On a bus in the West Bank ...... As we drove back toward Ramallah that evening, we passed a checkpoint near an Israeli settlement without being stopped. “Amazing,” said one of the organizers and blessed the row of fair Norwegian faces against the windows that the soldiers must have seen. But a few minutes later, conversations stopped and a tense silence descended as soldiers on the side of the road flagged the bus down. It had grown dark by then. Two Israeli soldiers walked onto the bus, guns pointed at passengers. Casually, they asked, “Marijuana, Hamas, Fatah, terrorist?” as if someone was going to raise her hand and confess. When no one did, they got off. As the doors closed, one of the Ashtar students stood and said to us, the internationals, “Do you see, do you see how they treat us?” He spoke loudly, and his friends shushed him fiercely, afraid the soldiers would come back. He was a young man from Hebron, near where the Israeli teenagers had gone missing. At the time, Hebron was closed off, and his ID card would have been enough to detain him. (In Palestine, you can be jailed without reason, without a trial, for six months as a special “administrative detainee.” Of the almost 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisonsprisons, about 200 are administrative detainees.) The bus drove on, and everyone sighed in relief.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:08:31 +0000
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