Humiliation

This blog is written by my friend and colleague, Kate.

Kate is a Jewish activist who has spent almost a year in Palestine and writes regularly about her experiences here for her own blog and for her friends and family. Kate has kindly given me permission to publish her blog, ‘Humiliation’, on Palestine Eyewitness.

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December 5, 2004

Humiliation.When you ask Palestinians to talk about the occupation, especially the men, the word that comes up more than any other is "humiliation." Ask about the occupation, and the first ten stories will be about checkpoints, and all of them will have the word "humiliation" in them.

It is hard for people not living in this situation to grasp, that humiliation is the hardest thing about living under occupation, much worse than violence. I have said something like this before, the dailiness of it, the ordinariness, the fact that it might happen ten times a day or even more, depending on where you live and work and what is happening there, the way that it emphasizes to you that you have no control over your life. It is hard for me to grasp, and I have lived here for more than a year now (a fact that is also very hard for me to grasp). It's hard for me to understand because I don't feel humiliated when I am stopped at a checkpoint or asked a hundred times a day, "Where are you from?" "What are you doing here?" But of course, the checkpoints are not meant to humiliate me. They are not asking the questions for that, though why they are asking them, I cannot quite figure out. It is certainly not because they want to know, and not because it tells them anything.

But it is telling that "Where are you from?" ("Meayfo at?") is almost always the first question they ask, before "Where are you going?" or "What are you doing?" It speaks to the apartheid nature of these control mechanisms. By asking, "Where are you from?" they are asking, "How do I have to treat you?" Last night in the Old City, a border policeman stepped in front of a group of men and asked, "Where are you from" in Hebrew. One of the men said, "Do you speak English?" He repeated the question, immediately more polite. The man said, "Colombia." The policeman was visibly shocked and withdrew, saying, "Oh, go ahead," and then answered some questions about how to get to a certain bar near New Gate. I thought, they could have been from Nablus and answered, "Colombia," and would he have known the difference? He did not ask them for ID. I think it doesn't even occur to them that people might lie to them.

Whenever I am in a service going to Jerusalem, at the checkpoint the border police get on and usually everyone just holds up their IDs and they look at the cover and if they are blue, they don't ask to see them, only the green or orange ones. So I always think, isn't there a huge underground market in blue plastic covers? But I don't think there is, because most people are too afraid to lie. And that in itself is humiliating, that you feel like you have to tell these bastards the truth, because if you are caught lying, you will be punished so severely. It is like being a child with an abusive parent.

The South Africans who are working here talk about it being worse than their apartheid system. I tend to react negatively to that, because I think of the violence, and certainly, the South African government was as violent and as harsh in its repression of Africans and much more so of dissent within the white society. But I think what they are seeing is the humiliation factor, the in-your-face-ness of the occupation, the way that it controls every aspect of Palestinian life, they can never forget it, while the Black South Africans had more space to call their own, they didn't run into the police or the army every day.

My neighbor, Abu R, was saying tonight that the last Intifada was concentrated in the cities, but this one has been more in the villages, because the cities are technically unoccupied, while the villages are where the army is omnipresent. Sami Awad was talking about this issue, "How do we resist from within a prison?" Though in that sense, the prison analogy is not good (in others, it is quite apt), because in prison, normally the repressive apparatus is very visible. It is more like, "How do we resist when we are on reservations?" The South Africans had their labor to withhold, but Israel is no longer dependent on Palestinian labor.

This evening, I was going to visit some friends in Deir Balut, and there was a checkpoint at the entrance to the village. A service was being checked, and when I got there, I asked the driver if he had room and he said no, though I think that he did. The soldiers asked me where I was from, as usual, and I answered in Hebrew, and then they asked why I was taking Palestinian transportation. I said in English, if you want to go to Qarawa, it is the only way to go. They didn't understand. I tried to ignore them, and one soldier asked, "Do you need any help?"
I said, "Well, if you want to help me, you could go away, because while you are here, no one wants to pick me up."

He said, "I don't know what you are talking about."

He finished checking the next car and it went through and I realized that it was Abu R, who was taking one of his employees who lives in Biddia to the Qarawa roadblock. When he saw me, he picked me up, and then he said he had thought I was with the army. I said, yes, everyone thought that, and told him about my conversation with the soldier. He laughed and said, "He can understand what you say, but he cannot do what you ask."

I thought about how it feels to be someone like him, a man of tremendous power in his community, who was, at some point, a military leader much higher than these kids who were asking for his ID, and now is sort of a leader in a nonviolent movement including hundreds of Israelis and internationals, as well as Palestinians, who's been interviewed for documentaries and European television and South African radio, and to have to give your ID on demand to any bored Israeli punk in a uniform and say nothing, if you don't want a hassle or worse. I think about how it must feel to men who are doctors or sheikhs, standing for hours at checkpoints, to have to ask Israeli women or me, who has no social power in my own society whatever, to beg the soldiers to let them go to the doctor or to work or whatever. And then I feel bad for being classist and thinking that maybe their humiliation matters more than that of an old farmer or a builder or the kids who sell gum at the checkpoints.

