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

by Mark Thomas

  Of course, I did what British people do best in these situations, which is turn bright red and stammer: ‘Well, nice to meet you, anyway, and er … chin up.’

  He was arrested for breaching his parole conditions just after our first walk. One of the conditions is that he cannot leave Israel; another that he cannot have any contact with foreigners. As his girlfriend is Norwegian this is problematic. He was arrested for speaking to her.

  *

  Back in Israel we begin our first day’s route on the Israeli side, yet we remain in the West Bank. The walk is around Alfei Menashe, an illegal Israeli settlement on the Palestinian side of the Green Line but which the Barrier encircles. The ‘fence’ cuts into the West Bank, lassos the settlement and returns to Israel; this will not be the last time on our walk that we see the Barrier twisting into the West Bank for the sake of including a settlement on the Israeli side. If Britain’s colonial map-makers were guilty of overusing the ruler, then Israel can likewise be accused of cartography with spaghetti.

  With a military barrier surrounding Alfei Menashe, the place is inaccessible from the West Bank and so to get there I have to leave Palestine, enter Israel and then re-enter Palestine, or at least a part of it with settlers on. In a car you can tell which side of the Barrier you are on blindfolded, as the lack of swerving and sudden braking indicate and absence of potholes which immediately place you on the Israeli side. I recommend you don't try this experiment, as being blindfolded in a car on the West Bank has an altogether different connotation.

  Driving through Israel, we start to notice the absence of certain familiarities with the West Bank.

  ‘Do you know what we haven’t seen in a while?’

  ‘What?’ says Phil.

  ‘A boy hitting a donkey with a stick.’

  ‘You’re right!’

  Neither had we seen a man standing at the roadside selling coffee from a Thermos flask, nor a single poster of the shahid martyrs.

  In fact, at some points the Barrier itself seems to disappear: driving right next to Tulkarm and Qalqilya in Israel, you would need a keen eye to spot the Barrier in places. Instead of concrete slabs and barbed wire, this side of the Barrier features embankments of municipal shrubbery, like those seen on any British motorway, where saplings and brambles scramble for life as traffic roars past them. The Barrier has been landscaped out of the view. All that remains of it is a thin and continual strip of grey concrete running above the grass, like dull icing on a green cake.

  The walk in Alfei Menashe will be our first in an Israeli settlement. I have been to Israeli communities, kibbutzim and the like, but all of those have been on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Alfei Menashe is not. It is a controversial settlement even for a settlement, and the charge sheet against it makes for quite interesting reading: as the Barrier expands around Alfei Menasche, it squeezes the room left for Qalqilya and turns a once vibrant market city into an enclave, with only one narrow road in and out of the place. Then there are plans to use Alfei Menashe as the starting point to extend the Barrier along a corridor of settlements even further into the West Bank, by some twenty-five kilometres. This is referred to as a ‘finger’ and, rather aptly, two ‘fingers’ are planned, one from Alfei Menashe, called Qedumim, and another to the south, called the Ariel Finger.

  These two ‘fingers’ will effectively take a hundred square kilometres of Palestinian land – almost half of the region’s area – onto the Israeli side of the Barrier,11 while between these ‘fingers’ to the west and the closed military area of the Jordan Valley to the east, Palestinians will be sandwiched into a twenty-kilometre strip of land which, it is hoped, will form part of a ‘viable state’.

  There are two schools of thought on the legality of the Israeli settlements built over the Green Line: Israel believes them to be legal, and the rest of the world does not.

  The Fourth Geneva Convention (to which Israel is a signatory) protects civilians under military occupation. Article 49 states that, ‘The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’

  The United Nations and the International Court of Justice argue that as Israel is the ‘Occupying Power’, the settlers are Israel’s ‘civilian population’ and the ‘territory it occupies’ is the West Bank, therefore they deem Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law, a view held by the entire international community except Israel.

  There are four legal points that Israel develops against this global view.

