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

by Mark Thomas

  ‘I see you are looking at the pictures.’ The geography teacher’s side-parted grey hair is ruffled by the wind, and he has zipped up his red tracksuit top against the chill. ‘One month ago, soldiers came to this town, gathered all the women and children into this yard and turned it into a police station. They broke into the sports hall and used it for interrogations.’

  At the side of the playground he opens the door of a small hall to show me, then gestures back to the empty playground.

  ‘This isn’t the first time they have used the yard like this. In the past they ordered the students, young men, to put their hands up against the wall and then they beat them in front of the crowd.’

  ‘They publicly beat kids?’

  ‘Yes, in this place. So this is why the paintings; we wanted to transform the playground.’

  The geography teacher is friends with the PE teacher, who tells me: ‘When the army came and arrested the children last night, most of them, except one of nineteen years old, are twelve years old.’

  ‘Twelve?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Twelve years old?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the army came in the middle of the night and took them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The PE teacher knows a family who had one of their children taken by the army a few nights ago. ‘I can take you to him.’

  Ali, a teacher in another village and a member of the local council, welcomes me into his living room and offers tea. He cuts a figure of mannered propriety with his sports jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. He sits down on an ornate sofa, a single pat of the empty space next to him brings his son, Yaya, alongside him, and they tell their story.

  At 2 a.m. a few nights before, banging and shouting woke Ali. Opening his door, he found Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at him. He was told, ‘Wake your family! Get them out on the street!’

  One son, Achmed, was already up but the two youngest, Yaya and Zachariah, were still in bed. Ali took a glass of water up to the boys so they could have a quick drink when he woke them. His son Yaya is twelve years old, and it was him the soldiers wanted.

  ‘We have a picture of him, wearing a blue and red shirt, throwing stones at the army,’ said the soldier in charge.

  ‘He doesn’t throw stones,’ Ali replied.

  ‘We have a picture.’

  ‘A football shirt?’ asked Ali.

  ‘A Real Madrid shirt,’ came the reply.

  ‘But he doesn’t have one like that.’

  The soldiers searched the wardrobes for the T-shirt in vain, but remained intent on taking Yaya. By now his mother was crying and his younger brother, Zachariah, tried to hit the soldiers when they moved to arrest Yaya. Fearful of his family’s safety, Ali said: ‘I will come with him. Let me come with him, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ replied the soldiers and, handcuffing Yaya, led him to a jeep. Ali quickly calmed Zachariah, and left with the soldiers.

  The army vehicle drove a short distance into the village square and parked. There were some eighteen other army jeeps and two armoured personnel carriers in the square, all of which had picked up other children from the village. The soldier told Ali they needed to transfer vehicles. The door was opened and Ali got out of the jeep, but then the door was shut behind him, and Yaya was left alone in the jeep.

  ‘But what will I tell his brother? I told Zachariah I would look after him. What will I tell him?’ Ali implored.

  ‘Go home,’ said the soldier, ‘and when you get there, catch Zachariah by the ear and tell him, “Don’t throw stones like Yaya, don’t throw stones at the army.”’

  As Ali sits on the sofa telling me this story, the family cat jumps lightly onto his lap. It is ginger, with a white belly, not yet an adult. It takes a few cautious steps around Ali’s legs to find a comfortable spot, then curls up. Sitting next to his father, still visibly shaken but attempting defiance, Yaya can’t resist the purring and reaches out to stroke the cat.

  After being taken to a military base – handcuffed and blindfolded – Yaya was questioned about the village, school and throwing stones at the soldiers.

  ‘They showed me a photo and said it was me, but it wasn’t,’ he says, arms folded and his lips tight. ‘Then they asked me to sign a paper saying they had not hit me. Then they let me go.’

  ‘How long were you detained?’

  ‘About twenty-four hours,’ says his father, as the ginger cat searches for a more comfortable position.

  ‘Did you get any food?’

  ‘They gave me some cold rice and beans and some water, but I didn’t eat it. And when I went to the toilet they would not take the handcuffs off.’

