Thread by @hodakatebi

okay time to talk about Israel's apartheid wall & checkpoints: a thread.
In the short time I was in Palestine last month, on 2 separate occasions Israeli soldiers made my friends take their pants down at the checkpoint between the West Bank & Israel.

We were walking through the checkpoint & they yanked her aside & forced her to drop her pants & lift her shirt in a tiny room while a teen soldier watched from behind a camera in the ceiling, machine gun in hand (clearly just for aesthetics given you can’t shoot through a camera)

The time before that my Palestinian friend was coming to pick me up. What should be so infuriating & shocking is a daily reality for Palestinians living under occupation. What should have just been a quick trip (just 10mi/16km, ~20mins) between Ramallah & Jerusalem takes ~1.5hrs.

Not to mention these trips are almost always w/harassment by the IDF, meant to humiliate, stall, frustrate, & dehumanize. Palestinian elders having to drop their pants at gunpoint at the whim of a 18yr old is no small thing on what is a daily commute for countless Palestinians.

& this is the experience for the Palestinians who are able to even travel to Jerusalem, one of the holiest cities, along w/other places inside “Israel”, including: their own farmland that the wall strategically cut them off from & therefore their livelihoods), family & friends...

...the ruins of their destroyed home (or if it’s still standing, their homes that Israelis now live in), the sea, etc. Yet Israeli citizens can access all of it--after all, they have yellow license plates (Palestinians w/o Israeli IDs have white plates) giving them full mobility.

The wall is just ONE of the many ways Israel controls & regulates Palestinian mvmnt, & with it, the very intimacies of how they must live their lives. I even saw ambulances get stopped at the checkpoint w/armed soldiers requiring a pregnant mother in labor to get out for a frisk.

Important note: the wall does NOT follow Israel’s “borders” i.e. the green line designated in 1959 as the intl recognized borders of Israel. Rather, Israel’s convenient lack of a constitution means they haven't actually declared their borders (as they're constantly growing).

Rather, the wall is nothing more than a disgusting monument of apartheid fragmenting Palestinians, rendering Palestine as an open-air prison, & annexing more land & water resources. Palestine controls none of its own borders, airspace, water, or truthfully, its own “government”.

As a (funny? absolutely ridiculous?) side note on borders: one of the many questions asked of me during my interrogation to enter included the question: "Hoda, on a scale of 1-10 how Muslim are you?" 🧐🤔

The wall was built in 2003 for the most pathetic of excuses: “security concerns”, i.e. the code word used internationally for aggressively regressing hmrts in the name of protecting white ppl (& wealth) from Black & Brown people. How about the security of indigenous Palestinians?

As Omar Barghouti said in our mtg, “An oppressor has no right to security”. If Israel wants wants security it should end its illegal apartheid regime & violence against Palestinians. 🤷🏽‍♀️

If the wall is about security why does it cut through Palestinian farmland? Strategically annex water resources? Extend far beyond Israel's “borders”? Do my friends dropping their pants make Israelis safer? If Israel’s security requires oppression what does that say about Israel?