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

by Mark Thomas

  ‘No, it’s not. They are about war crimes and how Israeli soldiers are committing them.’

  ‘Leafleting soldiers about war crimes is fine.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why not, it’s your walk, too,’ I say, trying to be inclusive and make amends for calling him a ‘babe’ earlier.

  The squad spilling out of the transporter is straight from central casting: an abnormally large soldier unloads riot shields; a couple of ordinary Joes carry helmets stacked like cardboard cups; the officer is tall and dashing; while the corporal is small and yappy. Sauntering towards them, I wave and shout, ‘Hi. How are you? My name is Mark Thomas. I’m writing about the Barrier and was wondering what time the demonstration is due to start?’

  The corporal spots I’m holding a digital sound recorder, which isn’t difficult: it’s silver, has a red ‘recording’ light which is on, and I am holding it in his general direction.

  ‘Look out, he has a recorder!’ With the instincts of a bodyguard he dramatically thrusts himself between his commander and the recorder, almost pushing his boss over at the same time. ‘Is that recording?’ he barks, arms stretched wide.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can’t record!’ he snaps. Then he simultaneously tries to slap the machine from my hand while backing away. Everyone goes quiet and looks at him, even his officer. It is the kind of silent stare that if you listen carefully, sighs the word, ‘Twat’.

  Now would be the perfect moment for Zohar to say, ‘Can I give you a leaflet about war crimes?’ but he keeps them in his rucksack, perhaps sensing that any attempt to hand them out would be met by the corporal leaping into the leaflets’ path.

  ‘Please don’t hit the equipment,’ I say in a tired, dad voice.

  ‘You can’t record!’

  ‘Why not?’

  The officer steps round the corporal, exasperatedly holding up his hands. ‘If you want to protest you must go to the other side.’

  ‘We don’t want to protest, we just want to observe the protest; we are press,’ I say, holding out my press card. The corporal twitches, resisting the urge to jump in front of it.

  ‘If you want to report the demonstration you must go to the other side,’ says the officer. ‘This is a closed military area. You must go.’

  ‘What bit exactly is the closed military area?’ I ask slowly.

  ‘All of it,’ he replies, equally slowly.

  ‘Where does the closed military area end, then?’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘So where can we go?’

  ‘Back.’

  We do not go back; instead, we follow the Barrier across the hills as it moves south, away from the soldiers and the protest. Once we are far enough away and as the clouds blow away to leave a clear sky, we take the chance to share lunch. Earlier we had picked up some snacks from a small settlement ‘corner shop’, the type that stocks everything and smells of soap and bread. As we wandered the aisles I had stopped dead in my tracks by the nectarines.

  ‘Hang on a minute, listen to that.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Phil had gasped in amazement. ‘It isn’t, is it?’

  ‘It bloody is.’

  The piped in-store music playing for the good, religious folk of Modi’in Illit was instantly recognisable: ‘Smoke on the Water!’ exclaimed Phil. ‘Smoke on the bloody Water.’

  The familiar plodding bass line – learnt by any male of my generation who ventured near a guitar as a boy – droned its incongruous way out of the tannoy above the men in homburg hats and women in wigs who were going about their last-minute Friday shop before Shabbat.

  ‘You’ll notice the music played in the shop only has men singing; they will not play music with women singing,’ Zohar had commented.

  ‘But Deep Purple! That’s the real issue. Wow! Nothing exemplifies a fear of the future quite like seventies rock.’

  Zohar had smiled, ‘For the religious community, clinging to the past isn’t a problem.’

  As we eat the oranges and nuts bought under the wailing chorus of ‘Smoke on the water, fire in the sky’, I ask Zohar a question that has been with me all morning. ‘This community is quite insular, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ he says calmly.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It is not quite insular. It is very insular.’

  ‘OK, then, do you think this makes the idea of the Barrier, the separation of Arabs and Jews, easier for them? I mean, they are separate, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Here basically men study; they don’t work.’

  ‘What do they study?’

  ‘The Torah. It is very inward-looking. It is not that they dislike other people. The best way of looking at it is that non-Jews only have seven mitzvahs …’

  ‘Mitzvahs?’

