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

by Mark Thomas

  At the edge of the village the road runs out. A man has kindly brought us to a sheep track and he stands on the slope above it, lifting his head as if expecting rain. The sky is a mass of low, dark clouds hurrying over the grey. The wind is gathering, too, and the grass is bending on the hills; barley that twists and rustles the signs of the coming storm.

  ‘You want to walk to Ni’lin?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes. We should make it.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, let’s just ask if this is possible,’ cautions Phil.

  I turn to reassure him, saying, ‘We won’t go if it looks too difficult.’ But I have not the slightest intention of stopping the walk.

  ‘We have fifty minutes, maybe an hour, before darkness,’ says Phil.

  ‘Maybe less …’ starts the man.

  ‘Roughly speaking …’ I jump in.

  He looks to the sky and sighs. ‘There is path on the top of that hill. Stick to the path and it will take you to Ni’lin.’

  ‘Great. We should make it if we hurry. Yes?’

  No one lifts their eyes, which is all the consent I need.

  ‘Right then, come on. It will be fine if we get a move on.’

  The sheep track broadens to a lane that gently rises to the hills, above which is nothing but dusk and clouds. Glimpsing parts of the Barrier’s fencing and wire, Mohammad issues a cheery warning: ‘We must not get too near the Wall. They are more likely to shoot at night.’ There is little concern in his voice, but he feels he should add, ‘If the army stop us, do not worry about me.’

  ‘I’ll just tell them the truth; that you are our translator.’

  ‘Exactly. There is no problem.’

  It starts to rain as we’re walking through long grass that knots and tugs at out boots. It is slow and heavy drops: sporadic rain that lands on the waterproofs with a muffled clump.

  ‘This way?’

  ‘We will find the path up there … that is what he said.’

  Leaving what is left of the lane, we strike upwards. We quickly find ourselves on trails that are only wide enough for one foot at a time, and weave around thorn bushes and jagged rocks almost on tiptoe. Fifteen minutes later we reach the top but can find no path. There is nothing here but the brow of another rise and the sudden realisation that it is dark; the day finished without us noticing. Not so the rain, which tips into a deluge with such suddenness that it is impossible to ignore. We hurry to a large olive tree, huddling underneath it while the rain hisses down onto the canopy above us.

  ‘Take this,’ says Phil, handing Mohammad a headband with a torch on it.

  Mohammad slips it on and a beam shines from his forehead.

  ‘You look like a coal miner,’ I say.

  Phil slips on a luminous waistcoat.

  ‘I’ve got a torch,’ I say, and produce a small Maglite that possibly came out of a Christmas cracker.

  ‘Right,’ says Phil. ‘I want to be seen and I want to see where I am going. Luckily we have got this night light.’

  He holds up a rectangular halogen lamp that buzzes slightly as he switches it on, illuminating the tree and everything under it in harsh, bright light. ‘OK. Let’s stay together.’

  ‘Yes, let’s take our time and get down safely,’ I say.

  In total silence, Mohammad’s headlight and Phil’s arc-light turn on me for a moment, temporarily blinding me before they turn away with a sense of timing that I can only describe as contemptuous.

  At the field’s edge, thin pathways rise above the mud of the furrows. These are firmer to walk but come to abrupt ends and force us into the sodden soil all too often. The terraces make descending the slopes awkward. The rocks are slippery and the walls are either crumbling or drop dangerously away on the other side. So we crawl over them, lowering ourselves into the mud and onto the rocks below. Old bits of fencing are perilously rotten and leave strands of barbed wire dangling to catch us, but we keep moving slowly on, shouting warnings of holes, ruts, roots and dangling branches, waiting for each other when we separate, turning the lights to obstacles and dangers. Rain flickers like scratches in the beam of the lamps. Steam issues from our mouths and our hands have lost all feeling. But all the while we keep an eye on the two dark shades that have become the horizon.

  As Phil stands on a ridge of terracing, reaching out for my hand while I use a tree stump to haul myself up to him, a sudden cry goes up across the night. We stand stock-still. Slowly I ask, ‘What the fuck was that?’

  Mohammad is standing on the pathway below, his light shining in the direction of the cry.

  Eventually he says, ‘I don’t know.’

