Checkpoint Time: Helga Tawil-Souri

Checkpoint Time
helga tawil-souri
Under siege, life is time

Between remembering its beginning
And forgetting its end
The siege is waiting

Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm
Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege
the connections among beings alone make time

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Prologue: Spring Forward, Fall Back
It was my one chance to meet Yasser Arafat: a friend who worked

with Arafat called me out of the blue on a Friday morning in March
2003 and said to come by at 9 p.m.1 It struck me as odd to be invited
to the muqata’a at night, but I figured that having been imprisoned in
his compound for a year already, no doubt Arafat had a different
sense of time from those of us not locked up.
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Fig. 1. Fences and walls, along the periphery of a checkpoint. Qalandia,

2015
I planned to arrive in Ramallah by 7. Traveling from ar-Ram to

Ramallah—a distance of five kilometers—I did not expect delay go-
ing “in” through the Qalandia checkpoint. I also planned to spend
the night at a friend’s, given it was not uncommon, especially at
night, for the checkpoint to be closed on the way “out.”2
I made my way up to the soldier. “Checkpoint closed,” he grum-
bled, without lifting his eyes. “Closed? Why?”
To have the whole checkpoint closed, and especially on the way
in, would have been likely if it had been a Jewish holiday, a European
diplomat was visiting the Israeli prime minister, the United States

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Tawil-Souri: Checkpoint Time 385
was increasing its bombing campaign in Iraq, or some other far-off

event was taking place that the Israeli regime used as a pretext to en-
cumber Palestinians—none of which was the case that day.
Seeing that I hadn’t moved, the soldier barked, “It’s 7 o’clock.”
I was on my way to meet the president, so I had planned my travel
time carefully. I looked at my watch. “It’s 6,” I said.
“No. It’s 7.” I looked at my watch again. As I looked back up at
him, he grinned: “Daylight savings.” Yes, that strange modern inven-
tion of setting the clock forward.
“But daylight savings starts in two weeks,” I responded.
He retorted: “It is already daylight savings in Israel. It is 7.”3
“But we’re in the West Bank,” I said. The Green Line was a few
kilometers well to our west.
The corner of his lips took a slant upward, almost smiling. He
matter-of-factly declared: “Checkpoints are in Israel.”
I was standing in a no-man’s-land where it was 7 p.m., while in
some circumference beyond it was 6 p.m. I wondered where the
line was where I could have half of my body in one time zone and
the other half in another time zone. But I didn’t bother asking. In the
soldier’s logic, which had the backing of the Israeli regime, check-
points were islands functioning on Israeli time, no matter where
they territorially existed. I had also learned that at the checkpoint,
communication with a soldier, if it happens at all, doesn’t go very far.
That particular discrepancy of time lasted only a few weeks, until
both Israel and the Territories were back in the same time zone. But
I walked away from the checkpoint that evening with a nagging
thought: Israeli time had already “sprung forward” yesterday, and
the Palestinians were lagging behind. It hinted at a larger metaphys-
ical quandary: a complex imposition of “Israeli time” onto Palesti-
nian temporality.
What does it mean that the checkpoint marks different time
zones? Was it that Israel’s measurement of Palestinian time was cal-
culated according to a different logic, one in which Palestinians’ time
was not as valued? What does it mean that various temporalities
butt against each other at a checkpoint? Was it that the checkpoint
seemed simultaneously premodern, modern, and hypermodern (be-
cause of the crude force used to contain populations; because of
eighteenth-century ideas on the need of surveillance, discipline,

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and governance; because of the progressively disembodied technol-

ogies of control used)? Certainly, checkpoints defy and redefine qual-
ifications related to time and offer different layers of time. But what
do these slippages suggest?
This article deals, first, with analyzing “checkpoint time”: how
does the material site of the checkpoint mark, make, and represent
a particular temporality? Rather than focus on checkpoints as spa-
tial separators, I focus on their temporal work, asking how check-
points have enabled temporal archipelagoes—not just spatial ones.
Second, what does such a twisting of time do to Palestinian togeth-
erness or sense of community? In a sense, then, this article asks:
What does a checkpoint “say” about Palestinian temporality? And
what does that in turn tell us about the relationship between time,
communication, and community? How does a checkpoint define
and enable different kinds of interactions between Palestinians, be-
tween Palestinians and soldiers, and between Palestinians and the
space of Palestine? The rupture that checkpoint time engenders is
a power dynamic that structures Palestinianness itself.
More than a Space
Checkpoints exist in space. One can find them today throughout the
West Bank, surrounding the Gaza Strip, on roads leading to Jerusa-
lem, encircling some cities and villages, or at a specific number of ki-
lometers outside Ramallah, for example. Checkpoints accomplish
spatial work: they cut across streets and valleys, separate and enclose
communities, define and control the flow and speed of traffic. They
are also embedded in and change the geography around them with
concrete blocks, fences, walls, buildings, bus depots, parking lots,
turnstiles, corrugated roofs, metal gates, and so on. In short, they
are material spaces made up of specific technologies and practices
that engender particular embodied and territorial experiences.
Implicit in positing checkpoints as spatial objects is the fact that
they also exist in time. In the West Bank, for example, checkpoints
emerged in full force in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Qalandia
checkpoint described above materialized in the fall of 2001. As
such, checkpoints have been situated specifically in the Territories

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during the “peace” and “post-Oslo” years as part of a larger matrix

of (mostly territorial) control.4 Geographically and historically,
checkpoints have not been unique to Palestinians inside the Territo-
ries, as similar structures and practices have been imposed on Pales-
tinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, or on Palestinian communities
“inside” Israel since before 1948, to name just two examples. Thus if
we recognize checkpoints as bordering processes imposed on Pales-
tinians neither specific to the Territories nor to the post-1990s time
frame, they also exist across time. Indeed, the tensions of border
crossings and territorial containment are experiences shared by all
Palestinians since the early twentieth century—in diaspora, exile,
statelessness, or occupation.5 Their prevalence is precisely why Ra-
shid Khalidi opens his book on Palestinian identity with the follow-
ing statement: “The quintessential Palestinian experience, which
illustrates some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity,
takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one
of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and ver-
ified.”6 It should come as no surprise, then, that checkpoints and
roadblocks are tropes, metaphors, and actual spaces that emerge
in Palestinian films and literature and thus appear in cinema and lit-
erary studies.7 In short, checkpoints in both material form and as
emblematic of processes such as border crossings and im/mobility
have been a significant part of Palestinian life for more than seven
decades, both within and outside the Territories, engendering partic-
ular temporal and phenomenological experiences.
Whether approached as specific places or as symbols of something
else, checkpoints perform temporal work—a concern that remains
largely understudied, particularly in relation to the abundance of
scholarship that focuses on checkpoints’ spatiality and territoriality.
Moreover, checkpoints have existed alongside a variety of temporal
technics that have sought to differentiate and control Palestinians:
curfews, travel permits that denote when and for how long a person
can travel, work permits that specify which hours in a day a Pales-
tinian is permitted to be somewhere to work, among others.
The most common form of theorization that connects the check-
point to temporality has been that which has relied on thinking
through temporal inequalities and speed, echoing Paul Virilio’s

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argument that geopolitics (a politics based in space) has been sup-

planted by chronopolitics (a politics based in time). Virilio’s work
demonstrates that speed privileges certain populations and restrains
others, that the experience of time is relative.8 Checkpoints subject
different populations to distinct time regimes. In analyzing the time it
takes to travel through a checkpoint, Ariel Handel argues that space/
time relationships and practices between Palestinians and Israelis are
radically asymmetric: Palestinians face difficulty, slowness, and un-
predictability, while Israelis experience time and space as predict-
able, fluid, and ultimately “modern.”9 Cédric Parizot complicates
this in recognizing that there are different speeds, depending on
who is attempting to cross a checkpoint: an Arab-Israeli, a Palesti-
nian Jerusalemite, a Jewish-Israeli, a West Banker, and so forth.10
The speed of one person versus another can be very different (slow
vs. fast) and varying (whether it’s always the same), and in some in-
stances mutually exclusive (one can pass only if another is stopped).
The work of Handel and Parizot helps situate Palestinians’ position
in a larger economy of temporal value. But this focus on different
time zones, or speeds, seems to miss the important point that multi-
ple temporalities can be—and are always—interdependent, relation-
al, entangled, or, as in this case, separate. Of course, the sharing of
space does not guarantee the sharing of time. But the structures that
make time’s passing different for one or another group demonstrate
the presence and diffused violence of the Israeli regime everywhere
and every day across Israel/Palestine. In other words, “Israeli time”
determines the relationship wherein experiences of time are relative
to one another.
Checkpoints are part of the political power dynamic between Is-
rael and Palestine. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, “When powers are
unequally distributed, the economic and social world presents itself
not as a universe of possibles equally accessible to every possible sub-
ject . . . but rather as a signposted universe, full of injunctions and
prohibitions, signs of appropriation and exclusion, obligatory routes
or impassable barriers, and, in a word, profoundly differentiated.”11
The checkpoint promises to suspend time in the purging of risk and
danger for Israelis at the expense of Palestinians. In doing so, it dis-
avows a heterogeneous temporality. The unevenness, as it were, is

