JERUSALEM/CAIRO:Years ago the Israeli government told Rami he couldn’t travel outside his West Bank town of Ramallah, where he had no work. He then fled to Jerusalem to work at a small hotel and support his family. For years, Rami couldn’t leave Jerusalem’s Old City for fear of imprisonment for absconding.
Restrictions on Rami, a Palestinian Christian whose name has been changed to protect him and his livelihood, were eased somewhat recently, and he can now travel occasionally outside the Old City. But his greatest agony still involves his inability to move freely. He missed the birth of his child because of a government checkpoint keeping him from the hospital.
Rami’s lack of personal freedom is common among Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but his frustrations are an important reminder that common Palestinian despair often focuses not on aspirations for formal statehood – certainly an eventual goal – but rather on the scarceness of freedoms of association and assembly.
Rami wakes each day longing for mobility, while nationalism is further from his mind.
The freedom of association – the right to move in order to sustain employment, set out to acquire personal property, publicly worship or protest, send and receive information, and to otherwise maintain personal relationships – is the most basic human entitlement, the denial of which renders other human rights meaningless.
The anguish resulting from being denied these freedoms fuels many Palestinians’ anger toward the Israeli government.
In his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter reported that in many conversations with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, common grievances involve immobility.
“What the Palestinians wanted, Carter wrote, was to “catalogue their current grievances, such as their inability to “assemble peacefully, travel without restrictions, or own property without fear of its being confiscated.
Many Palestinians don’t obsess daily over formal statehood, with its national currency, sovereign airspace, and security forces.
Instead, what many Palestinians immediately crave is unrestricted access to potable water and a life in which they can support themselves, visit loved ones, and travel to new places without being turned away at the nearest military checkpoint.
In his Cairo speech, President Obama rightly called conditions in the Palestinian lands of the West Bank and Gaza “intolerable, not because Palestinians don’t yet have a national monetary system or recognized aviation space, but because freedom of human movement there is strangled.
Israel imposes one of the world’s most visible military presences in and around these territories. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that “Palestinian movements within the West Bank have been tightly restricted by a shifting, maze-like network of Israeli military checkpoints, barricades and permit requirements.
As of June the UN counted 613 “closure obstacles – military checkpoints, roadblocks, and other impediments – restricting movement in the West Bank, which is just slightly larger than the US state of Delaware.
These checkpoints complement a 450-mile concrete segregation wall – 25 feet high with electric fencing, razor wire and sniper towers – Israel has been building to enclose Palestinians in the West Bank and protect Israeli settlements.
Once, after telling Rami that I grew up in Florida and my wife in Seattle, and explaining the distance between these places, he asked how many walls and checkpoints I’m forced to brave to visit her family. He was both astonished and saddened when I said I could make the days-long drive without encountering an army or a fortified wall.
No one who longs for Israeli-Palestinian peace with any seriousness argues Israel can’t use its military to legally protect itself from enemies without and within. But the force and scope with which Israel constricts movement in Palestinian territories is unconscionable.
World leaders are correct in pushing for the formation of a Palestinian state with recognized borders and financial and security networks, and this state no doubt will exist in Israeli-blockaded Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
But lasting peace is usually reached by expanding freedom of association before parties agree on the logistics of the new order. Just ask Gunter Schabowski, former East Germany spokesman who said of his 1989 speech announcing the Berlin Wall was open, “The only choice was to open up the pressure cooker, or watch it explode.
When viable Israeli and Palestinian states eventually exist, and they will, the successful peace agreement will likely follow the opening of the cooker in which Palestinians’ freedom of association currently suffocates.
It’s usually after people are allowed to move and breathe that they find strength to set out toward peace. “The caged bird sings of freedom, wrote Maya Angelou, but only the un-caged bird can pluck the olive branch.
Justin D. Martin, Ph.D., teaches journalism at The American University in Cairo. He wrote this essay while traveling in June. Contact him at [email protected].
