56 Years of Temporary: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine

When you get to the Ofer Military Court, you are nowhere. The parking lot is just a wide expanse of sand and gravel. The path to the court itself is long and winding. It sort of goes on forever. It’s a little bit like you're walking into no-man’s-land or the desert. But there are some giveaways.  

At the top of a tall embankment is a military base—clue number one. Along the other side of the path you walk down is a tall fence with barbed wire curled along the top—another giveaway. But at the entrance to that parking lot is a man who sells tea and snacks.  

It’s strange, this oasis in the middle of the desert, until you realize, oh, many people must come here, and that’s how he makes a living. He makes a living from the many Palestinians and just the handful of Israelis who come here. The Palestinians come as prisoners and their families and maybe an attorney or two. The Israelis are only ever soldiers and judges. Israelis are never prisoners here, which is, at some level, the root of the apartheid system.

Israelis here live under civil law, so they aren’t tried in military courts. Palestinians, their neighbors who live right beside them, they live under military law, so they are only ever tried in military courts. Two laws, two people, one place—apartheid.  

At the end of that path that seems to take you to nowhere, which, I think, is actually kind of the point—it makes you feel like it’s a place where you could disappear—you cross through security, with its usual Byzantine turnstiles and humiliations. And then you find yourself in a somewhere-nowhere—makeshift seating, a big, open awning. It feels a little bit like an oversized bus stop where people are waiting, waiting. There is, behind it, a sort of squat, slapped-together building—four walls and a roof. I don't remember if there was even a bathroom. And that place is full of parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and families—each family, a story—waiting for a person to be tried, sentenced, imprisoned, or, if they’re a child, detained under house arrest.  

I’m going to let you guess what the conviction rate is—just hold the idea in your head. Do you have it? It’s 95 percent: 95 percent of Palestinians here are convicted; 800,000 Palestinians detained since 1967; 700 children a year—that’s two children a day, every day. Usually for something like throwing stones.  

“They came in the middle of the night. They were screaming,” she said. This was a mother. Her boy was taken, and the story is so often the same. 

“He was in bed. It was 3:00 in the morning. They took him in the middle of the night. They blindfolded him, handcuffed him, threw him in a military Jeep. But he was sleeping, so they didn’t know that he wore glasses.” 

And then I noticed that she was holding her chest, but what she was really holding was a pair of glasses that was sort of tucked into her lapel. 

“I come because I just want to give him his glasses,” she said. 

To call them courts is a kind of overstatement. First, there isn’t really any justice here. And second, the funny thing is they’re little more than shipping containers. They’re actually—I promise you—they are corrugated metal on stilts. There are nine of them all lined up, like mobile trailers in a row. It’s sort of like a caravan penal system. And they’re all meant to look, to appear, to give the illusion of being temporary. 

But what temporary? Since 1967, 56 years of temporary? 

You walk into one of them, and there are benches along the back. There are a couple of desks, a makeshift stand and a platform where the judge sits—again, judge, I think, is a bit of an overstatement. An air conditioner drones lazily in the corner. And I have to tell you, the soldiers, the guards, and the bureaucrats—they look so bored. They look so bored because nothing new or interesting ever happens here. It’s always the same. Palestinians come. They’re found guilty, and they go away.  

Except when two young men who, I suspect, are probably similar in age to many of us here, are escorted in, handcuffed, and then there’s a flurry of activity. One of them lights up like a Christmas tree. 

“Mom, Dad!” He yells. I don’t really speak Arabic, but that much I know. 

“Mom, Dad,” he yells. He’s smiling. And the older couple behind us are on their feet, and they’re burbling away. And, again, I don’t really know what they’re saying, but you get the feeling of it. It’s “How are you? We miss you. We love you. Are you OK?” Hands and arms reaching out to one another, yearning to hold, to hug, to be held. Love stretching across the distance.

The judge bangs his gavel almost immediately. Again, I don’t really speak Hebrew—I have about the vocabulary of a two-year-old—but this, I understand: Quiet. Order. Stop.

The accused gets wind that we’re observers from Harvard, he flashes us a winning smile and a peace sign: unbreakable. Before long, the judge decides he doesn’t really want us there, so he starts arguing with our chaperone in Hebrew to have us removed. But then this happens.  

He turns to us, and he speaks directly to us. And he switches into English, and it is the most perfect New York accent—because he’s American. So, we get thrown out. And I’m a special kind of asshole, so Nick and I and a few of our friends, we try to finesse our way back in, and we succeed.   

Now the courtroom is empty, and it’s just us and the judge. 

“So,” Nick says, “Can I ask you a question?”

The judge says, “Sure.”

Nick says, “Where are you from?”

The judge hesitates. “New York.”

“Where?”  

The judge sort of laughs. “Queens. Does it really matter?”

Nick says, “Where do you live now?”  

The judge says, “Israel.”  

Nick says, “Where?”  

The judge says, “It doesn’t matter where I live.” But of course it does. By evading the question, what he’s really saying is, “I’m a settler, and I live in the Occupied Territories.” Then the judge says, “Where are you from?”  

Nick says, “Boston.”  

The judge says, “You don’t sound like you’re from Boston.”

And Nick says, “Oh, well, we’re sort of from all over.”  

Then the judge says, “You know”—and he interlaces his fingers like this, competitively—he says, “Boston and New York, they have a kind of rivalry, don’t they?”

Nick, who is a lifelong fan of baseball says, “Yeah. Go, Red Sox!” We all sort of laugh nervously.

The judge says, “Go, Yankees.” He’s sort of stammering. He says, “You know—you know—they’ve won 18 out of their last 20 games.”

And then my universe shifts, ever so slightly, with a click. Because we are standing in a shipping container, in the middle of fucking nowhere, in the heart of an apartheid state, talking to an American judge who puts Palestinian kids in prison, and the conversation has turned into a pissing contest about baseball. 

“Who are you here with?” The judge says. 

Nick says, “Harvard.”

“No, who’s organizing your trip?”

“Harvard.”

“No, no, who are your contacts here on the ground?”

And we stay silent. He’s taking notes.  

He says, “Forget it. I’ll look into it.”  

Our conversation was never about baseball, was it. And those questions that he asked at the end, they weren’t just idle curiosity. This place—it wasn’t nowhere, and it wasn’t temporary.  

But it’s actually more than a symbol of Israeli apartheid. It’s more than a metaphor for state power. We have to remember: This is a place where families are torn apart, where lives are destroyed, and where kids are thrown in jail. And that judge wasn’t the only American connection to that place.

The way I see it, though, I think we’re all implicated.

by Kevin Keystone, MTS ’23