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

by Mark Thomas

  Our new guide is Mustafa, an ex-schoolteacher, and he looks it in a grey sleeveless V-neck jumper and white shirt. He grumbles and moans, gets blisters, occasionally shares out bread with za’atar (a sort of herb mix) baked inside, can be chatty one minute and sullen the next, chain-smokes relentlessly, is as quick to judge as he is to pontificate, and never tires of blaming others. We like him a lot.

  His first walk with us is from Al Jalama to Zububa, across the plains by the straight line of the Barrier, picking, as we go, either light brown mushrooms or live ammunition out of the soil. The mushrooms are a good size, as are the bullets, too.

  ‘The mushrooms come up after rain on this type of earth,’ says Mustafa. The ammunition appears in furrows particularly after ploughing; in that respect at least, both are seasonal. Mustafa, his pressed trousers fastidiously tucked into his white socks in an attempt to keep the cuffs clean, plods gently through the mud, giving an occasional commentary that doesn’t wander past the certitude of his knowledge as he points out, ‘These shoots are carrots’ or, ‘Over there is a hazelnut orchard.’

  When darkness finally descends, we are lead off the field by both the imam’s call to prayer and the green fluorescent lights shining on the local minaret. Getting into the village, Mustafa lets out a great sigh with the last of his energy, ‘I am sooo tired.’ He has quickly grown used to our company.

  In every village, the streets are lined with memorials to dead fighters: pictures of young men in green or black headbands stare out, weighed down with ammo belts and machine guns, or posed with arms crossed over their chests holding a pistol in each hand. The posters are Photoshop-ed using old snaps and pictures, and the process makes the colours slightly garish. They are also printed onto illuminated signs, the type used by fast-food shops. In Jenin, there are so many of these posters hanging from lampposts and buildings that, illuminated at night, it looks as if the city is full of armed chip-shop owners.

  On one hand it is easy to arrive at an intellectual and logical conclusion: that a people under military occupation, denied the right to a state in their own land, have a right to defend themselves and to use the armed struggle to achieve freedom. Indeed Article 51 of the UN Charter goes some way to affording people that right in law. But some of these pictures will invariably be of suicide bombers, and the thought of celebrating them is alien and disturbing. It raises all sorts of questions about moral legitimacy but, stupidly, I don’t ask them: the certainty of the posters seems to intimidate me.

  A short distance from Mustafa’s home village of At Tayba, we walk into Rummana where, attached to a telegraph pole, is a poster that dominates the street. It is a picture of two men, one holding a machine gun with a banana-shaped clip.

  ‘Who are they?’ I ask Mustafa.

  ‘Shahid. These are shahid; they are the martyrs of the village.’

  ‘People involved in the Intifada?’

  ‘Er’ – he fidgets slightly as if looking for the right definition for me – ‘people killed by the Israelis. We believe we should keep the memory of the martyrs alive.’

  ‘A memorial …’

  ‘These two are Mohammad’s brothers,’ says Mustafa, pointing at the boys in the picture.

  Mohammad is Mustafa’s close friend, and the man who turns up at night in the middle of nowhere to drive us to wherever we are sleeping.

  ‘He lost two brothers?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, his father two sons,’ he says, then adds, ‘His father used to teach me at school. A very great man, very great.’

  Ahead of us, just past a bakery, is another shaded sign that sticks out from a building, and beyond that hangs another from a pole; another picture of a young man clutching a machine gun, in happier times. Everyone seems to know someone with a gun.

  Almost as prominent and noticeable are the hoardings for government or NGO aid projects. Every single village I have seen has at least one project supported by foreign aid: in Zububa, the Japanese have funded a sub-pumping station; in At Tayba, the UN’s World Food Programme has funded efforts to rebuild the terraces for olive trees; the council building in Al Jalama is built with EU and Irish government funds; Oxfam helps provide water for Bedouins; and so on. The buildings and schemes they sponsor proudly bear their names and logos on plaques. Boards on stilts spring up by the roadside proclaiming NGO mission statements, UN slogans and the words, ‘A gift from USAID’, or some such.

  Every village has a banner thanking someone for their money and a poster thanking someone for their life; and so we walk the roads in the sunlight by the pictures of the dead and the giving.

