Checkpoint Watch: Bureaucracy and Resistance at the Israeli/Palestinian Border

This article sketches my personal impression of the changes that have occurred over the last decade in the Israeli checkpoints in and around Jerusalem. These changes have manifested both in the physical design of the checkpoints and in their human management. I discuss these changes through focusing on the women's human rights organization 'MachsomWatch'. The role of this organization, I claim here, has changed in ways that parallel the solidification and the bureaucratization of the border. Especially noticeable is the shift in the location of resistance and its characterization, from a direct confrontation model that occurs at the physical space of the border to a focus on legal actions and administrative strategies, performed in distant and at times even virtual locations. Alongside this process, MachsomWatch women - avid protestors of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank - have, despite themselves, become a routine feature of Israel's occupational apparatus. This essay's grounded ethnographic account provides a vivid illustration of the ways in which resistance feeds from and into power.