Last week, I went on a trip to Jenin, and we hit a flying checkpoint on the way. The line of cars was really long and didn't seem to be moving well. I got out and walked up to the front to see what was happening. There was a huge space between the cars going north and those going south – maybe 200 meters, and the soldiers were standing in the middle and really taking their time motioning cars forward from one side and then the next. I was just going to stand at a distance and watch, see if it sped it up any, but they called out to me to come, so I did. They asked me a bunch of questions (interestingly, the first one was not "Where are you from?" but "Where are you?"), and told me that they hate Arabs.

I asked, "So is that why you are here, because you hate them?" and one of the soldiers answered, "Yes, I hate them because they kill my friends." I walked away, and he called me back. I tried not to go, saying, "I don't want to talk to you, it will just hold up all these cars." He said, "It will not take long, just two words." I went back. "Two words," I said. "I don't hate all of them," he said. "Just the ones who kill us."

I said, "Okay," and turned around. The commander came forward then and made a point of telling me to go wait in the car, which I was already about to do. The line suddenly went a lot faster and people were able to wait much closer to them.

When our car got to the front, they told us all to get out. Ours was the only car they did that with. We were standing on one side of the car, and they gestured to us to move to the other side. We obeyed, and lined up and gave them our IDs. Then one soldier, not the one I had talked to before, came over to me. "What are you doing here?" "Visiting friends. What are you doing?" He said, "Visiting friends." I have to admit, that is the first time I have gotten that response. His friend called out in Hebrew, "Give her your phone number." He said, "I'm looking for a special friend." I said, "Well, you're unlikely to find one here, go home." He gave me back the IDs and we left.

Why did they do it? Whom were they hoping to humiliate, me or the Palestinians? Or both? The sad thing is, they wanted to do something to show disrespect, and to flaunt their power, but they were not really sadists, so once they had done that, they couldn't figure out anything to do with us.

On Saturday night, I encountered some border police who were sadists. Nine of them were hanging out near the entrance of the Old City, and they would call young men over and beat them. Just like that. One guy, they slapped twice and kicked once, another guy they choked and were getting ready to beat with clubs when I ran up. They made one kid take off his shoes and socks and it was freezing and wet. They had told me to get lost, but I didn't, so they took my ID and they didn't like it (copy of my passport and my IWPS ID card, in a Palestinian ID folder). I think they let it go because they don't read English well and couldn't tell exactly what the ID card was and if it was something official or not. Father M, the rector at the Hospice, came by while I was waiting to get it back, and I went to talk to him, thinking it might help. Then right before they let me go, a Palestinian man I know, who works in a drug prevention and treatment program in the Old City, happened by and said, "Are you okay? Do you need any help?"

People have been talking about the story, that Israelis are more upset about soldiers at a checkpoint making a man play the violin for them than they are about the soldier in Gaza firing a barrage of bullets into a 13-year-old girl after she was wounded. I don't think it should be either-or, people can and should be outraged by both incidents. But in a certain way, those who are more outraged about the violin incident, are the ones who correctly understand the long-term strategy of occupation. The incident in Rafah illustrates the complete dehumanization of the officer who killed the girl. The incident at Beit Iba illustrates the conscious dehumanization of the violinist – taking a man's pride and joy, his talent, the thing that gives his life meaning, and forcing him to use it as an instrument of oppression.

In an online chat with my friend N, she asks, "is it humiliating because that is the intent? or can it not be humiliating if one is not humiliated?"

The intent is definitely to humiliate. But if you are not humiliated, then you pretty much rob them of their power. They can use violence, but the violence is also primarily meant to humiliate.

My friend A told this intense story, in the interview I did with her, about an incident where a soldier said, "You're going to spend the night with me in the tower," and she decided to keep walking and leave her ID behind. And how she took the power from him. But I think about how terrified she must have been, because really, he could have killed her.

For Palestinians in the area where I live, the sheer existence of the army in their faces every day, on their land, driving their jeeps around on roads carved out of their olive groves, and the fact that these 18 year old kids can stop them and demand ID from them and ask them prying questions or make them play the violin and they can't fight back, is humiliating. Because it says that as a people, they have no power.

My friend Um F never even looks at the soldiers when she encounters a checkpoint, never takes out her ID ahead of time like others do, and almost all of the time she just walks through without stopping. A Palestinian friend of N's in Ramallah says she doesn't believe in documents (passports, IDs, car registrations), so she doesn't carry them. I don't understand how she gets around, but she does. She gets hassle, but she has never been arrested for it and she always gets to work and home again. I want to interview her about it. I don't know how long she's had this policy. Right now, she is about my age.

It's kind of like me and giving the copy of my passport all the time. Sometimes I think it is making trouble where there doesn't need to be any. But it is also subverting the occupation, which is built of rules. Because if I just give them the passport, they glance at it and let me go, and everything goes smoothly. And if I give them something they don't expect, they have to think about it. Sometime this year, I started to think, "Why do I always make so much trouble? I can just show them the passport and go on my way." Now I think, maybe that is when I started to think more like an occupied person.