check his documents. A group of people, mostly young men, also a 30ish father with his small son, sit on the roadside in the mud. I am told they were refused passage but won't give up. They have been there several hours already. The little boy sits between the legs of his father, wide-eyed and silent. Kedar comments: “they don't cry. They've lost the habit. They know that nobody will come and help.”

The check-point is filthy, a real dump, nothing but garbage everywhere; there is a foul smell of rotten fruits; everything is humid and brown as it rained in the morning. I find quite a lot of rubber bullets lying around in the dirt, as well as a used sound grenade. I show them to Aya Kaniuk, another Machsom Watch activist. “Every now and then”, she explains, “children throw stones at the soldiers and they fire back. Many kids get badly hurt that way, some have died.” She shows me the different kinds of bullets: some are cylindrical and are made of hard rubber — they are the least lethal ones. The others are round, with a metallic core and a rubbery coat: these are the actual "killers".

Like her colleagues, Kaniuk goes to the checkpoints twice a week. “If it were up to me, that's all I'd be doing. You can't ignore it, you can't turn it off, so it's best to go there: when people cry from every corner, you can't just pursue your old goals.” During the long hours she spends at the checkpoints, she sees the arbitrariness and senselessness of the whole process: “the Palestinians are confined in pens, forbidden to move from place to place and punished for things they haven't done, only because this may theoretically prevent others from committing a crime. All this is done in the name of security! It's ridiculous: who do our people think they are kidding?”

Kaniuk has tears in her eyes. All the nightmares she has these days are centred on an existence that is not hers, she says. She wakes up from a nightmare that takes place in someone else's reality. When she first saw the destroyed houses, she dreamed about destroyed houses. In her dream she was everywhere: among the broken bricks, with the little girl looking for her book among the ruins.

We approach the barrier to watch the soldiers at work. They ignore us. Kaniuk takes notes and talks at the same time: “a couple of weeks ago, I saw a father with his little son standing in a long line. A soldier stepped back, with his back to the father, and gave the man a shove, apparently by accident. The man fell down, dragging his son with him. The soldier saw this, but continued walking. He did not gloat or enjoy seeing the two fall down; from his perspective, it just did not happen. The man got up, helped his son get up, dusted him and said nothing. To me, this image epitomises the occupation. A Palestinian man falling down means nothing. This invisibility is a metaphor for the whole situation.”

Kedar sees the soldiers themselves as victims, simple draftees who find themselves in an impossible situation and cannot be expected to act humanly: “they are children who have to carry out our government's wrong policies. They wear flak jackets and steel helmets even in the worst of heats, because they are afraid”. She describes an incident where the soldiers were under a lot of pressure, following a warning that a suicide bomber was on his way. They were nervous, aggressive to the point of brutality. “And here we come, a bunch of old ladies, looking like their grandmothers, and they tell themselves: if they're here, perhaps nothing bad will happen.”

Machsom Watch only accepts women, feeling that men act too aggressively and are too closely tied to the army (although women are also drafted). Most of the husbands and sons of the activists are members of an elite army unit. It is a question of social status, patriotism and competition. Men pretend not to be militaristic, but there is a rather romantic cult of the war hero in Israel, a country where people constantly feel threatened and believe that only the army can save them from destruction. Children learn at school the names of the well-known generals and the details of famous operations, like the liberation of the hostages at Entebbe. “Even men who support our movement find it hard to adapt to our 'soft-power' strategy,” says Kedar. “In fact, we play the Jewish grannies that try and revive the conscience of our children-soldiers.”

Many of the soldiers standing behind the concrete blocks and pyramids of sandbags indeed look like children playing war. But the game bores them. They stare blankly into the papers they are shown and don't seem to have a clue about what they should do. It is a widespread belief that doing service at the checkpoints corrupts the young soldiers' character: being in a position of power goes to their head and they start behaving like masters towards slaves, becoming brutal and arrogant. The enemy is dehumanised. One can humiliate him, hit him, even shoot him. At the end of their service, draftees are said to need months to get back to normality. Drug abuse is widespread.

On the way back to Tel Aviv, Kedar tells me how she lost her peace of mind, going to the checkpoints. “I have been totally engulfed. But despite the hardships, the cold weather and the long hours, I feel it is nothing I can give up.” Her personal life is inextricably interwoven with the history of the state. She represents the mainstream, Israel's Mayflower. She was born in Jerusalem. Her mother was a native Israeli; her father, a British Jew, was killed in the King David bombing in 1946 (a terror attack by the Jewish underground organisation “Irgun” that made 91 British victims). Her brother, an air force pilot, was killed in action. For 52 years she has been married to Paul Kedar, a prominent military officer who was army spokesman in Lebanon.

