From Ben-Gurion to Bethlehem: Borders, Identity, and Doing Better

She stares at me one last time before stamping my visa, a flimsy piece of paper separate from my passport, and signals me to move ahead. I let go of a breath I had not realized I was holding. I’m greeted with smiles from my peers, and then look around and realize – we were four for five.

All of us, 15 undergraduate students participating in the Ibrahim Leadership and Dialogue program – a national fellowship focusing on strengthening intercultural dialogue and conflict resolution skills of students engaged with the Middle East – had tried to decipher the unspoken rules of Israel’s airport security before our infamous border crossing. We tried to profile ourselves. Between a Yemeni-born American citizen, two Palestinian-Americans and two Americans of Egyptian descent, we were five red flags. Detention happened nearly every year on this program, usually to students that a) looked brown or visibly Muslim; b) had Arab names (Khalil, Reffat, Omar, Ali); or c) an unlucky combination of both.

This year I was “lucky.” I only know of my fellow Arab-Americans’ ordeal based on what they shared days later: an officer that refused to look at the paperwork we had spent weeks acquiring from the Israeli foreign ministry, my Palestinian-American peers forced to sign deportation papers on the basis of “attempted illegal immigration.” This decision only being reversed after a high official in the Situation Room saw what was happening through security camera footage and understood that they were holding up our professor, named one of the “50 most influential Jews in America.” Four more hours of interrogation, “failed” background checks, and a lack of cooperation. Taunting, laughing, humiliation. Feeling utterly helpless because by withholding your (American!) passports, they withheld your mobility and agency.

Worrying about my friends as we waited for baggage claim, I felt the most unproductive survivor’s guilt. I guess that day the officer didn’t recognize my last name as the Palestinian name for what is now Hebron. I later found out that the guards had angrily argued about why “Khalil” hadn’t been questioned more. The simultaneously arbitrary and purposeful nature of the entire process made me realize that this border crossing said much more about Israel than it did about me. Borders are a mechanism of control. Through a convoluted bureaucratic system thriving on prejudice, the Israeli government flaunted its impunity.

For some students, it was the first time they had experienced, even if so indirectly, this side of a state that had previously only been presented as a birthright. To see a fellow peer, American, friend, child of parents born on this same land, be treated otherwise was “eye opening.” But for some of us, our eyes had come in already alert and anxious. This experience confirmed perceptions we wished could have been proven wrong, as we were instantly met with in indisputable proof of systematic and institutionalized racism.

This racism and profiling is far from unique to Israel – we all have heard the horror stories from TSA lines. But in the U.S., there appears to be an underlying shame to the practice. We see it in the advocacy to end stop and frisk laws, in the movements to counter islamophobia and xenophobia and in the appeals made by civil liberty groups. In Israel, by and large, there is no such public understanding. What occurred to our group on that day wasn’t a fluke; it was business as usual. The system was functioning impeccably.

Some will argue that what we experienced in Ben-Gurion was excusable because it was done in the name of safety. Indeed, many deem Ben-Gurion the safest airport in the world, having not experienced a single terrorist attack since 1972 through adopting the most thorough security practices. Nobody can deny a country its right to protect itself from threat. But when a country that occupies territories decides that those who they occupy are such a threat that they are not allowed into their airport, whose selective safety are they ensuring? What cycle of abuse, fear, abuse do they fall into? And how do they construct a path forward towards peace when every detention fuels a resentment that anyone denied their humanity and equality would feel? I can say that none of us with names like Khalil and Reffat felt any safer, but, yet again, we were not the ones intended to be made safe. No, for those profiled it is hoped that their experience will be so unpleasant they simply won’t come back.

I left that airport feeling angry for my friends and resenting that strangers had the power to make me feel so insignificant. But as time passed, that hurt evolved into a desire to contextualize my anecdote. Why were things this way? How does a country that calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East get away with actions that are so undemocratic? I wanted a better framework to make sense of it.

Reflecting on my journey through the region, having crossed into five societies in four weeks, that framework was one of borders. It became clear that borders were more than geo-political lines on a map.  How a nation interacts with, represents, and discusses what lays on its peripheries is extremely telling of the character that lays at its core.

In Israel, our experience at the airport reflected a deep national insecurity which became clearer as our journey continued. With every meeting we had, we could not escape the questions of borders and the ongoing process of definition, inclusion, and exclusion. On our tour with Peace Now, a leftist Israeli group protesting the growth of illegal settlements, we could see how settlements tried to redefine borders by putting “facts on the ground,” making the two state solution increasingly impossible. With every new growth of Jewish presence in the West Bank, the hypothetical Palestinian state lost a sense of continuity and
feasibility.

When talking to Palestinians living in Jalazone Refugee camp, we heard stories of people aching to have the right to return to homes that stood on the wrong side of the border. Crossing from the West Bank into Israel proper meant hours at checkpoints that our bus, branded with a (yellow) Israeli license plate, passed with ease.

In talking to Rabbi Yossi Klein Halevi, we heard from a leader in the Jewish community and an expert in interfaith dialogue, why defining borders was central to a Jewish sense of safety. It is not until borders form two states and the Occupation ends can either side feel as though their claim to indigeneity is being heard. As imperfect a peace as this would be, with either side feeling as though they had lost a piece that was theirs, the current status quo is simply not a solution. It is not real safety.

And finally, when visiting Bethlehem in the West Bank and the religious sight of Rachel’s Tomb in Israel proper, we saw on two separate occasions two sides of the same border wall. This barrier was constructed as a means of security following the second Intifada. While seen as an insurer of self-defense, it was ironically a response to violence that acted as a  “shaking off” (the meaning of intifada) of the borders defining Palestinian occupation. These borders were now being made even more solidly permanent, and symbolized the ongoing occupation that most Israelis believe to be the biggest security threat of all. Amongst the images of resistance found in Banksy’s famous protest street art, one graffiti sentence stood out: “This wall may take care of the present but it has no future.”

For me, this summed up Israel’s relations to its borders. It made sense of the detention. Currently, Israel justifies its policies from profiling at airports to human rights abuses at checkpoints within a mindset of immediate survival. It is taking care of the present. But every instance that it chooses to sacrifice its supposed democratic values chips away at a possibility for true long-term peace and security. They may allow Israel to survive the next ten years, maybe the next hundred, but people do not stop fighting for their humanity that easily. Eventually, Israel, a small, isolated, country in a rapidly changing
region, will have to do better.

Those who control borders control a country’s character and identity. They can define themselves as a leader or a tyrant. As Israel undergoes its own identity crisis, it must ask itself how it plans to use its power to construct an identity that is not rooted in fear and exclusion, but one that seeks to recognize the indigenous claims of those it has pushed into “occupied territories” as equal to theirs. Not until its leadership is willing to make a true and genuine recognition of this claim, and a recognition of the uneven power and influence that Israel brings to the negotiation table as an enforcer of occupation, can its borders become symbolic of a future of long lasting peace, as imperfect as it is, rather than as a temporary mechanism of oppression, degradation, and hostility.

I hope that one day people find the courage to look past the fears that make them want to build walls high, and instead open doors to a future of dignity where everybody has the right of mobility and safety. And where that is not decided by the color of your skin, the sound of your last name, the length of your beard, or the fabric on your head. Until then, security is merely an illusion.

Hanna Khalil ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hannakhalil@wustl.edu.