Category: Journals

Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement are encouraged to write personal reflections about the work they engage in with Palestinian communities, the events they experience, and the people they meet. These journals offer the human context often missing in traditional reports or journalism. These articles represent the author’s thoughts and feelings and not necessarily those of the International Solidarity Movement.

In the Spirit of Revolution

By Hanna

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks with groups of people who enjoy more privilege here than perhaps any other group – American Jews. We can relatively easily pass through walls, fences, gates, checkpoints, “terminals” and other obstacles, moving from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to Ramallah to Haifa and back to Jerusalem without a second thought. Unless we think. Unless we call our Palestinian friends on the phone and try to explain what we’re doing. Unless they ask us, “Where are you?” and we debate whether to lie or to tell them we’re in their capital city that they haven’t been able to reach for the past 5 years.

Last week my host family was looking at some of Dunya’s pictures of the terminal and the Wall, and my 11-year-old host brother looked at one photo and asked, “That’s the Wall?” “You haven’t seen it?” I asked incredulously. “Once or twice,” was the reply, “but not recently.” Freedom of movement is so limited that people who don’t have the permits to leave their ghetto have no reason to even approach its walls.

A couple days ago I asked the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) landlord if he is still able to drive to work in Salfit from Hares, a village separated from Salfit by the settlement of Ariel and roadblocks and checkpoints. For now, he told me, he can drive there, but the checkpoint at Zatara is being made bigger. I said, “Yes, I know, it will be like the new checkpoints at Bethlehem and Kalandia.” “No,” he said, “the Bethlehem checkpoint is easy to get through.” Instantly I realized that he hasn’t seen the new terminals, because he isn’t allowed on one side of each of them. So he goes around the long way, through a huge valley that steers clear of Jerusalem, and ends up back in Bethlehem, in order to attend a conference on nonviolence. And the checkpoint in the valley, he says, isn’t so bad. He’s a well-connected man with ties to the Palestinian government, and still I know more about the institutionalization of the checkpoint structures than he does, at least on the physical level of having seen and experienced them. If you separate an entire population into small disconnected enclaves, it makes it difficult for people to organize against the magnitude of the system. This is not a new concept for the Israeli government. This is not coincidental.

And then there’s the less visible, or, for internationals like myself, invisible. I’ve been traveling north and south and all over the place for the past two weeks, and I found out only two days ago that nobody from the northern West Bank has been allowed south of Zatara checkpoint (in the center of the northern West Bank) for the past several weeks. 800,000 people in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus cannot travel to Ramallah because of this Israeli closure. People like me can travel without knowing this, because our taxi drivers from Ramallah or Jerusalem can come north and bring us south. We never have to know, but the same is not true of my Israeli friend who is married to a Palestinian from Nablus. They were traveling back from Nablus to Ramallah after Eid Al-Adha, one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, and they split at the checkpoint so my friend could come meet our group in Ramallah while her husband twisted and turned through unpaved dirt roads to try to get home without being turned back at checkpoints. Or another man I know from Jenin who works at a human rights organization in Ramallah. He had gone home for the holiday, and it took him more than 5 hours to return to Ramallah. It should have taken about 2 hours, and that’s already taking into account the separation of land and roads due to settlement expansion. I asked him about his father, who I know is sick, and he told me the family has moved him to a hospital in Jericho, though none of them live there, because it’s the only place that different family members can go check up on him without too much hassle.

The division of the West Bank into tiny disconnected cantons is the most recent method of separation the Israeli government has employed, beginning in 1967 and intensifying continuously until today. But I’ve also been especially conscious these weeks of the more existential separation that still haunts people to this day – the loss of 78% of Palestine in 1948, the expulsion of more than two thirds of the Palestinian population, and the separation of families that have never been reunited. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Palestinian who is able to have regular family get-togethers. Some of them are in the West Bank or Gaza, some in Lebanon, some in Syria, some in Jordan, Bahrain, Dubai, Russia, Venezuela, London, Montreal, Chicago, Houston… Everywhere but together.