“In retrospect, my generation made a lot of mistakes”, she says. We were arrogant, perhaps, but we felt that we were building the country. Today, when I look at the result, the disappointment is terrible. My husband Paul, who started out as a radical right-winger (he was a member of the Irgun) is now dejected, totally disheartened by what is happening. He supports my work.”
Kedar has no illusions. There is no chance, she thinks, that she and her colleagues will be able to get rid of the system of military blocks. “But no one can tell me that these things do not happen and that the hundreds of checkpoints in the occupied territories really serve the security of Israel. I have seen it with my own eyes.”

In Israel, it is the women who lead the way for peace. For all Ruth Kedar's disillusion, they were successful once before: When Israel pulled out of Southern Lebanon in May 2000, after nearly two decades of war, a women's organization called Four Mothers was credited with helping rally Israeli public opinion behind the move. Right-wing politicians like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition Likud Party, harshly criticized the army pullout as caving in to the guerrilla tactics of Hezbollah, a fundamentalist organization backed by Iran and Syria, and argued it would hurt Israel's deterrence. But in countless interviews and opinion pieces, the Four Mothers — women who lost their sons in the Lebanon war — helped focus the debate not only on security issues but on the young lives that would be saved by putting an end to what was being labeled as Israel's Vietnam — a war against guerrilla fighters on foreign land with victory nowhere in sight.

The Four Mothers spawned about a dozen other women's peace and human rights groups, including Machsom Watch, which have been agitating for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But the battle is much tougher now. According to Kedar, “many people feel we're not occupiers and that the West Bank and Gaza is our land. In Lebanon, it was much clearer. There was a border and it was a different state."

Now the man who has a map of the greater Israel in his office, Premier Ariel Sharon, ordered the disengagement from Gaza. No one knows whether this was his first or last step towards the end of an occupation that started in 1967 and has poisoned the lives of generations of Palestinians and Israelis. According to Kedar, "he only did it in order to keep a large chunk of the West Bank. This won't work. We need to give back all of the occupied territories. Otherwise the war will never stop and in the end, our dream of a safe land for our children will be forever destroyed. No matter how strong, our army cannot, in the long run, subdue a whole civilian population. Even then, the Palestinians would end up with only 22 % of the original Palestine (i.e. the territory of the British Mandate). They have done all the compromises they can afford. The ball remains in our camp."

Israel, Why We Care

As a 7 year-old girl in Paris, I went to Sunday school and learned all about Cain and his brother, Abraham and his son, Esau's lentils, Jacob's ladder, Moses' tables, Joseph's well, David's lute and all the rest. Palestine was home. Jews were relatives who'd found God and had been found by him back way back. From then on, I accepted them as fellow travellers along the path of my life. They have accompanied me to this very day.

As a 9 year-old, my father started telling me and my brothers about the war. He'd been in Berlin in '42-'44, a passionate anti-Nazi, and had done his private bit in opposing Hitler's thugs, saving a Jewish couple from the claws of the Gestapo and preventing the arrest of an American secret service agent. This got him thrown out of Germany, which was lucky, since these guys were more used to murdering than banishing. Still, they had their own rules and stopped short of assassinating a Swiss diplomat. I have always wondered about the two Jews: did they survive?

As an 11 year-old I fell in love with a beautiful young Egyptian boy who told me about camels, minarets and 1001 nights, teaching me how to write my name in Arabic. On the 5th of June 1967, he disappeared. Our school mistress told us a war had broken out in the desert, and that my friend had had to leave. He'd come back when all was over and done with. At home my parents were glued to the news. A few days later, they triumphantly announced Israel's victory and took us kids to the Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées. I had a banana split.

François Kamel didn't come back. Instead, a new boy arrived in our class. He was pale, thin and his black eyes were shining. His name was Gil and he told us he was a Sabra as well as a Kibbutznik, which left a deep impression. I promptly fell in love, since my previous flame had abandoned me. Gil told me about the Shrine of the Book and the hill of Armageddon, and about sharing property and having no money. Then he taught me how to write my name in Hebrew.