  ‘Duties, obligations to God, tasks. A Jew has hundreds of mitzvahs: 613, in fact. These are simply things they must do. That is what concerns them. They are not much interested in anyone else.’

  ‘Do you know what I find very cool about being an orthodox Jew?’

  Phil and Zohar look at me.

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Phil.

  ‘It is the complete absence of fashion pressure.’ Zohar grins and Phil shakes his head. ‘A man can wake up every day of his life knowing he needs a black suit, white shirt and a hat. That’s it. Brilliant. Every day is Blues Brothers Day. I bet no religious Jewish male has ever said the words, “That is soo last year.” Never.’

  ‘There might be a bit more to the religion than that,’ says Zohar.

  ‘That is not the point. I’m nearly forty-seven, and a dad, and those two things change who I am; everything, from my relationships to my clothes. Old dads in designer T-shirts are cringingly trendy; if the T-shirts have slogans, the dad is doing a sponsored walk; in Fred Perry T-shirts, we still think telling stories about seeing The Clash in ’77 is interesting. Short-sleeve shirts are just expensive paunch-concealers. Long sleeves yell, “City-wanker-on-the-weekend”. Jeans can’t be straight or tight. Baggy makes me older. Cords are tasteless. Slacks sound bad from the off. Trainers take me back to trendy dad. Deck shoes are for yuppies. Flip-flops are just no. Jackets are dull. Leather jackets are for mid-life crises. Overcoats are for funerals.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Exactly. When I was a young man I got up and slung on anything and looked fine, because I was young and scruffy and thought I was hip. Now I wake up and spend half an hour just aiming for neutral. Thirty minutes each morning trying not to look like a twat.’

  ‘What has this got to do with orthodox Judaism?’ says Zohar.

  ‘I envy the consistency of their identity.’

  Phil takes a deep breath and a slug of water from his bottle before he says, ‘Have you ever thought of speaking to someone about this on a professional basis?’

  After lunch we trek on in a burst of sunshine. The pathways are old networks of tracks and easy to follow. Small groups of ibex bound over the slopes ahead and for a short while the walking is good.

  A few miles south and the Barrier’s route crosses a highway and a checkpoint, which looks like a militarised road toll. We have no intention of crossing the checkpoint. We want to cross over the road it sits upon and as we do so we pass a solitary booth in the middle of the traffic, I resist the urge to say, ‘Three for Finding Nemo, please.’

  We attract the attention of the soldier.

  ‘Hey, where are you going?’ he shouts, leaning out of the booth, all crew cut and shades.

  ‘Walking along the fence,’ Zohar calls back.

  ‘Rega!’ he snaps, and makes a gesture of an outstretched hand jerking an imaginary length of string between pressed forefinger and thumb.

  ‘That means wait here,’ says Zohar.

  ‘The word or the gesture?’

  ‘Both.’

  Stepping over to us, the soldier says, ‘Enjoy the protest?’

  ‘We didn’t go,’ Zohar replies.

  The soldier
points at our feet and says, ‘Muddy boots!’ in expectant triumph, as if this not only clinches his argument but means that we will instantly gasp, ‘My God, Holmes, how did you do that?’ Instead, he is met with a casual wave of cynicism, a snort of derision, a shake of the head and a muttered, ‘Did somebody fail profiling class?’

  Still smiling, the soldier says, ‘You want to walk along the Barrier?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Zohar sharply, ‘that is where we are going.’

  ‘You can’t go down there.’

  ‘Well, we are going there,’ Zohar replies, turning his back on the conversation and heading for the road. We confidently follow his lead onto the highway, before dashing, stopping, waving and screaming ‘STOP!’ at the on-coming traffic, with all the dignity of walking road-kill.

  Having crossed the road (remaining on the Israeli side), we stop to examine our options. These are to follow the highway back to where we started this morning, or ignore the soldier and follow the Barrier. The second route is, on paper at least, shorter and nicer, taking us down a narrow strip of land that runs between the Barrier and the Israeli town of Maccabim. Looking over Zohar’s shoulder at the map, I say, ‘The gap between the Barrier and Maccabim is fairly narrow …’

  ‘But we will be able to walk this, I think, and it looks like there is open land at the end. We should be able to do this,’ muses Zohar.

