Palestinian Walks

by Raja Shehadeh

  'I've already started a campaign,' Mustafa told me, 'against the proposed law on non-governmental organizations. The draft the government prepared imposes all sorts of restrictions on this sector. If it passes as proposed it would make matters much worse for us, worse even than it was under full Israeli rule. They are trying to do this so that they have a free hand politically. We have to be there to put the brakes on.'

  Mustafa always knew what he wanted; I only supplied him with the legal arguments that confirmed his political hunches.

  We had now circled the attractive village whose houses straddled the peaked ras and proceeded to walk westward under the full glare of the sun. Mustafa began to tell me about his experience at the Allenby Bridge between the West Bank and Jordan during his last return from a trip abroad. He thought it illustrated what I had just been saying:

  'When I arrived I gave the Palestinian official at the border my travel documents. He passed them on immediately, without even checking them, to the Israeli in a booth right behind him. I couldn't help noticing that the paint over the glass that separated the two officials, which is supposed to hide the Israeli, had faded. This, I thought, was symbolic of the whole Oslo deal,' Mustafa chuckled. 'I could see through the screen, the deception that is the Oslo Agreement. The Palestinian flag, which the Palestinian negotiators wasted many sessions fighting for, was nowhere in sight. It had been removed. The Israeli exercise of sovereignty over the border was absolute. Their official behind the glass with the faded paint apparently wanted to see me. This was communicated to me by the hapless Palestinian official. I simply refused to go. I told him: “Aren't you ashamed of yourself, obeying the orders of the Israeli? So far I have been treated royally and now have to submit to the Israeli mukhabart [security service]? I refuse to go. You can do what you like with me.”

  'I was kept there until midnight when it was finally agreed that the Israeli would come out of his box and stand in a line with the Palestinian officials and that they would all shake my hand and then the Israeli would hand me my passport. This way the Israeli could assert his presence and make it clear that he was the one with real power.

  'I asked the Palestinian officers at the bridge how they could tolerate this stupid charade. They agreed that the deal that had been negotiated was a bad one but they could do nothing about it. I said we should not be taking this lying down. I was delayed for many hours at the bridge but in the end I made my point. If everyone resisted these practices we would get somewhere. After they gave me back my passport, I refused to shake the hand of the Israeli official. Instead I told him: “I will be sending you my picture.” “Why?” the Israeli asked. “To hang it on the wall of your cubicle so that you will see me constantly,” I said. “Weren't you anxious to see me?”'

  We continued our walk westward below the village and down to Wadi El Shoak (the thistles). Again we could hear earth-moving equipment working above us and realized that they were opening a new road through the hills that would connect the settlement of Talmon in the east and Na'ale to the north-west with the urban settlements of Modi'in Illit and Matityahu that straddle the green line, a straight four-lane highway in these undulating hills.

  When we climbed up again the whole scene of the new construction lay bare before our eyes. There was so much upheaval, it was as though the entire earth was being re-shuffled. Developers were levelling hills, destroying the terracing and excavating large boulders from the ground for service in retaining walls. Israeli settlements no longer consisted of modest enclaves planted in our midst that could be reversed. Enormous changes were taking place that it was hard not to see as permanent. It was as though the tectonic movements that had occurred over thousands of years were now happening in a matter of months, entirely re-drawing the map. The Palestine I knew, the land I had thought of as mine, was quickly being transformed before my eyes.

  Several hills north of where we walked was the settlement of Halamish, close to Deir Ghassaneh, the village where Mustafa's family originated. During the war of 1967 his father sent him and his siblings to the village, thinking it would be safer there than in Ramallah. On their way back from the village Mustafa met his first Israeli.

  'I will never forget it,' he told me. 'I remember every detail. My father had sent us with my mother to Deir Ghassaneh. I was still very young, fourteen years or so. When the Israeli army arrived the people thought they were Nasser's Egyptian soldiers. We were going back home when they stopped us and asked to see identification. I lost my innocence that day. I realized that the faith we had put in Nasser was misplaced. The man could not save us and I felt a strong responsibility on my shoulders. I have to work hard now, I thought, because our fate rests with us. When Nasser tried to resign the elders were angry with him. They were spiteful. My own reaction was different. I thought the man could not do it. It was not within his capabilities. This did not make me feel any malice towards him.'