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manifested in different ways. Handel, for example, demonstrates

how checkpoints are temporal in the sense that they are pervasive.
“Everything, both space and time, is measured in terms of before or
after the checkpoint, and there are no assurances that another check-
point will not pop up around the bend,” he writes of the West
Bank.12 In other words, the power of checkpoints is in their spatial
and temporal ubiquity, in their constant possibility of being present.
Certainly, in their early days—in the late 1990s and early 2000s—
checkpoints marked the precarity, arbitrariness, and flexibility of
time in a different way as well, for back then “mapping checkpoints
[was] an absurd exercise of documenting the shifting temporal land-
scape of occupation—a map created today does not necessarily re-
flect what was yesterday and could likely be obsolete tomorrow.”13
As I spent more time studying checkpoints and returned to them
at varying intervals of days, months, and years, they struck me as
markers of the movement of time—places where one sees changes
from one month or one year to the next, for example in their chang-
ing architecture. Any Palestinian (or person familiar with the check-
points) confronted with an image of a specific checkpoint would be
able to identify when the image was taken by looking at the structure
itself or the graffiti around it, whether the wall was already built,
whether there was a parking lot or a bus lane, and so on. The phys-
icality of a checkpoint changes over time: what may have started out
as a temporarily staffed roadblock now sits along the security fence/
wall; is made up of hundreds of tons of concrete, CCTV cameras,
and automatic turnstiles; and has twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Yet checkpoints equally mark the stoppage or suspension of time.
Indeed, after spending so much time ethnographically observing the
checkpoint, I wrote that “every day feels like the next or the previ-
ous: as if time never moves here. For in a sense it doesn’t. The check-
point slices and cuts across Palestinian life, transforming Palestinian
space-time into one of constant transience, impermanence, volatility,
sometimes simply standstill.”14 Checkpoints slow down the flow of
traffic and people. Daily and weekly activities are defined by the
presence (and unpredictability) of checkpoints. The inordinate and
unpredictable amount of time spent waiting at a checkpoint, and in
different spaces within the checkpoint, not only adds up day after

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day but fundamentally changes one’s disposition to one’s own sense

of and control over time, and its relationship to Palestine.
Palestinians are ripped apart by mechanisms imposed by Israel
that are nothing short of what Sari Hanafi has termed “spacio-
cide”: annihilating the space of Palestine and its everyday experi-
ences.15 In bringing the temporal into the analysis about the space
of the checkpoint—in unpacking its everydayness—I seek to reveal
the distressed temporality that is engendered in spacio-cide. Taking
into account a checkpoint as an anthropological space from which
to understand larger questions about Palestinian mobility, resis-
tance, and fragmentation for example, I ask: what kind of time ex-
ists in the space of Palestine?16 Ultimately, my concern is to think
through the relationship between time and communication, between
temporality and a public: do distorted time and space—which a
checkpoint exemplifies—make a public possible?
Theorizing Time
In thinking about the relationship between space, time, and the

public, I draw primarily on media and cultural studies and anthro-
pology. Time is a central problematic understood as a parameter
of communicative possibility, and, simultaneously, time’s ordering
is a sociopolitical and cultural manifestation of specific and situated
power dynamics.
Media and communication theorists have long analyzed the role
of time and temporality, contending with questions of synchronicity,
simultaneity, and feedback. For example, Harold Innis and Ithiel
deSola Pool foreshadowed analyses of the time-space warping dy-
namics of capitalism (such as David Harvey’s notion of space-time
compression) by analyzing the kind of temporal and geographic
distances or proximities made possible by different technologies
of mediation.17 Others have analyzed the extent to which media
technologies are often attempts to “shrink” distances between peo-
ple in the search for “true” or profound communication.18 Radio
and television have provided fodder for thinking about flow, seg-
mentation, and liveness, although what constitutes “liveness” in a
media-saturated environment pertains to more than the realm of

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Fig. 2. A turnstile and corridor. This is an unused set outside the

checkpoint, perhaps stored for future use. The same contraption is
used inside the checkpoint. Qalandia, 2015
broadcasting.19 Media scholars are now contending with “new” me-

dia’s role in (re)structuring our time, the crises that structure new me-
dia temporality, or how contemporary “speed” is the commanding
by-product of a mutually reinforcing complex that includes global
capital, real-time communication technologies, corporate productiv-
ity demands, military technologies, and scientific research.20 That we
are living in a 24/7, always-on and on-the-go world, which has been
theorized in media studies by scholars such as Jonathan Crary, con-
tinues to be the assumed starting point for much critical analysis of
globalization, labor, and democracy.21 Drawing on philosophers as
far back as Plato, I build on an implicit argument in media studies:
the sharing of time is a condition for communication.

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This crucial point is summarized by Johannes Fabian: “For hu-

man communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Commu-
nication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time.”22 Fabian’s con-
cept of coevalness highlights the importance of a togetherness that is
both synchronous and simultaneous (occurring at the same physical
time) and contemporary (as in co-occurrent). Coevalness is a com-
mon, active sharing of time. Coevalness is necessary for communica-
tion. And communication is necessary for collectivity—whether the
formation of a public such as one based on class, national identity, or
otherwise.23 Time is at the core of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of
nationalism, for example: the modern perception of time as a chro-
nological continuum has facilitated the development of the national
idea.24 Thanks to technological, economic, and cultural changes—
such as the advent of newspapers—the nation can imagine itself as
operating simultaneously and moving in unison on the same time
axis. Nationality is not only an ideological, social, or economic phe-
nomenon but also a temporal one constructed through rhythms that
define how the components of the national story will be arranged in
relation to one another.25 What this scholarship makes clear is that
chronological time sequence is necessary for meaning making, com-
prehensibility, and the formation and recognition of collective iden-
tity. Control over time is a main expression of human action, as are
perceptions of history, units of time, control over time, and products
of long-term conflicts between social (primarily national) groups. In
short, time is not simply a measure or a vector but a constituent of
culture, and it is so because it is one of the most important means of
communication.
Time is also a form of power. In Discipline and Punish, Michel
Foucault described how the regulation of activity proceeds from dis-
tribution in time: how timetables, for example, constituted a mech-
anism of control, as well as how such measurable time was set to
increase “the quality of the time used”—to waste less time, to be
more productive.26 Such a calculation has been made in the context
of checkpoints, as, according to Amal Jamal, “the act of detaining
Palestinians at roadblocks empties their time, transforms their lives
into ‘valueless’ entities.”27 Foucault’s work also demonstrates that
time is a site of material struggle, creating social differences and

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inequalities structured in specific political and economic contexts.

Timekeeping is a way of imposing order, distance, or power. Build-
ing on Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work, Michael Hardt
further suggests that “time is the measure of power, and once a sov-
ereign power has our time it is loath to let it go.”28 Meanwhile, time
discipline also structures people’s abilities to make decisions about
their activities, and thus it has important repercussions for individ-
uals’ subjectivities. Foucault’s infamous example of the prison is not
far-fetched here. That control in prison was exercised through the
control of time is salient, for the feeling of incarceration is prevalent
at a checkpoint. Carceral geographers, criminologists, and prison
sociologists’ approach to the temporal is suggestive here. Such schol-
ars, as Dominique Moran argues,
have developed a sophisticated understanding of prisontime . . . high-
lighting the overlapping temporalities which exist within carceral
space, such as the externally imposed clock time which measures
sentences in days, weeks, months and years, and the experiential
time as experienced by individual prisoners, who variously sense
stasis (with time seeming to stand still while they are incarcerated
through the daily repetition of penal routines), who perceive time
to flow more quickly outside the prison than inside (as events in
the lives of others seemingly pass them by), or who observe the
passage of time biologically (through their own embodied pro-
cesses of ageing and attendant physical deterioration).29
The comparison of Palestinian containment via checkpoints with in-

carceration demonstrates the unevenness of temporalities, how con-
trol over time leaves individuals more vulnerable to control, and
how the inability to control time prevents its organization and un-
dermines the individual’s and society’s sense of being.
This comparison can be pushed still farther, as both checkpoints
and prisons are built and discursively framed as necessary for (some
people’s) security. Here we come back to another concern dealt with
in media studies about our crisis-ridden, preemptive, “securocratic”
world. As Brian Massumi argues, our “temporalization” of the po-
litical has been focused on the growth of “pre-emptive security”
strategies, rhetorics, and technologies that have emerged as central