  Israel argues that the West Bank cannot be ‘occupied’ as they say it wasn’t anybody’s to begin with. It is, therefore, ‘disputed territory’ and hence not covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention. Ergo their behaviour is legal.12

  Israel goes on to argue that even if that isn’t the case, the treaty means forcible transfers of the civilian population and as nobody forced the settlers to move to the West Bank, Israel isn’t in contravention.13

  Even if that isn’t the case, the treaty was only created because of the Second World War, and was only meant to deal with similar circumstances.14 So, unless there is again a global conflict involving a small man with a moustache, then the Convention doesn’t apply.

  And finally, even if that in turn isn’t the case, they advance the legal invocation of ‘bollocks to you’.*

  Whether you are of the official Israeli view or that of the rest of the world, it is hard to see the Israeli settlers as anything but a significant part of the problem. There are 121 illegal settlements on the West Bank15 housing some 304,569 settlers (one in nine people on the West Bank is an Israeli living in illegal settlements). When it’s finished, the Barrier will encircle sixty-nine illegal settlements, bringing eighty-three per cent of the settlers on the West Bank into Israel – a process that is causing enormous hardship for Palestinians. And it’s true the illegality of the situation makes the settlers somewhat … well, er … lawless, an image only reinforced by the media coverage of their forced evacuation from Gaza a couple of years ago. (There, settlers were portrayed as religious zealots defying the rule of law, not dissimilar to American ‘survivalists’, and thus equating them with religious gun-nuts who can’t wait for the Apocalypse and the chance to live off their own urine.) But the closer we get to the settlement of Alfei Menashe, the more aware I become that many Palestinians regard the settlers simply as Yahod – Jews, the race of the enemy, equating military occupiers with an entire religion and people. This is not something I am comfortable with. So I try and think of positive things that can be ascribed to the settlers, warming to the idea of a pioneering spirit of adventure – tough, hardy folk who live off the land and have a love of it, too. There must be plenty to admire in people who can create buildings and communities in uninviting environments. In no time my mind has wandered off into the hinterlands of my imagination and quickly recast the settlers; they are no longer survivalists they are a Jewish version of the Amish, except armed and not frightened of turning on the electricity – except on Shabbat, of course.

  Lost in thought and in the line of hills on the horizon, the settlement arrives sooner than I had expected, and I emerge from these cursory musings in a good frame of mind and more than happy to have my preconceptions demolished.

  The first person we see is a security guard in a plain coat, yarmulke and a machine gun.

  There are some 10,000 folk who live up here. The air is clean and clear and the wind gently plays round the hills. The main road past the council buildings is a street of detached homes, some built onto the hillside in descending levels. There are tall garden walls covered with creeping vines and bright orange flowers, and there are low garden walls offering tempting glimpses of yukka plants on garden lawns, and clematis tendrils twisting in trellises. There are hedges and kumquat bushes, ornaments and wrought-iron chairs.

  The only sign of the frontier spirit is a decorative wagon wheel.

  We follow the paths around the settlement where olives trees grow. There ar
e rows of thyme and horses in paddocks and, in the distance, cranes standing by the newer builds. Eventually, we re-emerge back into the bosom of tarmac and mini-roundabouts as the sun’s light turns a dusky evening hue. It is the hour of children’s final shouts, the last noises of play, of clinking cutlery and garden chairs scraped up to the meal table. Along this road of split-level gardens, swings, car ports and al-fresco dining, are garage doors open to the street. They reveal bicycles and skateboards leant against walls; plastic washing baskets in corners and piles of trainers; lines of shoes and boots scuffed and unlaced; roof racks; tool boxes and power drills; shelves with sticks and string; boxes; brooms, rakes and spades; coats; racquets and bats; jump leads; rods and line; and mowers, lots and lots of mowers: the clutter of suburbia. We are as far from the pioneer spirit as it is possible to be, we are halfway between Torquay and Disney. This is the stuff of Spielberg dreams, just with the picket fences uprooted and electric ones erected in their place. This is what the fuss is about? This? Is this what people have died for? For rose bushes and hedges, for wind chimes and off-road parking?