I’ve been especially conscious of this dispersion these past weeks because Dunya and I are beginning a new project today that I wish wholeheartedly we had no reason to do. We will try to take kids from a refugee camp to their holy sites in Jerusalem, to the sea in Yaffa, and to the villages that their grandparents fled in 1948. We wish they could just go with their parents and grandparents, that they could visit the land, picnic on the land, build a new house on the land if that’s what they chose to do. But they have no choice. So we will go with them for a short visit, though it breaks my heart when people in the older generations ask us to call them on the phone from the villages so we can describe what we see and they can tell us where we are, what houses used to stand there, where the children used to play.

It breaks my heart when we talk about the project to other Palestinian friends and they ask if we can do the same with their children. It breaks my heart when I tell a 17-year-old friend about the project and she says, “I wish I were younger so I could come… But I’m not sure if I wish I were a refugee.” She just wants to come to the beach. Just to see the sea.

Sometimes my work with refugees, my work connecting Palestinians on either side of the Green Line, feels like a sloppy symbolic attempt to sew back together what my people have torn apart. Sometimes if feels like repentance. Except it’s not about me, and most Palestinians don’t particularly care about my identity as a Jew or as an American. It’s about power and trying to dismantle it. It’s about injustice and trying to fix it. It’s about my 17-year-old friend’s response to a question last week about what message Americans can take back to the U.S. from Palestine. “Revolution,” she said. “If all the people in the world overthrow all the governments in the world, we’ll have no problem living with each other in peace.”

What Is Holy Here?

by Marjorie, of Birthright Unplugged, Boston USA

I’m overwhelmed by the desire to share what I’ve learned this week in Palestine, but also overwhelmed by the size of that task. We completed the Birthright Unplugged tour last night, and it’s hard to believe it was only a week long. The amazing people I was blessed to meet, the horrific abuses I was forced to see, the institutional violence I was part of witnessing, the challenges I began to understand, the hope and courage I had the privilege of honoring…so much to tell you…

Too Many Walls

The Wall is called the Separation Wall, the Apartheid Wall, misnamed the security fence. It’s misnamed for both the security and the fence; 3-stories high, permanent concrete blocks wedged shoulder to shoulder, with watchtowers spaced throughout. It is not an overstatement to say that the Wall is creating a prison out of the West Bank.

Security

Most people think that the Wall follows the Green Line (the armistice line of the war of 1948 that forms the de facto Israel/Palestine border and which, under international law, separates Israel from the occupied territories). Let there be no confusion. It does not. The path of the Wall steals 10% of West Bank land into Israel. Though still only partially built, it snakes around the West Bank, carving once-contiguous areas into separate regions, unable to access each other. Its path runs around illegal settlements, de facto annexing them and the land they are on into Israel.

The policy is clear – the most land with the fewest Palestinians is seized. Once the Wall is completed (its planned completion route is public information), the entire West Bank will be carved into non-contiguous “bantustans” that can only be connected by road through illegal Israeli settlement territory.

Roads

There is also an infrastructure of roads that cuts through the remaining connected parts of the West Bank, allowing easy access between Jerusalam and all its “suburbs” (settlements). At its deepest point, the Wall cuts into the West Bank 22 kilometers (13 miles). This is all Palestinian land.

I walked through the Bethlehem checkpoint, now called a “terminal.” That’s very much what it looks like, a massive structure, wedged between the Wall on either side. It’s a sterile building compared to an airport terminal, yet more like a prison with a system of electronic doorways, metal detectors, and soldiers behind bulletproof glass. Above is a platform where at least one soldier stands with his gun pointed down. At the entrance is a banner the height of the Wall: “Peace Be With You” in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. It’s pink, green, and purple, with Israeli Department of Tourism at the bottom.

The Bethlehem terminal is well into the West Bank. Perhaps the department of tourism is confused. I pass through without incident, and turn back to get close to the Wall. I stand up right against the hard concrete, look up, concrete to the sky; look right, left, concrete to both horizons; cry, kick, yell. Silence. I don’t know what to do. I have never been in a ghetto before…

What is Holy Here?

Hebron, Al-Khalil by the Arabic name, is a Palestinian city in the West Bank, 35 km from Jerusalem. Throughout the West Bank, most illegal settlements are built either as “suburbs” to Israeli cities, or further east in rural areas (most of which will soon be annexed into Israel de facto by the building of the illegal Wall). But in Al-Khalil, a group of extremist settlers have planted themselves in the middle of the old city, the heart of the city. The daily violence they cause has forced Palestinians to flee the old city, leaving behind abandoned homes and stores that the settlers will soon take over, excavating the area and confiscating land.

In the mean time, the doorways are covered in anti-Arab graffiti. To date, 840 shops have closed. The corridors echo. The Israeli army, which is supposed to have military jurisdiction over only half of the city, currently controls all of Al-Khalil. There are about 200 settlers in the city, and about three soldiers per settler. The main road of the city has been closed off for Palestinians. All of the gates to the old city, except for two, have been walled. Of the two access points, one has an x-ray machine that all Palestinians must pass through, including children. The Hebron Rehabilitation Commitee (HRC), an amazing Palestinian organization, works to rehabilitate buildings within the Old City to try to encourage Palestinians to return to their homes and shops, so that the settlers will not confiscate their property. They are fighting an uphill battle.

On the tour with Walid Abu-Al-Halaweh of the HRC, we hear of settler violence happening nearby. We go to the place where the settlers have just left, and the ground is covered with rocks, some the size of my finger, some the size of both my fists. We follow Israeli army guards to the noise.

About 20 girls, none looking older than 14 or 15, are screaming, screaming. They are being gently cloistered by the army officers as they continue to scream at the Palestinians around them. The Hebrew is translated for me: “get out of our country, you’re dirt, you’re scum.”

We stand with a group of Palestinian men, women, and children, watching them… or rather, our group is watching them. The Palestinians are mostly waiting to get through the gateway that the girls have effectively blocked now for 20 minutes. Three girls break through the acquiescent army line and race towards us, where another officer holds them.

Grown Palestinian men beside me run backwards. I am shamed for the men, at the humiliation of having to fear a 13-year-old girl, because they know what the soldiers will do to them if they act in self-defense. They are afraid of the girls, with Jewish stars around their necks, screaming filth at their neighbors. The soldiers, who look no older than 19, speak softly with the girls, then turn around to scream and threaten the Palestinian crowd, telling them that if they take one step forward, there will be consequences.

For me, as I watch a people to whom I belong behave worse than any animal on this earth, feet planted, fists clenched, I stare into the eyes of the girls, hoping to communicate to them their own shame. I stare into the eyes of the soldiers, “I am witnessing you, you cannot be held unaccountable.” Finally, the girls are subdued and moved back to the gateway they came from, a gateway that has been built from the ruins of the home of Hashem, our tour guide of the afternoon.

He says that most settler violence happens on Friday and Saturday, on the Jewish holy days…

To Exist is to Resist

1948, known to Palestinians as Al-Naqba, “the catastrophe,” is not some faraway historical moment for Palestinians. For most people, it is the year their family lost their land.

I stayed with a wonderful Palestinian family in Dheisha refugee camp – Sa’de, Nahade, Amani, Jasmine, Wajde, and Sha’de Alayasa. Their family fled from their village of Zacharia in 1948. Upon returning to their village at the end of the war, they were told they could not longer enter. They had deserted their land. It was now a closed military zone, soon to be occupied and turned into a Jewish Israeli neighborhood. No one in the family has been to the village land since 1972. No member of their family is currently allowed to enter Israel. Two generations later, they continue to identify as coming from Zacharia, though both generations were born into the close-quarters of Dheisha, not far from the Wall.

The story is the same for family after family, some who still keep the key to their front door in their refugee home.

Inside Israel, the story is hardly different. During 1948, while some villagers fled from the war into the West Bank or Gaza, some further into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, some also fled to what remains Israeli land. They built new villages, sometimes less than a few miles from their old, now razed or occupied villages. Over 100 of these villages are still “unrecognized.” Since the Israeli government does not recognize them, they do not provide them with water, electricity, or any infrastructure whatsoever, including schools or clinics. Yet, all citizens in the state of Israel have a right to these services.

I had the honor of talking with Mohammed Abu-al-Heja, the original lead organizer of the Unrecognized Arab Villages of Israel. Mohammed, originally of ‘Ayn Hawd village in the North, started organizing for the rights of his people in the 1970s and lives adjacent to his former village. Presently the land and homes of his village are occupied by the Israeli town of Ein Hod and Nir ‘Etziyon. Joined by other unrecognized villages throughout the State, they are slowly getting the Israeli government to recognize their new homes. So far 5 villages have been recognized. Mohammed is a charismatic man, slight in build with fiery eyes. Although well into his 60s, he is not quitting the fight any time soon…

The Israelis say they see no partner for peace, yet the Palestinians see no partner for justice.