  ‘Did you get access to a lawyer or an adult like a social worker?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  The Israeli authorities released Yaya and another boy from Jayyus on the roadside five kilometres from his home. His parents were not informed of his release, the boys had no money and it was dark.

  ‘Fortunately,’ says Ali, ‘a doctor was driving past and stopped and gave them a lift home, or they would have had to walk.’

  Yaya is lucky. In the West Bank, children of twelve and over can be held without charge for up to eight days, with no access to family or lawyers.10

  Before leaving Jayyus, I talked to the town’s mayor about the arrest. He said, ‘The problem here is that in Palestine the children are soldiers, and in Israel the soldiers are children.’

  On the day of Yaya’s detention his brother Zachariah, by all accounts, did not have a good day at school.

  chapter 6

  ALBERT AND THE LION GIRAFFE

  Today is the final day of the first part of our walk and we are even more ‘rude tired’.

  Phil is up first and has gone to the window.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says, from across the room.

  ‘Weather?’

  ‘Fucked.’

  ‘How fucked?’

  ‘Semi-fucked.’

  ‘Rain fucked?’

  ‘Cloud bollocks.’

  ‘Is that fucked or bollocksed?’

  ‘Bollocksed.’

  ‘Not fucked then.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Coffee; shower; fuck off. Yeah?’

  ‘Fuck yeah.’

  Phil hasn’t bothered to shave in a while, and his goatee beard is losing its shape. It is now a thatch of unmaintained face topiary swamped by uncut stubble. I intend to suggest that he might like to remedy this but the words come out as, ‘You look shit.’

  ‘You look shitter,’ he says, meaning, ‘Thanks for your concern.’

  Like I said, we are rude tired.

  The final destination is Qalqilya Zoo, it adds a sense of fun for the last day and Mustafa has never been before. It is some twenty-five kilometres short of the planned end point, but frankly I couldn’t care less. Waving goodbye to people this morning, I shouted, ‘Have a happy Christmas.’ It is the first time I have uttered those words this year and at once I felt horribly homesick. I want to go home, have a bath, cuddle the family and get some sleep. Everything else can wait.

  We restart our walk from where we left off at the school the night before. The village seems on edge once again after another raid last night. Officially, no one should be on the streets this morning as the army put out a military order to that effect, but life goes on.

  Mustafa is as grumpy as we are, and is having a sulky smoke when, suddenly, a group of young kids runs, shouting, at us. The oldest can only be around nine years old, and there is playful confidence to the group; but a couple have their hoods up and one has a face mask on. A pebble flies and bounces off my rucksack, a couple of lads shout and make the victory sign, and one comes at me screaming, ‘Roooaaar,’ but his voice hasn’t broken yet so it sounds rather squeaky.

  Mustafa snaps, ‘Halas!’ Enough.

  But the kids have seen Phil’s camera and swarm, though it is more Lord of the Midges than Flies. A couple more pebbles ping off our bags and I make out one w
ord in the shouting children’s melee: ‘Yahod!’ Jew.

  ‘Halas!’ says Mustafa again, reaching for his phone.

  ‘Just tell them we are internationals,’ I say.

  But Mustafa is on his mobile.

  ‘Just tell them we are not Jews,’ I insist. And then, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I am calling the mayor.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To get an apology for these children’s behaviour,’ comes the testy reply.

  ‘Let’s not waste time,’ I groan. ‘Let’s just go.’

  ‘I must talk to the mayor,’ says Mustafa, and starts mumbling into the phone.

  ‘Bollocks to this.’

  In truth, I am furious with myself: ‘Tell them we’re not Jews,’ I had said. Despite being factually correct, it feels cowardly and wrong. A few years ago, I was included on a far-right website listed under, ‘Influential Jews Controlling the British Media’. I was delighted, thrilled to appear next to my comic hero Alexei Sayle, who was also included. It didn’t matter that I am not influential, nor in the British media nor indeed Jewish: it still felt like a badge of honour. In a world that is increasingly complex on issues of identity, it felt nice to know I could ‘pass’, that I could cross the line from Gentile to Jew and back, even if it was only with anti-Semites. But just then, I had gone from being proud of being mistaken for a Jew to being quick to proclaim I am not one. Nor is this the first time this trip.

