Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel's Separation Barrier. For Fun.

by Mark Thomas

  Maybe he will do that drama degree after all.

  Finally an officer appears, returns the passports and tells me, ‘You must walk away from the fence along here, sometimes 150 metres, sometimes 300 metres away. OK?’

  ‘OK, but where do I walk 150 metres from the fence, and where 300?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How will I know? When I can walk 150 metres from the fence and where I can walk 300 metres …’

  ‘Never mind,’ he says, moving away abruptly, then turns back to add, ‘Let us say it is … 150 metres. Along here, 150 metres.’

  I have an urge to shout, ‘You’re making this up as you go along!’ as the officer stomps off with his ‘My ball, my game!’ attitude, while Fadhi smiles with an expression that says, ‘I told you so.’

  The next morning Fadhi sounds surprised when I call to enquire as to his whereabouts. He greets me with: ‘You are walking today?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  ‘In this rain?’

  ‘I am English.’

  ‘Really?’ he says, questioning my intentions rather than my place of birth.

  ‘I’m English, Fadhi, it is what we do. If it rains we walk; if it snows we climb Snowdon and wait to be rescued; in heatwaves we become immobile on garden furniture and burn our faces red. It is just what we do.’

  In truth, the delay with the army yesterday took up even more time and yet again we didn’t complete the planned route. I simply cannot afford to waste another day.

  ‘I have a fever today,’ says Fadhi, ‘but I will arrange for someone to walk with you.’

  Two hours later, standing by a plastic greenhouse crackling noisily from the rain, we meet guide number three, Hakim, a tall, wiry farmer in green wellington boots, old khaki jacket and headscarf. His stubble is white and his English is basic, but he knows the area.

  ‘You want to go Faqqu’a to Al Jalama?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘I have tractor. I drive you.’

  Remembering that rambling is an unknown phenomenon here, I start slowly from the beginning, in a tone more patronising than I had intended. ‘We need to walk near the Barrier.’ For some reason I am moving my hand in a snake-like gesture with the instinctive belief that it signifies off-road travel.

  Apparently it does, as Hakim replies, ‘It is tractor; it can drive anywhere.’

  ‘We need to walk,’ I stress.

  ‘But the mud. It will put five kilos, ten kilos on your foot.’

  He is right, the mud not only sticks to my boots, it grows into large floppy clods. While Hakim lifts his red and white keffiyeh over his head, clasps his hands behind his back and walks steadily into the squall, I flail behind in the brown furrows like someone given a pair of clown shoes from the Battle of the Somme.

  The surrounding hills are empty, deserted but for the sound of the odd F-16 military plane that interrupts the white noise of perpetual downpour. We traipse under dripping trees, up pathways with rivulets flowing down them, and plough across flooded farmland. We are soaked. Water runs off our clothes and over our faces, forcing us to blink. My jeans are brown from the knee down and the waterproof coat that clings to my back is a liar.

  Phil’s goatee-infested face peeks from under his hood, wrapped up tight like a wet monk. He has long-ago packed the camera equipment in his bag, and now he shouts, ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like I’m on holiday in Wales, but without my family.’

  Hakim, hands still fixed behind and head down, walks steadily on, leading us along the Barrier, or at least 150 metres from it. After two hours, we take shelter under an olive tree for a few minutes, and our voices sound suddenly loud under the relative peace of its branches. Hakim reaches for a cigarette – it should be scientifically impossible to smoke in this weather, but this doesn’t stop Hakim, a Palestinian male and therefore able to smoke anywhere (with the exception of a British pub). We drink out of the water bottle in turns, Hakim holding it away from his lips and pouring it directly into his mouth, while I unwrap some bashed Kendal Mint Cake, which turns to mush in my wet hands.

  ‘Would you like some?’

  Hakim holds up his cigarette by way of saying, ‘No thanks,’ so I sit contentedly sucking sugar from my fingers.

