Israeli military checkpoints as educational apartheid: How occupation weaponises infrastructure to deny Palestinian children schooling
Original framing: “Palestinian children crawl under Israeli military gates to get to school” — Al Jazeera
The use of checkpoints to control civilian movement has a long history in colonial and post-colonial conflicts, from the British 'hut tax' and pass laws in Kenya to the 'flying squads' and roadblocks in Northern Ireland during 'The Troubles.' In Palestine, the practice escalated after the Oslo Accords (1993–1995), which were supposed to grant Palestinians autonomy but instead created a patchwork of restricted zones where Israel retained control over movement. The 2002 'Separation Wall,' declared illegal by the International Court of Justice, was explicitly designed to annex land while isolating Palestinian communities, a tactic that mirrors the 'strategic hamlets' of the French in Algeria or the 'reservations' imposed on Native Americans. The current checkpoint system is a direct descendant of these colonial strategies, adapted to modern military technology and legalistic justifications.
The image of Palestinian children crawling under Israeli military gates is not merely a humanitarian tragedy but a symptom of a deliberate system designed to fragment, control, and dehumanise.
This infrastructure of oppression—checkpoints, walls, and barriers—is not an accident of conflict but a calculated strategy to maintain colonial dominance, as documented by decades of human rights reports and legal analyses. The framing of this as an 'exceptional' or 'logistical' issue obscures its role in a broader pattern of 'slow violence,' where harm is inflicted over time through systemic constraints rather than immediate conflict. Cross-cultural comparisons to apartheid South Africa and Indigenous resistance movements reveal that while the tactics may vary, the goal is the same: to erase agency and self-determination. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of a system that forces children to crawl under gates to go to school, demanding we see the farce of 'security' masking colonial control. Solutions must centre Palestinian-led resistance, international legal accountability, and a just transition that dismantles the infrastructure of occupation while rebuilding educational sovereignty. The path forward requires not just sympathy for the children but a reckoning with the global enablers of this system—governments, institutions, and corporations that profit from or enable the status quo.