Checkpoint Time

Under siege, life is time    Between remembering its beginning    And forgetting its end

The siege is waiting    Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm        Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege

the connections among beings alone make time        Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Prologue: Spring Forward, Fall Back

It was my one chance to meet Yasser Arafat: a friend who worked with Arafat called me out of the blue on a Friday morning in March 2003 and said to come by at 9 p.m.¹ It struck me as odd to be invited to the muqata'a at night, but I figured that having been imprisoned in his compound for a year already, no doubt Arafat had a different sense of time from those of us not locked up.

Fig 1.

Fences and walls, along the periphery of a checkpoint. Qalandia, 2015

I planned to arrive in Ramallah by 7. Traveling from ar-Ram to Ramallah—a distance of five kilometers—I did not expect delay going "in" through the Qalandia checkpoint. I also planned to spend the night at a friend's, given it was not uncommon, especially at night, for the checkpoint to be closed on the way "out."²

I made my way up to the soldier. "Checkpoint closed," he grumbled, without lifting his eyes. "Closed? Why?"

To have the whole checkpoint closed, and especially on the way in, would have been likely if it had been a Jewish holiday, a European diplomat was visiting the Israeli prime minister, the United States was increasing its bombing campaign in Iraq, or some other far-off event was taking place that the Israeli regime used as a pretext to encumber Palestinians—none of which was the case that day.

Seeing that I hadn't moved, the soldier barked, "It's7o'clock."

I was on my way to meet the president, so I had planned my travel time carefully. I looked at my watch. "It's6," I said.

"No. It's7." I looked at my watch again. As I looked back up at him, he grinned: "Daylight savings." Yes, that strange modern invention of setting the clock forward.

"But daylight savings starts in two weeks," I responded.

He retorted: "It is already daylight savings in Israel. It is 7."³

"But we're in the West Bank," I said. The Green Line was a few kilometers well to our west.

The corner of his lips took a slant upward, almost smiling. He matter-of-factly declared: "Checkpoints are in Israel."

I was standing in a no-man's-land where it was 7 p.m., while in some circumference beyond it was 6 p.m. I wondered where the line was where I could have half of my body in one time zone and the other half in another time zone. But I didn't bother asking. In the soldier's logic, which had the backing of the Israeli regime, checkpoints were islands functioning on Israeli time, no matter where they territorially existed. I had also learned that at the checkpoint, communication with a soldier, if it happens at all, doesn't go very far.

That particular discrepancy of time lasted only a few weeks, until both Israel and the Territories were back in the same time zone. But I walked away from the checkpoint that evening with a nagging thought: Israeli time had already "sprung forward" yesterday, and the Palestinians were lagging behind. It hinted at a larger metaphysical quandary: a complex imposition of "Israeli time" onto Palestinian temporality.

What does it mean that the checkpoint marks different time zones? Was it that Israel's measurement of Palestinian time was calculated according to a different logic, one in which Palestinians' time was not as valued? What does it mean that various temporalities butt against each other at a checkpoint? Was it that the checkpoint seemed simultaneously premodern, modern, and hypermodern (because of the crude force used to contain populations; because of eighteenth-century ideas on the need of surveillance, discipline, and governance...