Violinist at the Checkpoint: Performance and Human Rights Under Occupation

The landscape of the occupied West Bank is injured by hundreds of checkpoints. The intervention in the Palestinian public space is all-pervasive, designed to harass and humiliate the Palestinians in order to make them relent on their struggle against the occupation. Rather than fighting terror, this network of checkpoints actually encourages it, in that it turns human beings into helpless objects of oppression, stripped of subjectivity, driven to the point of total despair.

This system of military barriers is transparent to most Israelies. But the “cruel theatre of life” that is the human dynamic that takes place at the checkpoints is revealed by a group of human rights women activists called MachsomWatch. These women try to uncover the banality of evil in the condensed hostile space, at regular time intervals.

The group's “agora” on the internet becomes a stage for story telling, for presenting photographs and videos, for the transmission of crucial information regarding the soldiers' moods and attitudes. This communal virtual stage is a free show, open both to those who exercise surveillance over the group and to the media, that sometimes pick up stories or visuals from it.

A good case in point, on which I focus in this paper, is the performance of a Palestinian violinist made to play at a checkpoint, which I videotaped and which was then picked up by the media globally, with great impact on the political and moral discussion of the occupation.