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to the conduct of the global “war on terror.”30 The checkpoint is

(partly) a manifestation of a security apparatus, which has a tempo-
ral dimension that entails projecting a particular political order or
set of power relations into the future. A checkpoint is an anticipatory
governance strategy premised on controlling the unfolding of the fu-
ture through preemptive intervention in the present. The checkpoint,
then, is as much the opposite of the (Western) high-speed, always-on,
24/7 world as it is a result of the proliferation of anticipatory gover-
nance and control strategies. What this suggests is not simply that
the checkpoint prevents action in the present as well as in the future
but that, more broadly, the checkpoint gives us a glimpse of all of
our futures. It is accepted by now that Palestinians are treated as
guinea pigs whose lives and spaces and temporalities are a testing
ground for new military technologies, new forms of urban warfare,
new forms of political exclusion.31 As Nasser Abourahme states,
“Checkpoints can be thought of as a kind of built microcosm of wid-
er reality: the physical-architectural mark of the lived political trau-
ma.”32 The impact of Palestinians’ temporal experiences reverberate
much farther than the space of the checkpoint.
Taken together, the scholarship above confirms that time is lived,
time is power, time is relative, and that time is a material struggle.
Moreover, as a power dynamic, “the temporal is political regardless
of speed and present. . . . It is an enduring political and economic
reality with important cultural effects.”33 It is through this under-
standing of temporality’s politics and its constitution of people’s ex-
periences that I approach the checkpoint. Checkpoints mark and de-
fine Palestinian temporality; they disrupt time and the possibility of
Palestinian coevality. It is to this disruptive power that I turn next.
Checkpoint Time(s)
Material formations of checkpoints have changed over the decades,
becoming increasingly stringent and inaccessible. Despite these changes
and despite there being no such thing as a generic checkpoint, they
share a particular architecture, a logic, by which I mean that from
the perspective of the Palestinian attempting to get “out,” check-
points are generally structured in a similar fashion. To get at the

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Fig. 3. Inside the checkpoint. After having passed through turnstiles

and metal corridors and given his ID card to a soldier behind the
window (on the right), this man is waiting for his belongings to come
out the X-ray belt (on the left), before going through the last turnstile
to exit. In this space—deep inside the checkpoint—one normally goes
through alone. Qalandia, 2015
checkpoint’s temporal work, I describe here the process of going

through one.
First, one knows that one is approaching the checkpoint because
taxi services or bus lines abruptly end, enormous traffic jams erupt,
and hundreds of people are suddenly making their way toward
a particular place. Second, one encounters a large waiting area—
sometimes covered with a corrugated roof, sometimes exposed to
the open air and butting up against the wall—lined with metal

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barricades, surveillance cameras, and signs. People flood at a fren-

zied pace into this waiting area. People forge ahead, although there
are always those who are waiting for someone to catch up, who
pause to buy a coffee or a sesame roll from men who have set up
stands over the years. Something like a set of queues forms, but it
helps to visualize this as a triangular mass trying to make its way
into a siphon. A set of turnstiles is the first contrivance through
which people must pass, making their way from cramped chaos
into a funnel. These first turnstiles—operated by remote control
by an unseen Israeli soldier—lead toward a narrow corridor lined
by metal barricades, above which are surveillance cameras, razor-
barbed wire, and sharp metal arrows. People press into each other,
suffocating those “ahead” up against the metal barricades and
against the turnstiles. There is no routinized tempo: the speed at
which the turnstile unlocks and keeps rotating is determined by
the unseen soldier. By virtue of the narrowness of the corridor (about
eight meters long by sixty centimeters wide), people are forced to
squeeze into a (dis)orderly queue. At the other end of this corridor
is another remote-controlled turnstile, most often unlocked at a
slower tempo than the first: the barricaded corridor fills up at a faster
rate than it is emptied, often forcing limbs or excess weight to bulge
between the bars. It’s more the space (or lack thereof) that forces the
formation of a queue than the people in it. At fifty-five centimeters
wide, the turnstiles are extremely narrow (compared to seventy-five-
to ninety-centimeter-wide turnstiles used at Israeli bus stations, for
example). Only one person can fit at a time; heavier-set people, peo-
ple holding infants, and pregnant women cannot, let alone those in
wheelchairs. Once jammed inside the corridor, one slowly inches up
to the second turnstile, constrained with the growing pressure from
behind. When the second turnstile is remotely unlocked, a person en-
ters what can be thought of as the main security hall, where bright
fluorescent lights give the space a vapid, sinister feel. Directly in front
is an X-ray conveyor belt on which to place bags and personal be-
longings. To the right is a thick, opaque, bulletproof Plexiglas win-
dow. The Plexiglas looks as if it were lined with a pasty film, making
it difficult to see more than a few centimeters in to where Israeli sol-
diers sit; one is more likely to see one’s own reflection. At the bottom
of the window is a tiny horizontal slit for identification cards,

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permits, and paperwork. Unlike at a bank, there are no perforations

in the Plexiglas to allow for a direct auditory experience: the soldier
speaks through a loudspeaker, the Palestinian speaks into the air
teeming with microphones and video surveillance cameras. People
now wait to be explicitly told—over the microphone—that they
can move on. Then they are permitted to pass through a full-body
scanner and pick up their belongings from the X-ray conveyor belt,
where another soldier (or two or three) may conduct a more thor-
ough search; ask them to step aside for a pat-down, to step inside
the office for interrogation, to be sent back; or ignore them altogeth-
er. The wall to the right is lined with more opaque Plexiglas, behind
which are more soldiers. All along the left side are barricades. If ap-
proved to pass, there is one last remote-controlled turnstile to pass
through before being let out altogether. By this last turnstile, the flow
has become a trickle—from a gush to a protracted drip—making one
wonder if some, or how many, bodies disappeared along the way.
The turnstile clicks; with this last push, one has made it out.34 There
is usually no roof over the exit, which makes the sunlight beam-
ing down jarring—it is more than a metaphoric light at the end of
the tunnel.
As a person going through the checkpoint, the next step is to
proceed—until the next checkpoint. For the purposes of this article,
however, we need to rewind and suspend our focus on each step de-
scribed above. By slicing the description into the checkpoints’ differ-
ent junctures, I zoom in on the kind of temporality that is engendered
and analyze the spheres of interaction and communication made
possible at each juncture.
One’s first personal encounter is with a merchant: a bus driver, a
taxi driver, a coffee seller, a peddler, a kid or old man selling gum.
These merchants are located along what can be thought of as the pe-
riphery of the checkpoint—along the road where the traffic slows
down, in the parking lots, outside the corrugated-roofed hallways
or right inside them. Even if one buys a cup of coffee every day
from the same merchant, interactions are based on monetary ex-
change. Communication is basic, contractual, although it does not
mean it is not friendly. Given that many people must pass through
the checkpoint day after day, those who are prone to purchase a cof-
fee or a snack will usually, as in any recurring commercial exchange,

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know the merchant’s name and have a hurried chat before moving
on. Ayman, for example, has been running a coffee/food stand at
Qalandia since 2002, and most people who must pass the check-
point regularly recognize him as well as the changes he makes to
his stand—over the years it has grown from a cart to a van to a metal
container eventually painted bright yellow. Since this exchange does
not yet technically take place “inside” the checkpoint, I am only pro-
viding a cursory description.35
Palestinians are forced to go through a checkpoint—because rare
are the people who pass through the checkpoint because they want
to, and even rarer are those traveling through on a whim, as a permit
to pass is needed. The primary reasons for going through are one’s
job, school attendance, a doctor or hospital visit, or a family visit. By
far the most people moving through checkpoints need to do so be-
cause of work. Collectively, all checkpoint passers face a politically
unstable future and endless loss of rights and dignity at the hands of
the Israeli regime; as workers, most of them are also exploited labor-
ers inside Israel.
The crowd of male laborers between 3 and 5 a.m. is a haunting
scene. They arrive early because there is no knowing how long—or
if—one will get through the checkpoint. They have no control over
their time: they do not know if they will get to work on time (if at all)
and must wait for their turn to come through the first turnstile, into
the corridor, and through the next turnstiles. There is lots of shoving,
pushing, cursing. Even if some workers are trying to get to the same
factory, office, or construction site, there is no solidarity between
them while here. The checkpoint might close or the turnstile be fro-
zen for an inordinate amount of time. Every person wants to—needs
to—make sure that he or she is ahead. There is no sense of together-
ness: these atomized beings are a mass inevitably about to get frag-
mented by the turnstiles. They are all collectively trying to beat the
clock, although the clock here is the click of the remote-controlled
turnstile. There is a palpable corporeal frustration, especially during
high-traffic times, that did not exist in previous years; before turn-
stiles, before tight corridors, before soldiers were hidden behind opa-
que windows and walls. From a bird’s-eye view it’s a constantly shift-
ing crowd; from up close, it’s an ugly contest.