In 1970, 14 years-old, I read the memoirs of Golda Meir, "O Jerusalem" from Lapierre/Collins, and Leon Uris' "Exodus". To a girl brought up with the stories of the French resistance instead of Andersen's fairy tales, the Israelis became the quintessential resilient underdog, the freedom fighter summa cum laude, forever repeating little David's slaying of the big bad Goliath. I loved them and totally identified with these wonderful cousins who'd suffered beyond imagination but never given up the ghost, and who were now about to transform a piece of dump into the modern Garden of Eden. Had I been allowed to, I would have gone straight to a kibbutz.

1974-1978 I read all the books of Primo Levi and started to believe in hell, which was on earth, and in the Devil, humanity itself. God was dead, obviously, and for a while, there had not been enough light for most people to see what was perpetrated before their very eyes. Light needed to be reinvented, this was the purpose of life.

In 1998 I went to Israel with 25 German youth actors. We performed "Goodbye Butterfly", my play about the Theresienstadt ghetto, to sold-out audiences in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Hasorea. On the last night of our trip, we had a bonfire party with about 20 young Israelis on the Sheraton Beach in Tel Aviv. Just before midnight, Ruth Elias, a survivor from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, came to meet us. She looked frail and hard at the same time. Her silvery crew-cut shone in the moonlight. A dozen German kids came to sit in the sand around her, to talk things over. She wanted to know what it was like to have a Nazi grandfather. They told her. It was a starry night and the waves were loud. I let them deal with this alone; it was their story. At the end, everyone hugged Ruth. 50 years ago, when she'd given birth to a child in Auschwitz, Mengele had her breasts hermetically bandaged, wanting to find out how long the baby would survive without food or drink. As it started to dry out, Ruth poisoned it.

From then on, my life was full of Israel and Israeli friends. I travelled to the country several times. There were terror attacks, army operations, 2002 the end of Oslo; checkpoints sprang like mushrooms all over the territories and the settlements spread. My friends talked heatedly around the Shabbat table and said: "look at what is happening to us. We must stop this nonsense. Let them have their state and deal with their own internal mess. One day it will be too late and we will not wake up from this nightmare anymore". They told me to write about this and I did.

This is my story, and the story of many Europeans from my generation. We care. We listen to our Israeli friends, share their concern and join in their silent, o much too silent chorus: "No to occupation. Two states for two peoples. Share Jerusalem. Now". There is no security except in peace, justice and human dignity.

A Visit to the Bazaar of Hebron

We entered the narrow cobbled street leading to the centre of the bazaar and it was like walking into the tunnel of death, so full of emptiness and silence that we lowered our voices as in a church and walked without making a sound. All the metallic shutters of the shops were pulled down and locked with chains. Humidity oozed out of the stone walls; they smelled of weeds and urine. I longed for the powdered whiteness of the desert, for the blinding light of the Judean sun. But its rays couldn't reach our loneliness: fishing nets had been hung over the street to protect passers-by from the rage of the settlers, who had gradually taken over the rooftops on the east-side and would throw at the Arab merchants and customers anything from garbage to excrements, discarded furniture, wood poles or rusty ironwork. Now that they had succeeded in emptying the bazaar of all life, I wondered why the nets were still full of these incongruous projectiles. But victory had not stilled the hate of these raving conquerors. I passed a door with Hebrew words painted in white. David translated: "Death to the Arabs. They belong in the gas chambers". There was anger in his voice, as well as shock, despair and immense bitterness. "How dare they?" he whispered, as if to himself. "You know, when the few remaining members of my family came over from Poland, having survived the death camps and marches, they had a dream. They wanted to build a beautiful land of peace, tolerance and social progress, a land where they would be safe. Now, these madmen here, who claim to be Jews, are destroying our vision, our desperate attempt to vanquish death and forget horror." We walked in silence; he was gone, lost in himself. I knew these moments of existential anguish and had learned to leave him to his dark musings. I watched the damp stones of the arcades, the vaulted alleys leading into even blacker darkness, the words of hate smeared on the biblical walls. And then I saw two ghosts, the last inhabitants of this forsaken crypt. They faced each other, completely still, each sitting in his shop, surrounded by an abundance of vegetables and fruits. Their wrinkled faces were like parchment and I wondered whether they would disintegrate to dust if the air suddenly touched their ancient skin. "Salam Aleikum", I said to one of the mummies. He slowly turned to me, eyes blinking, he was alive. He murmured a greeting, bent to the ground, picked up an orange and stretched his hand to me. I reached out for my purse. "Don't", said David. "It is a present. You must not humiliate him."

