By Tamar Fleishman
The girl with the doll, her mother and her two sisters, one of which was burning up with fever and kept crying each time she saw a soldier, weren’t permitted to pass through the checkpoint and head home to Abu- Gosh.
Everything was done according to the regulations and everything was done according to the orders, there were no irregularities.
That is what they teach them and that is what they are trained to do, to obey with full compliance without taking responsibility or acting according to their own judgment.
Because this way is better for them and this way is better for the system, and this is how generations of children turn into obedient adults who follow their orders without second guessing the actions they perform and their consequences.
The mother of the girl with the doll, who was born and raised in Ramallah and has a Palestinian ID, married an Israeli citizen from the village Abu Gosh.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law is in essence a racist law, and no other country in the world has anything like it. This law determines that all the Palestinians are a threat to the security of the Israeli state, and is intended to prevent legal status to Palestinian couples. It was designed in 2002 as a Temporal Order but has been renewed over and over again each time it was supposed to expire. This law prevents the mother of the girl with the doll from permanently living in the house where she shares her life with her husband and children, and forces her to always have a: “Temporary Permit for Family Reunification”, which as is evident from the title, is a temporary permit that might be taken away from her at any given moment.
But on that morning the woman who was visiting her family in Ramallah with her children, had possibly taken a different bag or perhaps forgot to make sure or maybe…
Either way, it was only in the afternoon at the checkpoint, as they were heading back, that she learned that she only had a copy of the passage permit. But a copy is never good enough, when you are a Palestinian you must have the original document.
And even if she had the original document, she also didn’t have her ID with her, now that is really bad. However, it’s not as though the inspecting soldier and the policeman who was summoned, couldn’t verify her identity. The computer is able to verify anyone’s identity using their ID number or by comparing their finger prints with the biometric database, and they could have even used both methods.
But where there is a will there is a way, and there was no will so they didn’t check and following the orders they got by phone from the high and mighty, they cleared that hazard away and sent away the girl with the doll, her mother and her two sisters, one of which was burning up with fever and kept crying each time she saw a soldier.
That’s it. And no one can tell me this occupation doesn’t stink.
– As a member of Machsomwatch, once a week Tamar Fleishman heads out to document the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah. This documentation (reports, photos and videos) can be found on the organization’s site: www.machsomwatch.org. The majority of the Spotlights (an opinion page) that are published on the site had been written by her. She is also a member of the Coalition of Women for Peace and volunteer in Breaking the Silence. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
