View From a Height

Another Benefit of the Fence

Last week's Washington Post discussed the effects of Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank on both Israelis and Palestinians. A lot of it sounds eerily familiar to the sort of thing we heard from the first Intifada: the Palestinians are just trying to live their lives, etc.

Typically, the Post, in an effort to gain sympathy for the Palestinians, mixes the trivial with the more worrisome:

As the Palestinians inch forward, armed soldiers standing behind sandbagged concrete walls shout orders to have bags opened and their contents dumped on the ground. On one recent morning, soldiers demanded that a man squirt shaving cream from an aerosol can to verify its contents. They ordered another man to rip the red-and-silver wrapping paper off a box to reveal what was inside: a doll for his granddaughter.

"You can't look at a person and know if he's good or bad," said Israeli Sgt. Nadav Efrati, a stocky, square-faced 21-year-old who recently finished his military service after spending months at the Hawara checkpoint. He said the limited Arabic that the Israeli army teaches most of its soldiers exacerbates the friction between the two peoples. "The main words they taught us were: 'Stop. If not, I will shoot you,' " Efrati said.

This is under the heading, "A Glimpse of Brutality." Demanding an aerosol be squirting? Unwrapping a present? I go through more "brutality" than that trying to get on a Frontier Airlines flight. And it's because of these guys. As it happens, when I was leaving Israel in 1993, I took back a present that a friend of mine had wrapped. The security guy unwrapped it.

As for the language difficulty, the Army could do a better job of teaching some Arabic to the soldiers. But Hebrew is the predominant language in Israel. If you were under occupation, and you wanted to make your life a little easier, wouldn't you take the trouble to learn a little of the Army's language?

In fact, the most troubling incident, one of clear abuse, came not from a Jewish soldier, but from an Arab, a Bedouin. He almost certainly was under some pressure to be "more Israeli than the Israelis," and he also understoof the taunts and insults the Palestinians were hurling at him.

Now people are people, and anyone can get to enjoying a little power a little too much, but the problem here isn't primarily that the soldiers are enjoying their power, but that they're not enjoying it. It's miserable work, not fighting, having to interrupt people's lives this way.

In fact, it's a fine argument for getting on with the fence, and finishing the disengagement.