Dennis Fox’s Weblog

In my last posting I described the hassle of getting through the Qalandia checkpoint last Sunday. And that was without any luggage to juggle through those three turnstiles (the kind that stretch from floor to ceiling, where you push the bars and sqeeze through). Today, instead, I’m using my privilege as a US citizen and ability to pay for a taxi. This will let me avoid maneuvering my luggage from my Ramallah hotel to the bus station or Palestinian-licensed service group taxis, then through the checkpoint and back on a bus (or maybe leave the luggage on the bus and then find the same bus again on the other side, as it’s been explained to me), then from the bus to my next hotel in East Jerusalem. This will cost more - probably 100 shekels with the driver someone recommended. He’s coming from East Jerusalem and will be here in half an hour. A local taxi with yellow Israeli plates (the kind that can avoid the Palestinian checkpoint) would cost 150 or so. 100 shekels is about $23. Looking at my luggage, the price doesn’t seem that high.

Palestinians don’t have that option.

Yesterday Israel’s Olmert and Palestine’s Abbas agreed, among other things, that Israel would remove some of the 600 roadblocks it now maintains in Palestinian territory. 600! Most of these are internal, not between Palestine and Israel. Most of these are arbitrary and even temporary.

Last night, during my last Ramallah dinner with a shifting group of mostly Europeans, a German woman who works at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation that funds the Legal Encounter series I spoke at last week told me that the lawyer and judges and government types from Ramallah who usually attend these lectures couldn’t get there because there was a sudden temporary roadblock between Ramallah and Birzeit University. That explains the small audience. She was troubled.

Time to check out of the hotel, and to leave Ramallah until my next trip.

Update: The taxi ride, going the long way through Hizme (no checkpoint) instead of Qalandia, took all of 25 minutes door to door. Life on the West Bank would be a lot different without checkpoints.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 9:39 am and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.