on 27 March 2018
One dark morning, standing with Ayman near his coffee stand,
we watch a fight develop in the space leading to the first turnstile.
A man is eventually dragged out from the crowd with a bloody
nose and comes to rest in front of Ayman’s stand. Later, after the
man leaves, Ayman declares: “There’s a brawl every morning! Peo-
ple fight each other even though they’re all in the same situation.”
People are put into competition with one another, and exchange be-
comes for the most part tense, competitive, angry, selfish. People
punch or elbow each other, curse, spit, shove. Ayman expounds:
“There is a perfectly logical way of explaining what is going on. Peo-
ple are taking their frustration out on each other because there is
no other room for them to do so. Neither can they fight against
the occupation forces, nor can they fight against the [Palestinian
Authority].” Notwithstanding the poignant critique against the Pal-
estinian Authority, Ayman was alluding to the shrinking possibilities
of where, when, and how “resistance,” or even simply frustration,
can be expressed. What he was also suggesting is how connection
is structured through the regime of the checkpoint itself: disconnect-
ing people, suspending the possibility for communal resistance, emp-
tying their existence in a phenomenological sense by atomizing
individuals and a larger collective from one another.
People press into each other to form a line, funnel into the turn-
stile, compress into the barricaded corridor, and wedge into the next
turnstile. At each passage one waits for an unknown period of time.
This process is unpredictable and contingent: people never know
whether they will get shut in one of the turnstiles (which happens of-
ten) or for how long; whether they will be stuck in the barricaded
corridor, with how many others; and whether this “togetherness”
will last minutes or hours. As Julie Peteet points out, “Although clo-
sure attempts to routinize confinement and subdue resistance, it is
equally about rule through the imposition of calibrated chaos.”36
People are trained to listen for the “click” of the turnstiles and to ac-
cept that their fate and time is not under their control. This kind of
instituted (dis)order is suggestive of what Bourdieu refers to as abso-
lute power, which “has no rules, or rather its rule is to have no
rules—or, worse, to change the rules after each move, or whenever
it pleases.”37 Having made it through the turnstile, the corridor, and
the next turnstile, people never know that they won’t be turned away

on 27 March 2018
at the checkpoint, or that if they make it through the checkpoint,

they will make it through the next one, or this same checkpoint on
their way back home later in the day, tomorrow, or the day after.
This unpredictability denies one any reasonable anticipation, evok-
ing Bourdieu’s explanation of absolute power as the power to place
other people “in total uncertainty by offering no scope to their ca-
pacity to predict. . . . The all-powerful is he who does not wait but
who makes others wait.”38
Power is not simply exerted in forcing people to wait; it is also in
having them stay put. Entering the first turnstile through the corridor
and then the second turnstile, people find that there is no way out.
They are stuck inside, constrained in a space that is oppressive and
dehumanizing: harsh, colorless, made of concrete and metal, with
soldiers booming incomprehensible commands over loudspeakers,
bone-chillingly cold in the winter, unbearably sweltering in the sum-
mer. It can take a minute to get through the checkpoint, or it can take
hours. Deep inside the belly of the checkpoint, between the barri-
cades and the turnstiles, the present remains motionless. Time be-
comes measurable, fragmented into a series of nows relegated into
spatial instants. These frozen “nows”—inside the turnstile, in the
corridor, in the next turnstile, in front of a mirrored window—block
the multiplicity of the future and suspend all possibilities. The check-
point imposes the abstract “now” over temporal possibility, freezing
the moment on the edge of the tragedy. Henri Bergson calls “measur-
able time” a sequence of “nows” in which time remains spatially ex-
ternal to what determines it. Time becomes measurable only when it
is made divisible—and it is divisible because it is space. To put it dif-
ferently, time becomes measurable “because it surreptitiously rele-
gates duration to spatial instants.”39
This disjunctive temporality produces deep ontological insecurity:
there is no continuity, stability, or routine. There is no ability to plan
ahead, no ordered sequence, no continuous narrative, no cause and
effect. One’s present time is occupied with itself and overdetermined
with the moment and its immediate consequences. Existence here
does not plot itself on a chronological time line but collapses in on
itself. People look down at their feet, stare at the back of the head of
the person in front of them; there is no room to move or shift.

on 27 March 2018
Suspension in time is a crisis-ridden experience, suggesting powerless-

ness with respect to time as well as to the possibility of self-expression
within time. Inside the barricade, between the two turnstiles, there is
barely any communication. Whatever loudness existed in the shov-
ing and pushing to enter this funnel has now turned into an eerie
silence punctuated with the occasional curse, prayer, or grumble.
Traveling through a checkpoint is a confining and asphyxiating
experience.
Each person is physically alone but further classified and separat-
ed as existentially alone by the soldier, or the entire apparatus, that
renders a Palestinian a unit that can be separated from the others
also attempting to get through the checkpoint. Whether people ar-
rive at the checkpoint with their children in hand, their whole fam-
ily, their coworkers, or an emergency medical team, they can pass
through each mechanism only by themselves, at whatever tempo it
happens to be. Each person is atomized. Solitude is the fundamental
experience at the checkpoint: one is concerned only with the present
task of waiting to maybe pass through and, it bears repeating, wait-
ing without knowing how long the wait will be. The atomization is
furthered by desocializing each person from others.
There is nothing to do but wait, and wait alone. Undeniably,
waiting has become a mode of Palestinian life. But it is not simply
for those chopped up by checkpoints, for those under curfew evoked
by Darwish’s poem quoted above, or even for the refugees for whom
waiting has become permanent; it is for all Palestinians. Drawing on
Palestinian cinema and literature, Nadia Yaqub declares that Pales-
tinians are always on the road, but a road that leads nowhere.40 Pal-
estinians are collectively in-waiting, and, as Darwish hints at, they
are in-waiting for the waiting to end. This stuckness in waiting
has been experienced since at least 1948, since the time at which
“all Palestinians share an experience of suspended time that lacks
normal continuity. All Palestinian communities everywhere confront
the same temporality crisis: a festering sense of temporariness, the
suspension and emptying of time, of waiting.”41 Waiting is a perma-
nent companion.
Waiting, here, is less than waiting: akin to remission, quiescence,
discharge, exemption. Prolonged and unpredictable waiting has be-
come part of the structure of Israel’s rule. This kind of waiting is

on 27 March 2018
evocative of “prison time.” As Hardt suggests, prison time, an “ob-

vious form of punishment in our world,” is a temporal nothingness
that exists purely as a sentence, a punishment.42 The usefulness—no
pun intended—in comparing checkpoint time to prison time stems
from the similarity of one’s phenomenological experience. “Inmates
live prison as an exile from life, from the time of living,” Hardt sug-
gests; they are forced “to grapple with one of the most intense meta-
physical problematics and they suffer a properly ontological malady.
They are constrained to an existence separate from being—this is
their exile from living.”43 Without the ability to “own” their tempo-
rality, they cannot be. As criminologists and prison sociologists have
recognized, the very fact of being in prison changes how prisoners
experience time. The “now” of incarceration takes the form of an
extended present, Moran explains, in which each new moment of
imprisonment is added to the past as a moment of memory, shaping
prisoners’ thoughts and feelings about their past and their future, as
well as their sense of the passage of time.44 And while there is an
awareness of clock time, its flow does not feel continuous and regu-
lar. Whether individual people are stuck inside the turnstile, or the
social structure more broadly is stuck between walls and check-
points, universalized standards and tools of time measurement—
such as hours, days, months, day and night, wristwatches, timers,
clocks, and calendars—lose their relevance. When imprisonment
goes on for so long and the days of one’s sentence cease to be num-
bered, time stops.45
The arbitrariness of what happens inside a checkpoint in terms of
soldiers’ control of Palestinians’ time is further comparable to forms
of solitary confinement. According to Martel, the three key charac-
teristics of coerced isolation are flexible rationales for confinement
and isolation, the meticulous planning of architectural and spatial
dimensions, and the subjectification of those isolated. Martel further
explains, “In the absence of comprehensive narrative spaces delin-
eating the use of prison segregation through legislated boundaries,
provincial prison employees and decision makers are virtually un-
constrained in their practice of segregation. Pretty much everything
is open to interpretation!”46 The same is true of a checkpoint: there
are no rules, and there is no way to know what a procedure is, if