  Then the wail goes up again, like a chorus of feral children howling into the night.

  ‘The Wall is not far, so maybe it is soldiers,’ offers Mohammad.

  ‘Soldiers making noises for a laugh?’

  ‘Sounded like kids, could be kids,’ says Phil.

  ‘A pack of kids … No, it’s dogs,’ I say.

  Mohammad hunches his shoulders as the rain rolls from his jacket. ‘It could be,’ he says, and for the first time he sounds worried. When it comes again, the clamouring yell of feral dogs sounds nearer this time.

  ‘We should keep moving,’ says Mohammad.

  Instead, Phil laughs. His hair is ragged and damp, his goatee looks as though it is barely clinging onto his chin. ‘Oh, bollocks. It’s raining, I’m soaked, it’s dark, we don’t know where we are going and we have wild dogs on our arses. What else can go wrong?’

  And with that he slips and suddenly disappears from sight, along with his light.

  All is silent, even the dogs. The shock stuns us, then Mohammad and I both scream, ‘Phil!’

  ‘I’m all right,’ a voice calls out from somewhere below us, ‘I’m fine.’

  On the other side of the ridge, Phil stands rubbing his hands on his knees, the light still intact, blasting a patch of bright light on the ground in front of him.

  ‘I slipped,’ he laughs. ‘I’m OK.’

  And behind him is Ni’lin. The familiar green lights of a mosque shine from the minaret, houses dot the land around it and in the distance cars are made visible by their headlamps following the curving roads.

  ‘Brilliant,’ I gasp. ‘Brilliant! Ten … fifteen minutes’ walk, Phil, then a cup of tea. Brilliant.’ I laugh with him in relief.

  ‘We still have a climb to get down, so let’s be careful,’ he cautions.

  ‘Noooo,’ says Mohammad in the midst of a realisation. ‘This is bad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. Look at the lights! The village will see the lights up here.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ says Phil, holding his lamp in the air so we stand in a cone of light.

  ‘Nooo, the village will think we are settlers or the army … Oh, fuck.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If they think we are settlers they will defend themselves. They might come for us. Oh God. We need to get off the hill very quickly.’

  The only way down is straight down, over the terracing. Clambering over the walls is our only option, so we start looking for lower jumps onto the steps below, searching under the blank glare of the lamps for gaps in the cactus hedgerows and dodging low tree branches. Phil and I move slowly as the starkness of the light robs us of the ability to judge depth and distance.

  ‘Keep together,’ says Phil, as Mohammad jumps from the precipice of stones and mud into the dark, lit only by the headlamp that spills across the ground as he lands.

  ‘I’m going to phone the police,’ Mohammad calls to us. ‘I’ll explain to them we are internationals coming down the mountain and we are friendly.’ He is clearly rattled and stands punching numbers as rain splashes and his goatee drips water onto the keypad of his phone. Phil and I slide over the stone walls on our backsides, looking for rocks on the other side to step onto. Rivulets flow around us and I hear Mohammad’s frustration when he snaps, ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The police
are on answer machine.’

  ‘Stay together,’ shouts Phil. ‘Mohammad, wait a sec.’

  But he is already on his next call, phone fixed to his ear, trudging through mud and over puddles and stones, heading to the next wall. He shouts in Arabic then in English: ‘Internationals. We are internationals.’ Then stands on a ledge of rubble and calls back to us, ‘Shit, man, I told them we are internationals, and to send some police out to meet us and they say they have no one there.’

  ‘Well, someone is coming to meet us.’

  Phil has spotted a set of car headlights driving from the village towards the hill. The beams lollop from side to side as the car bumps on the track below. With no one else here, the car is definitely coming for us, slowly and relentlessly. There is no need for them to hurry as there is nowhere for us to go, and we have lit up the hillside.

  ‘Wave at them,’ says Mohammad, and he starts to call out in Arabic, his arms frantically flapping.

  ‘Let them know we’re friendly,’ calls Phil.

  The car has stopped. Figures emerge from the doors. Phil resolutely holds the lamp high as he moves cautiously over the shale and mud. I hold my tiny beam aloft, peering out from the hillside to see four men and a car, and I am struck by the incongruousness of a lynch mob in a hatchback.

