865: The Other Territory
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A quick warning; there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. The comet's got the vibe of a guy who can handle anything, a beefy Tony Soprano type, but without the menace. We're in this big white four-wheel drive pickup truck that he tools around in, me and him and a producer, Sausan Khalifa. And Ammett's task this morning requires ingenuity. His task? He's got to get to work. Step one; get himself out of Hebron, the city where he lives. This is in the West Bank, so a movement on the roads is controlled by the Israeli army. And every day the army changes which exits out of the city are open. So are you checked on many groups, which entrance is easy to go out? These are WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Today they say that only two roads are open, in and out of the city of a quarter million people. We drive to one of them, where handful of soldiers with assault rifles are manning a checkpoint. They open this door around six at morning. And we're third in line, there's a gate, and soldiers are going through the cars. Yes, once most of the time you will stay here between ten minutes until one hour. Today we're lucky. We're early, line short, and they wave us through without stopping. After seven thirty, Hamid says, stop every car, and it gets really backed up. Hamid works for a company called Comet Me, that sits up solar power and internet and water systems in Palestinian villages around the West Bank, so he spends a ton of time driving from place to place. It has had to become this kind of weird expert, in a thousand details, of checkpoints and closed roads and tricks to get around. That suits him. I'm the kind of person who likes to talk to everyone and learn everything and hear everything, he says. His truck is outfitted with video cameras in case we have any kind of run-in with Israeli settlers or the army. Hamid said frightening moments when soldiers will guns on him. For two five minutes into our drive, people is over in points to a winding road, the kinds of the side of a long steep hill in the desert. It's easier to explain this in Arabic, so Salsen jumps in to translate. So we can see here from up the hill, way over there, if you could see the road, this is the container crossing. It's called the container crossing, apparently because a man used to have a little roadside stand and an old shipping container there. Now it's the notorious checkpoint that divides the north of the West Bank and the south. See, over there, you can see the queue of cars, that means that they're just stopping every car to search the cars, and we can't see any cars moving. I would choose to go to alternative routes because we're gonna get stuck there for a couple of hours. One possible alternative route is an unpaved road that curves away in the distance that Hamid points to. But it doesn't like that option, because it will do another checkpoint, that could be an hour and a half way. But I have another road. Less people, they know this road. And do you think that's the best one to do? Yes. And I will save a lot of time. Okay, we just turned around, maybe you turn. Within minutes, we're off the highway, speeding down a two-lane street, houses close on either side. The danger with this route, Hamid says, is that we're gonna drive out an Israeli settlement where we get pulled over for hours. That we as a plan for that, there are people who knows nearby that he can claim that we're visiting, if we're stopped. We pop out into a clearing, then turn down an unpaved rocky. I don't even want to call this a road. It's more like a ledge on the edge of a cliff. Hey, can I just pause just to say like this is like one of the worst roads I've ever driven on. The car is rocking like left and right, as if we were on a stormy sea. And even to keep the car upright, you're having to like weave back and forth. Yeah, I can barely hold my coffee mug. At one point in this trip, we're on a bumpy, slow road, and Hamid points to an overpass with a freeway that is just for Israelis. Cars with Israeli plates, weeds by, they go through fewer checkpoints. This whole unequal road system is way faster for Israelis than we are harder for Palestinians. It's nothing new in the West Bank.
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