on 27 March 2018
there is one at all. Checkpoints do not exist on official maps, but they
do exist in different time zones. There is no crime that the Palesti-
nians committed, nor is there an elaborate calculus for how much
time their “crime” equals. (Even if these details are arbitrarily decid-
ed, there are generally matrices: theft equals six months, murder
equals ten years, etc.) Palestinians’ temporal experience is not simply
arbitrary (albeit driven by a colonial logic) but also temporarily per-
petual. The unpredictability and longevity of isolation and life sen-
tences have parallels here: time is an unknown factor or too long
to make much sense. In certain ways, checkpoints—like isolation
cells—are empty informational spaces.
If prison time is one comparison, unemployed time is another.
Bourdieu’s analysis of the unemployed’s time posits that uncertainty
about the future is an uncertainty about one’s social being, and that
“the extreme dispossession of the subproletarian . . . brings to light
the self-evidence of the relationship between time and power.”47 The
unemployed “can only experience the free time that is left them
as dead time, purposeless and meaningless.”48 If time—per Martin
Heidegger—is time to do something, for the unemployed there is
no possibility of doing. The person becomes “dispossessed of the
power to give sense, in both senses, to his life, to state the meaning
and direction of his existence, he is condemned to live in a time ori-
entated by others, an alienated time.”49 At the checkpoint, it is the
soldier, the apparatus, and the Israeli regime—in that click of the
turnstile—that dispossesses the Palestinian. For Bourdieu, too, the sig-
nificance is profound: “What truly is the stake in this game, is not the
question of raison d’être . . . but of a particular, singular existence,
which finds itself called into question in its social being. . . . It is the
question of the legitimacy of an existence, and an individual’s right
to feel justified in existing as he or she exists.”50 The unemployed—as
the imprisoned—is a person without a future, “living at the mercy
of what each day brings and condemned to oscillate between fan-
tasy and surrender, between flight into the imaginary and fatalistic
surrender.”51 Whether unemployed or imprisoned, the experience
of time is suspended under the control of a dominant force. So
too for Palestinians: “Palestinians cannot foresee the duration or
the outcome of waiting. Time has stopped, robbing them of their

on 27 March 2018
individuality as subjects.”52 Here the checkpoint is evocative of so

much more than itself, stripping life of everything but the time of
waiting—waiting for that waiting’s end, isolated, estranged.
As the turnstile clicks, people almost fall over from the pressure of
the pushing bodies. They can’t exhale, however, as an even more
tense experience awaits. They place their bags on the belt and step
to the right to slide their ID card in the slot under the Plexiglas. Now
their “identity” is assigned in a manner typical of the highly asym-
metrical sociopolitical exchanges between Palestinians and the Isra-
eli regime. It is a process that empties the subject’s individuality as it
renders identity a bureaucratic measure and abstracts the subject
from the object determining the identification—be it a soldier or, re-
ally, an invisible force behind the screen. Political decisions both near
and far can impact the experience, but as far as anyone knows, every
decision is arbitrary.
Whatever existential disintegration has taken place up through
the turnstile goes a step farther here because of the invisibility of
any human beings. All other Palestinians have been left behind,
and all that remains in front is one’s own murky reflection. As Jamal
perceptively states:
The Palestinians cannot communicate their distress; the soldiers in
their glass booths escape any burden of moral reflection conse-
quent to direct physical contact with suffering people. . . . The sol-
dier’s isolation from the privations of the waiting Palestinians
mirrors the technical isolation of Israeli society from the daily suf-
ferings of Palestinian society in the OPTs [Occupied Palestinian
Territories]. Communication becomes too difficult, and reconcil-
iation impossible.53
Palestinians for the most part deal not with their “oppressor” direct-
ly, or even with a regime per se, but with the architecture pressing
down on them, squeezing them between various metal and con-
crete formations. There is no room for a Palestinian to encounter—
let alone communicate with—an Israeli here (never mind that the
only Israeli in the vicinity is in military uniform).
Merchants who have set up shop at the checkpoint for more
than a decade now arguably have a broader view of these changes.

on 27 March 2018
On another morning Ayman and I were listening to a forecast of

snow. It brought back a memory from a few years earlier. “You re-
member during that snowstorm we had snowball fights with the sol-
diers! Now there is no soldier to throw a snowball at. We neither see
them, nor even know if they’re coming or going,” he says. These
“exchanges” are increasingly mediated, technologized, abstract, dis-
tanciated; over the years interaction and communication take place
through remote controls, loudspeakers, Plexiglas windows, one-way
mirrors, surveillance cameras, biometric strip readers, binoculars
peeping out of watchtowers, and so on. There is a range of tech-
nologies that make this possible: clocks, timetables, soldiers’ work
shifts, maps, databases, X-ray machines, turnstiles, sensors, scan-
ners, and the like.54 These help organize power into forms of spatial
and temporal surveillance whereby each Palestinian is measured,
classified, and separated. The consequence of indirect interaction
with soldiers is that people increasingly take out their frustrations
on each other (whether they are about running late, the checkpoint’s
presence, the occupation’s abstraction, colonialism’s expansion, or
something else). Solitude is experienced through spatial and tempo-
ral segregation, but it is even more profound because it renders col-
lective response or resistance impossible. Fabian’s coevalness is not
even a distant possibility here. Communication, community, and the
formation of a public—and thus any political change—are not pos-
sible. Checkpoints prevent “Palestinians from questioning their
‘fixed’ national culture, prevent associations with the outside and
with each other. Checkpoints serve to further split, and erase, the
Palestinian ‘nation.’”55
The architecture, the sound clicks, the booming microphones, the
walls—all of these impose a particular disposition. This disposition,
or “thingness[,] . . . has become all that much more impressive—
indescribable—to the point of obfuscating, silencing and rendering
invisible any humanity, whether of those who still have to pass
through here, the handful of merchants who still loiter around but
seem more like beggars, the bus drivers, even the soldiers behind
their bullet-proof glass, mirrors, and databases.”56
Of course, technologies have made it harder to interact interper-
sonally, corporeally, or face-to-face with soldiers. But the inability to

on 27 March 2018
address the soldier or, more broadly, the regime does not exist simply
because of increased mediation and technologization—although
these certainly matter. The process of passing through checkpoints
renders one impotent. The most poignant remark made during my
research remains a statement by a young woman in 2003: “I get
there [the checkpoint]. I see them [the soldiers], I see the gun, I forget
everything I had just told myself [about wanting to resist the sol-
diers]. . . . I see the huge line [of people waiting] and my thoughts,
my strength evaporate. Nothing. I feel beaten before my turn has
even come.” Considering how the checkpoint—let alone the larger
political situation—has become so much more intractable over a de-
cade later, the young woman’s powerlessness makes for a bleak
prognosis. Her sense of imprisonment is corporeal as much as it
is figurative: fighting against Israeli occupation and colonialism
seems increasingly futile. The suspension of possibility and futurity
is totalizing.
The checkpoint also suppresses one’s ability to communicate.
First, despite advances in the technologies used to run the check-
point, use of technology for communication by Palestinians, such
as mobile phones, is not possible. Israeli policies block cellular sig-
nals at most checkpoints. A Palestinian cellular user cannot call
anyone from Qalandia—neither another cellular user on the same
network nor one on an Israeli network with whom Palestinian pro-
viders have roaming agreements. “Israeli signals are not available
there . . . for the simple reason that Israelis do not travel through
the area. Qalandia is a telephonic no-man’s-land—quite appropri-
ate, since it is, from an Israeli perspective, also a political and terri-
torial no-man’s-land, despite being a busy and bustling location.”57
Second, the checkpoint renders one mute because the place and its
experience are often indescribable:
I find it impossible to describe. I can tell you about the concrete

blocks and slabs, the wall on one side, the wall on the other
side, walls on every side; about the roundabout, the watch towers,
the layers of fences, the paved walkways, the gates, the metal tire
piercers to stop one from reversing his car; and those automated
turnstiles, the x-ray machines, the biometric scanners, the glass

on 27 March 2018
behind which sit soldiers, the loudspeakers, the flashing lights,