  ‘I used to come as … a boy. Here,’ says Hakim, speaking in his broken English and erratic inflection. ‘With friends we come. Here. No walls. We walk to Bisan, Beit She’an …’ He waves his hand in their general direction. ‘We. Come here and catch … rabbits.’ He joins his hands as he remembers, ‘With fires we cook rabbits.’ Hakim searches for his words before he continues. ‘Then you can go anywhere. Walk anywhere. No problems here.’ He nods his head as he makes a list, ‘Problems: occupation. Money. Things at home. You can leave it all behind. Here you feel free. You are free. I not come here for many years. I forget.’ He takes a final drag on the cigarette and bends down to put the butt under his boot, saying with a grunt, ‘I am glad I come today.’

  We have another three hours of walking, rain and mud ahead of us. Yes, it will be tiring, yes, we are going to get soaked and yes, I will scramble down the terraces with all the grace and agility of a mattress being thrown onto a skip. But today has been a day of rare joy because today I have found my first Palestinian rambler.

  Before the walk, some Palestinian friends of mine had given me some advice. ‘You will not,’ they said, ‘have trouble getting Palestinians to talk. The trouble you will have is getting them to shut up.’ And they are right. So far on the walk, four days in, we have probably spent at least half a day listening to farmers talk about their lost land. Frankly, it would save us a lot of time if they could all just pin the number of dunams on their chest like a marathon number and we could all just crack on.

  The Barrier is the biggest infrastructure project in Israeli history, and is planned to run for 723 kilometres; something this big and this long simply can’t happen without someone being pissed off. The ‘someone’ in this case is village after village of Palestinian farmers, which is hardly surprising considering over ten per cent of the West Bank’s most fertile farming land has been adversely affected by the Barrier. Each village we go through has a story to tell. In Al Mutilla, I see farmers cut off from their land and trees. In Jalbun, the mayor details how his village had lost 2,500 dunams (600 acres) of land to the Barrier. In the Arabuna council chambers, a map is spread over the table showing precisely where the Barrier crosses the Green Line and takes twenty per cent of the village farmland.

  The northern section, where we started from, was the first part of the Barrier to be erected. It had an immediate and dramatic effect on the Palestinian economy, as many Palestinians reliant on better paid jobs in Israel were simply stopped from entering. Trade between the two communities all but ceased; the fruit and vegetable markets dependent on Israeli custom died and, of course, there were the farmers who now found their land on the other side of the Barrier. So it is no small irony that one of the men responsible for getting the Barrier put up is also leading the attempts to now resuscitate the Palestinian economy.

  Danny Atar is the head of the Gilboa Regional Council, a council in the farming area in northern Israel, just on the other side of the Barrier. Phil and I cross the checkpoint to see him.

  The council building is like any other regional council building: the stairwells echo, the lifts are small and members of staff have the usual clutter and occasional soft toy next to their work station.

  Danny cuts a big figure behind the tasteful wooden desk of his office. He sports a fashionably flimsy black jumper, his hair is two trims away from a mop top and he slouches a little. If a young John Prescott had a TV fashion makeover, he would look like this.

  After being offered coffee, we get down to business. ‘There are only two solutions when you have suicide bombers: either an allout war with all that entails or a fence. A fence is the lesser of two evils,’ says Danny, indicating he has finished his point by waving his hand in the air, as though turning away
an offer of dessert.

  The suicide bombings that characterised the Second Intifada galvanised the public mood for some kind of barrier, but the Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, was ideologically opposed to anything that might resemble a border for a future Palestine state, so he prevaricated. It was at this point that Danny Atar entered the fray.

  ‘How do we create the reality that forces a government to act? We asked ourselves, “Why don’t we start fundraising for it?” So we went abroad with this idea to raise money, and started building our own fence.’

  While his local fence was being built, Danny used every opportunity he could to embarrass Sharon into action: ‘Every time there was a suicide bombing, I used to get on the television, on the radio, and attack the indecisiveness of the government.’

  ‘So was building your fence part of the campaign to get your government to build the whole thing, or an effort to stop attacks?’ I ask.

  ‘It was both. The campaign put pressure on the Israeli government to actually build a [national] fence but, of course, the fence I built did provide security, too.’

