January 9 2006 10.58pm
“Is it because I am Muslim?”
“We don’t know. It’s just security reasons.”
“I want to speak to the man who questioned me,” I demand after a hellish day spent trying to cross into Jerusalem.
“I’ll try to find him.”
I was really angry. The woman in uniform picked up the phone and dialled a number. She hung up and told me: “He’s already gone home. You need to go to the bus.”
I looked at her, her colleague behind the counter, two security officers at the door behind me, an old man next to me and another security officer sitting at a small table in the same office.
“If you come to my country, we won’t treat you like this. I am totally disgusted,” I said, speaking democrat in a country in which it is clearly a foreign language.
I wasn’t the only one who was turned away from the Allenby Border Control by the Israeli occupation force this evening. A Palestinian man and his young daughter Yasmin were also on the bus back to the King Hussein Bridge border that one crosses in Jordan to get to Jerusalem. Unfortunately for us, Jerusalem was just twinkling lights in the distance as we missed the chance to spend Eid-ul-Adha, the festival marking the hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, in the holy city of Jerusalem.
When I first arrived, I was hauled out of the queue by a short young female Israeli security official. She gunned questions at me: “Where are you from? Are you Muslim? Do you pray? Why did you go to Egypt? What did you do in Sudan? Why are you traveling alone? Do you have a Qur’an with you?”
“But you should have it with all the time,” she responded when I said that I did not have a Qur’an with me.
Next step was a body search and I was led to a 1m2, yellow-painted cubicle with a blue curtain. I was asked to take off my belt, empty my pockets, remove my shoes and take off all tops until I was left standing in a vest and jeans.
A second guard asked me if I had “anything” in my underpants. And then I was asked to lower my jeans to my knees. The guard moved the metal detector between my legs.
Soon I was emptying my bag so yet more officers could check samples of my shampoo and face wash. Every piece of clothing was scanned; so were my wallet, belt, hairbrush and guidebook titled Palestine.
While having my goods scanned, I watched how an officer checked letters brought through the border by a Palestinian. The officer tore open every single envelope. Another two officers opened the boxes of household goods carried by another Palestinian.
I was patient for most of the day because at some point it really started feeling like a dark comedy. But I was getting tired as well.
“Is this normal?” I asked one of the officers, who spoke English, while waiting for another round of questioning.
“It’s the first time you come here and we have nothing to compare to,” he replied.
“But what are you looking for?”
“It’s just security reasons.”
“I’m tired and hungry. I want food.”
“The kiosks are closed.”
“But that guy over there has food.”
“He’s staff and the food is not for the general audience.”
“You mean the general public? We’re the public,” I said again lapsing into the language of democracy we speak in South Africa, where we learn to question power.
“But you can be the audience because you just sit and listen.”
I felt increasingly uncomfortable about being asked a barrage of questions: “What is your grandfather’s name? Where did you study? When will you go home? South Africa is a poor country but where do you get money to travel?”
Then the officer asking all the questions asked for my e-mail address. I didn’t see him again.
By eight o’clock I was told that I had to leave. I couldn’t help feeling that they knew by 4pm already that they weren’t going to clear the path for me to progress to Jerusalem, an ancient religious city with significance to the three monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
I now have to renew my passport if I want to travel to other countries — such as Syria or Iraq and some others — in the Middle East. I specifically asked the border staff not to mark my passport with any Israeli stamps and was then asked why.
“Someone told me that I won’t be able to enter some other countries if I have an Israeli stamp in my passport,” I replied.
All I sit with is a stained passport and a head trying to rationalise what happened. I still do not know why I was denied access to Jerusalem. But I do now know what Palestinians face daily.