No Way Through: approaching the West Bank checkpoint

Abstract

This article considers the intriguing frequency of “proxy crossings” by British and American protagonists in international cultural advocacy that seeks to represent the West Bank checkpoint. This highly visible instance of the global checkpoint is the site of a spectacular confrontation between opposing notions of safety, embodied in the encounter between the Israeli soldier guarding the checkpoint and the Palestinian who seeks to pass through it. The narratives I am interested in prompt their readers or viewers to imagine themselves as the person requesting passage by placing a metropolitan protagonist at the checkpoint. Through this act of substitution, metropolitan audiences are asked not simply to side with Palestinians, but to share in their sense of fear and endangerment, and to recognize their common yet unequal implication in the global security order. At the same time, however, audiences are also reminded of the limits of this form of empathetic identification. When the intermediary figures in these narratives approach the checkpoint with fear and then cross it without incident, they are compelled to acknowledge their own safety, and in acknowledging that safety to feel shame, to feel ashamed that they are safe when others are not. The checkpoint thus becomes a site of political conversion, a site where the protagonist, standing in for the reader or viewer, can be persuaded to stand in solidarity with Palestinians.

Keywords:

• checkpoint
• Palestine
• West Bank
• advocacy
• empathy
• safety

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexandra Monro and Sheila Menon for their generosity in discussing their work and providing production stills, the Random House Group Limited and Fantagraphics for permission to reproduce images from Joe Sacco’s Palestine, and David Fieni and Karim Mattar for their helpful comments on this piece.

Notes

1. The most recent OCHA report lists 542 currently operational “obstacles”, of which 15 percent are “passable” (road gates that are normally open, checkpoints that are sometimes unstaffed, and checkpoints that do not require ID or permits for passage). The report states that some restrictions (including the notorious Huwwara checkpoint outside Nablus) have been removed or eased since 2008, but that Palestinian access to agricultural land and Palestinian movement within the city of Hebron remains severely curtailed, and that restrictions on movement across the West Bank continue to adversely affect Palestinian daily life (OCHA 2012, 1–4).

2. For a thought-provoking account of Palestine’s significance in understanding contemporary globalizing processes (specifically colonization, militarization, securitization and acceleration), see Collins (2011).

3. As Wendy Brown notes, the “dangerous alien” that contemporary walls purport to keep out is often a composite figure, merging the threats of migration and terror (2010, 116). In the case of the West Bank wall and checkpoints, while their stated aim is to deter attacks against Israeli civilians, they also assert the Israeli state’s power to defend its citizens against competition for resources: the closures allow the state to control Palestinian access to agricultural land and water, and to annex disputed territory.

4. Derek Gregory suggests that the conjunction of the spectacular and the mundane is integral to the operation of the war on terror: “It is important not to allow the spectacular violence of September 11, or the wars in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, to blind us to the banality of the colonial present and to our complicity in its horrors” (2004, 16).

5. For a creative response to this representational challenge, see the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s film Mutasalilun (2012; Infiltrators), which presents documentary footage of Palestinians attempting to cross through gaps in the West Bank wall as a form of high-stakes adventure.

6. This kind of imaginative identification with Palestinians crossing the checkpoint is also prompted by performative acts of protest in metropolitan settings, such as the mock checkpoints set up by student protestors on American college campuses including UC Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton and Yale (Christensen 2008; Greenbaum and Etra 2010; Chituc 2011; Messerly 2013).

7. This title is taken from the Al-Jazeera documentary of the same name (2012), which focuses on Palestinian experiences of the West Bank checkpoints.

8. Bloomsbury first published the book in the UK in 2006, followed by a paperback edition in 2007. The US edition did not appear until 2009, and it was published not by a major commercial house but by Olive Branch Press, an imprint of Interlink specializing in non-fiction with an emphasis on the Middle East. The subtitle was changed to A Jerusalem Memoir.