Interview by Shivani Khanna

Gargoyle assistant editor

Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2007, The OG, features & in depth

IN EARLY APRIL, a series of events marking Palestine Awareness Week took place on the University of Illinois campus.

One Uni student for whom that week had a special resonance was senior Dana Al-Qadi, whose family is from Nablus in the West Bank.

Gargoyle assistant editor Shivani Khanna recently spoke to Al-Qadi about Palestinian life in today's Middle East.

From her experiences traveling back to an occupied Palestine to the inconveniences that the Israeli military causes local residents, Al-Qadi gives us a personal account of life in Palestine.

The first night of Palestine Awareness Week at the U of I featured a panel of several people talking about their own experiences in the region. What has your experience been like when you've traveled back to Palestine?

Due to the limited time I spend in Palestine, about an entire summer every other year, I really do not feel the true extent of the occupation. However, every single person who has ever stayed in the West Bank for some time has some sort of experience.

The last time I was there in the summer, there were very frequent invasions into Nablus, the city I stay in, at night. The soldiers would always come in at night and withdraw to the outskirts by morning. It sounds really frightening to say, “The city has been invaded,” but everyone is so accustomed to it.

The first time I walked near a tank, I was absolutely petrified. I could barely breathe, much less move. A tank is really heavy. I mean when it drives by, everything shakes. The fact that it rolls over pavement that has been dry and hard for so many years and still leaves an imprint in the ground is indicative of just how powerful that piece of equipment is.

Israeli soldiers check a vehicle in the West Bank.

(photo courtesy Dana Al-Qadi) (click to enlarge)

A specific incident I recall is when I was hanging out near the Old City area, which is similar to a downtown, and the Israeli Defense Forces had a soldier dressed in civilian clothing wandering around the Old City. He was completely unmarked and I'm assuming they lost touch with him on their walkie-talkie or they thought he had been discovered or something similar.

All of a sudden there were a lot of army jeeps coming in and everyone starts rushing to get into taxis and leave this area and soldiers are yelling through their bullhorns and throwing sound bombs. For me, it was a problem to think that there were unmarked soldiers among us. It just perpetuated this fear and utter instability.

In Palestine, if you're above the age of 16 you are required to have a mandatory ID card that's issued by the Israeli government, and it enters you into their system, just to keep track of everyone. You have a special number and you can't go anywhere without it. At one of the speeches [during Palestine Awareness Week], one of the speakers, Prof. Jamal Nassar, said it was “just like your American Express card, you just don't leave home without it.” The consequence of not having it on you is potential jail time, so I had to get used to making sure I had it all times.

But I think the checkpoints are really the highlight of everything. They're really borderline in the sense of the fact that they're not so bad where you can't tolerate them but they are so inconvenient and just make regular life extremely difficult. Checkpoints are just dispersed throughout Palestine and make fluid movement from one point to another impossible. I can understand why there would be checkpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian border, but it is just unacceptable to me that Israel manages checkpoints within Palestinian territories.

Especially at this age, we bicker with our parents about the time of our curfew. “Oh my gosh, 10 o'clock? No way!” Imagine having a foreign government imposing this closure at an hour like 7 p.m. One of my cousins spent the day outside of the city visiting Ramallah, which is a city very close to Nablus but yet takes an entire afternoon to reach thanks to checkpoints. So the checkpoint back into Nablus closed early that day and he was stuck. He had to spend the night in a hotel and could not get back into the city.

Local graffiti expresses a widespread sentiment.

(photo courtesy Dana Al-Qadi) (click to enlarge)

I feel like the soldiers operate the checkpoints based upon their moods. Sometimes they close them early. Sometimes they make all the men sit down on the side. Sometimes they make people go through barbed wire pathways.

There have been horror stories where women have been in labor and still not allowed to pass through the checkpoints. They had their babies in front of everyone on the side of a dirt road. People have often passed out from heatstroke because of standing in the heat for so long.