The Wall, the checkpoints, the Israeli army at every turn, the fight for basic human services, the number of adult males held in detention or prison at any one time, the refusal to allow access to farm lands; all of these actions, including closures on villages, towns, roads, and homes seized between the wall and barbed-wire fences, increasing unemployment, continued dispossession of land makes it impossible for justice for these occupied people.

The continuous threat of violence…hope, faith, organizing, getting pushed down, getting back up, resisting….

Love and anger and sadness and shame and fire and loss and tears and hope.

Marjorie is a young Jewish-American from Boston on her first trip to the West Bank. She is with Hannah and Dunya of Boston to Palestine, who have started the separate Birthright Unplugged organization to give American Jews a chance to witness the occupation.

IOF:0, Goth Girl:1

by Katie
More photos

One of the activities of ISM is to create a physical presence of support for Palestinians resisting the occupation. The presence of international volunteers with cameras in the West Bank has a deterring effect on brutality and excess violence by the Israeli military who want to avoid the bad publicity of an international incident. It is abhorrent that the lives of international volunteers are given more value than that of Palestinians, but this unfortunately is the reality in Palestine. This is a symptom of the new anti-Semitism. Like Jews were scapegoated by the 3rd Reich, Arabs and Muslims have become the new scapegoats of the governments of the West who are incapable of doing any introspection beyond “Why do they hate us so much?”

Bil’in is a village of about 1000 people just north east of Ramallah. For the past year, the village has been resisting the seizure of their land by the Israeli government who have developed a large settlement nearby on the villager’s land. A wall is being built up around the settlement, cutting the Palestinians off from their former farm land. In response to this illegal seizure of the land (building settlements on occupied land is illegal under international law) the village has built their own “settlement” on the Israeli side of the wall. This is a one room shack built in protest.

The shack has been threatened with demolition because the Israeli government calls it “illegal” which is, of course, quite ironic. For the past few days we have been supporting the Palestinians of Bil’in by being present at their “settlement,” hoping to protect it from demolition. This is just one of the creative, non-violent methods the Palestinian resistance is using to draw attention to their cause.

I made a somewhat crude map of what is going on:

It was very heart-warming sitting around a campfire at the shack with Palestinian, Israeli and international activists singing songs, goofing off and having fun together. It could have been the opening line to some sarcastic joke, but it was real, honest and genuine and that made me very happy.

The IDF showed up a few times, we thought maybe they would try to bust up our party but they came and left rather quickly.

People have questioned what is the point of doing this? What is it accomplishing? Last night I saw for the first time what our presence accomplishes.

Abdullah is the owner of the apartment we are staying in in Bil’in and one of the ISM coordinators in Bil’in. He woke us up last night at around 2am saying there were Israeli soldiers in the village and that we needed to come out and demonstrate to them that there were people here who would hold them accountable for anything they did, that they would not be able to go around terrorizing the village and get away with it.

We walked down the street to the mosque where they had passed by earlier and littered the ground a bunch of leaflets. The leaflets said:

To the people of Bil’in:

The Israeli Defense Force who are protecting the Israeli civilians from terrorist acts are determined to prevent any act that creates obstacles to the work on the security fence.

The construction of the security fence aims to prevent terrorists from getting into Israel.

Do not participate in any acts that create obstacles for the building of the security fence.

Do not let those people (demonstrators) effect your daily life. These acts are against your interests.

The IDF will respond strongly to any act that might effect the security fence.

-IDF leadership

Someone called Abdullah on his phone and said they were heading our way. A few seconds later two humvees with approximately 6 or 7 soldiers in full riot gear pulled up. I walked straight towards them, not really having any plan of what to do or say, just knowing that I needed to confront them and show them that there were people here who were not going to let them get away with bad behavior. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was thinking “ok, this is it, this is how it ends, you are going to get shot right here and this is how you are going to die.” But you know, I would rather take 100 of their bullets right now, than die of old age later because I was afraid to stand up for what I believed in, and so I kept on walking. And of course I didn’t get shot, of course I had nothing to be afraid of because I am not Palestinian. We stood in front of them and Marcy told them in Hebrew they they should go home and that they were not welcome here. They told her to go home. It was tense for a few minutes as six unarmed women and two unarmed men stood in front of the seven or eight fully armed soldier waving their guns around. Then they left. Our first victory!