  Our days merge into climbing terraces full of olive trees, clambering over low fences and taking off layers of jumpers as the sun quickly heats the morning’s chill. By midday, the shade in the groves is as refreshing as the oranges and tangerines local kids gather for us, when they appear at our elbows happily passing around their illicit bounty. Lunch is a shared affair, Mustafa bringing lebeneh (a thick yoghurt) and home-made bread smelling of thyme and olive oil, while Phil and I provide the Pringles. Then it is back to the Barrier, and rocky paths, hills and roads till dark. There is no real need for a watch as the Imam’s call to prayer is never far away, and nor is Mustafa’s, ‘Oh, I am sooo tired,’ around about three thirty, just to remind us it is time for a cup of coffee.

  Mustafa’s English is good, and he continually asks me for the meaning of words, carrying a piece of paper and a pen in his top pocket to make occasional notes. Sometimes his vocabulary runs dry: sitting down for a break he takes his boot off, saying, ‘I have a painful water bubble.’

  ‘Blister.’

  ‘Blister,’ he repeats thoughtfully then, getting out his piece of paper, says, ‘Spell this for me.’

  Between admiring the country, Mustafa’s explanations of all that surrounds us, general banter and long discussions on linguistics, we continue. The big problem is time. I am rambling like an alcoholic. I look at the map, I look at the schedule and for the life of me cannot work out how we have lost two days. The finishing point of this walk is forever changing, too, as it becomes more and more obvious that our itinerary is not a timescale of obtainable objectives, and has actually been reduced more to a prayer.

  Originally the walk was to stop at Deir Ballut, then Mas-ha and now I will settle on getting to a city called Qalqilya. The most important thing is to get to our appointed destination each day, but it is impossible to miss the trail of consequences created by the Barrier as it chases itself across the mountains and along steep ridges. Initially it is the small oddities, the daily absurdities, that catch my eye. In At Tayba, the Barrier cuts right across the football pitch of the boys’ school, which seems a wonderfully Israeli way to play football: if you want to stop the other side from scoring, stick an electric fence in front of the goal. In Anin, farmers have to queue at the crack of dawn to pass through an agricultural crossing gate to get to their own land, now on the other side of the Barrier. A large yellow sign is attached to the gate reads:

  ‘Gate no: [Blank]

  The passage through this gate will be permitted between the hours of [Blank]

  In case of emergency or a closed gate during the opening hours, please adress [sic] at the local DCL at the following phone number: [Blank]

  Different cultures have different ways of saying things: in France a bottle of wine might say, ‘I love you’. In Italy flowers might mean, ‘I am sorry’. But no one says ‘Fuck off’ with a blank form quite like the Israelis.

  Having been intrigued by relatively minor oddities along the Barrier, the sheer scale of the one at Tura ash Sharqiya is both devastating and captivating. In this area, two towns sit next to each other – Tura al Gharbiya on the Israeli side and Tura ash Sharqiya on the Palestinian. Pre-Barrier, a huge market ran along the street from the Palestinian Tura to the Israeli Tura, and sold everything from fruit and meat to furniture and clothes. Arab Israelis came here in their droves but, like many border towns, it was a place where Jews came, too; it was
a place where Jews and Arabs met.

  The market closed down the day the concrete went up. Raheed, a municipal councillor, stands in his brown tracksuit and slip-on sandals on the broad walk by the shut shops in the Palestinian Tura.

  ‘These shops here are closed now because of the Wall,’ he says, before reeling off statistics. ‘There were about 400 shops here alone. Each shop supported 15 people.’

  ‘Where have they all gone?’

  ‘All the shopkeepers? Left to try to find another job … this area lost about half a million shekels a day because all the income was generated here in the market.’

  Producing some keys from his tracksuit pocket, he starts to unlock a shop door.

  ‘I own this shop and used to rent it out to another person who ran it; I earned $2,000 a year from it. Let me show you what I use this shop for now …’ and he steps into the cool shade of the store. The smell inside is distinctive, though I don’t quite recognise it before I see the rabbits hopping across the concrete floor; the smell is pet piss.

