I decline

We are, by some margin, the most filmed country on earth, a nation of cameras on corners, drones over rooftops, and phones aimed at everything that moves, including a good deal that would have been better off not moving, which is why it comes as such a wonder that our army’s spokesman, asked what happened at the Awarta checkpoint on the morning of July 27, replied that the claim that soldiers had held up an ambulance was false and that no report of any such incident had been received. The two halves cancel each other with perfect composure, since a man who has been told nothing is in no position to judge the falsity of anything. The one camera that mattered that morning was in the hand of a Palestinian driver, which may account for the delay in the mail.

No law of ours forbids Palestinians to drive on Route 60, which would be a scandal, and forbidding is ugly. What is forbidden is that they reach it, which is discreet, costs less, and works better. The UN has counted nine hundred and twenty-five movement obstacles across the West Bank, of which one hundred and twenty-one exist for the sole purpose of sealing the village approaches to that road, to which we added one hundred and twenty new gates in 2025 alone, one every three days, a rate of output no other branch of our public service has matched in any field. Drivers say those gates tend to stay locked between six and nine in the morning, so that the settlers’ children get to school on time.

Bashar al-Qaryuti’s ambulance left Qaryut at half past six carrying a 28-year-old woman, six months pregnant, drifting in and out of consciousness, bleeding in a way that Sabreen Atallah, a nurse on these roads since 2014, says she had never seen before. He found the village’s only way out locked, tried the dirt track through the olive groves and found the second one locked, doubled back, and reached Awarta, where the closed gate, it must be said, was rigorously the same for the car going to market and for the car carrying a hemorrhage, an impartiality that does us great credit.

Two soldiers ordered the engine switched off, and when al-Qaryuti explained, in the rudimentary Hebrew one picks up over years at checkpoints like that one, that the patient’s equipment ran on power from the engine, he was told to shut up. The screens went dark one after another, and the last number Atallah read before they did was eighty-four percent oxygen saturation. She warned them in English that the patient might die, and their weapons came up at her, which in the local idiom is called restoring order. The identity cards were collected and handed back half an hour later. The baby was born shortly before the checkpoint and died. The mother reached the hospital with three units of blood and emergency surgery ahead of her, and lived. She told a newspaper that she had been choosing names.

Nobody ordered that child’s death, and there the trouble begins, because cruelty with conviction at least has an author, while the absent-minded kind dissolves into procedure, survives every inquiry, and never turns up on anyone’s service record. The nineteen-year-old at that gate, short of sleep, frightened, with a week behind him in which armed settlers killed and no one stopped them, was carrying out an order he did not write. After the settler attack of July 24, which left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead, Binyamin Netanyahu ordered a large-scale operation, and Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron were locked down, so that the mourning belonged to everyone and the punishment, as usual, fell to a few. We call the arrangement defense, an inventive use of a fine word, given that nobody has explained what exactly that woman’s hemorrhage was defending us from.

Our great-grandparents knew gates inside out, knew the hour they opened, the name of the man with the key, and the going price of the favor, and it was with that bitter competence that they wrote, in May of 1948, the promise of equal rights to all inhabitants without distinction of religion, race, or sex. They did not write it out of kindness. They wrote it because they had just finished being the car stuck in the line. Seventy-eight years on, what was being asked at Awarta was less than anything that was ever denied to us. What was being asked was an engine left running.

An army that can install a gate every three days ought to be able to open one in thirty minutes. It took thirty-one. Nothing in this account is exceptional, which is the whole of the difficulty. We took the land and declined to take the children who came with it, and the arrangement runs so smoothly that the twenty-seventh of July was, for almost everyone here, an ordinary Monday. My countrymen may go on finding it ordinary. I decline.