#meitar

Meitar river flood victim located after search | The Jerusalem PostJerusalem Post/Israel News According to the Israel Police, the man was last seen attempting to extricate a vehicle stuck in water when he slipped in and was swept away by the current. Israel fire and Rescue Personnel at Nahal Beersheba, where the lifeless body of a man swept away by flooding was found, December 30, 2025.(photo…

The Meitar Award, a collaboration between PHOTO:ISRAEL and the Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund, will be awarded for the third time this year for a body of work which demonstrates originality and excellence in the field of photography.

THE AWARD WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN NOVEMBER DURING THE FESTIVAL AND WILL RECEIVE A $14,000 PRIZE, INCLUDING A $2,500 CASH PRIZE AND $11,500 FOR THE PURPOSE OF PRESENTING A SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE 2019 PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL.

Of the submissions received, 20 finalists will be selected and their work will be presented in a group exhibition at the PHOTO:ISRAEL International Photography Festival in November 2018. In addition, we are happy to announce a collaboration with Head On International Photography Festival in Sydney, Australia, the finalists’ exhibition will continue and travel to be exhibited in Australia at the HEAD ON festival in May 2019.

MEMBERS OF THE JURY KRISTEN GRESH, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. CLEMENT SACCOMANI, Photographer, Managing Director, NOOR, Netherlands. DR. NOAM GAL, Horace and Grace Goldsmith Curator, Noel and Harriette Levine Department of Photography, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem MAYA BENTON, Consulting Curator, International Center of Photography, New York.  MICHA BAR-AM, Photographer, Magnum Correspondent since 1968. DAVID ADIKA, Photographer and head of the Photography Department at Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem. RAZ SAMIRA, Chief Photography Curator, The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art. RIVKA SAKER, Chairman of Sotheby's Israel, Founder and board chair of ARTIS. DAFNA MEITAR NECHMAD, The Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund.

My awesome cousin

The South Hebron Hills is a pretty cruisey placement. We have a lot to do, but a lot of freedom in when and how to do it. The exception is checkpoint duty. In six of the seven EAPPI placements, we monitor checkpoints and agricultural gates in the so-called "Security Barrier" (and some not even in the barrier). We do this not only for us, but for partner organisations (including Machsom Watch, a group of Israeli women who do the same thing for the same reasons: machsomwatch.org/en) who use our statistics to make reports on the humanitarian situation. In the South Hebron Hills, we monitor the Meitar checkpoint Sundays and Thursdays from 4am-7am. There are many, many problems with the Wall, but that is a subject for another post. This post will concentrate on the checkpoint itself. Incidentally, 'machsom' means 'checkpoint' in both Arabic and Hebrew.

My day begins about 3am, when we (always pairs) get up to wake our driver. I get dressed in a sleepy haze, wash my face and drink a glass of water. The driver arrives about 3.20, and the journey to Meitar takes anywhere from 20-30 minutes, depending on whether we need to buy petrol and how crazy our driver is prepared to speed that day. When we get to the checkpoint, we get a coffee at the market:

and take up our position in a space from which we can (sort of) see the three things that interest us: how many x-ray machines inside the checkpoint are operating at any one time, how many people pass through the corridor, and what the queue looks like both in terms of length and conditions. We are also in line to speak with people turned back from the checkpoint: Israel sometimes does this fairly arbitrarily, and it's important to keep track. 

Meitar is one of the friendliest checkpoints in the West Bank. Although it's sneakily inside the 1948 Armistice Line, stealing a few acres of land from the Palestinians, it's practically a legitimate border crossing compared to one such as Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem. The red circles indicate car parks: Palestinian-plated cars are forbidden from entering Israel. (This is subject of a future post, When Green Means Stop.) You can only get a permit to enter Israel by having a job, so people carpool to the crossing and then employers send cars to pick them up. 

The green circle in the middle is the actual pedestrian crossing point; it's like a figure-8 with a shed for a queue, a short connecting corridor and then a shed for the three x-ray lines. Being a security installation, the GoogleMaps image is pretty blurry. (Something else you might notice is this checkpoint is a one-way valve. Israel is not at all concerned about what goes into the West Bank, only what comes out. The entire infrastructure of the checkpoint is facing one way, with the other direction quite simply a boom gate which sometimes is literally left up so the staff don't have to put it up and down all the time.)

