The area where the massive Qalandiya checkpoint now stands was once just an ordinary three-way intersection cut into the hillside, with steep cliffs overlooking traffic coming from the Palestinian towns of Jericho, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, mixed with a few vehicles driven by Jewish settlers.
“The Qalandiya roadblock is located on a road that is in a scandalous state of maintenance and is the busiest route in the West Bank,” wrote Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in August 2001, estimating that more than half a million Palestinians from towns and nearby villages used the route at that time, while Jews did not.1
Nearly three decades later, the Qalandiya checkpoint, which Israel would like us to refer to as a benign-sounding “terminal,” is an imposing structure, with a pedestrian walkway overhead, an underground bypass road for Israeli settlers being constructed beneath, and a growing number of unreliable Israeli-run service kiosks operating on its premises. But Levy’s initial description still rings true: the Israeli military uses the checkpoint to punish Palestinians, gumming up the works and slowing passage at whim. His words from that time, before the checkpoint was even officially established:
“Three or four [Israeli] soldiers check the vehicles, their [Palestinian] passengers and their contents (the permits to enter Israel are checked a bit later, at the A-Ram site). Here’s how they go about it: the line of cars, which is several kilometers long, stretches toward the horizon behind concrete blocks and a terrifying army bulldozer, which sits, poised and mute, by the roadside, perhaps to intimidate the travelers, and one of the soldiers signals one vehicle at a time to move forward. When the check is over and the vehicle has been cleared to go ahead, the soldier takes a break—it can last two minutes, or five minutes, and sometimes more—before signaling the next vehicle to move forward to be checked. It’s a methodical procedure. The result is that each vehicle must wait for three to four hours in each direction—and this is not in the rush hour.”2
Today, the Qalandiya checkpoint has expanded to three vehicular lanes where Israeli soldiers screen vehicles traveling from the city of Ramallah towards al-Ram or Jerusalem under a large pavilion. The system remains arbitrary and unsystematic, however; travel can take hours when there is traffic, or the military is stopping the flow. Often, Palestinians with Israeli IDs (whether residents or citizens) leaving Ramallah bypass Qalandiya, taking a left just before the checkpoint to connect with Route 60 (the main highway leading from Jerusalem southwards and points west). This route is expected to close soon, as part of the geostrategic transformation Israel is effecting to bring its E1 Plan into being, which will crowd Qalandiya even further (see Road 45, a New Israeli Settler-Only Road, Will Now Traverse Qalandiya, Further Dispossessing Palestinians). One lane, usually unchecked, provides vehicular access for Palestinians traveling out of Jerusalem to Ramallah.
Walking travelers often take a public bus through the checkpoint, because traversing it on foot is confusing and physically challenging. The Israeli organization Machsom Watch sends volunteer women to visit, monitor, and report on the conditions at Qalandiya. “I find it hard to understand how a walk of a few meters to enter the checkpoint of old has been converted into a winding, steep, convoluted, unfriendly cement ramp,” wrote one volunteer. “I do not understand how anyone in a wheelchair, electric or other, how a woman with a pram or children can possibly deal with the steep ascents as the corridors wind round and round.”3
To pass through using public transportation still requires one to disembark from the bus near the terminal and enter it for an Israeli search and register one’s ID or military permit. Passing through the checkpoint with a physical disability or while pushing a baby carriage is very difficult—but the rotating military commanders constantly altering the physical landscape upon arrival don’t care.
Increasing Restrictions
More than 25,000 Palestinians traverse Qalandiya checkpoint every day, but amid restrictions implemented during the US–Israel war on Iran, on some days, only an estimated 2,000 people were allowed through.4 Tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli IDs live on the Ramallah side of the Qalandiya checkpoint, and the Israeli-drawn borders of the Jerusalem municipality extend beyond the checkpoint into much of the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Kufr ‘Aqab. Many of these Palestinian Jerusalemites who have Israeli permanent-resident IDs access Jerusalem’s city center regularly to work, study, visit family, or complete errands. Jerusalem officials have been forced to establish some centers to provide these city residents with mail, a health clinic, and a military liaison office within the Qalandiya complex. For Palestinian Authority (PA) ID holders, Qalandiya is the main exit point from the Separation Wall to the northern West Bank, and those acquiring a permit to enter Israel are usually required to pass through it: their passage and return are digitally recorded, with severe consequences for overstaying the time allotted by the permit.
Qalandiya is often closed, with new barriers, routes, adjustments, checkpoints, and onerous procedures cloaked in security justifications. This retrospective, however, of the checkpoint over 25 years makes one thing clear: the now-sprawling Qalandiya checkpoint is a hub for controlling the northern and central West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and stifling its viability as a Palestinian region.
Strategic Importance
In the spring of 2000, just months before failed Camp David talks in July brought negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis to an end, Arabic news reports emphasized the importance of the unused Qalandiya Airport airfield to the Israeli government.5 Despite efforts by Palestinian negotiators to include the airport, also known as the Jerusalem International Airport, within subsequent withdrawals by the Israeli military, Israel repeatedly refused. The Gaza airport (agreed upon in the mid-1990s as part of the Oslo Accords) was already operational, and Palestinian leaders still hoped to also have air access in the West Bank. “As for the third phase of redeployment, the Israeli side continued its procrastination by not implementing this redeployment; the Qalandiya airport and Gaza seaport have joint committees that are discussing the issues,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told a radio show in June, just before talks broke down and the Second Intifada broke out.6
The Qalandiya airport had been an important part of Jerusalem’s rise as an international city before Israel’s occupation. In the 1960s, thousands of international tourists from Arab countries and Europe arrived through the former airfield each year. “Every time a plane landed or took off, police had to stop the traffic on the road from Jerusalem to [the nearby village of] Qalandiya because the runway crossed the road,” one traveler from Beirut shared.7 (Hear Jerusalem as an Arab Metropolis: The Airport Years (1948–67).
Israel blocked Palestinian aspirations to reopen the airport and create regional trade routes by seizing the area, using the Qalandiya checkpoint and military installations as a security pretext. It also used it to create a panoptic-like surveillance system for the nearby Qalandiya refugee camp and interrupted Palestinian hopes of maintaining access to and institutions, services, and infrastructure within East Jerusalem. Constant upgrades and “beautification,” including the establishment of biometric permit readers, may have made the checkpoint temporarily more efficient. In February 2019, the military installed six new metal detector stations and 27 automatic gates that open with the use of electronic biometric permits,8 enabling it to collect biometric data on anyone passing through without their consent and use it to track their whereabouts anywhere in the country (see Jerusalem: A Closed City).
But with many of the permit readers consistently broken, and Israeli military operations instituting impediments—Israel is, one must remember, an occupier—traversing Qalandiya remains an ordeal. One traveler aptly called it a “chokehold:”9 The checkpoint maintains a firm grip upon Palestinians in the northern and central West Bank while facilitating the travel and livelihoods of Jewish Israeli settlers.
In 2021, Israeli officials indicated their intent to permanently hold this area, approving the construction of approximately 9,000 residential units in a planned new settlement on the abandoned runways of the old airfield. The seizure of this large swath of open property directly adjacent to the Palestinian localities of Qalandiya, Qalandiya refugee camp, Kufr ‘Aqab, and Ramallah was both provocative and not surprising. Meanwhile, the travelers at Qalandiya checkpoint—the rightful holders of the land—are kept busy with frustrating lines, cumbersome pedestrian walkways, massive traffic jams, and Israel’s ubiquitous surveillance bureaucracy.