  I realized how similar Mustafa's reactions were to my father's. Both men had applied all their energy to the national cause. They only came to believe in a peaceful negotiated settlement to the conflict after full consideration of other options. Despite their age difference, the 1967 war was a turning point for both of them. After my father proposed his peaceful resolution to the conflict, he was attacked by the extremists on both sides whose politics have only brought us disaster. Likewise those who found fault in Mustafa's strategy were also numerous. In a society as small as this, envy also plays a role. A local leader can get nowhere armed only with good intentions and political acumen. As my father realized late in his life, money played a big role in moving people, as it does everywhere in the world.

  Throughout our walk in these hills we had not come across a single soldier or settler and yet we felt their presence all around us as they continued to build new settlements, enlarge existing ones and connect them with roads. This did not bode well for the future. As we descended further down into the valley, the hills muffled the sound and we could pretend once again that this land would remain ours, a place where we could walk in peace and silence, undisturbed.

  We now got to Wadi El Nada (the dew), which we found awash with yellow mustard seed and the blue bugloss. But the dominant colour in the flat wide valley below Deir Ammar was the bright red of vast flocks of poppies. There were a few clouds in the sky that filtered the sun, making the wide wadi look even more striking. When the sun emerged from behind the clouds, the intensity of colour strengthened. The grass became radiant and when it swayed with the light wind different shades of green were exposed. We decided to sit at the edge of this valley before we started our climb up to Deir Ammar, our final destination.

  As we climbed we could see the verdant fields with patches of rocks in between, little grey islands bathed on all sides by the yellow of the broom rising in spiky leaves above the grass. But as we got close to the village we were bombarded with the putrid smell of an animal carcass, so strong we had to hold our noses and run away as fast as we could. When we got up the hill we stopped and looked down at the valley from a distance, and were only then aware of a group of young boys who had gathered around us, curious about who these two middle-aged men racing up the hill might be. The clouds had cleared, and everything shone in the bright clear light. Such beautiful fields, such a beautiful, spoiled country!

  Mustafa was known in Deir Ammar. The village had a refugee camp, established in 1949 on village land and run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), where the Palestinians whom Israel expelled from the border villages in 1948 settled. In return the UN agency provided non-refugees in the village with services. Mustafa had come with others from the Medical Relief Organization that he ran to provide free medical services to the villagers during the numerous sieges Israel imposed on the village during the first Intifada.

  By the end of our walk I had realized how necessary it was to go beyond mere recognition of our desperate political state. I had been dwelling too much on the past, indulging in self-flagellation over what
I assessed was our defeat, which I was perhaps all too eager to recognize. I was grateful to Mustafa for encouraging me to start thinking about what could be done rather than succumbing to despair. I tried to remind myself that I should see the past in a more positive light. I was privileged to have had the opportunity of participating in the public struggle. This and only this was my reward. I had no right to make further claims to the fruits of my labour.

  Our assessment of the Oslo Accords has been proven correct. The agreement with Israel proved to be a false start, with disastrous consequences for the Palestinian struggle to end the occupation and achieve statehood. Politically Mustafa had done well not to join the newly established Palestinian Authority. He left the People's Party where for many years he had served as a high-ranking member. He formed his own party and after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2005 ran for head of the Palestinian Authority. He did well, managing to win about a quarter of the vote. For a number of years he served as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and became a cabinet minister in the unity government established in March 2007.

  I continue to be peripherally involved in public matters helping Mustafa, as a fellow traveller, where and when I can. But most of my attention remains focused on my writing. My house continues to be the sanctuary I had hoped it would be, where Penny and I can retreat, living as quiet a life as is possible in this war-torn land.

  But the country was not moving towards peace. The suffocating closure of the West Bank by the Israeli army and the continuation of intensive settlement construction throughout the land were creating tremendous pressure on the period of calm that the Oslo Agreement, with all its faults, had ushered in.

  During earlier geological eras the pressure on the land mounted and mounted until it could bear no more and cracked, forming the Great Rift Valley. Only peace could circumvent a similar rupture between the two people living on the same land. But the Israeli government was unwilling to leave the land or its people in peace.

  As Mustafa and I witnessed during our walk in the hills, our land was being transformed before our eyes, and a new map was being drawn. We were not supposed to look, only to blindly believe in the hollow language of peace proclaimed by Israeli leaders, a peace that amounted to mere words, rhetoric that meant nothing.

  But an entire nation cannot indulge for long in voluntary blindness. Predictably another cycle of violence soon began, this time a more violent Intifada than the first, one that threatened to bring about the ultimate cleavage between the two peoples, one that would be unbridgeable.

  6

  AN IMAGINED SARHA

  Wadi Dalb

  Much has happened since the last walk described in the last chapter. My hope that I would find refuge in my stone house was dispelled in the spring of 2002, when the Israeli army invaded Ramallah, entered my home and broke the sense of sanctuary I had ascribed to it. The ostensible reason given by Israel for invading West Bank cities was to defend the country. Such was the power of ideology that in the eyes of most Israelis, 'Israel' had come to mean 'the Greater Land of Israel', including most of the settlements. In fact maps used in Israeli school books had done away with the pre-1967 borders between Israel and the Occupied Territories. To defend their 'country' also meant to defend the settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its decisions the Israeli High Court confirmed this. The settlers, it ruled, had a basic right to be protected by the state. The fact that they were on illegally acquired land made no difference.

  When the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, formulated his ill-fated plan in 2006 to annex the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank to Israel, he called it the Convergence Plan. The old Israel of the pre-1967 borders was to converge with the new Israel in the occupied West Bank to form 'Greater Israel'. Thirteen years after Israel had committed itself under the Oslo Agreement to negotiating with its Palestinian neighbours the fate of the Jewish settlements during final status talks, the government announced that it was planning to determine their status unilaterally by annexing most of them to Israel and redrawing the borders of the state without further negotiations. After the annexation the Palestinians would be left with scattered, non-contiguous areas of land that could not possibly constitute the basis of a viable state. So powerful had Israel become, and such was the unlimited support it was getting from the United States and its British ally, that it felt it could renege on earlier commitments to the Palestinians with total impunity.

  A number of these settlements had been established after commando operations against Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, with the Israeli government claiming that their establishment was 'the proper Zionist response'. Over the years the Zionist ideology never evolved to the point of believing that the only policy which would ensure its long-term survival would be to seek peace with its Arab neighbours and integrate in the region, rather than proceed to antagonize further the Palestinians by taking more of their land and planting foreign enclaves within their territory. Just as Israel remained in a state of enmity with the people and states around it, so the settlers were living in total isolation from the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the land. Israeli leaders were fond of repeating that they wanted to 'sear into our consciousness' the Jewish presence in our land. In other words to make us surrender our rights to it.

  The invasion of Ramallah was followed by drastic measures that continued long after the army withdrew. Using security as a justification, entrances to all the cities and hundreds of villages were closed. Use of most roads in the West Bank was prohibited to Palestinians, forcing us to use unpaved roads that had to be travelled in secret, mere tracks that went over rocks and took dangerous bends, damaging the cars that travelled them.

  The large number of checkpoints and obstacles placed by the Israeli army on West Bank roads complicated our lives immeasurably. Even after the bombing in Israel had stopped, they increased in number from 376 in August 2005 to 528 by October 2006. We now moved in our own country surreptitiously, like unwanted strangers, constantly harassed, never feeling safe. We had become temporary residents of Greater Israel, living on Israel's sufferance, subject to the most abusive treatment at the hands of its young male and female soldiers controlling the checkpoints, who decided on a whim whether to keep us waiting for hours or to allow us passage. But worse than all this was that nagging feeling that our days in Palestine were numbered and one day we were going to be victims of another mass expulsion.

  The residents of Ramallah, the centre of the Palestinian Authority, did not escape the constraints of the ghetto life experienced in other West Bank cities. All entrances to the city were controlled by the Israeli army. At the Beitunia exit south-west of Ramallah on the road leading to Beit 'Ur, where Albina's land is situated, a prison that began as a temporary tent facility for incarcerating juvenile offenders had now become a permanent, ever-expanding fortress, with watchtowers and high walls topped by barbed wire where the Israeli military court was convened. A highway cut through the low hills going from east to west, restricting Ramallah's expansion in that direction. It was reserved for the use of Jewish settlers travelling from Jerusalem and the settlements around its north-western borders to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain. Passage through this exit was prohibited to Palestinians.

  Those settlements around Ramallah that existed at the time of the Oslo Accords had been enlarged and more than ten new ones added, some on land that even the discriminatory Israeli legal system recognized as Palestinian. One of these, in the north-west of Ramallah, bore a similar sounding name to Abu Ameen's summer farm, Harrasha. When I look at night from the roof of my house at the horizon I can see the yellow lights of these illegal outposts creating an illuminated noose around the city.

  But the most destructive development, which boded only misery and spelled continued conflict for the future, was the wall being constructed by Israel. This stretched in a jagged course that was determined not only by Israeli military considerations but also by the special interests of settlers and land
mafia lords, slicing through the hills, destroying their natural shape, gulping large swathes of Palestinian land. Only in part did it follow the 1967 armistice's internationally recognized border between Israel and the Palestinian territories, which has now been deleted from official Israeli maps. The 'settlement blocs' Israel planned to annex, which thrust like daggers into the Palestinian land, were now sheathed by the wall.

  Still, I was determined that none of this was going to prevent me from taking more walks in the hills. Not the military orders closing most of the West Bank, not the checkpoints and roadblocks, and not the Jewish settlements. Weather-wise that spring of 2006 was one of the best for many years. The rain had been plentiful but also well distributed. It even continued to rain through April, giving vital sustenance to the wild flowers that by the end of the month usually begin to shrivel and die. I could not let this season pass without a walk.

  A slight damper on my audacity was my determination not to repeat a terrifying experience I had a few months earlier when, driving back from the Jordan valley, I got lost. I must have taken a wrong turn and found myself in the midst of new settlements and industrial zones, vast open spaces that made me wonder what country I was in. I told myself not to panic and that if I continued driving westward I must eventually emerge in an area I would recognize. But the further I drove the more lost I became. All the signposts pointed to Jewish settlements. I could find none of the features that used to guide me on my way: that beautiful cluster of boulders, those cliffs just after the bend that dips into the valley and up again onto the road with the attractive village to the right. 'Where am I?' I kept asking myself. At first I tried to pretend that it was just a game. I had enough petrol in my car and eventually I would surely be able to find my way out of this maze. But as time passed and I was not seeing anywhere I recognized, panic struck. As a child I had a recurring nightmare in which I found myself in a strange place unable to find my way home. I would try to shout for help only to realize that I had no voice. This felt like a similar situation. I began to sweat. Where was I? How would I ever get out of this? It began to get dark and with the twilight the land became even more unfamiliar. My driving was getting reckless. I was not stopping at crossroads. Circling around without any notion of where I was going had induced a mental trance. There were no other cars on these roads. I seemed to be the sole traveller in this never-never land, experiencing this waking nightmare entirely alone. 'Perhaps I should stop and try to calm down,' I told myself. But how would this help? Penny always advises me to take a deep breath when I'm caught in such situations. But this was different. I did not know where to begin to extricate myself from the mess I had got myself in. I felt I had finally been ensnared in the labyrinth of settlements I had long been pursuing in court and would never be allowed to escape. After my petrol ran out I would have to remain here until someone came to save me. But who other than armed settlers roamed this new world in the midst of my old familiar surroundings? I was utterly exhausted when, in the end, I finally managed to find a way out. How I did so, I will never know.