An Invitation for Barak Obama

by Katie

The morning of Thursday, January 12, myself, and other Palestinian and international activists were invited to the branch of Jerusalem University in Ramallah for a conference that Barak Obama, the US senator from Illinois, was holding with students. The others were skeptical about him, but I assured them that he is a very progressive politician and he would be supportive of the Palestinian cause.

Barak Obama began the conference by saying how surprised he was that it was cold and raining in Ramallah, that it went against his preconceived notions about the climate in the Middle East. He spoke about his background and how he was the underdog in his race for the Senate. He explained to us that even though the US has made many foreign policy mistakes, that he believed in our system of checks and balances. He then offered to start a dialog with the audience.

One student asked how Arab governments can create a paradigm shift and improve relations with the US. When he answered the question, I tried not to give in to frustrated laughter because, I kid you not, this is what he said (I am paraphrasing and my comments are in parenthesis):

The Arab governments need to embrace democracy, not theocracy. When you allow the will of God to influence the laws of your country, you will not win the support of the US. (What about Israel claiming they have the God given right to rule this land?) The Arab governments need to renounce violence against civilians. (What about 100,000 dead Iraqis, were all of those people terrorists, Baathists, foreign fighters or were some of them civilians?) The US is opposed to theocracy and terrorism and if the Arab governments want to create a paradigm shift, they need to address these concerns of ours.

So then I asked him, “You say the US is opposed to theocracy and terrorism, how can you explain to the Palestinian people how the US can be opposed to these things but still supports a state that has racist, oppressive, unjust and apartheid policies. And do you see how this paints an inconsistent picture to the people of the Middle East?”

He began his answer by saying he would not accept the assumptions I made and therefor was not going to address that part of my question. He said he could understand the Palestinian view that the policies of the US were one sided but he said the relationship with Israel was not going to change. My high hopes for Barak Obama’s foreign policy ideas were shot down!

Obama said this was his first trip to the Middle East, that he had just come from Qatar and Jordan. I imagine he stayed in some pretty fancy hotels. I’m not sure that if you are a powerful American politician on your first ever trip to the middle east that you can really get a good idea of what things are like here.

So Barak Obama, I would like to send you an invitation. I invite you to consider that maybe your preconceived notions about the weather in the Middle East are not the only notions that were incorrect. Barak Obama, I would like to invite you to stand in line at Qalandia checkpoint, I would like you to witness the humiliation Palestinians face there, I’d like to invite you to take part in a peaceful demonstration like Mohammad Mansour was doing when his friend was shot and killed, or Roni, who was shot in the neck and who is now paralysed from the waist down. I’d like to invite you to acknowledge that there are families on the Palestinian side of the wall who cannot travel 5 minutes away to the next village to see their familes on the Israeli side of the wall. I would invite you to meet Ahmad, a five year old boy I met on the way back from Jenin whose father was killed by Israeli soldiers. I would like you to consider that if a Palestinian wants to leave the country by plane, he or she cannot leave via Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, he or she must travel by land to Jordan and leave via the airport in Amman. This is the Middle East’s only democracy, Mr. Obama! I would invite you to consider how the unconditional support for Israel with US tax dollars affects 4 million Palestinian people who just want to live their lives and be free from oppression.

Three Checkpoints, One Day

By Suneela

It is overwhelming to be awakened to the reality of a military occupation all of a sudden.

Qalandia terminal, is supposed to be the clean and efficient face of the occupation, like an airport terminal with electronically operated metal gates with stop and go signals and X-ray machines, or ultramodern sanitized humiliation.

As soon as I got there, I could see dozens of people crammed up against the metal gates, pushing, yelling, begging the teenage brat Israeli soldiers to let them through.

