Trudging along Highway One in East Jerusalem on Sunday morning, I barely batted an eyelid at the 50 border policemen massed on the side of the road. This was their manor, after all, and their dark grey uniforms and short-barreled M16s are as much a part of the scenery round here as the tumbledown buildings and parched palm trees.
I was on my way to the Museum on the Seam with Erika, to meet the curator and discuss the upcoming exhibition there. As I tried to circumvent the squad of policemen, I overheard their commander barking out instructions for the day’s mission.
“You’re not to touch anything, you’re to behave like gentlemen, you’re going to listen to everything you’re told and be a credit to Magav [the border police unit]”.
Intrigued by now — after all, the Magav name is hardly synonymous with good manners and gentility — I slowed my pace and tried to clock what on earth they were doing that required such sensitivity and restraint. Suddenly, every one of them lifted their guns off their shoulders, arranging them in a neat pile on the pavement, and formed a line outside the museum door — leaving one of their unit standing guard over the weapons cache by the side of the road.
Disbelieving, Erika and I made our way inside the building, asking the girl on the front desk why her place of work was about to be invaded by a Magav platoon, albeit unarmed and looking half-asleep after a weekend on the tiles.
“They’re here to get a bit of culture”, she replied.
“But ... they’re Magav”, I said. “Since when did their job description change from hired henchmen to art critics?”
Smiling knowingly at me, she explained that Magav had been sending their charges to the Museum on the Seam for some time now, in the hope that its controversial and unsettling exhibitions will help the young recruits challenge the stereotypes that they grew up with.
“We want to create a dialogue in Israeli society that looks at local and global perspectives of the economic and political situation here”, said Michel Gherman, who was one of the guides for the policemen.
All well and good, I thought, but from the experiences I’d had of the border police during my time in the army, the chances of them being receptive to sociopolitical dialogue was about as likely as me being invited to the next JCDF fundraiser. After all, this is the same unit of the army that I wrote about in Rabbit in the Headlights:
Last December, Magav thugs stopped two Al-Nueman residents, tried to arrest them both, only one of them cooperated and, to cut a long story short, the second was found later tied to his mule and beaten unconscious. The 43-year-old never came round — he died, and so too did the chance of his eight children ever forgiving and forgetting Israel for its deeds.
But, fair’s fair — this latest batch of Magavniks seemed quite genial and open-minded as they were led round the three floors of the museum. They freely discussed issues such as child labor, sex slavery, migrant workers, and all the other topics that the “Equal and Less Equal” exhibition covered. Their commander had no problem with us following them round, allowing us to interview him and his charges freely.
It was when we got to the final part of the show that the chickens came home to roost for the soldiers. Up till now, they’d been viewing the art on display with a sense of detachment — their critique of the work, whilst animated, had a benign feel to it. After all, they had no first-hand experience of life in a sweatshop or Brazilian goldmine, so could discuss the issues at hand in an abstract fashion, not relating the exhibition to their own reality or daily grind. However, the top floor of the museum contains two video installations — one of Palestinian workers marching like ants across the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel; the other of Palestinian laborers waiting for work on Bethlehem Road, Jerusalem, before getting picked up by a Magav patrol and driven back to the Bethlehem checkpoint.
Discussing the Erez video first, the guide asked them to describe their feelings at watching the Palestinians trudging across the border in the roasting midday sun, having evidently been held at the crossing all morning. “Very good, very good”, barked one stern looking soldier matter-of-factly. “Why ‘very good’?” asked the guide, with a look of resignation on his face at the unmoved recruit he was dealing with.
“Well, it proves our boys are doing their job properly — making sure their IDs check out before they let them into our country”, came the brisk reply.
“But”, said the guide gently, “is that really good for our security in the long term? Imagine your dad came home and the Israelis had made him stand out in the baking heat all morning, preventing him earning money to feed your family — how would that affect what you and your siblings thought of the Israelis?”
With that, the floor came alive — everyone hurling their two shekels in, drowning one another out in the way that only testosterone-heavy Israeli soldiers can. The final verdict never came — each Magavnik had their own opposing, intransigent views — but the very fact that a healthy debate on the matter was taking place was enough for Michel the guide.
“All I was trying to do was turn the Palestinians into humans in the soldiers’ eyes,” said Michel. “To this ends, it’s also important they don’t see me as some kind of left-wing militant,” he continued, explaining why he’d broken the ice with the soldiers by discussing his own army service with them at the start of the tour.
As they moved on to the video of the laborers waiting for work on Bethlehem Road, one soldier turned to me and asked — quite sincerely — if the images on the screen were just a CCTV camera trained on the outside of the museum. I set him straight, though could see his point — looking out of the window of the building, a near carbon copy scene was being played out. Gangs of Palestinian men slumped against the wall, hoping to be spotted and picked up by potential employers rather than the border police who patrolled the East Jerusalem streets looking for illegal workers.
For all the seemingly useful tools that Michel and his team were arming the soldiers with, it still seemed a drop in the ocean compared with the nonstop propaganda that the army pumps soldiers full of in order to dehumanize the enemy. Even in my brigade, a comparatively well-thought-of branch of the IDF, we were constantly bombarded by commanders with the so-called evil and barbarism of those we were up against in the conflict, and by all accounts the indoctrination in Magav is far worse.
However, the museum’s staff are equally adept at drumming home their message of humanity, when given the opportunity, and — for all that I took what was happening with a pinch of salt — it’s reassuring to witness that even one day of these boys’ service will be spent in this fashion. Because, when they can look into a Palestinian laborer’s eyes and see a family man with mouths to feed, rather than just another threat to national security, we’re one step closer to breaking the deadlock that surrounds us here.