You can't take a car through a checkpoint unless the soldier is having a really good day. So most of the time you come with your car to the checkpoint and you can't move unless the soldier beckons to you, and when they do, they are all completely loaded with weapons and many guns.

I remember one time a soldier poked one into the car, and my brother and sister were asleep in the backseat and my mom was so worried that they would wake and see a gun in their face. They ask you for your IDs and they ask you why you are going where you're going.

They make you get out of your car so if you just went shopping you would have to carry everything you purchased. You have to walk to the other side, and you hop into a taxi or a different car that's waiting there to pick you up. There's a lot of walking involved even if you're old, even if you're sick, even if you're young — you're still expected to get out and do the walking and wait just like anybody else.

So you personally feel threatened by the tanks and the soldiers?

Of course. I should never have to not want to go see my extended family because I'm afraid I won't be able to come home to the U.S., and it's a really valid fear. I remember three years ago when it was the first time I was going to go back since the most recent Intifada had started, and I remember just watching the news and saying, “I can't go there.”

It's scary, and of course I feel threatened because when you hear stories about when kids are shot at or random bullets being shot you realize there is nearly no discrimination between who is being punished.

The punishments that are being imposed are often unilateral for the whole area. A curfew affects everybody, and when they come into town it affects everybody — a lot of times a lot of extra people are being detained in certain areas. Houses are demolished, killing entire families rather than just one person whom they say they want.

So yeah, I do feel threatened, and I feel really scared, but then the really sad thing, which is even worse than the fear itself, is that you get used to it. Like right now being at a checkpoint doesn't faze me that much, but it should. That kind of injustice and that kind of violence should always bother someone tremendously. But when my 7-year-old cousin is running by an army jeep and he doesn't even think twice, that's not a good sign. It's not a good sign at all.

Do you have a particularly vivid memory of the type of inconvenience the checkpoints have caused you?

Because we're American citizens we can come in through the Tel Aviv airport, which is in Israel, but then somehow you have to get from Israel to Palestine. Jews and people within Israel have cars with yellow license plates, and if you're Arab or from outside Israel then you have a green plate. Green-plated cars can never go through Israel. When things were more peaceful a yellow-plated car could come into the West Bank, but now that's a no-go for sure.

We arrived at the airport, and if you're Arab then you're nearly always searched and questioned extra. You're always asked why you're there, how long you will be there, what business you have, and it's just tedious. So we were running a little late when we got to the checkpoint.

At the checkpoint there were three soldiers, 18-year-old guys who were goofing around, and they were play-fighting with each other, and we're just waiting and it's hot and we're just waiting for them to finish playing. When they finally decide that they have had enough they wave us over, and so we go and they're like, “Oh, it's too bad the checkpoint already closed like 10 minutes ago.”

And my mom was so angry, and it was like we waited several minutes for them to kind of act professional and then they were like, “Oh, it's closed and there is nothing we can do for you, you can't pass.” After a lot of heated arguing, they finally agreed to ask higher-end officials, who only gave us permission [to go on] because we didn't have proper documentation to be able to spend the night in Israel. It was absolutely ridiculous.

Even when my grandmother … when she got really sick over spring break and no one was sure if she was going to make it and my dad decided to go see her, it was really difficult.

Any normal person provided the money would just be able to go and get the ticket and go, right? If you were going to go to Europe, that's what you could do.

My dad had to get permits, he had to get permission to enter the country, permission to leave the country, he had to work out all sorts of different cars to come get him and pick him up from certain spots, and it was just so inconvenient.

He didn't even get to spend that much time with his mother because the whole time he was there after he arrived he had to plan how he was going to leave and how he was going to get the proper documentation.

It's all a hassle I feel for the sake of just creating almost a cage actually. I mean, when you're in Palestine, it is a cage now and you can't leave and you can't go anywhere else.

RELATED

— Gargoyle multimedia: Audio slideshow: Dana's experiences in Palestine

— Gargoyle coverage: Palestine Awareness Week begins today on U of I campus

— Gargoyle coverage: Expert on Middle East urges change in U.S. mindset

— Background: Rashid Khalidi, “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood”