CPTnet
9 May 2007
AT-TUWANI BLOG: "You're a Palestinian -- you need to go a hundred times."

by Heidi Schramm

[NOTE: To see Schramm's original blog entries and accompanying photos go
to http://heidischramm.livejournal.com]

22nd March 2002

This evening we got a call that there was a checkpoint on the road. The
mayor of Tuwani (who has been living in Yatta since his home was
demolished in 2004) and his son were not being allowed to cross. The son
is a twenty-three-year-old man with special needs and no ID. They have
been trying to get an ID for him since he turned eighteen and are always
denied. The father returned to Yatta to get his son's birth certificate
but since he was born before the IDF started keeping their records
electronically, the paper is now invalid. This means that birth
certificates for all Palestinians over the age of about fifteen are
worthless, which I'm still having a hard time comprehending. So they
arrested him.

 He went in the army jeep and Ilse and Marco followed with the father in
his car. The Israeli police station for this area is inside the Kiryat
Arba settlement, so Palestinians are not allowed in unless they are taken
there by the police or army. (Another mind bender for me. Palestinians
can't visit family being detained or pick them up from the station when
they are released. They are released into the middle of a very hostile
settlement and made to find their own way out.) Marco stayed with the
father at the gate to the settlement and Ilse took a cab to the station.
The police looked at the birth certificate and immediately said it was
fine and he could go. (How much was due to the presence of an
international, I do not know.)

Back at the gate, the soldier told the father he needed to take his son to
get an ID. The father said they had been fifty times but were always
rejected. The soldier said, "Fifty times? You're a Palestinian -- you need
to go a hundred times." Which is just about the best summation of the
occupation I have ever heard. Things that are a given for anyone else in
the world take one hundred tries for Palestinians.

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