"Road Blocks"

This is an article I wrote for a school newsletter but who knows if it fits the format.

"East Jerusalem-I was with some friends of mine when we were going through a checkpoint outside the neighborhood of his friends’ house. It was a wooden shack with two soldiers standing guard. I didn’t really want to go into the neighborhood because I knew that we would have to deal with the checkpoint on the way out. As the soldiers were looking through my passport, one of them came back and explained to me with my friend translating that he couldn’t find my Israeli visa. I showed it to him and we then argued back and forth about whether the visa was still valid (it turned out that the soldier couldn’t read well). After pointing out all the dates on my visa several times and even showing my e-ticket to prove that I wasn’t going to over stay my visa. Later, my friends explained that for Palestinians incidents at the checkpoints get much worse than that.

Israel has today pledged to remove 50 of these ”road blocks” in order to advance the peace process while also pledging to upgrade checkpoints to reduce the wait time without compromising security. However, these 50 are only a fraction of the 500+ checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and the number of checkpoints have only increased from Annapolis until now. The World Bank has found that checkpoints are the main factor that is stifling the economy in the West Bank and the Palestinians claim they are collective punishment.

Although Palestinian officials welcomed the move, both Palestinians and Israelis are deeply skeptical of a peace deal being concluded before Bush leaves office. Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East to try to invigorate the peace process and may use this opportunity to claim that progress is being made. In the meantime, Israel is using this opportunity to pressure the Palestinian government to take “greater security responsibility” in the West Bank by allowing 600 Jordanian-trained security officers to be deployed to the West Bank city of Jenin. However, there does not seem to be great expectations for an improvement in security for the Israelis or substantial concessions for the Palestinians."

On another note I was accepted the Arabic program at AUB so I am officially awesome.