  Danny’s local fence was to be twenty-five kilometres long, but it was only eight kilometres into its construction when Danny was invited by the Prime Minister’s Office to meet him.

  ‘I entered Sharon’s office and all the government was there, all the heads of the security forces were there, and Sharon comes and shakes my hand and says, “We have decided to build a fence; will you now please get off my back and stop attacking me?” And I said, “Yes.”’

  ‘Those were his exact words?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s Sharon,’ Danny says, his hand gesture dismissing another portion of imaginary dessert. ‘The next day they came and started to build the fence. They dismantled our fence and built one that was much more sophisticated … Before the fence, there was an average of 365 terror incidents a year, since the fence there is an average of zero.’

  ‘Palestinians we have spoken to have said the Intifada had burnt out, that it was defeated. Did the Barrier stop the terror attacks, or had the momentum to commit them burnt out, do you think?’

  Danny smiles, ‘You can check the army records. As more of the fence was built, so the attacks moved south to where it was not yet built. So it’s a myth what you are saying. It’s not right. It’s because of the fence, one hundred per cent.’

  And so the Barrier went up, as did Palestinian unemployment, while the only thing to go down were the wages for those still in work.

  Acutely aware of this, Danny is working with his Palestinian counterpart, the mayor of Jenin, to create an industrial zone alongside the Barrier. Aside from being one of the West Bank’s largest towns, Jenin was the site of some of the worst violence in the Second Intifada and Atar is at pains to point out how he and the mayor are trying to tackle causes of discontent. Now that there is security, he says, they have ‘to see how we can improve the lives of Palestinians who are poor and suffering. We have to move very quickly, to get employers to create more jobs. Unemployment is more than fifty per cent in Jenin.’

  Coming from England, the concept of an industrial zone fills me with an equal measure of incomprehension and loathing; I instinctively mistrust any address that features the word ‘unit’. The companies are usually induced to take space via incentives like tax-free operating periods, and the jobs created are normally badly paid, although I am aware that the one thing worse than having a shit job is not having a shit job.

  ‘So how will this zone work?’ I ask, holding back my opinionated twaddle that’s so middle class I get points on my John Lewis store card every time I spout it.

  ‘Well, there are two separate industrial zones,’ continues Danny. ‘The Israeli side is a logistical back-up for the Palestinian side. We have a specific target of 15,000 Palestinians employed, to 700 on the Israeli side.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘First of all, it’s basic values: you don’t want to see people suffering. But more long-term, you have to understand there are Palestinians with academic degrees who are unemployed, and in that situation it is very easy for them to become terrorists.’

  ‘But,’ I stammer, thinking, Perhaps you would not need to build a zone if you had not built the wall, ‘Palestinian income has been hugely affected by the Barrier, so is this not just a case of causing an injury and providing only a sticking plaster?’

  Danny Atar bluntly replies: ‘Definitely the fence makes life harder for the Palestinians, but the Second Intifada made life very hard for both sides.’

  Reviving the economy is no easy job when Palestinian freedom of movement is so curtailed. Danny Atar had to lobby Tony Blair (the Middle East Peace Envoy, and dealer in fine irony) to talk to the military about opening up the local checkpoint at Al Jalama.

  ‘We opened the crossing. It takes three minutes to get through,’ says Danny, adding in a flat and deadpan manner: ‘And there are many people trying to take the credit for it.’

  ‘This is Al Jalama checkpoint?’ I query, gesturing back at the one Phil and I have just come through.

  Nodding, Danny says, ‘Working from our side, we convinced the Minister of Defence to open this crossing.’

  There’s an awkward silence. ‘We crossed it by foot and it took an hour and forty minutes to get through,’ I volunteer.

  ‘By car, you can go by car. You can show a certificate and it will only take a couple of minutes,’ says Danny a little impatiently, adding, ‘The crossing is mainly for Israelis coming to revive the Palestinian economy, and then it takes them a very short time, a matter of minutes.’