  ‘This is all I use the store for now, to keep rabbits,’ he says, his voice echoing in the emptiness as the rabbits lollop away from the centre of the room, cordoned off with some old plywood panels to stop them escaping when the door is opened.

  ‘How many do you have?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘And how much income do they generate?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says smiling, embarrassed. ‘These are for eating, just for the family.’

  The economic impact of the Barrier is writ large here, in decay. Back in Al Jalama, where the mayor pointed from the rooftop to a concrete area by the checkpoint and told me that a thousand market stalls had gone, I could only attempt to equate that fact with the reality for those stallholders. Here, rust and rubble tell the story clearly in a fifteen-minute walk along the old market road from the Palestinian to the Israeli Tura. The street is inhabited only by empty shops, derelict warehouses and deserted workshops; and all that is left of these is some oil stains, and spaces in the roof where the corrugated iron sheets have fallen in. Where once there was hundreds if not thousands of traders and workers there is now an empty road with a wall at one end, and a closed shop housing fifteen rabbits.

  Dusk settles as we arrive in the West Bank town of Tulkarm, home to an industrial zone far more established than Danny Atar’s plans for Al Jalama and Jenin. Somewhere between getting to the giant meat factory by the Barrier and using the toilets at the petrol station, the sun drops out of sight, or maybe it just dipped low enough for the pollution to reach up, drag it down and beat it unconscious.

  The Nitzanei Shalom or ‘Buds of Peace’ industrial zone is a proper industrial zone, with eight chemical factories, respiratory illness clusters and a thriving sector selling doomed canaries in cages. Its name suggests its purpose: it was set up after the Oslo Accords in 1993 to stimulate the local economy and promote better relations between the two sides, although its appearance suggests it may not have worked. The area is dominated by this heavily guarded complex, which sits right on the Green Line. There is a single door on the Palestinian side for workers, which is opened only in the morning and at night. Once you are in, there is no getting out. It is cold, unwelcoming and intimidating.

  Strangely, Tulkarm has a nouveau riche area where gated gardens, colonnades and balconies befuddle the boundaries between grandeur and ostentation; essentially this is a working factory town, with a small yuppie enclave and a university in the middle of it.

  The town doesn’t look like an ideal place to be an organic farmer – with the factories, students, traffic jams and crowded, late-night streets, you would have to be in a peculiar type of predictive-text hell to describe Tulkarm as ‘rural’ – but that is what Fayez Al-Taneeb is, and it is him I have come to see.

  A West Bank farmer whose land happens to sit between the Barrier and a chemical factory, Fayez sits in his living room or, at least, he occasionally sits; mostly he jumps up and paces, gesticulates, draws maps, enacts the story of his farm and, in stiller moments, leans over his son who sits at the family computer, playing film footage of their lives. Fayez is lean and fit, with grey cropped hair in the Palestinian style (by which I mean he has a moustache). He has the appearance of a boxer’s second, a ring man with a towel and a fast line of advice, and the demeanour of a trial lawyer putting the Israeli authorities on trial in his own living room. The jury, for tonight at least, is me.

  I’m a city boy but even I know that one of the last things a farmer wants is a chemical factory as a neighbour. But that is what Fayez got in 1984, when the Geshuri chemical factory set up on the Palestinian side of the Green Line – it had intended to operate in Israel but failed to get a licence so moved to the West Bank. The factory is actually an award-winning building designed by Lord Rogers and constructed in reflective glass and Italian marble … like fuck. It’s a chemical factory. It has lots of pipes and chimneys popping out of the top: a concrete fortress that can’t decide if it wants to be a factory or a prison.

  Down the side of this ugly building and in its shadow, lies a narrow, muddy path. It leads to Fayez’s farm, which is sandwiched between the factory and the concrete slabs of the Barrier: when that was built in 2003 the military took nearly two-thirds of Fayez’s land, leaving him only 12 dunams (just under three acres).

  The consequences of putting a chemical factory next to a farm are as predictable as they are ruinous: as Fayez says, ‘So you are a farmer and you grow beautiful organic things and they dump a chemical factory next to you.’ He pauses, then continues, ‘I took a sample [of plants] to the Palestinian Agriculture Authority; they told me the plants were poisoned.’

