We were 405 metres below sea level when we reached the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the earth's surface. We could not descend any further.
As a child I used to cast my eyes across the elusive divide between the West Bank and Israel. The town was here and over there were the hills with usurped Jaffa on the horizon. And nothing was in between. No roads, no development, no buildings. I never thought it possible to extend electricity lines and water pipes and establish human settlements in such faraway areas. Palestinians in the West Bank then did not have the technical or financial resources to undertake such projects. I had never seen it done; nor for that matter had I ever seen a bulldozer. After 1967 Palestinians needed a permit from the Israeli authorities to own one. When Israel began establishing settlements, opening roads through the hills, flattening hilltops and connecting far-flung places with water and electricity I was filled with awe. And fear.
The countryside I grew up in was being transformed so rapidly I could hardly keep up. With large capital infusions from the US it was possible for the state of Israel to make the 'desert' bloom with concrete and neon lights. Vast areas of my beloved country were being fenced to become off limits to us. I felt the gravity of what was happening and I was willing to give everything for the struggle to stop it. My weapon was the law. All my time was taken up with it. Nothing was more important. I had no doubt that if we tried hard we would win and justice would prevail. For that glorious day of liberation there was no limit to what I was willing to sacrifice.
Now, after Oslo was signed and the struggle as I saw it was betrayed, I was back to real time. And with its re-entry into my life, my dead father's reproachful voice was also returning. He was still angry with me, disappointed at how my life had gone, asking unsettling questions: Why have you wasted your life? Why were you so distracted that you never raised a family? I knew the answer: when I was young I was too captured by the fear of the future to think of having children. I had no regrets. I was perfectly happy in my marriage. Yet I was in too weakened a state to stop him from ranting. He went on inside my head: What has your struggle achieved? Where did it get you? You never listened to me when I predicted the future.
We had reached the promontory just below the site of Khirbet Qumran overlooking a clear blue sea. This rift in the solid rock before which I now stood has not always existed. There was a time when this area was part of the 'supercontinent' of Africa, Florida, South America, Antarctica, Australia, India, Tibet, Arabia, Iran and southern Europe known as Gondwana. Geologists tell us that there was so much pushing up of the solid block of this land area that the strain crushed it, creating the rift valley that extends from north Syria down to East Africa, before which I stood.
The tourist authorities in Israel delineated with ropes and small placards the site where the Essenes had lived two centuries before Christ, pointing out how this renegade community survived, where its adherents met, ate and wrote, and how they collected and stored water and managed agriculture. They were the rebels of their day, the settlers who broke away from the ruling establishment and created their own settlement in the harsh conditions by the Dead Sea, where they managed to live by their own laws and practices. They wrote down their own interpretations of the Scriptures. Before the Romans destroyed their community in the first century ad they had managed to hide these texts in long jars in the deep caves, where they remained until a Palestinian shepherd looking for a missing goat entered one of the caves and discovered the clay jars with the scrolls still intact.
Today's Jewish settlers, not unlike the Essenes, appear to think of themselves as renegades breaking away from the ruling establishment and following their own beliefs and interpretations of the Scriptures. When you see them on street corners with their bushy beards, long hair topped by the knitted yarmulkes, fringes swaying beneath brown shirts and dusty sandals, you can get a sense of how anachronistic they are, like a people from another era. But unlike their predecessors these presentday rebels live on state subsidies. They are protected by the strongest army in the region and needn't work for a living. Instead they spend their time studying scripture in strategically positioned yeshivot (the plural of yeshiva, a Jewish religious school), which use the pretext of religious study to metamorphose into Jewish settlements that serve political objectives. Their heroism is attributed to their harassment of unarmed Palestinian civilians: women, men and children whom they attempt to drive away from the land they consider theirs. What will today's settlers leave for posterity but ugly structures which destroyed the land they claim to love and a legacy of hateful colonial practices condemned the world over that have contributed to delaying the onset of peaceful relations between the Palestinian and Israeli people?
I turned to look at the crystal-clear sea below the escarpment where I stood. I could not help recalling that it is one of those great marvels of the world which is in danger of disappearing. Over the years it has been shrinking at an alarming rate. Fifty thousand years ago its surface was at least 200 metres above the present level, which would mean that, standing on this promontory near the ruins of the Qumran settlement, the sea would be lapping at my feet instead of where it is now, almost a kilometre away. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century the sea was twelve metres higher than it is now. More recently the water has been declining by about a metre every year owing to Israel's diversion of the River Jordan and the tributaries which used to flow into it, and to the use of the seawater by factories in Israel and Jordan. Our precious land was slipping from under our feet as the Dead Sea was receding from its salty shores. The agreement that was branded as 'the peace of the braves', as Arafat was fond of repeating in his unique English, was nothing but a surrender document, a false promise for a better future.