  The first thing you notice about the mayor of Alfei Menashe is that he looks tough. His shirt is unbuttoned down to his middle showing a lot of white vest, and he doesn’t give a damn. Some might say his tanned face has a lived-in look; I’d say someone probably died in there, too. The second thing you notice is the glass cabinet full of sporting trophies, including a karate black belt with his name on it, which means he is certifiably tough. He has short grey hair, smokes, and is so craggy Ordinance Survey probably do his passport photos. He has been the mayor of Alfei Menashe for twelve years and in that time he has seen the place grow from about 900 homes to 1,900.

  ‘Alfei Menashe was established in 1983,’ he explains, ‘to help people coming out of the security forces; basically to give them an affordable, good quality of life.’

  ‘Affordable?’

  ‘Yes, it was open to other people, too; however, you can see most people are not here for ideology but for a good, affordable quality of life.’

  The ideology to which the mayor refers is the idea of Eretz Israel, The Land of Israel, which refers to the land promised in the Bible to the Jews by God, as his Chosen People. Ultra-orthodox Jews seek land as the fulfilment of this promise. It’s also a great way of claiming land, religious prospecting if you will, it’s a mixture of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Fill your boots!’

  The mayor talks fast and while his voice isn’t exactly gravelly, there are certainly some loose chippings in there. Sitting behind his office desk, he lights a cigarette, grabs a novelty ashtray of a toy duck lying on its back and explains one of the settlement’s main attractions.

  ‘When I speak to the young couples that move here, they say they come here mainly for the schools.’

  Schools. Well, that puts things into perspective, then, doesn’t it? What motivates settlers? Ideology? Religion? Zionism? No, a good Ofsted report. In fact, I have half a mind to spread the word when I get home, sit back and watch the British middle classes swarm in, trilling, ‘It might be illegal, but their SATS results are brilliant.’

  The inhabitants might not be ideological but the mayor certainly is, and the Barrier put him a dilemma. Being a Zionist he believes in a ‘Greater Israel’; that one day Israel will exist from the Mediterranean through to the River Jordan and possibly beyond, so the very idea of a Barrier through this land strikes at the heart of his belief. As he says: ‘The Separation Wall will probably be the border and this could mean giving up the dream of a Greater Israel for ever.’

  With framed photographs of Peres and Netanyahu looking down from the wall, the mayor flicks the ash from a Marlboro Light into the ashtray duck’s stomach and continues: ‘But I had to defend my citizens and make sure this settlement would be on the west side of the fence, on the Israeli side.’

  The mayor got his wish. But the Barrier does not just go around the settlement and return to the Israeli side: it captures Palestinian land and villages in its net, thereby trawling them, too, onto the Israeli side. Technically, Palestinian villages caught in this way remain in the West Bank but on the Israeli side of the Barrier, and thus cut off from the rest of the West Bank.

  The settlement of Alfei Menashe, by its inclusion into the Israeli side of the Barrier, originally pulled five Palestinian villages along with it. One of them is Arab ar Ramadin and it is to this village that I am now heading, with the Israeli human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard.16

  Michael has a small law firm that represents Palestinians, activists and NGOs. The villagers in Arab ar Ramadin are his clients and they have agreed to let me sit in on one of their legal meetings.

  Michael could not be described as flash. His suit is black and off the peg, and he doesn’t so much as wear it as accompany it. Like myself, if he lost a couple of pounds, I doubt he would phone in to report them missing. As he drives through the Tel Aviv traffic, Michael explains the situation in Arab ar Ramadin.

