This is Huwara, hot and cruel, the first of several checkpoints on the way from Nablus to Ramallah. We wait with several hundred Palestinians under a currogated roof. There are full-height metal turnstiles in front of us and on the other side of those turnstiles are Israeli soldiers with machine guns.

Nothing is moving; not even the air.

We’re told that the soldiers are cranky this morning at Huwara and things are moving slowly today as they do most days here.

I’d be cranky too if I were an Israeli soldier. They’re dressed in dark green with heavy body armor on. They wear big helmets on their heads. It’s hot and there’s all these Palestinians around them who are hot and tired of waiting, agitated and crammed like cattle into the waiting area.

Thousands of Palestinians have to pass through Huwara every day. We wait along with everybody else. It’s mostly men here waiting; some women and children too. The men tell us to move forward to another line, a “special” line that has a gate along the side. We’re ajnabi (foreigners) and will receive special treatment.

We work our way up to the gate. The soldier there lets two other people through then closes the gate and wraps a heavy metal chain across the top. We’ll need to wait for him to return.

All the soldiers here are in their early to mid 20s. There are males and females but with all the heavy gear on the only way you can tell the difference is that the women have hair spilling out the back of their helmets.

We wait.

They begin allowing people queued up in the line next to use through the metal turnstile. They go through one by one, stopping at the booth with soldiers in it on the other side. They hand over their Palestinian ID and any items they may be carrying. They pull up their shirts. They pull up their pant legs. While all this is happening another soldier standing off just to the side is pointing a machine gun at them.

I want to take photos of all this, but don’t dare take my camera out here at Huwara.

We stand and watch Palestinians going through the checkpoint one at a time. I’m timing them. It takes an average of two minutes per person. One is turned away, comes back through and begins to head back toward Nablus.

An old man makes his way to the front and walks up to one of the turnstiles that isn’t in use. He begins to try and go through but he’s turning the turnstile toward him as if pulling open a door. The soldier on the other side pointing his machine gun at people as they come through begins shouting “No, no, no,” to him in Arabic. The old man seems lost and confused by the turnstile door that keeps closing the path through each time he tries to open it by pulling it toward him. The other Palestinian men in line pull him away and bring him over to the turnstile that is in use. They tell him to go next. He begins pulling the turnstile bars toward him just as he’d done on the other one and seems just as confused by the way this one keeps closing on him too. The younger men help him through. He shuffles forward, seemingly oblivious to the soldiers. They have to physically make him stop. He seems startled and confused by their sudden appearance. They check his ID, then he shuffles on and out into the sun on the other side of Huwara.

We wait. Abu Majdi dropped us off at Huwara a half hour ago. It is now mid-morning and getting hotter by the minute.

The soldier working the side gate returns. A Palestinian man and his daughter are in front of us. He lets the daughter through but tells the man he has to go to the back of the line that is going through the turnstile. He says he needs to accompany his daughter. The soldier tells him to go to the back of the line. The men at the front of the line for the turnstiles tell him to come over and go in front of them. He begins to come over, but the soldier tells him that he can’t do that, even if the others will let him. The soldier tells him again to go to the back of the line. The man looks very frustrated and turns with his head down and begins walking slowly to the back of the line. I do a head count. There are about 60 people in that line. If the current average of 1 person per 2 minutes keeps up, he’s looking at a 2-hour wait. And that’s his best case scenario.

We’re next.

The soldier asks me where I’m going in Arabic.

“What?” I say to him in English.

“Who are you?” he asks in English.

“My name is Scott,” I say.

“You are American?”

“Yes.”

I hand him my passport along with Kacey’s and girls’ passports.

“This is your family?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We went to Nablus.”

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

By “here” he means the Palestinian terretories.

I just nod my head. I agree with him. It is dangerous. However, based on my experience in Nablus the past couple of days, my view of what the source of danger in Nablus is probably very different from his.

“Weren’t you scared in Nablus?” he asks.

“A little bit,” I say, remembering the other night when you could hear the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invasion going on in Askar and wondering if they would come into the city center.

“I recommend you don’t go into the Palestinian territories. It’s dangerous and once you go in we cannot guarantee your safety.”

Cannot guarantee your safety? I nod my head again in agreement. He’s absolutely right. Nobody’s safety is guaranteed in Nablus, especially when the IDF invades and starts shooting up the town.

I want to tell him how I think he can guarantee my safety: tear down this checkpoint and all the other checkpoints between Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank. Stop invading Nablus and other cities in the middle of the night. Stop preventing the Palestinian people from moving between their own towns and cities. Stop disrupting their education. Stop strangling their economy. Stop making them live every day in fear. Just stop all of it and get out and return to Israel to patrol and protect your borders just like every other country in the world. Do this and I guarantee that my safety and the safety of millions of Palestinians and Isrealis will increase 10 fold. This checkpoint, this hell called Huwara inside of Palestinian territory will not stop one suicide bomber from entering Israel. But through this daily humiliation and overbearing occupation, there is one thing here at Huwara that I am certain of: all of this will only help create the hatred that opens the door to the dark path that leads to desperate and disastrous actions.

But I don’t say anything to him. I just remain silent as he hands our passports back to me and tells me to move on through to the other side and not return to the Palestinian territories. He’s the one who calls the shots here at Huwara. He’s the one in control, the one who tells me what to do and where to go or not go. And as I walk along the chain-link fence and concrete barriers—an American in Palestine who has known nothing his entire life but the freedom to go wherever he wanted to go in his own country—I feel for a fleeting moment what it must be like to be a Palestinian.

We wait now on the other side among the fleet of taxis waiting to take those who got across to Ramallah. Everybody is just waiting. We’re waiting for Linda, who was right behind us, but she does not show. We go try and find our luggage, which had been taken across the checkpoint after being X-rayed by the IDF on the other side. I don’t see our luggage, so I stop and ask a man making coffee in a dilapidated and partially covered wagon if he knows where the porters drop off the bags. He says somewhere over here, waiving his hand along the rows of taxis waiting for a fare. He asks if we need a taxi. I tell him we’re waiting for a friend of ours to cross the checkpoint. He asks were I’m from. I tell him. He asks if I can arrange an American wife for him so that he can have dual citizenship. I laugh and tell him the bad news. He offers me coffee and refuses to take any money from me for it.

We wait.

I walk back up the row of taxis, back toward the checkpoint. There is no sign of Linda. There is no sign of our luggage. I stop and talk with one of the guys working at the covered stands selling drinks and food. While I’m asking him where we might find our bags, I see that they are right there in the stall behind him so I go and get Kacey and the girls.

We continue waiting for Linda. She should be here by now. Something has gone wrong. Perhaps the soldier figured she was with us and sent her packing back to Nablus just because she was friends with Americans. We don’t know and we can’t go back now and find out without probably stiring up more trouble. So we do the only thing you can do at Huwara: we wait.

Twenty minutes later Linda emerges from the checkpoint. She’s flustered and frustrated. Apparently, the soldier closed the side gate again right after we went through. She told him she needed to go with us. He wouldn’t let her through. She yelled at him that she had a British passport. After Linda had some more verbal volleys with the soldier in charge, all the young Palestinian men were yelling together for them to let her through. This made the soldiers nervous and when they couldn’t get everyone to calm and quite down, they let her through the side gate and sent her on her way.