I don't know why the memory came as I stood looking over the endangered sea. My father had told me many years ago that after he was forced out of Jaffa in 1948 he had continued to pay rent for his apartment there. Irrespective of the fact that he could not return to his home and had to scrimp for money in Ramallah, where he had no house of his own, the rent was due and had to be paid. This was the kind of man he was, conscientious and honest to the bone. I began to work out how old he was when the Nakbeh (the 'catastrophe', which is how Palestinians describe the loss of Palestine in 1948) struck and he lost everything he had worked for, his law office, his matrimonial home, and the lands he bought around Jaffa for investment. According to my calculations he was in his early forties, the same age as me now.
Within the short space of two decades my father had to deal with not one but two major catastrophes. After Jaffa he had re-established his home and office in Ramallah, which then came under Israeli occupation. For several years after 1967 he had little work. He was so distressed by the thought of losing everything once again that he considered ending his life. He put his shotgun to his temple and was about to pull the trigger.
At the last moment my mother stopped him and within a few days he was on his feet again. He switched from despondency to hyper-activism as he began to call for political realism, for the recognition of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside it in all the Occupied Territories. He made his proposal before any Jewish settlements had been built in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, before the rise and political empowerment of the religious right in Israel. How much suffering could have been spared had his call been heeded.
Nothing can be done to change the past but I knew I had to come to terms with the present. The truth was that we had been defeated. We had lost. For now the Israeli policies had succeeded. And I had wasted many years working on an area of law and human rights that came to nothing. Father lost his work twice. I lost mine only once. After years of hard work in the human rights field I was at the height of my career. Now the new political developments had made me redundant, unable to make any practical use of my legal knowledge and expertise to stop Israeli violations of the law.
I refocused on my surroundings. The western slopes of the Dead Sea are c
omposed of beds of limestone with dark nodular pebbles that make the walk up to the Qumran Caves hazardous. I saw Penny and Selma charging ahead as I made my slow way up, alone. I continued to think of my father. He dedicated most of his life to the public good yet all his work came to nothing. He saw clearly what Israel was doing. He wrote and spoke about it, but the Palestinian leadership outside took no notice. They saw him as a political rival. Their primary concern was to keep all the cards in the hands of the external leadership. Political expediency blinded them to the war of annihilation Israel was waging against all Palestinians inside and outside the Occupied Territories. At the end of his life he was angry, frustrated and embittered. He used to tell me: 'Someday you will know what I have come to know.' I had done my best not to get infected by his lethal despondency. But with the onset of the Oslo period, when it became evident that it had indeed all turned out as he had foreseen, his admonishing voice returned with a vengeance.
Halfway up the hill I began to feel dizzy from the height and had to sit down. I could go no further. I seemed to be constantly slipping. I put both my hands on the ground and held firm for I felt I could easily tumble all the way down the deeply channelled side of this precipitous mountain into the abyss, with no way to stop my fall. With my hands anchoring me to the ground I turned my head and looked up at the unreachable caves. I could see their dark openings in the rocks. I wanted so much to stand at their mouths and look down into them as I used to do with my cave alongside the old road when I was young, travelling with my father to Jericho. But having sat down I could not make myself stand up again and continue the climb. I was petrified of slipping.
A black hawk was gliding low, not far from where I was sitting. He circled round and round. He seemed so dizzyingly close. Then a shadow began to slide across the mountain where I sat: a thick cloud had covered the sun. I felt the ground on which I anchored myself tilting.
Slowly and carefully, keeping close to the earth, I made my way down, almost crawling. Once at the bottom, I stood up and waited for Penny and Selma, who seemed to be taking their time. I didn't mind waiting. I relished the security of standing on level ground. The sea spread before me, so perfectly blue and sparkling. Usually seawater contains from 4 to 6 per cent of solids. The imprisoned waters of the Dead Sea hold more than 24 per cent. With the sun beating on me with such fierce heat I dreamed of plunging into water that looked as clear as day. But I knew better. This is not water for diving. It has a nauseating taste, feels oily and when it dries on the skin leaves a crust of salt over the body. If a drop of water touches the eyes they itch terribly, if it enters the lungs it can lead to death. Despite this, no other lake appears more blue and inviting. How could Mark Twain, when he visited this area in the nineteenth century, not have noticed its outstanding beauty?
Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective – distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.
(The Innocents Abroad)
The midday sun had turned the mountains to the south into translucent sky-blue humps with their frizzled edges silhouetted against the sky. Lit now from the back by the afternoon sun the peaks closer to me overlaid the ones further south with their edges marked by a dark line. Both in colour and in texture what could be seen in the distance was quite unlike the mountains when seen close up, with their mud cliffs and stark scrub.
