The definition of a checkpoint differs from the definition of a siege. A siege is a complete hostile relationship, a situation that may be long or short, aiming for surrender, occupation, or storming. A siege is a one-way relationship, characterized by the exploitation of willpower, steadfastness, and defiance. A checkpoint, however, does not include all of that; rather, it is a situation aimed at subjugation, normalization, engineering, and control. A checkpoint is a conditional relationship based on the principles of the Russian Pavlovian school or the American behavioral school pioneered by Watson and Crick. A checkpoint establishes or founds a relationship that may be more complex than the two aforementioned schools, which is what we claim in this article. Although a checkpoint uses the idea of punishment and reward, the echo of this condition exceeds expectations, as humans are more complex than physics, and the human psyche is not subject to laboratory laws. In this article, we aspire to provide an initial intervention into the sociology of the military checkpoint, a vision that has certainly been examined in security sciences, crowd psychology, and mass communication. Here, we are gathering, or inventing, aspects that may be new for this phenomenon to transform into a separate science, noting that the use of military checkpoints has become common, especially in light of globalization, which is witnessing ethnic, racial, and sectarian explosions, such that the military checkpoint has become an inherent feature in these wars. The military checkpoint has multiple definitions, different uses, various forms, near and distant goals, effects of different levels, and ways of dealing with it that exceed imagination. In our occupied territories, for example, the military checkpoint is further and deeper than merely preventing movement, humiliating people, cutting off roads, preventing the birth of a state, delaying the economy, or paralyzing social life. The military checkpoint usually performs the following functions:
First: The military checkpoint usually engineers people's daily lives. It determines the times of exit and entry, and specifies the times, types of acceptable and unacceptable situations and circumstances. This leads – over time – to the complete subjugation of the public, so that the checkpoint becomes an integral part of their lives, making the checkpoint the starting point and the reference for life itself. The connection of daily life to the checkpoint – with its intensity, strictness, capriciousness, violence, and humiliation – makes this life one with few ambitions and meager achievements, usually characterized by a desire to avoid contact with the checkpoint as much as possible.
Second: The military checkpoint usually normalizes reality. Based on what was mentioned in the previous point, it receives expected reactions from the public it deals with. A checkpoint that sets incomprehensible, illogical, and inhumane laws for who enters and who exits, and what enters and what is brought in, transforms in the eyes of the weak public into something akin to fate, characterized by power and mystery. This, over time, leads to the acceptance of the idea of the checkpoint and the rejection of revolution against it. The checkpoint, which usually uses machines, bars, glass, covered faces, and multiple weapons, reinforces this concept.
Third: The checkpoint usually alienates the place from its owners. The checkpoint is not only based on the idea of exclusion, prevention, and detention, but also on the idea of transforming the place into a frightening and forbidden place, and that whoever enters it must obtain a special permit. Over time, all places become strange and forbidden, and this separates citizens from their place, so that they lose the desire to know it, and begin to despise it and its resources, as they are not theirs and they do not enjoy them. The idea of alienation and prohibition is a deep and influential idea to the extent of thinking about emigration or leaving the entire place. The alienation and prohibition of a place is an old colonial idea, and it is used for a more dangerous and deeper issue. The occupier or colonizer usually presents a new narrative for the forbidden place, a narrative based on the principle of eligibility and use, meaning that the colonizer is more entitled to the land than its people because he is more advanced and can use and exploit it in a superior way. As for the Israeli occupation, it adds to this the idea of divine ownership, which this occupier believes is not repeated or is one of the strongest documents that can be presented or displayed for owning the place.
Fourth: The checkpoint, especially permanent ones, develops new interests for the public, as the checkpoint divides geography into before the checkpoint and after it, or beyond it and behind it. And because the checkpoint carries out selection, targeting, and filtering operations, the public behind the checkpoint – due to the inability to communicate and interact with others – over time develops different interests for themselves, and are forced to invent new ways of living, earning a living, education, and marriage. Thus, their interests are confined, narrowed, and defined within their areas. Developing local interests means new challenges, questions, and new responses, and this leads to the next point.
Fifth: The checkpoint usually develops new identities or establishes the emergence of new identities, due to the emergence of different interests, concerns, and challenges. Identities are usually not discussed clearly at first, but, over time, and with the help of the checkpoint and increasing pressure of interests, the new identity is expressed first by descriptions, then by geography, and finally by giving it a new name. There are clear examples of this here and around the world.