The only way I was able to get through was by flashing my American passport all over the place and arguing with the soldiers myself to let me through. It was one of the most personally and collectively humiliating experiences I have been through, and confirmed that what is going on here is not just similar to apartheid, but in fact is apartheid. I know it’s massaging my guilt about my own personal privilege, but it really made me feel complicit in the system to be let through while dozens of desperate people who had been waiting much longer than me were pushed back forcibly, just because of the passport I have, which effectively makes me “white”. I know that rationally speaking, I was there alone and could not have done anything to show my solidarity effectively even if I had stayed back and waited, and that in this case I was not an ISM activist but simply an individual “tourist”, but I still felt like a participant in the apartheid system, and I was sweating all over and weak by the time I got out. Especially after seeing one Palestinian man almost get shot in front of my eyes. This poor man had apparently lost it and was trying to climb above the metal gates and yell at the soldiers, and this oversized high school jock got pissed off (as he is properly trained to do) and had his gun pointed and loaded, ready to fire. On the other side (my side) the other people around this man were frantically trying to pull him down before the soldier boy lost his patience and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, that did not happen, and I was happy that as the man was pulled down by the people around him, he managed to twist up a sign above the gates that said something like “One by one. Please be patient.”

That wasn’t the end of it. The taxi I had to take from the checkpoint to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem was stopped by soldiers at another(“normal”) checkpoint, and another Incredible Hulk got on the bus to “inspect” everyone’s IDs. By bad luck, my suitcase was the one that didn’t fit in the back, so I had it on me and had to open it all up.

And all this was after having gone through two other checkpoints in the same day, the first of which was in the Jenin region, where we were refused to be let through and the two Palestinian ISMers with us made to stand for an hour and a half apart from us. When the two girls in our group tried to go to talk to the soldiers to say what is going on, why are you holding them if their security has been cleared, one soldier who communicated only by yelling pointed his gun at them. I don’t know if this was all an act to make himself feel better, as if it makes him feel more well endowed to aim it, or whether he actually wanted to shoot. All Palestinians going through checkpoints have to be “cleared” to make sure they aren’t “wanted” for heinous crimes such as resisting illegal military occupation. I have seen guys with big guns plenty of times, but to see one pointed and loaded in front of me several times in a day is something else. They had this whole good cop bad cop routine going on, with this obviously American guy who identified himself as a “volunteer” in the army being the good cop and speaking in English, and the bad cop being the above soldier who understood perfectly well what we were saying but wanted to scare us by only barking in Hebrew. And by the way, before it was our turn for special treatment, we had to watch these two guys in a furniture truck be made to unload every piece of furniture and tear open all the wrapping just to “check”. This is ridiculous. I don’t understand any justification for “security” for this. If someone wants to sneak a bomb past a checkpoint, would they really hide it in a piece of
furniture, in 2006? Hello? The only object of this was humiliation, racist humiliation that is state sanctioned.


Tayaseer checkpoint

To get back to Ramallah as well we had to go through the Nablus region and through the Huwarra checkpoint, which is another “terminal” style cattle cage, notorious because it is close to an Israeli military base as well as settlements (which always makes it harder for Palestinians to move). This was the second checkpoint of the day, before Qalandia but after Tayaseer (the above). It was raining and of course me and my fellow internationals cut the line with our wonderful blue passports, but we waited right at the other side in solidarity with our Palestinian friends, even though several different soldiers yelled at us to move here and move there, stand here and stand there, why are you standing here, go away, etc etc, and one soldier with a vaguely American accent came up to us and started asking us why we are in this region, and what “tourism” is there to do here. He seemed to be talking as if there are no people in this area, only some kind of subhuman species that happen to be called Palestinians or “Arabs”.

I noticed from here and the Bil’in demo that the “minorities” within the military, women and Israeli Palestinians who volunteer (mostly Druze) are often way meaner than the Jewish men. The women seem to need to prove they’re more manly than the men, so often they’ll enjoy treating Palestinian men worse, and the Druze need to prove they’re just as loyal to Israel as Jews, so they will treat their Arab brothers and sisters like shit as well.

I’m sorry if this post has been a little chronologically scattered, but it’s been really hard for me to write this out. My mind keeps drifting somewhere else because it doesn’t want to relive this again, but I know I need to write it so that you can read it. I’ll try to write more later when I can deal with all this stuff better.

Also, so that you get a better visual sense of what I had to go through in terms of the cantonization of the West Bank by checkpoints and the wall, here is a link to a really useful map:
http://electronicintifada.net /bytopic/maps/372.shtml