The tentative midday moon high up in the sky looked as fleeting and flimsy as any slice of cloud. It reminded me of those evenings we used to spend as a family on these shores, before the Israeli occupation, with the music-loving Georges, a Palestinian family originally from Haifa who were forced to leave their home in Tiberius in 1948 and now lived in Ramallah. There was nothing like being by the Dead Sea on the evening of a full moon. Usually the George daughters played the accordion but it was deemed too harsh an instrument for a romantic moonlit evening so they brought their guitar and played more gentle music instead. I recalled one night when the moon was a particularly bright silver. The gently rippling sea managed to calm even as anxious a person as my father. We rented a boat and slid through the oily water in the dark, crossing the path lit by the moon.
Now the Lido Hotel next to which we spent that memorable evening was a long way away from the water, an abandoned miserable place. The sea has receded, leaving salt rock scattered along the coarse sand. Evaporation is incessant: every twenty-four hours as much as 25 millimetres of water evaporates from the surface of this small sea, leaving behind yet larger chunks of salt. But this was not what accounted for the high concentration of salt. Nor could it be explained solely by what the River Jordan brought down as it flowed into the lake. These salts were not the Jordan's own, but those of an earlier era reactivated by the washing action of the river.
On the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, the banks rise steeply, forming a line of terraces that reach up as much as 3,000 feet above the shore, and composed of sandstone capped by limestone. They are deeply furrowed by the courses of the streams which descend from the high-level springs of the tableland and the fierce winter rains. With the sun shining on this wall of stone it turns into the most luminescent rose pink. As I looked across I remembered the walk Penny and I had taken during one of the breaks from the negotiations in Washington, DC, in the Nabatean city of Petra, on the southern edge of the sea. There are great walks to be had in that rose-pink ancient city. After an hour's walk through the barren deep ravine they call the Sik, bordered on both sides with rocks of different colours that change their hue depending on the angle the sun hits them, we came to the imperious structure called the Treasury, made of decorated columns carved into the rocks. It was but a facade and yet it was so awe-inspiring that I felt like bowing before its towering beauty. After walking for weeks in the empty desert, the ancient traveller must have been overwhelmed when he came upon this delicate work of art. The whole of Petra is full of carvings on rocks that serve no apparent function except perhaps to impress and to awe. Not unlike the effect the Israeli settlements and their complicated network of roads, bridges and tunnels is intended to have on us Palestinians. Except that they are not just facades.
For many years I managed to hold on to the hope that the settlements would not be permanent. I had meticulously documented the illegal process by which they came to be established, every step of the way. I felt that as long as I understood, as long as the process by which all this had come about was not mysterious and the legal tricks used were exposed, I could not be confused and defeated and Israel could not get away with it. Knowledge is power. I had to keep up with the Israeli legal manoeuvres and expose them to the world. I had perceived my life as an ongoing narrative organically linked to the forward march of the Palestinian people towards liberation and freedom from the yoke of occupation. But now I knew this was nothing but a grand delusion. There was no connection outside my own mind between my knowledge and reality. It was only my way of feeling I was part of the rest of struggling society, a way of enduring hardships by claiming and holding on to the belief that there was a higher meaning to the suffering – that it wasn't in vain; it wasn't without purpose. As long as I was gaining a better understanding of the grand plan within which all this misery was taking place, my efforts had a point. I was not just a sufferer. I was an interpreter and challenger acting in solidarity with others.
But the Oslo Agreements buried my truth. The only resistance that was recognized was the PLO's armed struggle. The generally accepted claim was that it was the military strug
gle that was responsible for bringing us to this 'peace'. The legal battles waged for years against Israel were never recognized by the leadership, which, as I discovered, had the power to deny them at will. When the Oslo Peace Accords were signed I distinctly remember feeling the final rupture, the termination of what for years I had called my narrative. My bubble, my illusion, was burst.
And to make matters worse, well-wishers from around the world were congratulating me, believing that with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the famous handshake between Arafat and Rabin, shown countless times on CNN, 'good has finally won the day', a hope with which I had ended my first book in 1982 on life in the West Bank, The Third Way.
How baffled all this made me feel! How alone I found myself, standing on this promontory overlooking the Dead Sea contemplating the horrifying future and the end of a narrative of struggle I had thought I shared with others, which had given meaning to my life for so many years. As these thoughts passed through my mind I looked at the receding waters. An ecological disaster was looming here. The drop in the sea level, combined with the flow of fresh groundwater that dissolves the salt in the soil, was causing hundreds of sinkholes to appear along the shore. Some were as large as half a metre across and over 20 metres deep. It was no longer possible to walk here without fear of sinking into the salty sands. In the northern part of the sea, close to 200 sinkholes were appearing each year, making the entire area unsafe.
My silent musings were interrupted by Selma's mobile phone. It was a call from her husband telling her the good news that he had been issued a permit and would be crossing the bridge from Jordan tomorrow. She became so excited she started jumping up and down and ululating. Without a second thought, she decided to cut short her trip with us and return home in a taxi to finish her preparations for the house. Penny and I continued further south along the sea to the start of our main destination, the walk in Wadi El Daraj.
Palestinian Walks Page 12