The first point of interest is the number of gates open. This indicates the speed with which Palestinians can cross. If there's a large queue and only one gate, that would be a reason to call the Humanitarian Hotline, but it happens here rarely. 

The next important thing is to count the raw numbers going through: men, women and children (though usually almost all men; they have jobs like olive harvester and construction labourer.) On a typical Sunday, over 3,000 people pass through over the 3 hours. The bit you can see it open is the sit gate for pedestrians returning to Palestine. It occasionally brings people who have attempted to enter Israel and been turned back. Our position here gives us a chance to speak with them about their problem.  If there is a prison visit planned, the Palestinian Red Crescent will bring several buses of women and children to drive to Israeli prisons where their relatives are incarcerated. These 'humanitarian visas' are valid from 7am, so while they rock up at 6.30, they cannot cross till after we've left. But the Red Crescent keeps an eye on that. 

We aim to arrive before 4am, and check how many people are already waiting. Often it's none [see picture above]. A queue is a sign that people have no faith in an easy crossing, but Meitar is fairly reliable. If the gate is not open by 4.10am, we call the Humanitarian Hotline, actually an office in the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Force in Beit El, an illegal Settlement near Ramallah, requesting that they look into it. We keep calling every five minutes until it is opened. I've only had to call a couple of times, and it was opened almost immediately afterwards. 

At least sometimes, we attempt to monitor how long the 30m journey from the queue in Palestine to a waiting minibus in Israel takes. (A rare opportunity to say "let's synchronise watches!") One of us walks through the vehicle checkpoint [that's the grey shed just above the "60" across the road heading south in the picture at the top of this post] having our vests x-rayed and papers checked, and then walks back towards the pedestrian exit on the Israeli side. Once in place, we call our partner and they begin handing out small cards with the time written on them. Having got through the checkpoint, people hand the card to the waiting partner, who notes the time.

At Meitar, this is typically 10-30 minutes. In other places it can be over an hour. The procedure can be difficult, however, as many Palestinians are afraid the security staff will see them co-operating with us and make it more difficult to get through. More than once cards are not returned.

At 7, we wake our driver (sometimes with a coffee from the stalls) and head back to Yatta for a nap before an afternoon of drinking tea in the villages. Yup. Life is pretty cruisey in Yatta. I like it.

If you're interested in reading about some of the other, less pleasant checkpoints on offer, I recommend some of my colleagues' blogs:

http://kerynbanks.tumblr.com/post/34173720739/checkpoints http://morgenerijayyous.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/handler-det-egentlig-om-sikkerhet/ http://vyeolywedruiwe.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/goeiemore-bethlehem/  http://www.dombook.blogspot.co.il/2012/10/morning-at-qalandia-checkpoint.html http://amosaicforpeace.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/qalandiya-today/ 

Well, it certainly feels like more. I met these people less than a week ago, but it feels like an eternity. 

After our huge day on Wednesday, Two of us get up at 0305 to go to Meitar checkpoint. One of my principle duties here in the South Hebron Hills is to monitor this check point. We arrive before the opening time of 4am, and Leah takes the time to explain what is about to happen. Two of us will take turns of half an hour for three hours, counting the flow of people and enumerating men, women and children. We note conditions at the check point, and discuss with those turned back why this might have been. Sometimes one of us will pass through the check point and we will time certain people, to get an idea of how efficiently the process is working. I am lucky in that this is reputed to be the best check point in the West Bank. Leah cautions me to remember that it is still a humiliating experience, but then, so is airport security. 

We achieve nothing else this day, because there are demonstrations in the town regarding fuel prices (not my area) and the roads are blocked; it is anyhow unsafe to be out of the house. 

On Friday, I am treated very kindly going through the check point at Beit Yatir. We did so to meet some children in the Seam Zone whom we will be accompanying through the check point to school some mornings and back again some afternoons. School has just gone back after the summer break, and we're organising with the families when best to do that. Later in the day, Sanna and I (and Jo) provide a protective presence for a local shepherd who is normally afraid to let his sheep graze on a hillside he owns but which is in sight of a Settlement. Often when there, especially on Saturdays, Settlers will drive across to harass him. Finally, G45 has its first team meeting to discuss what we're going to discuss with Pauline, the co-ordinator, in Jerusalem tomorrow.