  Climbing the crash barrier, we leave the highway, clamber down an embankment and almost immediately enter a totally different environment from the roaring cars above us. Weeds and plants come up to our chests, the ground quickly becomes a marsh and the marsh a stream. As the rain starts to pour we can see Maccabim beyond a clump of trees, its houses visible through the leaves; the emergence of a small pavement to guide us through the mire would not go amiss. Instead, Phil finds the words, ‘Oh, fuck’ while I find the words, ‘Double bollocky fuck’, and all of us find a yellow sign with the words, ‘DANGER: ELECTRIC FENCE’. We are effectively in a corridor between the coiled barbed wire of the Barrier and some high-voltage chicken wire. This no-man’s land is our only pathway, however, and with that realisation, a lightning bolt cracks dramatically across the dark sky, a thundering boom rolling in moments later. If anyone in Maccabim has a spooky old church organ, I think, now would be an appropriate time to start playing.

  ‘OK, everyone just stay away from the wire and we will be fine,’ says Phil, whose ability to state the obvious is borne of a desire to remain positive in all things, though not in a circuitry sense.

  ‘You’re right,’ I add.

  ‘Just keep on to the field at the end.’

  This weird corridor of land runs downhill, a series of pylons spanning its length. Crammed under these power cables is a slalom course of sodden earth dotted with terraced olive groves, bushes, brambles and large lumps of jagged stone. Terraces come to abrupt ends, but the thickets under them give no indication as to the drop, so our legs either stop suddenly with juddering jolts or fall through space leaving us perilously spatchcocked. For a couple of kilometres we slip and sink, stumble and wade our way across this narrow, waterlogged way.

  ‘Coffee,’ shouts Phil. ‘I’m having hot coffee when we finish.’

  ‘Yes,’ I luxuriate, ‘coffee!’

  ‘Proper Arabic coffee with loads of sugar.’

  ‘From a proper cup, too!’

  Then it starts to hail. Balls of ice pelt our jackets, their minithuds reverberating inside our hoods like peas dropped on a drum. More lightning swipes the air and the hail bounces off our jackets. We hold out our hands to catch it.

  ‘This couldn’t get any more biblical,’ shouts Phil, laughing above the noise of pelting ice.

  ‘It could,’ says Zohar. ‘Frogs next, I think.’

  We shelter under an olive tree until the hail stops, then venture further into the ever-narrowing corridor. The pathway is barely a metre wide now, with the electric fence right next to us, and barbed-wire razor coils stacked in a tangle to our other side. Dark green leaves push through the electric wire, dripping with the day’s downpours, and nettles spring high around us, poised and indifferent. Ahead, though, is the end: the open field and our destination. Except it isn’t.

  Two steps more reveal that the path is entirely wrapped in razor wire, metres from the open land. We are stuck, surrounded by overgrown undergrowth, jagged metal and signs warning us of imminent death. It is a crushing moment.

  ‘We have to go back, then,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ sighs Zohar.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Two or three kilometres back uphill in this,’ rages Phil.

  ‘Unless …’ says Zohar, ‘I seem to remember seeing something …’

  Five minutes later we gaze at a hole in the razor wire. This is what Zohar had seen. The hole is a portal that leads straight onto the Barrier. It is precisely cut, so we would only need to stoop to pass through; indeed, loose strands have been neatly tucked away to one side to avoid catching on anyone, or anything, passing through.

  ‘Who do you think did this?’ I ask, slightly nervously.

  ‘I have no idea,’ says Zohar, ‘but it is here.’

  ‘It is a very neat job,’ says Phil.

  Lying next to the hole is the familiar red sign: MORTAL DANGER: MILITARY ZONE. ANY PERSON WHO PASSES OR DAMAGES THIS FENCE ENDANGERS HIS LIFE.

  ‘I think we should go through,’ says Zohar.

  ‘Onto the Wall?’

  ‘Yes. It will be a lot easier walking there than walking through this. What can happen to us?’

  ‘That,’ I reply, pointing to the sign.

