For American Jews who are uncomfortable with questioning the Israeli government, the Gaza War, and the Occupation, "The Checkpoint Women: Memories" demonstrates how courageous individuals on the ground in Israel, moved by their doubts about national policy, have become actors in the fight for Palestinian equality. It was a featured documentary in the 2024 Other Israel Film Festival.
Director Eliezer Yaari focuses on the specific stories of women, primarily over fifty-years-old, who became part of an organization known in Israel as Machsom Watch. In 2001, a group began going to checkpoints and crossings to monitor the behaviors and actions of IDF soldiers as they oversaw Palestinians trying to enter Israel from the West Bank for work, medical appointments, or necessary tasks.
Yaari sets the stage with information outlining that after a "wave of terrorism" resulted in hundreds of Israeli deaths and thousands of injuries, Israel began the erection of a separation wall between the "territories of the Palestinian Authority" and itself. Restriction of movement for Palestinians within the West Bank became a way of life.
Interviewing these activists, Yaari intercuts footage of their efforts with their testimonies. Each woman profiled shares her backstory and why she felt it was essential to become part of the struggle against entrenched policies on the ground.
Yehudit Elkana, now in her late eighties, had heard negative stories about what was happening at checkpoints. She started Women In Black. "You couldn't stand idly by," she recounted. Her father was a journalist for a liberal newspaper in Berlin. After reading Hitler's Mein Kampf, he saw the writing on the wall and departed for Israel in 1933. Based on her family background, Elkana said, "It made it natural for her to engage in political activity against the Occupation." Arriving in Bethlehem in the pre-dawn darkness when Palestinian workers arrived at 5:30 a.m., Elkana filmed interactions, made calls, and questioned tactics. When lucky, she would run into someone she knew, facilitating the challenge for a Palestinian with medical issues.
Commenting on the Separation Wall as one of the "cruelest undertakings" of the Occupation, Hanna Barag discussed the "shock" of how Israel forces Palestinians to live. She stated, "There is no freedom of movement. Palestinian ambulances can't move in the streets of Jerusalem." Her reaction to the situation was "shock and horrification". There is a definitive irony in seeing a guard in tefillin praying next to barbed wire, while below him school children are having their backpacks searched. Barag overhears a soldier saying loudly to a colleague upon seeing her, "Here's another of Arafat's whores." Waiting until a few hours later, with her emotions calmed, Barag approached the young man and asked, "Would you talk that way to your grandmother?"
These women are not to be trifled with or easily intimidated. Dafna Banai has been a Machsom member for twenty years. She came from a staunchly Zionist and military background. Banai spoke about how the subtext of the Occupation became evident to her. Rather than being an issue of security, she realized the impetus was to "break Palestinian society and to hurt people and entrench a sense of Israeli 'superiority'".
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