more automated turnstiles. . . . But no! I do not want to describe
it, for to describe it would be to deny that the Qalandia I love is
dead, and that this “thing” before me today—“the Qalandia ter-
minal” as the Israeli military calls it—is what constituted its
death.58
The checkpoint does not allow the Palestinian to speak. Whether

in the dramatic passage above or in the young woman’s words, the
pervasive sense of impotence, powerlessness, and a shrinking future
is echoed in still another example that highlights the muting of po-
litical power, the shrinking realm of political possibility, the shrink-
ing realm of the struggle, and the shrinking realm of the nation. In
2003 I am standing with a taxi driver, staring at a queue of cars
stretching for more than a kilometer in a rural area in the northern
West Bank. We have already been waiting for hours. He erupts:
“Wow!” He whistles, staring at the long, immobile line, and contin-
ues: “Our national struggle is shrinking. It used to be fighting against
the occupation. Now we feel victorious if all we do is get through the
checkpoint!” If thirty years ago the dream was to overthrow the en-
tire occupation, and fifteen years ago it was to get from one part of
the country to another without checkpoints, by 2005 it had con-
tracted to simply getting through the checkpoint. In fact, only a
tiny number of Palestinians are even given a permit to pass through
a checkpoint, and those who can obtain a permit often do not bother.
A man born in Jaffa and living in Ramallah explains to me in No-
vember 2014: “I am old now, I am allowed to get a permit to visit
Jaffa [Israel more often provides permits for people over sixty-five].
I always imagined that I would fly at the first chance. But I haven’t
been because I can’t bear having to go through Qalandia [check-
point].”
Palestinians remain hanging as “temporary subjects” of the occu-
pation, where the past has been pulled from under their feet, where
time is disintegrated from its being endured, where the future is
a dead end. Achille Mbembe calls “emergent time” the feeling of
absence in which both past and future horizons are fading.59 But
the checkpoint demonstrates how these have already faded. It is a

on 27 March 2018
more pessimistic read, to be sure, because it has to be read alongside

the temporal displacement and dispossession under which Palestinians
have been excluded from past and future time. Being inside the
checkpoint is not simply a state of in-betweenness toward an antic-
ipated future, because what lies ahead is not a probable outcome but
a certainty: of being inside the turnstile, inside the checkpoint, of
doing this again tomorrow.
Palestinian temporality is itself perpetually in waiting: people
must linger; landscapes are obliterated; connections between one
place and another are severed; continuity between one time and an-
other is amputated; political concerns zoom in on trying to get
through the checkpoint or survive within its confines, rather than
contend with the more macroscopic affairs of an entire territory or
nation. There is not simply a lack of shared space; there is also no
shared time. Without shared time, there is no communication, no
community, no public. The implications are tremendous, and they
are best stated in a recent joke: “The Arab Spring was on its way
to Palestine but got held up at a checkpoint.”60
Palestine at the Checkpoint
The above joke can be tweaked to iterate a more extensive point:

Palestine is stuck inside the checkpoint. The checkpoint demon-
strates how Palestinians live with(in) a disruption of the chronolog-
ical continuum of past-present-future, a disruption that undermines
both the individual’s and society’s very sense of being. More so, as
Abourahme states: “The issue is not simply that the multiplicity and
unevenness of various senses of social time becomes [sic] more
apparent—it is that these timespaces are increasingly isolated, cut
off, estranged from one another in a present that seems to have
come to a halt.”61 The checkpoint, as I explained above, disrupts
the temporality for those passing through and stuck inside it, but
the checkpoint is equally significant because the temporality it en-
genders speaks to how the control/loss over time has been an integral
component of the conflict and Palestinian life since at least 1948.
The checkpoint tells us something more than just its own imme-
diacy: it “communicate[s] our shared experience of the loss and

on 27 March 2018
on-going search for temporal stability.”62 If the checkpoint were to

speak, it would echo the predicament of Palestinians’ disordered
space-time, which, as Edward Said posited decades ago, is marked
by “the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed
time.”63 More specifically, the temporality that has been imposed
on Palestinians has resulted in this discombobulation. Indeed, as
Sean McMahon states, “Palestinian-Israeli politics, or more specifi-
cally the Zionist colonization of Palestine which defines these poli-
tics, is about nothing if not time.”64 It is to this larger concern that
I shift now.
In Zionist ideology as well as its practice across Palestine/Israel,
Jewish national identity is based on a continuum that skips over
two thousand years of Jewish exile and creates a direct link between
the ancient and modern settlement of the Jewish people in the Land
of Israel.65 Zionism created an explicit link between national aware-
ness and existence in historical time, creating a Jewish national awak-
ening within the framework of modern, progressive time. Time was
argued to have been lost to the Jews because of historical events out-
side their control. With the creation of a nation-state, time would be
“returned” to them.66 This becomes a core myth in Zionist political
thought. Zionism is thus a collective effort to “return” to modern
history and establish new temporal standards for Jewish existence,
expressed in the dynamic figure of the pioneer–cum–national hero
who resurrects Jews from history and leads them on their modern
journey.67 This historical narrative, an inseparable part of the Jewish
claim for Palestine/Israel, serves as justification for Jewish settle-
ment. Jamal explains, “This effort has existential implications not
only for Jews, viewed as carriers of modern national time, but also
for Palestinians, who pay the price for Jewish time by being expelled
from history.”68
As a national and modern movement, Zionism suspended Pales-
tinian time and replaced it with Jewish time, thereby nullifying Pal-
estinian time by declaring it empty of meaning. In what can be seen
as an ironic twist of positions, Zionist time expelled Palestinians
from their own time and ejected them from history, suspending
“their temporal development for the sake of advancing its own.”69
Palestinian time’s existence outside the modern time frame is best

on 27 March 2018
observed at the checkpoint, where it has been rendered worthless by

the machinations of the Israeli state.
Policies instituted in the early days of the Israeli state—structured
by Zionism—have enduring impacts on Palestinians. While law, ter-
ritory, and demography certainly defined Israeli colonialism, struc-
tural inequalities were exacerbated at the level of time. In the imme-
diate aftermath of 1948, Palestinians were categorized by the new
state according to their location in space and time: laws about citi-
zenship and landownership were passed not simply about who was
or was not there but about when and for how long.70 Zionist legal
policies transformed time into measurable entities, separating differ-
ent types of people who then move along different chronological
timelines. Jews were and continue to be “unlimited by time and
place; they can freely move along their historical axis without dam-
aging their inherent connection to the homeland.”71 While all Jews
were entitled to Israeli citizenship irrespective of their place or time
of residence (if they had ever lived in Israel), Palestinians were par-
celed according to whether they were residents in certain areas after
a date arbitrarily determined by the Israeli authorities. Palestinians
were fragmented into “sub-sectors, differentiated by a time-related
key”: some were permitted Israeli citizenship upon proof of living
in “Israel” (i.e., in their own homes since before the state appeared)
continuously between 1949 and 1952; some whose land was expro-
priated were rendered “present absentees” (an oxymoron both spa-
tial and temporal); and those refugees exiled from their homeland
were considered living outside Israeli time and historical time—as
they still do.72 As Jamal explains, segregation between Jews and Pal-
estinians was effectuated by delineating time by means of physical
barriers: checkpoints are only the most contemporary example in
a long-standing practice of disrupting a coherent Palestinian time.
Time’s instrumentalization through legal, territorial, and political
initiatives did not end with early Zionist settlement. Instead it seeped
through various aspects of the relationship between the Israeli state
and Palestinians. McMahon demonstrates, for example, how polit-
ical initiatives and “agreements” posit Palestinians as existing out-
side time: “Palestinians are constituted as being without time. They
are not with time; not with a past, or a future. . . . Palestinians are