  Standing in mud up to my ankles, on a terrace, up a hill, I am pondering modernity when I notice Mohammad has stopped yelling. He has stopped moving, too. Instead, he is holding his hands up. He is twenty metres ahead of us and on the lower slopes, but he is frozen to the spot. I feel the rain running from my hair behind my ears and watch the men. They are pointing at him. Pointing something at him. It is only when Mohammad shuffles to one side, grins and calls to us, ‘Watch out here, guys,’ that I realise they are pointing torches up the hill to stop him breaking his neck. He is, it transpires, very near a gully and a considerable drop. The ‘lynch mob’ is talking him down the terraces, showing him where the safe pathway lies.

  Once we are all at the car, explanations are carried out. We had been walking over the men’s farmland when they saw our lights on the hillside. Thinking we were thieves coming to steal their equipment, they had set out to deal with us, little realising they would end up giving us a lift.

  ‘Shokran,’ I say, as we squash into the back of the car.

  ‘Shokran,’ adds Phil.

  ‘Mohammad,’ I say, ‘would you please tell them we are really grateful for their help and sorry to cause them any inconvenience making them come out in this weather.’

  ‘Shokran …’ begins Mohammad. The driver listens and stares at us as the windscreen wipers scrape backwards and forwards on the screen in front of him.

  In Ariel on the Israeli side of the Barrier, Phil had accused me of being ‘seduced by the comfort of the settlement’. I had been drinking coffee, eating toast and looking at Snow White when he had said it, so he had at least half a point. On the Israeli side, the roads are smooth, the checkpoints wave you through and soldiers are immeasurably more polite. Life is certainly harder here on the Palestinian side. Everything takes longer, things unravel more quickly, and people do not expect the best outcomes. But as I look at the view of Ni’lin through the smeary, misted window of the car, this is where I want to be more than anywhere else.

  Mohammad turns from speaking to the driver to address Phil and me in the back seat. ‘He said we should be careful. There have been thieves around here and problems with the army, too, so we should start our walk earlier tomorrow morning.’

  Sitting on my lap, Phil nods, then says quietly, ‘Let’s not have another day like this.’

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ I say, but in my mud-covered clothes, tired and wet through, I am not sorry at all. I am delighted.

  chapter 12

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  On paper, the ramble is a simple affair: moving from A to B and following the line of the Barrier. Each morning we start walking from the point we had finished at the night before, and so we go on.

  The exception is Bil’in. We have broken from our route and come to Bil’in a week ahead of schedule, because today is a special day in the village’s life.

  Bil’in has had many famous visitors, from anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu and US president Jimmy Carter. But, with the exception of its reputation, nothing about the village of Bil’in could be described as big. The village square barely has room for all four corners, and the main road through the village is not ‘main’ in any sense; although it is in every sense the ‘only’. If you were to arrive here on a Wednesday or a Thursday, knowing nothing of the place, you’d be forgiven for thinking it sleepy or nondescript. However, come Friday, things change dramatically. Friday is protest day.

  Today is the fifth anniversary of the weekly protests. Bil’in might be small, it might even be a hot, windless suntrap, but today it is packed with protesters. Literally in fact, as flag-waving young Palestinians cover the flat roofs surrounding the square for a view of the speakers. Swarms of journalists move around, poking cameras with improbable lenses into everything and everyone’s way; an Al Jazeera satellite truck broadcasts the event live, and the prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Salaam Fayyad, appears, flanked by men in shades and earpieces with wires running into their collars. Today is a big day in a small village. It is a big day for the Israeli protestors, too, who gather a few metres from the square, waiting for the demonstration after the speeches. New arrivals pour out of taxi buses, cars unload, there’s shouting, waving and general mayhem as comrades and friends are hugged and greeted. The blocked street is a hub of pre-protest activity: leaflets are handed out, suncream applied and students in Che T-shirts pose for camera phones. Anarchists mingle with young Palestinians, leaning against the cemetery wall chatting and smoking. The socialists assemble a banner, those protest props that are essentially tracts written in shouting font. One begins: ‘ONLY AN INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST WORKERS STRUGGLE CAN DISMANTLE THE WALL, CHECKPOINTS, SETTLEMENTS AND END THE OCCUPATION!’

