| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
| A Postcard from Jerusalem |
|
|
|
| |
| |
| |
By Dr Abdullah Robin
Managing Editor: New Civilisation
abdullah.robin@newcivilisation.com
| |
| |
| |
| |
There was a tangible feeling of relief, and uneasy smiles all round inside the taxi as man looked to man incredulously; we had been exonerated, we had not committed the heinous crime of having any women with us on our journey today, and we were free! Free, to go without random stop and search; spared further hindrance. An absurd sense of triumph came over me for a small success that we were, in truth, powerless to effect. The triumph was swallowed almost immediately by a sense of guilt for our quick passage; we had it easy today, while female Israeli soldiers amused themselves waving men speedily through their checkpoint only to pull hapless Palestinian women out and leave them languishing by the roadside in this abandoned place on the edge of civilisation called the container.
This was not my first experience of the humiliating antics of female Israeli soldiers at this checkpoint. A few days earlier I sat with six other bemused passengers listening to a huge stocky woman bantering in Hebrew with our driver. Many of the Palestinian drivers can speak Hebrew: it helps sometimes. Not being able to understand Hebrew myself I wondered what the altercation was all about and looking at the discombobulated faces of those around me, who evidently had the irritating advantage of understanding what I could not, pressed them for an explanation. The unfortunate driver, staring fearfully at the heavily armed woman and waiting patiently for her permission to pass, had been sarcastically propositioned, 'what are you staring for, do you want to kiss me then?' The discussion in the car moved on as the checkpoint and the soldiers slipped out of sight in the rear view mirror; on to a kind of bidding to see who would be ready to resist the largest sum of money to be offered for meeting the woman's suggestion, and finally the comedy of the incident wore thinner. One day Palestinians may be waved through with ease, on another they may wait hours; they may be pulled out and searched; they may be humiliated one day and treated with courtesy the next. For the Palestinians the response is the same: patient resignation and the waiting for deliverance.
There are Israelis who would be offended to hear of the misbehaviour of some of these female soldiers and would wish to assert Jewish sexual morality, but my mind now turned to a different kind of morality. Those who are subject to the daily checkpoints that circumscribe their lives have no choice but to wait and listen to the boorish joking of soldiers who have the power to harass, and worse, with impunity. Perhaps the behaviour of these soldiers is a deliberate attempt to humiliate, along the lines of female US soldiers in Iraqi prisons such as Abu Ghraib; perhaps it is just a relief for them from the tedium of their duties. Whatever the explanation, military victory and occupation of lands brings with it an onerous moral responsibility, which is not obviated even by armed resistance. In the face of resistance the moral responsibility becomes greater and the moral collapse of the occupier a possibility. Failure to win the hearts and minds of the vanquished is a bitter fruit after initial victories on the battlefield, as the experience in Iraq now shows, but the failure to win the peace can be the prelude to something worse: corruption of the hearts and minds of the victors.
| |
| |
| |
| |
< 1 2
Page 2 of 2 pages
| |
|
|