on 27 March 2018
denied a position in time. They are only ever of a time, and they are
not for time.”73 As he explains by dissecting various “peace” accords
and negotiations, “Palestinians have existed only for a time: five
years in the case of Oslo I, two years in the case of the Road Map,
and a proposed ten years in the case of Obama’s initiative.”74 Pales-
tinians are temporary at best. Indeed, the West Bank and Gaza Strip
are concomitantly the “eternal Jewish homeland” yet “temporarily
occupied.”
But temporariness requires stages of progress toward an antici-
pated (better) future, whereas “temporariness” here is experienced
by generation after generation of Palestinians as a frozen present.
The temporary has a way of morphing into longevity; as Julie Peteet
states, “for Palestinians the temporary is distorted.”75 Refugee camps
were erected as temporary, just as settlements were initially declared
temporary—the growth and perpetuation of both, since the late
1940s and the 1960s, respectively, contravenes any claims to tempo-
rariness. Likewise, closure has been imposed as a temporary measure
since 1991, just as checkpoints (in their modern manifestations)
emerged as temporary a few years later. Palestinians’ experience
has been subsumed by the “temporary” that grows ever more per-
manent every year. In the words of David Theo Goldberg, “Perma-
nent impermanence is made the marker of the very ethnoracial con-
dition of the Palestinian.”76 Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay draw this
rhetoric to its logical end: because the occupation is temporary,
Palestinians are governed as temporary human beings.77 This “tem-
porary temporality is taken as ontological condition much as political-
military condition. The Palestinian is always between, always ill-
at-ease, homeless at home if never at home in his homelessness, if
anyone really could be. . . . Shifting, shiftless, unreliable, untrustwor-
thy, nowhere to go, nowhere to be, the persona of negativity, of
negation, of death’s potential. He is the quintessential Nobody . . . ,
almost already dead.”78 The condition is more than existential, for
just as the end of Palestinians’ displacement is spatially and tempo-
rally displaced, so too is the end of the conflict displaced.79 All of
these presumably temporary schemes—refugee camps, closure, po-
litical agreements, and so on—have morphed into longevity. In fact,
the Israeli military’s terminology for checkpoints since 2005 best

on 27 March 2018
demonstrates checkpoints’ and the broader condition’s spatial and

temporal intractability: they are now called “terminals.”
The terminal (in its temporal meaning) suggests that for Palesti-
nians, waiting is more than waiting: it is prolonged and unending,
taking one back in time, giving one the sensation of being left behind
in history. Palestinians are perceived and perceive themselves as
stuck in a system that belongs to the past, preventing them from
moving forward. It is as though Palestinians have unfairly been
left behind in the wake of a history that has granted others territorial
sovereignty. Abourahme calls this predicament the perpetual sus-
pended present: “trapped, seemingly perpetually, between the (end-
less) colonial present and the (deferred) postcolonial future.”80 This
can translate into a sense of amazement, fury, and hopelessness that
this (the occupation, colonialism, a geography pockmarked by walls
and checkpoints, what have you) is still happening. But if colonial-
ism belongs to the dustbin of history, so too does the Palestinians’
chase of an outdated mode of liberation. Palestinians are also well
aware—rendered more acute in their experience with Israel—that
territorial nationalism, even if the norm in world affairs, is rife
with violence and exclusionary practices. Thus Palestinians exist in
a situation that doubly belongs to the past, a counter-timeliness that
makes their situation seem especially perplexing.81 One can “think
of this Palestine as the tragedy of the postcolonial without the tri-
umph, however pyrrhic, of the anti-colonial.”82
The concreteness and continuous material fortification of walls,
bypass roads, and, of course, checkpoints bear Israeli colonialism’s
permanency. Time is central to the practice of colonialism. Coloni-
alism does not just take place in time. It constructs narratives of time,
in ways that create particular political relationships in the present,
and attempts to move itself through time to a certain political future.
Fabian writes:
When in the course of colonial expansion a Western body politic
came to occupy, literally, the space of an autochthonous body,
several alternatives were conceived to deal with that violation of
the rule. The simplest one, if we think of North America and Aus-
tralia, was of course to move or remove the other body. Another

on 27 March 2018
one is to pretend that space is being divided and allocated to sep-

arate bodies. . . . Most often the preferred strategy has been simply
to manipulate the other variable—Time. With the help of various
devices of sequencing and distancing one assigns to the conquered
populations a different Time.83
The control over Palestinian time is critical to Israel’s colonial pro-

ject. But here we can complicate Fabian’s view of colonialism: it
does not only or necessarily move or remove the colonized; it can
also produce and reproduce their conditions toward particular ends.
Temporality is a facet of colonialism, and the “temporary” has be-
come part of the very logic of colonial governmentality. Palestinians’
temporality was yanked away first with the brutal slap of Zionist
colonization, followed by ongoing dispossession, exile, military rule,
occupation, a shrinking territory, and “peace” processes. Not only
is Israeli colonialism a continuous if uneven process, but the suc-
cessive distortions of Palestinians’ presence, territoriality, sociality,
communicability, and temporality invariably result in a state of af-
fairs that appears as a spiral in its combination of repetition and
intensification—dispossession, displacement, destruction and recon-
struction of entire villages and camps, curfews, bombing campaigns,
checkpoints. The reality of dispossession is anything but linear.
By way of conclusion, one more question needs to be posed: Is
there perhaps, in a nonlinear temporality, room for alternative pos-
sibilities? If the checkpoint has avowed Palestinian time as worthless,
somehow ejected, what does it say about Israel? Following Patrick
Wolfe, if settler colonialism and invasions are structures (whose lon-
gevity defines the political life of their subjects), then is settler colo-
nialism not also a continually unfolding event that may never reach
an end point or a conclusion of permanence?84 Settler colonialism is
a condition of possibility that remains formative while also changing
over time.85 The Israeli regime derives and exerts power through its
investment and control over Palestinians’ time, but there remains a
tension in the very “temporariness” that Israel itself uses to describe
its presence in the Territories. Eyal Weizman argues that the term oc-
cupation, used to denote Israel’s fifty-year-old military control and
administration, is “complicit with the legal charade on which

on 27 March 2018
[Israel’s] entire system rests,” but it is more than simply a legal cha-
rade.86 While Israel, in its operation as a settler colonial state, draws
on colonialism as a repertoire of tropes and practices of social con-
trol, it remains anomalous to other settler-colonies in that its project
of expansion remains unfinished.
Settler-colonial structures achieve a kind of longevity, imposing
structures that are virtually impossible to extricate oneself from.
But longevity is not synonymous with durability or permanence.
The checkpoint, then, is the outcome not only of settler-colonialism’s
longevity but also of its precarity: what it hides in plain sight is the
impermanence and incompleteness of the settler colonial project.
The checkpoint has emerged, proliferated, and transformed because
Israel itself exists in a temporary and incomplete state. If “Israel’s im-
pact on the region as a whole has been to introduce ‘a structure of
rupture,’” then there is a possibility of rupture to the structure itself
that remains pregnant.87 Put another way, the possibility of a slip-
page of time is always present.
Drawing on Albert Einstein, it is from within media and com-
munication studies (to return us to the beginning)—a field in
which we are confronted with the very impossibility of true or full
communication—that we get a glimpse of hope. In the slippage—or
the distortion—of space and time, there remains a gap. In the words
of John Durham Peters:
Just as any light we see from Alpha Centauri is 4.3 years old, any
communication we receive from another person comes out of the
past, undergoing, even in a face-to-face discussion, an infinitesi-
mal delay between departure and arrival. In the infinitely small
interval between your utterance and my hearing, the present mo-
ment slips away asymptotically, leaving a gap long enough for the
universe to end or otherwise change the meaning of the message.88
......................................................
helga tawil-souri is associate professor of media, culture, and
communication and director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for
Near Eastern Studies at New York University. She works on issues
to do with technology, media, culture, territory, and politics in the
Middle East, especially Palestine/Israel. She is coeditor of Gaza as
Metaphor (2016).

on 27 March 2018
Acknowledgment
I owe my gratitude to Tarik Sabry, who first provided me with the time and
space to pursue the idea of checkpoint time, and to Kouross Esmaeli, Pascal
Ménoret, and Nasser Abourahme, who offered valuable feedback on earli-
er drafts. It goes without saying that none of this would have been possible
without the engagement of various people in and around the checkpoints—
and most especially Qalandia—over the past fifteen years.
Notes
1. “Spring forward, fall back” is a well-known North American mne-

monic to remember which way clocks are to be set during spring and
fall changes to and from Daylight Saving Time (DST), respectively.
2. I am using in (toward Ramallah) and out (of Ramallah) in the everyday
manner in which it is employed; although the directionality of going in
and out is problematic since the checkpoint sits inside the West Bank.
3. Both Israel and the Palestinian Territories observed DST when this
happened in the spring of 2003. Israel switched on the same day as the
European Union, but the Palestinian Territories did not until two
weeks later with the rest of the Arab countries observing DST. Across
the world, it is not uncommon for the switch to/from DST to take place
at different times or on different days. Moreover, Israel has not been
consistent when it changes the clocks, and during some years, it has
skipped the change altogether. In fact, the issue is related to temporality
as well, bringing about a conflict between Judaic notions of time and
more secular Israeli-state ideas. On this last note, see Kellerman, Time,
Space, and Society, 94.
4. Hanafi, “Spacio-cide”; Weizman, Hollow Land.
5. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity; Said, After the Last Sky.
6. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 1.
7. Yaqub, “Utopia and Dystopia in Palestinian Circular Journeys”; Fieni,
“Cinematic Checkpoints and Sovereign Time.”
8. Virilio, Speed and Politics.
9. Handel, “Where, Where to, and When.” The politics of movement and
waiting are also class matters, as they relate to economic conditions
of possibility. Time is money, after all. This will come up below in
Bourdieu’s example of unemployed time.
10. Parizot, “Temporalities and Perceptions.”
11. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 225.