(Written after a visit to the bazaar in March 2004)

Ayalon: Former Israeli Anti-Terror Chief Turned Peacemaker says Time is Running Out

The man sitting in front of me sipping cold tea wears jeans, sneakers and a short sleeved blue shirt. His head is shaved, his eyes are piercing blue. He looks like so many average Israelis. He isn't. From his tiny office overlooking Tel Aviv, Ami Ayalon carries the hopes of many Israelis seeking a lasting peace with the Palestinians.

Looking at his biography, he doesn't seem to fit the part. A former Chief Commander of the Israeli Navy and head of the notorious Shin Bet (the Internal Intelligence Service which “deals”, in particular, with the Palestinians — imprisonment, interrogation, allegedly torture), Ayalon is indeed anything but a traditional peacenik. But in 2000 the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse with the collapse of peace talks at Camp David, the breaking out of the second Palestinian uprising and the election of hardliner Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister. “The Israelis feel trapped in a state of war”, says Ayalon. “This is why they elect tough people. Sharon is a warrior.” Ayalon decided to jump into the battle for peace.

He contacted the prominent Palestinian scholar Sari Nusseibeh, head of the Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His idea was to develop a joint peace initiative that would be pushed up by the force of the people to the respective leaderships on both sides, then pushed up further to the international community. "We've had so many resolutions and plans and processes in the past," says Ayalon. "All of them have been conceived behind the clouds and parachuted down on the people, who are somehow expected to react positively. We are working the other way round.”

Together, Ayalon and Nusseibeh drew up a list of principles dealing with the five key aspects of the conflict: borders, Jerusalem, refugees, security and settlements. They made clear proposals: Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in 1967; establishment of a non militarized Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank; Jerusalem as an open city and joint capital for Israel and Palestine; Palestinian refugees could only return to the new Palestinian State, not to Israel.

“People need to know where they are going” says Ayalon. The American “Road Map”, like the Oslo agreements, purports to take the people on a trip to an unknown destination, which will be decided at some point through negotiations to come. This doesn't work. People are ready to make compromises, but they want to know from the outset how bad it will be. We prefer to call our principles 'Destination Map'”.

Ayalon and Nusseibeh have spent the last two years campaigning on both sides of the Green Line for the endorsement of their “People's Voice”, going literally from door to door, organizing meetings between Israeli and Palestinian supporters, speaking in schools, factories, City Halls, army and police quarters, talking to businessmen and politicians across the board.

The message seems to be getting through: to date the “people's Voice” initiative has been officially endorsed by 254.280 Israelis and 161.000 Palestinians. Never in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have so many people come forward and signed a shared document. The number of Palestinian signatures is particularly impressive given the circumstances in which Nusseibeh's team has been working.

“It's hard work”, concedes Ayalon. “The Israelis have become cynical and lost their dreams. The word 'peace' has been abused, it has become illegitimate. What we do is publicity for peace.” As for Nusseibeh, he was up against more than disillusion in the Palestinian territories: “In about 30% of the places he has been to, he found rigid resistance to the point where he couldn't actually speak”, says Ayalon. “That's because he waived the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes in Israel. He is one of the only prominent Palestinian who has the courage to tell the truth to his people: namely that the return of the refugees to Israel would mean the disappearance of our country. This is obviously unacceptable to Israelis. The abandonment of the right of return is a prerequisite to peace and to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Ayalon's credo is simple: “The Palestinians want an Arab Palestinian state and the Israelis want a predominately Jewish state. Only the two-state solution can satisfy both parties, and it is supported by 70 % of Israelis and Palestinian. A single bi-national state would neither be a safe home for the Jewish people, nor an independent Palestinian state. Violence would prevail, the economy would deteriorate, there would be no foreign investment and it would be a very unstable entity. The one state solution is a long term utopia.”

However, pragmatism could lose against utopia. Because of developments on the ground, particularly the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, within 10 years from now, it will have become impossible to create a separate Palestinian state. Then there will no peace but only long term chaos and slow disintegration. “Time is running out”, says Ayalon.

He leans back and gazes through the windows. Evening is falling on cloudless Tel Aviv. The skyscrapers shine in the horizontal beams of the sinking sun. In the distance, the Mediterranean Sea. “Isn't this beautiful? I am a Zionist. All I want is to keep this State alive.”

(Written after an interview made in June 2004)

Welcome to this New Blog

I will be writing here regularly and look forward to your comments. So long, Dominique Caillat