Letter from Ramallah: Despair, too, has its routines
May 31, 2014 2:35 PM Subscribe
THE STRANGEST THINGS become routine. Every weekday evening, a taxi idles outside the Ofer military prison compound in Beitunia, about 10 minutes south of Ramallah, waiting for the gate to slide open and a few dazed men to walk through carrying their belongings in sealed plastic bags as they step into freedom, or at least into the more spacious prison known as the West Bank. Sometimes there’s a van there selling coffee, chips, and candy bars to the prisoners’ families as they wait in the dusty lot outside the compound, which also houses an Israeli army base, a checkpoint for trucks crossing into Israel, and a military court — West Bank Palestinians are tried in military rather than civil proceedings. The conviction rate, the last time it was published, stood at 99.74 percent. Prison hence plays an outsized role in West Bank life: nearly half of all Palestinian males have at some point been incarcerated.
Every Friday, when the courts are closed and no prisoners can be released, teenage boys and young men from Beitunia, Ramallah, and the surrounding villages gather on the long straight road outside the jail to hurl stones in the direction of the metal gate. They rarely get close enough to hit it. Soldiers respond with plastic-coated steel bullets, copious quantities of tear gas, occasionally with live fire. Sometimes the clashes drift from Fridays into the workweek. Sometimes someone throws a Molotov. Sometimes dozens take part, sometimes just a handful. The Israeli military spokespeople — and following their lead, most of the Israeli media — call the clashes “riots,” a word that effectively strips them of all political intent, and their participants of anything like rational agency. They are not riots, and they are not exactly demonstrations. Most West Bank protests have some clear symbolic goal: to close a road or push through a checkpoint, to breach a fence, to reach land seized by settlers. At Ofer prison, kids risk death to throw rocks at the jail that will likely one day hold them, usually from a distance too great to reach their target. Despair too has its routines.
Every Friday, when the courts are closed and no prisoners can be released, teenage boys and young men from Beitunia, Ramallah, and the surrounding villages gather on the long straight road outside the jail to hurl stones in the direction of the metal gate. They rarely get close enough to hit it. Soldiers respond with plastic-coated steel bullets, copious quantities of tear gas, occasionally with live fire. Sometimes the clashes drift from Fridays into the workweek. Sometimes someone throws a Molotov. Sometimes dozens take part, sometimes just a handful. The Israeli military spokespeople — and following their lead, most of the Israeli media — call the clashes “riots,” a word that effectively strips them of all political intent, and their participants of anything like rational agency. They are not riots, and they are not exactly demonstrations. Most West Bank protests have some clear symbolic goal: to close a road or push through a checkpoint, to breach a fence, to reach land seized by settlers. At Ofer prison, kids risk death to throw rocks at the jail that will likely one day hold them, usually from a distance too great to reach their target. Despair too has its routines.
This post was deleted for the following reason: I can't tell if this is any more interesting than a typical I/P post, since the linked site doesn't scroll for me anyway. -- mathowie
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