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12. Handel, “Where, Where to, and When,” 191.

13. Tawil-Souri, “Qalandia Checkpoint as Space and Nonplace,” 7.
15. Hanafi, “Spacio-cide.”
16. See Bornstein, Crossing the Green Line; Hammami, “On the Importance
of Thugs”; Hammami, “Qalandiya”; Tawil-Souri, “New Palestinian
Centers”; Tawil-Souri, “Qalandia Checkpoint as Space and Non-
place”; Handel, “Where, Where to, and When”; Abourahme, “Spatial
Collisions and Discordant Temporalities”; and Abourahme, “Pro-
ductive Ambivalences of Post-revolutionary Time.”
17. Innis, Bias of Communication; deSola Pool, Technologies of Freedom;
Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity.
18. Peters, Speaking into the Air.
19. Wilk, “Colonial Time and TV Time”; Thompson, Media and Mod-
ernity; Scannell, Television and the Meaning of “Live.”
20. Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis.”
21. Crary, 24/7. See also Sharma, “Critical Time.”
22. Fabian, Time and the Other, 30–31; emphasis added. Fabian’s critique
is targeted at anthropology and the production of knowledge of the
other. But in touching on how time is used for the purposes of dis-
tancing and othering, his intervention is extremely useful.
23. Consider Marx’s argument that class consciousness would arise be-
cause of its conditions of exploitation (an ideological concern), and
because it could now gather in the factory floor (a spatial concern), but
also because it would do so at the same time and in a particular mo-
ment in historical time (a temporal concern).
24. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
25. Bhabba, “DissemiNation.”
26. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 150.
27. Jamal, “Place, Home and Being,” 6.
28. Hardt, “Prison Time,” 65.
29. Moran, “‘Doing Time’ in Carceral Space,” 309.
30. Massumi, Ontopower.
31. See Weizman, Hollow Land.
32. Abourahme, “Spatial Collisions and Discordant Temporalities,” 453;
emphasis added.
33. Sharma, “Critical Time,” 314.
34. As I noted above, I use the term out to denote passage toward Israeli
areas—even if, it bears repeating, many checkpoints are not on the

on 27 March 2018
presumed border between the West Bank and Israel but within the West
Bank and thus necessary for a Palestinian to pass through to get from
one part of the West Bank to another. The process going “in” is much
less cumbersome: seldom is there interaction with a soldier, and there
are not as many architectural junctures.
35. For details, see Hammami, “On the Importance of Thugs”; and Tawil-
Souri, “New Palestinian Centers.”
36. Peteet, “Camps and Enclaves,” 12.
39. Scott, “The ‘Concept of Time’ and the ‘Being of the Clock,’” 186.
40. Yaqub, “Utopia and Dystopia in Palestinian Circular Journeys.” In
Yaqub’s explanation, the condition of having one’s identity shaped by
aspirations for a homeland rather than by the founding of a state is
metaphorically rendered as an ongoing journey in process.
41. Jamal, “Conflicting Temporalities and Opportunities of Temporari-
ness,” 19–20.
42. Hardt, “Prison Time,” 64.
43. Hardt, “Prison Time,” 65–66.
44. Moran, “‘Doing Time’ in Carceral Space,” 310.
45. See Martel, “To Be, One Has to Be Somewhere.”
46. Martel, “To Be, One Has to Be Somewhere,” 589.
ness,” 15.
ness,” 16.
54. The checkpoint is one apparatus in a larger regime that separates,
classifies, surveils, and controls. See Zureik, Lyon, and Abu-Laban,
Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine.
56. Tawil-Souri, “Qalandia,” 77.
57. Tawil-Souri, “Cellular Im/Mobilities,” 174.
59. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 17.

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60. Abourahme, “Productive Ambivalences of Post-revolutionary Time,”

129.
61. Abourahme, “Spatial Collisions and Discordant Temporalities,” 455.
63. Said, After the Last Sky, 20.
64. McMahon, “Temporality, Peace Initiatives, and Palestinian-Israeli
Politics,” 5.
65. There are fascinating layers of contradictory temporalities at play here
of a new Israeli society/state that justifies its existence on a biblical time
frame, which fall outside the purview of this piece.
66. Büber, “Jew in the World”; Herzl, “Jewish State.”
67. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots.
ness,” 7.
ness,” 2.
70. See Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
ness,” 10.
ness,” 10.
Politics,” 6.
Politics,” 19.
75. Peteet, “Camps and Enclaves,” 9.
76. Goldberg, “Racial Palestinianization,” 42.
77. Ophir and Azoulay, “Order of Violence.”
78. Goldberg, “Racial Palestinianization,” 41–42.
79. While this critique is targeted at the Israeli regime, the search for so-
lutions on the part of Palestinian officials and parties has become
temporary too, permeating their own outlooks and actions and re-
sulting in a foreclosure of possibilities—Ayman’s quip about Pales-
tinians no longer being able to fight the Palestinian Authority and
therefore taking out their aggression on each other is very much on
target. See also Jamal, “Conflicting Temporalities and Opportunities
of Temporariness”; Jamal, “Place, Home and Being”; and Abour-
ahme, “Productive Ambivalences of Post-revolutionary Time.”
151.

on 27 March 2018
81. There are important critiques to be waged here about nationalism,

territoriality, and globalization—the idea of progressive temporality
that sections off what belongs to the present and future from that
which ought to be relegated to the dustbin of the past. Walter Benja-
min, writing about fascism, explained that “the amazement that the
things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible . . . is not philosophi-
cal. . . . It is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it
is untenable” (“On the Concept of History,” 257).
151.
83. Fabian, Time and the Other, 29–30.
84. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”
85. See also Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; and Scott, Omens of Adver-
sity.
86. Weizman, Hollow Land, 104.
87. Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,”
116.
88. Peters, “Space, Time, and Communication Theory,” n.p.
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Checkpoint Time: Helga Tawil-Souri

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Checkpoint Time

Under siege, life is time

The siege is waiting

the connections among beings alone make time

Prologue: Spring Forward, Fall Back

It was my one chance to meet Yasser Arafat: a friend who worked

qui parle Vol. 26, No. 2, December 2017

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Fig. 1. Fences and walls, along the periphery of a checkpoint. Qalandia,

I planned to arrive in Ramallah by 7. Traveling from ar-Ram to

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was increasing its bombing campaign in Iraq, or some other far-off

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and governance; because of the progressively disembodied technol-

More than a Space

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during the “peace” and “post-Oslo” years as part of a larger matrix

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argument that geopolitics (a politics based in space) has been sup-

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manifested in different ways. Handel, for example, demonstrates

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day but fundamentally changes one’s disposition to one’s own sense

In thinking about the relationship between space, time, and the

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Fig. 2. A turnstile and corridor. This is an unused set outside the

broadcasting.19 Media scholars are now contending with “new” me-

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This crucial point is summarized by Johannes Fabian: “For hu-

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inequalities structured in speciﬁc political and economic contexts.

The comparison of Palestinian containment via checkpoints with in-

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to the conduct of the global “war on terror.”30 The checkpoint is

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Fig. 3. Inside the checkpoint. After having passed through turnstiles

checkpoint’s temporal work, I describe here the process of going

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barricades, surveillance cameras, and signs. People ﬂood at a fren-

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permits, and paperwork. Unlike at a bank, there are no perforations

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at the checkpoint, or that if they make it through the checkpoint,

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Suspension in time is a crisis-ridden experience, suggesting powerless-

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evocative of “prison time.” As Hardt suggests, prison time, an “ob-

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individuality as subjects.”52 Here the checkpoint is evocative of so

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On another morning Ayman and I were listening to a forecast of

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I ﬁnd it impossible to describe. I can tell you about the concrete

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behind which sit soldiers, the loudspeakers, the ﬂashing lights,

The checkpoint does not allow the Palestinian to speak. Whether

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more pessimistic read, to be sure, because it has to be read alongside

Palestine at the Checkpoint

The above joke can be tweaked to iterate a more extensive point: