This is from mahsanmilim:
They raise their shirts, then turn around, then hold their breath. Sometimes their mouths tighten, their faces flush with embarrassment. One by one they get out from behind the bars, from the crush of the crowded waiting line in which they have been standing for hours, place their belongings on a filthy table. At times they cringe at first, having seen what happened to the person ahead of them in line, but then they approach, obey, for one soldier points his gun at them, the other stands there with today's list of wanted men. And then one of the soldiers, every time a different one, send his hands to rummage ahead, one young man after another, one drawn face after another. At times, coming out while tucking their shirt back in and buckling their belt and zipping their pants back up they swear, unheard.
Checkpoint Huwara, like all of the checkpoints in the West Bank, is not located upon the 'green line', it does not separate Palestinians from Israelis, but Palestinians from Palestinians, all of whom are – without exception – denied passage unless they answer to this or the other criterion that are always changing at random, and neither fixed nor sensible, as a method.
Israel's official reason for maintaining the checkpoints is security, an argument that even if it were valid, is by no means acceptable or justifiable – for it constitutes undifferentiating collective punishment imposed upon a whole nation, millions of people, a-priori, regardless of their individuality, their deeds, or the personal price they pay.
The security argument becomes nearly incredible when applied to checkpoints located deep in the heart of the Palestinian population, cutting it up and dividing it into small, crowded and isolated enclaves, preventing movement between villages and towns, on roads, anywhere. Checkpoints that in their inherent official cruelty, create a mighty distortion of every bit of normal civilian life, on the way to hospital to receive a transfusion, or to school, or to visit an old mother in the village, or to bury one's dead or to go shopping.
It is difficult to avoid the thought that the humiliation, the harassment that come about when people are denied existing and moving about in the space of their lives – are not the inevitable result of a policy, but rather its purpose.
Throughout history, in most cultures and religions, the ultimate humiliation of a person has been to undress him or her in public. This is true of western civilization, and with it and within in – all three monotheistic faiths.
Shedding the respect for an adult's nudity in public usually stands for the fact that the victim of this procedure is no longer considered human.
In 1984, in the chronic closed ward 6a at Abarbanel psychiatric hospital, people were required to undress. The chronic closed ward – unlike other closed wards – contains people who are hospitalized long-term and whose condition is diagnosed as permanent. There were those patients who had spent over thirty years in this ward. Many of them were Holocaust survivors and who knows how they ended up there, but they would never leave, and no one demanded to have them out. Most of them aged. And this ward was their only home.
In the morning the nurses would yell at them to get up, or wake up, depends who. And then on to the showers.
At the center of the ward were a few small shower stalls, without doors. Sometimes the nurses would place sacking partitions a meter and a half away from the open shower stalls. At other times, they did not.
Those old men and women as well as the not so old, would obey instructions, undress and walk nude over to the showers.
Hurry up, shouted the nurses, and turned on the water.
Women and men together, side by side, undressed, every morning, on their way to the shower in the non-human kingdom.
The nurses handed them bars of soap, maybe towels too, I no longer remember.
Naked, unseen, not really human beings.
When an adult is undressed in public, it is done either to humiliate, or punish him or her, or because he or she are not conceived as fully human. Even when, at an airport, some suspicion or other comes up (a problematic issue in itself), and a person is taken aside and required to take off one or another item of clothing, it happens off in some side room or cubicle. Never is this person required to undress in full sight of everyone present.
On their way to die, people were made to undress for they were no longer human, for they were about to die anyway, for their shame was unseen, like their humanity. In chronic hospital wards, in institutions for the retarded, in nursing homes – some people shake loose this delicate line of respect for the privacy of the patient's nudity, because the patients are not conceived as fully human.
Under Israeli occupation, by law and norm and not as an exceptional incident or because of some specific soldier, but rather as an entirely official routine, not on the way to any ovens, nor in a chronic ward of the demented aged, young men are required to undress. Not yet fully.
Young men who are not perceived as human.
translated by Tal Haran
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