  Talking to a group of teenage Palestinians in an orchard near Tulkarm, one lad had said, ‘Yahod?’

  ‘No, I am not a Jew,’ I had replied quickly.

  ‘Oh, where are you from?’

  ‘I am from Eng– … Scotland … Yes, I am a Scot and have you heard about what the English did to us in Culloden?’

  Declaring myself a strategic Scot (once again) nullified the discomfort I felt about declaring my Gentile origins so clearly. But why should it matter if I was Jewish? There are lots of Jews who are opposed to the Occupation, and surely this is the issue: this conflict can’t merely revolve around religion, can it? And should a nine-year-old boy who, along with the rest of his village, was woken by Israeli soldiers at two o’clock this morning, be conscious of these arguments?

  Jayyus comes to an end abruptly, the way that villages do here: the last house in the village is the start of the countryside. The hills run immediately in front of us, dropping down into a valley and shooting out into the horizon demarcated by a grey sky. To our left is a road that winds along the ridge from where we stand, dipping in and out of hills, disappearing behind mounds and gullies only to re-emerge later in the distance.

  ‘Let’s follow this road,’ I say. ‘It has to be easier than scrambling down the hills with no paths.’

  The road is new, with a long white line stretching perfectly along the middle of the tarmac, and yellow lines that run along the edge at each side: a proper road. This is no charity-project either: there is no proclamation of the donor’s name with a grandiose project title like, ‘The Jayyus Rejuvenation Bypass – a gift from Oxfam’; no signs announcing that it was paid for by the EU or Top Gear. This makes for a peculiar sort of road, made more so by the site of a huge, stripped olive tree, charred black from burning, standing by one side of it in some newly worked ground with replanted olive trees that look as if they have narrowly escaped a similar fate. Then the familiarity of it dawns. At the edge of the tarmac is a sandy track, next to which is a continuous line of concrete footings buried into the ground and just past that is a ditch running along the side of the road. This is the Barrier. The concrete footings have evenly spaced circular holes in them, into which will slot the poles for the electric fence. The sandy path is to identify activity near the fence and the ditch is part of the whole standardised structure. This is simply an old bit of the Barrier that has been taken down.

  ‘We’re on the Wall!’ I shout to Phil, who has walked off to set up his camera for some shots.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mustafa, slightly bemused at my sudden joy. ‘This is where the village won a court case and forced the Israelis to move the Wall back towards the Green Line. The Israelis had to come and take this down by the order of the court.’

  ‘And is it just left for anyone to use?’ asks Phil.

  ‘We’re on the Wall!’ I yell, jumping on it. ‘The Wall!’ Ramblers often walk on old walls and ruins, ancient paths and traders routes, but not like this. This is an old bit of a new wall. This is special. This is a vision of what the Barrier should look like, the mere path that it might become. That the Barrier will eventually come down cannot be in question; the question is, what will be left here when it goes? Will it be the border between two states? Will it be left to crumble and decay? Or will the Wall be ours to walk? Sure, we’ll need some signposts; those upright wooden ones with a symbol for the trail and an arrow carved into them. And, yes, we’ll need some rest stops at viewpoints with good panoramas, wooden benches and circular concrete tables. There will have to be guidebooks and maps and perhaps a badge on completion of the route. Plus flapjack with far too many bits of cereal and oats in it. But this is what it might be like. Are we walking on the future? Are we walking on possibilities? We are walking the Palestine Way.

  The joy of following the ‘old’ Barrier as it cuts across the hilltops has eased my tiredness and lifted me out of my gloom just as surely as Mustafa seems to sink lower into his. To prevent a soaking from the rain, he has rolled a plastic bag onto his head that comes to a pointy peak and he wanders, head down, looking like a chain-smoking Smurf.