  Socialists, I think. Even the slogans need sub-editing, although the familiarity is cheering. Likewise, it is the similarities to home that draw me to the older peaceniks and liberals. Wherever you are in the world, they will always dress like they have turned up for a spot of gardening. Perhaps this is my constituency: liberals who fancy a walk after lunch.

  A woman called Anat looks to be one of my fellow constituents.

  ‘This is the first time I have been here,’ she says. ‘I was frightened of coming, but my daughter persuaded me.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘Yes, there,’ she says, waving at someone behind me. Turning, I see a young woman with a keffiyeh round her shoulders, clutching a can of Coke and waving back. Phil lifts his stills camera to photograph her, but she shakes her head, covering up the can’s logo with a guilty and cheerful grin.

  ‘So why did you come here?’ I ask, turning back to Anat.

  She stops and fills a pause with a deep breath before sighing, ‘I am ashamed.’ She lets the words hang in the light of the sun, as if resting from their journey. ‘I am an Israeli. All of this is done in my name and it is … shameful.’

  *

  Earlier in the day, while the podium was being assembled in the square, I had spoken to the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee. Mohammad Khatib is a thin man with a quick mind and a lot on it, and is in the midst of organising the public-address system while we chat. The Barrier took sixty per cent of Bil’in’s land; land the settlement on the other side of the Barrier promptly set about building on.

  ‘There was a legal action where you forced the army to reroute the Barrier …’

  ‘Yes, it cancelled 1,500 apartments the settlement wanted to build, but there’s 1,500 already built.’

  The existing apartments are illegal under Israeli planning law and furthermore are built on Palestinian land, but neither fact was enough to get the Israeli courts to remove the settlers and demolish the apartments. Bil’in’s land s
eems lost for ever. However, the villagers’ legal actions did force the authorities to reroute the Barrier, and cancelled the building of an additional 1,500 planned apartments.23

  ‘So how much land did you get back?’

  Mohammad Khatib points a lad with a pile of plastic chairs in the right direction and says, ‘They must give back about 700 dunums.’

  ‘So is it a partial victory?’

  ‘It is good. It gives hope to continue the struggle but it is not enough. We are still a long way from what we want. We want the Wall demolished.’ He breaks off to yell at someone to stop testing the loudspeaker and then indicates I might want to quickly ask another question.

  ‘How important is it to have the Israeli activists with you?’

  ‘The Israelis and the internationals are a main part in our struggle,’ he says, ignoring his phone that has started to ring. ‘This is a Palestinian leadership, it is our agenda and the Israelis are here in solidarity. But when I, as a Palestinian, see an Israeli arrested the same as me, it strengthens my belief in them. And I welcome that solidarity.’ Someone shouts a question at him and he turns to quickly answer, then carries on, ‘When it is just Palestinians on the demonstration, the soldiers have different orders, and they use different weapons. But, importantly, the soldiers behave differently when Israelis and internationals are with us.’

  With an almost inevitable sense of timing volunteers are starting to hang a commemorative banner on the side of a house. It is a stencilled image of a man with his arms open, on a red backdrop. Written in black letters are the words, ‘Goodbye, Bassem’ and underneath, ‘You were a friend to us all’.

  ‘That was Bassem, one of our organisers. He was killed during a demonstration: he was talking to a soldier saying, “Don’t shoot,” and they killed him.’

  When the speeches finish and the last cheer has gone up for the last rousing slogan, the Palestinians move from the square to join the Israelis waiting by the cemetery. The intended march route is a simple one: walk through the village, down a hillside track and up to the agricultural crossing gate at the Barrier. What will occur at this point is uncertain, to me at least, though everyone else seems to know for a fact that when we reach the Barrier the army will tear-gas us all. Mohammad Khatib appears with a surgical mask dangling under his chin, the anarchists have gas masks hanging off their rucksacks, the internationals from the solidarity brigades have scarves and even the rambling liberals have their Palestinian keffiyehs ready to be pulled up over their faces. Everyone has something to breathe through, except me. All I have is my asthma inhaler, and it unlikely the Israeli army will defer military action because someone has a note from their mum excusing them from games.