Jerusalem makes me sick to my stomach. It is a repulsive city. I apologize for saying this. There are six checkpoints set up around Jerusalem. I woke up at 4:30am to visit one of these checkpoints, gather footage and talk to the people there. At the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, a row of steel bars runs the course of the Wall and creates a narrow walkway. Every morning starting at 3am, thousands of Arab men on their way to work inside Israel are herded like animals behind these metal bars. So close to each other, they wait to get through. Every half hour or so, there is a rush forward and they shove and clamor over each other. It is loud and chaotic. And sickening.

I walked the entire stretch of steel bars and filmed it, up to the point where the men go inside the checkpoint through the metal round robin doors where soldiers await inside booths to check their IDs, fingerprints, to question them. I did not want to film. It felt so unnatural to add to this humiliation by sticking a camera in their faces. But I swallowed that feeling and filmed. And some men talked to me. I don’t know how these families stay here and endure this. I sure as hell would have left by now. But to them, simply existing is a form of resistance. Leaving is what Israel wants. When Israeli politicians refer to the Arab population as a “cancer” and “demographic time bomb” staying put is the only way Palestinians can fight back. No matter how difficult or humiliating. In spite of everything, leaving would be defeat. Palestinians learned that in 1948 and 1967.

Israel has unlocked the secret to reconfiguring the demographic makeup of Jerusalem. The Wall traces a circuitous path through the city and consolidates Jewish neighborhoods in a nebulous center while isolating Palestinian neighborhoods on the other side of the wall. The borders of Jerusalem have been effectively redrawn by the wall to make it as Jewish as possible. At the same time, travel to Jerusalem for Palestinians who work in the city and throughout Israel becomes a routine humiliation.

I keep coming to the conclusion that this industry of segregation and demographic reconfiguration, with all its trappings of concrete walls, checkpoints, and watchtowers, is too rabid to subsist. Something has got to give. Maybe it is out of exhaustion and hopelessness that I need to believe this. But to covet something so mercilessly, and to maintain possession over it with such force, what is the point anymore? So all of Historic Palestine lies under Israel’s control. What is the point when they have to reconfigure borders of cities, erect massive concrete walls, herd Arabs through checkpoints every morning? When you have to evict people from their homes as they're doing right now in East Jerusalem? What is the point when maintaining control means doing whatever possible to win a grotesque war of demography? What is the point?

Yes. Some institutions are too monstrous, too rabid to last forever. Something has got to give.