Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness. Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousnes: "Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family. Lost lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank. CHOKE POINTS "

https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2107786279320482146 

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

 

Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. 

Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness.  

Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousness:  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere] 

Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family.

Lost lives.

How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.

CHOKE POINTS  

The Big Story

Sep 30, 2026 6:00 AM

Aref Jaber is on a neighbor's roof, trying to get home.

At 51, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door. He has no choice. Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint 160, is the only way in or out for the 140 families who live there.

But Checkpoint 160 is closed again; Jaber is not sure why. The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region—it could be anything.

For the last three years, he says, this has happened at least two days a week. So the community has devised a system of alternative routes. Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through. They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs. “When I finally get home,” he says, “it feels like I’ve achieved something monumental.”

The enclosure of Jaber’s neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank—for Palestinians, that is. At the same time that deadly Israeli settler violence robs communities in the West Bank of their land, and amid the genocide in Gaza, Israel has expanded its infrastructures of military control and domination... READ MORE  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

"... As they wait their time, many of the millennial activists who briefly turned the Arab world upside down and provoked so many changes are putting their energies into nongovernmental organizations, thousands of which have flowered, barely noticed. Others continue to coordinate with labor unions to promote the welfare of the working classes.

In this way, they are learning valuable organizational skills that — count on it — will one day be applied to politics. Their dislike of nepotism, narrow cliques and ethnic or sectarian rule has already had a lasting effect on the politics of the Arab world. And two or three decades from now, the twentysomethings of Tahrir Square and the Casbah in Tunis and Martyrs' Square in Tripoli will, like the Havels of the Middle East, come to power as politicians.

We haven't heard the last of the Middle East's millennial generation."   JUAN COLE

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]  

Why it's way too soon to give up on the Arab Spring 

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-cole-arab-spring-millenials-20140629-story.html