  I realise that his three minutes is for Israelis crossing into the West Bank, and not the other way around. The Palestinians can still have the hour and forty minute wait.

  Danny has been generous with his time so when he nods and holds his hands apart – brushing aside one final air-dessert – I recognise it is time to finish. After shaking his hand, I leave him to the phone calls and memos that have been building up around him, and the office bustles as folk clamour to see him with the next piece of business.

  Outside, the air is warm and fresh and, in the car park, I chat idly with some of the office staff leaving for the day. The other side of the Barrier could be a million miles away.

  Departing, I get a taxi to make a diversion via Har Megiddo, the literal translation of which is ‘hill of Megiddo’, although it is more commonly known as ‘Armageddon’. My reason for this has no significance, relevance or purpose, other than that it is nearby. Although there is the thought that if ever everything on the planet goes pear-shaped and we wake to the dawning of Armageddon, I’d like to be able to turn to the kids and say, ‘Oh, I’ve been there.’

  Back on the Palestinian side of the Barrier, the first thing the mayor of Al Jalama does is to offer tea and then take me to the flat roof of the council building.

  A talk on a council roof is a poor man’s PowerPoint presentation. From up here you can see everything laid out so clearly: the Barrier, the villages and the farmland stuck on the wrong side; you can see all the individual quandaries. Looking across the plain, a large section of the Barrier appears to run in a straight line and from this distance the Israeli armoured cars whizzing along the military road have the appearance of mechanised hares at a dog track.

  By the checkpoint is an empty concrete wasteland, desolate and broken, where the market once stood.

  ‘Here there was a market,’ says the mayor. ‘All things, fruits, vegetables, goods, everything; there were one thousand stalls. Israelis come from all around to buy. Now they are gone. The market is gone. The Wall has destroyed it.’

  ‘So what are you doing to revive industry?’ I ask.

  ‘I try to get Israelis to open their clothes factories here. I give them free electricity if they open.’

  ‘An industrial zone …’

  ‘Yes,’ he nods excitedly.

  chapter 4

  FARMING TODAY

  After a week o
n the West Bank I have decided that I need a T-shirt with the words: ‘Yes, I am British. Yes, I know about the Balfour Declaration.’ Every single day someone, finding out that I am British, will say in a manner intended for all to hear, ‘Ah, British … are you aware that in 1917 Lord Balfour of Britain signed away our land to the Jewish?’

  They are referring to Lord Balfour’s letter expressing the British government’s ‘sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’ for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. As the British ruled Palestine from 1917 until Israel declared independence in 1948, Lord Balfour pretty much laid out British intentions.

  The Palestinian questioner will then, with varying degrees, blame Britain and, by default, me, for the Palestinian situation. Facing this question three or four times a day leads me to the conclusion that this is more of an accusation than a question, and I wonder how I should answer. If I say ‘Yes’ I am damned; if I say ‘No’ I am damned, so I decide I might as well reply, ‘Actually, I’m his great-grandson and I’ve just popped over to see how it’s working out.’

  What I eventually do might be even worse. One evening, I’m introduced to a shopkeeper who starts the familiar phrase, ‘You know Lord Balfour …’ Before he can continue, I jump in quickly saying, ‘Yes, I do know about Lord Balfour, but it was the English who did this, the English. I’m Scottish! And I can tell you the Scots have suffered far longer at the hands of the English oppressor than anyone else in history! Now, have you heard about the Highland Clearances?’ It seemed to work. He looked baffled, offered me some tea and then changed the subject, none the wiser.

  Afterwards Phil turned to me and said, ‘You’re not actually Scottish, are you?’

  ‘No’ I reply. ‘I am not “actually” but I am “tactically” Scottish.’*

  Our identities are often as much defined by how others see us as by how we see ourselves, so when talking to the Israeli military I am very British; thrusting my hand out, and shouting, ‘Mark Thomas, how do you do?’ When I am with Palestinian officials I turn English, and to everyone else I am from south London. In truth, my identity is less defined by a notion of country and flag than by the fact that my nan was an air raid warden at the end of our street.