  Taking a path from the ‘old’ Barrier leads to a main road that branches in two directions: one to a checkpoint leading to Israel and the other into Qalqilya, our final destination for this part of the walk, and a city that is almost completely encircled by the Barrier, which here consists of eight-metre high concrete slabs.

  The narrow road into Qalqilya is referred to by most Palestinians and observers as ‘the bottleneck’. A map of the Barrier does give the encompassing route a bottle shape: an odd bottle admittedly; a sample bottle perhaps, or an old seventies bottle of rosé. The road also has an army checkpoint in the middle of it: a small booth, the bottom half of which is metal slates, while the top is Perspex window. As we pass by it, I wonder if a driver being pulled over by the army has ever been tempted to lean out their window and shout into the booth, ‘Er, I’d like two chicken nuggets, large fries, a shake and a Coke.’ Tempted perhaps, but only tempted.

  We walk into town, Mustafa and I both in childish moods: him sulking and me overexcited at the prospect of going home. On the outskirts of the city we move past nurseries full of seedlings, palms and ceramic pots; walk past a petrol station with a pizza concession and bright neon fizzing against the grey sky; we step around the second-hand sofas and chairs laid out under awnings on the pavements, and run a slalom of Formica desks and cupboards.

  As we walk further into town, the furniture shops turn into electrical shops that are full of reconditioned TVs and lines of washing machines; there are even a couple of exercise bikes sitting forlornly in the drizzle.

  In the centre, city life picks up: shops sell goods that come with a receipt and yellow taxis go about their business of braking sharply and hooting. There are clothes shops, sweet shops, music shops, street stalls and in shawarma cafés there are pans of oil bubbling with falafels.

  We are trying to find our last objective and suddenly, to our left, there is a side street where the walls are painted in faded colours and an elongated Palestinian flag hangs across the road, supported on either side by pillars covered in drawings of rhinos, horses and koala bears. Under this arch are the metal gates of the zoo. With one hand I reach out to touch the gates and the first part of our walk is done.

  ‘This is brilliant,’ I say to Phil, so relieved to be here. ‘Good work mate.’ I reach out and quickly hug him.

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘Well done all of us – a team effort and all that,’ I reply, grinning broadly.
/>
  ‘I have a question,’ Mustafa suddenly pipes up, ominously.

  ‘What’s that then?’ asks Phil.

  ‘It is for Mark.’

  ‘OK.’

  He pauses, staring at me, then says, ‘Is there a difference between the animals in this zoo and the life Palestinian people are living with the Wall around them?’

  ‘Well, yes, I think there is,’ I begin. ‘The animals are looked after by their keepers, they are fed regularly and they are not dependent on pass cards to get to work to get that food and …’

  ‘No,’ Mustafa’s voice is curt with emotion. ‘There. Is. No. Difference. Between the lives we lead and the animals’ lives.’ His eyes look hurt and his face tightens, and with sudden passion he shouts, ‘We are trapped in one great prison. Stuck in a cabbage!’

  ‘Cage,’ I correct automatically.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not stuck in a cabbage; you’re stuck in a cage.’

  ‘A cage,’ he says, his anger spent as quickly as it had arisen. He quietly finishes, ‘We are stuck in a cage.’

  ‘I have a question for you,’ I say to Mustafa.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If this is a zoo, does that mean I am just a tourist here?’

  He shrugs, then says, ‘Maybe … maybe.’

  ‘What do you think, Mark?’ asks Phil.

  ‘I think, maybe, too,’ I say slowly and, with a crushing sadness, I enter the zoo.

  I realise then that the reason Mustafa has been in a bad mood for the past couple of days is because Phil and I are going home. We are about to do the one thing he cannot: leave.

  In the zoo, the first sight to greet us is of a young monkey, with an erect penis, gripping the bars of its cage and screeching as a boy pokes at its genitals with a stick. The boy’s father looks on, laughing, throwing chunks of pitta into the cage, while the monkey howls in rage and all-too-apparent excitement.