Amira Hass : You live in Ramallah? Do you want me to help get you out?
“There is nothing exceptional today,” said the woman soldier from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman’s office when I asked why a crowd of hundreds of people waited for an hour and a half and longer at the Qalandiya checkpoint at the southern edge of Ramallah last Friday in a line that did not budge. “Nothing exceptional,” meaning that it’s always like that, the usual crowded group of people lining behind and between the bars at the checkpoint. Routine. Nothing special.
“In the course of the event, there were no exceptional events,” the spokesman’s office told the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which sought to find out why over Passover soldiers and police officers accompanying West Bank Jewish settlers had forced Palestinians swimming at Birkat al-Karmil in an area of the West Bank formally under full Palestinian control to get out of the water so the settlers could swim there as they pleased. So there is nothing unusual about expelling people from a pool that the local Yatta municipality had refurbished and maintains within the park. There is nothing unusual about members of the fortunate race disrupting a little leisure time from those of misfortune at a one of the few recreational spots in the area.
“A routine step,” said an Israeli bureaucrat, referring to the expected visit by a delegation from the prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague as part of a preliminary examination of the possibility of war crimes having been committed after June 13, 2014. Totally routine, really a matter of no concern that people should get excited over, that an International Criminal Court delegation is coming to look into the possibility that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed. It happens all the time – everywhere. It’s a routine step, just as the war crimes (as defined by the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute) being committed here (the settlements, for example) are routine.
The multiplicity of “unexceptional” incidents make us used to the screech of the increasing decibel levels, creating a constant din that stifles thought, increases the ceiling required to attract attention for a moment and prompting a questioning of the situation. After the wars on Gaza, anything that isn’t mass death and destruction at a level of 7 on the Richter scale, anything fewer than 500 children killed, is less likely to attract glancing attention. Think of the thousands of children that have been injured in war there, disabled for life. Where is the verbal sleight of hand and the attractive photos that will depict them in a way that shakes the viewer from complacency?
An illegal settlement in the Jordan Valley reached the ceiling last week after an actor, Norman Issa, refused to perform in a production there and Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev weighed in on the issue. But who knows or cares or gets all excited about “unexceptional” incidents occurring in the Jordan Valley last week alone?
On June 10, the residents of the Khirbet Humsa community were evacuated for seven hours so the IDF could conduct military training, according to a B’Tselem report. When they returned, the residents discovered that grazing and agricultural land of theirs had caught fire and that dud ammunition had fallen near where they live. They have received another order to evacuate on June 16, for more exercises, and three other communities have received similar orders.
And speaking of dud ammunition: On the morning of June 4, a 9-year-old boy, Kataiba Sawafta of the northern West Bank town of Tubas, was severely burned when dud ammunition exploded near the village of Ibzik in the northern Jordan Valley in an area that the IDF closed for training exercises. That too is routine in the Tubas area (and something should have been added at this point in this column that would exceed the necessary ceiling against the background noise of the sanctification of the IDF and training exercises, but I don’t know what I could write).
And on June 4, representatives of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, in the company of soldiers and a bulldozer, demolished structures, including five tents that served as homes, along with animal pens, in the shepherding community of Al-Makhsar in the northern Jordan Valley. That’s what Israelis are sending their children to the army to do; that boring, invisible routine, peaking with the “routine matter” of delegation from The Hague.
A time-out
Last Tuesday, my Palestinian cell phone rings. Caller ID shows it’s from an Israeli number. “Hello, this is Yad L’achim,” the young voice on the other end says. Excuse me? I respond.
I’m speaking from Yad L’achim. We’ve heard that you live in Ramallah. Is that true? Are you interested in our assistance?
Assistance with what? I say. If you want to leave, comes the response. Why would I want to leave? I ask. Just asking, the caller says. Just asking if everything is OK. If everything is OK, then stay there.
His name is Yitzhak, and I ask him: And if I do want to leave, how will you get me out of Ramallah? Do you go into Ramallah? Or set a place to meet?
“I’m just a volunteer,” he says diplomatically, “but the minute that you say you need to get out, I will tell the call center, the management at the office. They will know what to do.”
No, he has not yet had the chance to get someone out of the West Bank, but he has prepared for it. He hasn’t been volunteering for very long, he explains, but he “tries to help, just volunteering here for his national civilian service. Anything that Jews and Arabs need help with, I try to help.”
“You also help Arabs?” I ask.
“I help everyone. I try. I am not officially doing national service. It’s like picking up hitchhikers at every hitchhiking post.”
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