  ‘In every practical sense the villages are cut off from the West Bank, cut off from their communities, their teachers, their doctors, their customers and left in this enclave that was created by the fence. They are not able to keep on the contacts they had before because there is a fence between them and the West Bank. Not able to create new contacts with the state of Israel because they are not allowed to cross into Israeli territory. It is illegal for them to enter Israeli territory. If they do they are outlaws.’ He occasionally breaks from his discourse to change lanes or while concentrating at a junction, but neither cones nor contraflows derail him from his line of thought. ‘The area between the Green Line and the fence is called the Seam Zone. It is a closed military zone and people have a right to enter there or reside there only if they were living there before, and have a permit to keep on living in their homes,’ he says, then checking I have understood adds, ‘Right?’

  ‘So they don’t have to get the permit to cross into the village; they have to get a permit to live there?’

  ‘That is right.’

  ‘Do Israeli settlers have to get a permit? Do they need to get a licence to live in Alfei Menashe?’

  Michael smiles, looks out of the driver’s window and flicks the indicator, but his smile has answered the question before he tells me: ‘The settlers do not have the restrictions of the permit system.’

  Once again, there is one rule for settlers and another for Palestinians – quite literally as it turns out, as the settlement of Alfei Menashe is under Israeli law and the village of Arab ar Ramadin is under military law.

  Turning off the road, we arrive at the village. The abrupt departure from tarmac and entry onto a dirt track has a juddering intensity that leaves my internal organs realigned and my mind ungraciously wondering if Phil’s kidneys would be a match.

  ‘Blimey, this is like NASA training,’ says Phil, holding onto the dashboard. ‘It feels like G-force!’

  ‘There are two types of everything here, including road surface!’ I mutter under my breath.

  Michael does not miss a beat and calmly continues his discourse: ‘Whenever they put down asphalt here, the Israeli civil administration comes and takes it off because the village doesn’t have a building permit for a road.’

  The visual landscape of Arab ar Ramadin lacks the familiar sights of a village; like houses, for example. There are no houses to be seen. There is no road, pavement or kerb either, nor street lights or pylons, and no roundabouts. Instead, the pitted track navigates a line of tin huts basking in the sun. They are either grey or covered in peeling white paint, the front doors are large, the windows few and of glass there is little to be seen. There are no doorbells or letterboxes. The Israeli military have forbidden the construction of permanent homes and even the mosque is a tin hut, a green tin hut admittedly, but a tin hut nonetheless. As well as the refusal to allow homes and roads, the Israel military also forbids an electricity supply, so the entire village uses generators. There is a water supply, but the pipelines come throug
h Alfei Menashe and recently the settlers turned the water supply off. It took a day of legal activity to get it back on.

  I have been here two minutes and learnt one thing: Arab ar Ramadin might be called a village but it is not one – it is a village being bullied into becoming a shanty town.

  At the top of the track is what looks like an actual building. The village council building is essentially a two-up two-down, with a desk at the end of the living room. Sitting in a chair with his three-year-old son standing between his knees is the village’s representative for the legal action, Kesab. He nods a welcome at me as the rest of the village council gather around.

  ‘We have no electricity, we have no roads, our houses are not permanent brick houses and ninety per cent of the shanty houses have a demolition order issued against them.’

  He then moves on to the business in hand and, turning to Michael, says, ‘Things have got worse at the checkpoint: the soldiers are insisting that if you drive a car, all the passengers have to get out 300 metres before the checkpoint and walk the 300 metres, while the driver goes through. The passengers are taken to a security room to be checked. Then they have to walk to the car on the other side.’**

  I scribble notes but frankly don’t understand why this problem has half the significance as the lack of houses, electricity and roads. As if noticing my incomprehension, Kesab adds: ‘These are people who go through the checkpoint every day. They might be elderly people, pregnant women or sick people. Still they have to get out and walk. Yesterday, there was a woman ill with diabetes and high blood pressure. She had to get out and walk. Driving my son back from surgery, he had to get out of the car and walk.’

  None of which is good, but I can tell there is something of greater significance that I am failing to grasp. Having just arrived, the entire situation appears absolutely awful. Trawling through the minute details of the checkpoint doesn’t lessen the impact, but nor does it offer any greater clarity for this state of affairs.