23rd
“What you think of my shidduch” or; A kind of inauguration.
Yesterday I got hit on at a checkpoint between Israel and Palestine. Talk about the ramification of “hit on.” I was there volunteering with and interviewing members of the organization Machsom Watch, a group of older female volunteers who, since 2001 have dedicated themselves to monitoring the checkpoints that mark “borders” between Israel and Palestinian territories and within Palestinian territories themselves. In recent years, particularly since the building of the “security fence” between Israel and Palestinian territories, these checkpoints have become areas of hostility and human rights violations, in which crossing Palestinians are harassed or simply not allowed to pass through for various security reasons. Many cases have been documented – by Machsom Watch and others – of those in grave need of medical care who are not allowed through, or those who are not able to access their agricultural lands on the other side of the checkpoints. In groups of two or three volunteers, the Machsom Watch women have made it their project to stand guard as close as they can get to the checkpoint examination area, and simply monitor. Simply stand there and watch, stand there and make it clear – both to the soldiers and to those passing through the checkpoint – that someone is watching. At times they clash with the soldiers or are asked to leave, but for the most part – as I saw yesterday – they maintain a fascinating grandmother-ly dynamic with the soldiers, most of whom are between the ages of eighteen and twenty two. The Machsom Watch women command a kind of respect, a kind of tolerance, partially because they do not act as the kind of young, devil-may-care-anarchist activists who do this kind of work in many other area.
Still, that afternoon at Hawwara there I was, a “young” woman, standing there in my skinny jeans and throwing off the whole grandmother – soldier balance. Dina, my main Machsom Watch contact, approached me smiling from the other end of the checkpoint. “The soldier wants your phone number,” she said in Hebrew, pulling her purple parka away from her face. I watched the cold whip up toward her, pulling at a small piece of white hair that fell away from her forehead. The situation could have been one in a middle school or high school in suburban America, the one friend connecting the other to the boy who had a crush on her. But it wasn’t, and my chest tightened a bit as if the giggle forcing its way out of Dina’s throat was a threat. I’d never felt that Israeli soldiers were a threat to me – after all, as a Jewish American living in Israel, they are identifiably there to protect me – but somehow the introduction of the sexual, the entanglement of one kind of simple, social world with the mitigated, coldly metallic world of the checkpoint…somehow these were what made me afraid. These made me pay even closer attention to the fact that over behind the carrousel he was pulling a green hood over his head, and waving a gun at people to make them pass.
**”machsom” is the Hebrew term for “checkpoint.”
**”shidduch” is the Yiddish term for arranging a romantic connection between two religious Jews in order to examine the possibility for arranged marriage.
-LSF