  ‘When the factory was first built in an Israeli village, a Jewish farmer took Geshuri to court and said they were causing problems for land and health, and it was shut down. So they moved here. We took the factory to court in 1989 and they said we can’t do anything because it is in West Bank, on Palestinian territory.’

  But the factory is not the only worry for Fayez, who leads me again to the family computer, explaining how the Israeli army destroyed his farm for the first time. It was 2000, and the Second Intifada had started. Fayez had already had the legal tussle with Geshuri and was now the leader of the Farmers’ Union, so when the factory was attacked, the army decided to destroy his farm in retaliation.

  ‘Did they serve any sort of notice?’ I ask, and with that I unleash the full torrent of the story.

  ‘They don’t send to me letter, they don’t speak with me, nothing. Me and my wife we were working between the greenhouses and we heard there is a bulldozer in our farm. I go out to look [and] I cannot believe that the bulldozer has lowered the bucket down and starts to demolish the farm. I said, “What are you doing? Stop!” He says, “Don’t challenge me,” and carries on.’

  Instinctively, Fayez jumped in front of the bulldozer bucket and grabbed it with his hands, but the machine moved forward picking up more earth, pushing Fayez with it. The soil relentlessly surged around his legs, threatening to push him over, so Fayez turned to put his back against it, but the bulldozer just kept moving. The earth came up his back and then to his shoulders and, just as he was in danger of being buried alive, his wife started hurling stones at the driver with all her might, hitting him full in the face. That stopped him.

  ‘He said, “OK, you pelt me with stones; I’ll show you tomorrow what I can do.” Next morning they came with a hundred soldiers and two bulldozers. They destroyed all the farm, all the 32 dunams.’

  A neighbour filmed what happened from a safe hiding place as the army declared the area to be a military zone and that no one was allowed there. Fayez’s son presses play on the computer, and this film starts. The camerawork is shaky and slips in and out of focus, moving in amateur haste from one thing to another, trying to catch everything that is happening. The camera rushes from newly broken metal tubes and bulldozer-ruptured irrigation pipes to earth massing in the bulldozer bucket and there, in the middle, is
Fayez. His hair is longer and darker, but without question it is he on the screen, twisted in torment, wanting to step forward to stop the destruction of his farm but unable to do so, caught between impulse and self-preservation. In despair, he lifts his hands to his head and shouts, knowing there is nothing he can do, surrounded as he is by so many soldiers. The bulldozers start to rip up his greenhouses, ploughing up the soil as peppers and cucumbers disappear under great mounds of earth. He steps forward and stops, but then is unable to stand back and his friends have to grab him and lead him away.

  Sitting at the family computer, his son watches the pictures, and tears silently start to fall down his face. He remains motionless, one hand on the computer mouse, ready to stop the film with a click.

  ‘And why?’ continues Fayez. ‘Just to destroy me and my wife? Three times they did it – 2000, 2001 and 2002. The second time was one week after I had put in new irrigation pipes and planted, and two tanks came from the Israeli army. Just smashed everything up.’

  It seems a trivial question but I ask it anyway: ‘Does the army ever give a reason?’

  ‘Sometimes they say industrial area, sometimes military zone and I should not be here.’

  Witnessing the family watch their sufferings played back to them is intensely uncomfortable, and I am amazed they are all still here.

  ‘Do you ever think, “I’ve had enough, I should move”?’ I ask.

  ‘To where?’ Fayez snaps. ‘To where? To where can I go? Have you been to Lebanon? I was there in 2005, and I visit all the Palestinian refugee camps there. I have been to Jordan, I visit all the Palestinian camps there. You cannot believe our situation. Where would I go? There?’

  The next morning, Fayez is much happier. He practically skips around the farm explaining how to hang tomato vines to get the biggest crop, smelling thyme for za’atar, showing me his bees and telling stories. He guides me through a greenhouse door, ushering me into the damp heat and quiet, where I wander down a row of cucumber plants. They grow fast and tall, forming a leafy corridor decorated with delicate tendrils and small yellow flowers until, surrounded by foliage, I can no longer see the entrance I came in through. And, just for a moment, I can forget that above the plastic sheeting is the looming presence of a watchtower.