Sixth: The checkpoint usually pushes towards instinctiveness, meaning it pushes the public to act instinctively, spontaneously or non-spontaneously. Because the checkpoint is violent, unjust, dangerous, and may cause death, most of the public will act according to the rule of escaping harm and approaching safety. Therefore, the behavior of the public at checkpoints is usually characterized by much instinctiveness that manifests in opportunism, subservience, flattery, competition, rudeness, violence, and jostling. The idea of collectivism, organization, coordination, or unified action is usually absent, and this leads to the next point.
Seventh: The checkpoint usually pushes the public to feel like animals. The humiliating inspection processes, keeping them under the sun or rain or in crowds, looking at them from a distance, using weapons to terrorize them, using gloves so that there is no personal contact, and forcing them into specific paths of cement or iron, all of this leads to the idea of a herd that must be disposed of, confined, gathered, or released. Checkpoints usually lack bathrooms or any human services for the public, which reinforces this idea, in addition to the vulgar, abusive, and obscene language that may be used by those who manage the checkpoint.
Eighth: The checkpoint usually carries out extraordinary social control operations. First, it tends to allow the sick, weak, and incapacitated to enter or exit, and prevents the strong. It allows certain categories of those with special permits to pass and prevents the rest, so that the checkpoint effectively classifies the public into multiple categories: cooperative, less cooperative, more cooperative, wanted, and so on, which makes the checkpoint a place for differentiation and discrimination, and thus classifies the public who see this as tearing apart their unity or marginalizing the idea of unity and a single goal.
Ninth: The checkpoint is based on a sense of superiority between those who possess power and those who do not, and it exercises this power illogically and irrationally. Because it is capable of killing, the checkpoint practically presents blind force in its clearest forms. Over time, this superiority transforms in the public's conscience into a real inferiority complex, as the public sees itself as deserving of this treatment and considers it part of its punishment, which it believes it deserves. If this point is added to what was mentioned earlier, the public usually expresses this by saying, "We deserve what we are in." For this reason, the checkpoint reinforces the idea of inferiority among the public.
Tenth: The military checkpoint does not aim to impose security at all, as it is not logical for an individual or several individuals to bypass the checkpoint or think of bypassing it while carrying what is illegal or unlawful in the eyes of those who manage the checkpoint. And because the checkpoint's function is not to impose security, the checkpoint aims to impose a new reality, whose features include: stripping the public of the sense of security, normal life, ownership of the place, control of time, enjoyment of the land, or the feeling at any moment that they own their street, city, mountain, plain, or even their home. This new reality pushes the public, over time, to surrender, neglect, relax, and seek to adapt to a new, narrow, modest, and miserable reality. Therefore, options decrease and initiatives die out. The checkpoint aims first to impose a new, surprising, exceptional reality full of variables, and this leads to the next point.
Eleventh: The checkpoint, then, in the end, is a hundred percent aggressive policy, because it carries out discrimination between those who manage the checkpoint and the public for whom the checkpoint was first established, and it fragments this public second, and it dismantles geography third, and it dismantles the future fourth. The checkpoint can simply starve the public and prevent them from communicating, reproducing, integrating, and interacting. For all this, the checkpoint practically blocks the public from their future, meaning the checkpoint can prevent the establishment of a state, and it can stand as an obstacle to the birth of a unified identity for an entire people, and it can transform every geography into many geographies.
Twelfth: The checkpoint is also a racist policy, because it is based on the idea of exclusion, excluding the public from each other, and excluding them from their place, and excluding them from others. The checkpoint also excludes its personnel from communicating with the place or with its owners, as the checkpoint and those who manage it believe that owning the place means violating it and not sharing with it and in it, just as they believe that they are more entitled to movement than the public they govern. That is, defining, controlling, monitoring, and transforming the movement of the public into a trap and a place for reward and punishment and a way of life, means that there is a people better than another people, a culture better than another culture, and blood better than other blood, and this is the checkpoint in its ugliest forms.
Applying this to our current situation, I call on those concerned – politicians, human rights activists, and the public – to make checkpoints a priority to be added to many other priorities that Palestinians must bear and carry.
The sociology of checkpoints – as practiced in the world and also among us – requires us to know, to establish, and to study, because knowledge is freedom.