  ‘No,’ he says, dismissively. ‘Nothing will happen. We will get off the Wall when we find a place that’s easier to walk.’

  ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘What? Are you worried about the army?’

  ‘YES!’

  Then Zohar says, ‘Perhaps they will give us a lift …’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. The Israeli army will give us a lift?’

  ‘You don’t know,’ he says calmly.

  ‘That is true, I don’t know. But I do know the Israeli army’s global notoriety is not based on its taxi service.’

  It is also true we had walked on the Barrier in Ariel and got away with it, but in Ariel the army were not tear-gassing Palestinian protestors on a weekly basis.

  ‘Bil’in is just up the road,’ I protest to Zohar. ‘Aren’t they going to be on edge around here?’

  ‘That’s miles away.’

  He stands by the gaping hole in the wire like an attendant, waiting to guide us through. ‘I think we should do it,’ he says, almost daring me.

  I look at Phil, whose eyebrows are raised so high with concern you could backcomb them, then turn back to Zohar and ask him, ‘Is all this about me calling you a babe earlier?’

  ‘It could be.’ He shrugs.

  ‘OK, let’s go through,’ I say.

  Zohar shouts, ‘Fuck it!’ and we lunge through the gap, leaving the Israeli side behind, run down a concrete slope, scrabble up the other side and stand in the middle of the Barrier.

  We are exposed on the road’s broad expanse as it tracks downhill and onto the plain below, and immediately I regret doing this. The confidence we had moments ago has vanished. Even Zohar looks uncomfortable and we walk in silence. It is a muffled kind of quiet, broken only by the sound of our own heartbeats and our wet boots, whose clumps underline our anxiety as our strides beat quick and long. We are slightly delirious with foreboding, a dread born of the knowledge that our actions have set off a chain of events that we are as yet unaware of.

  Perhaps the army won’t see us, I think. Or perhaps we can find another hole in the wire and clamber through. In truth, I have become stupid with fear.

  Quite suddenly, we arrive at an agricultural crossing gate, next to the open fields we had tried to reach. The gates are oddly plain and the barbed wire that rests along the top of the frame has fallen away at one side.

  ‘We could climb over here.’

/>   My words sound strange after so intense a silence.

  ‘Why?’ says Zohar.

  ‘Because we need to get off the Wall, and if we hurry, we might make it without being seen.’

  ‘They will see us.’

  ‘Then they will have seen us already, and it doesn’t matter … Phil? I want to get off the Wall, what about you?’

  ‘Yeah, I want out, so I’m for it.’

  ‘Zohar?’

  ‘I don’t know, but OK.’

  Fear grants me the delusion of agility and with graceless speed I straddle the gate, hoist both legs over and drop to the other side, back into Israel. Zohar lands behind me, then Phil. We smile and nod at each other, then walk along an old tarmac path with increasing relief.

  ‘Well,’ says Zohar after fifty metres or so. ‘I think we have a success. It was a good plan to go on the Wall and it was a good plan to leave it. So, well done to all of us.’

  The thing about the Israeli army is that it really does have impeccable timing. Phil hears the Hummer first. ‘Er, guys …?’ he says, and all of us turn at the whine of the tyres and rumble of the engine.

  The squat armoured vehicle passes through the gate we have just climbed over and revs towards us. As it pulls up, Zohar, waving his arms, walks towards it. Instantly, a soldier holding a rifle leaps out, shouting, ‘Stay where you are!’ It is the small yappy corporal.

  I respond to the four soldiers who now surround us at gunpoint in a way that only the British middle classes can: I bellow the solitary word, ‘Sorry.’ It is uttered in the traditional way, cringingly, and more sung than spoken; as much a sign of embarrassment as an apology.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Phil, ‘we are very sorry.’

  ‘Sorry, for putting you to such trouble.’ I offer my hand to a man holding something that looks like it fires tear gas.

  For good measure Phil says, ‘Sorry!’ again.

  And I do too: ‘Sorry. We’re really sorry.’

  ‘Genuinely.’

  ‘Genuinely sorry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ repeats Phil.

  The soldier with the biggest gun lifts his finger to his lips and hisses, ‘Shhh.’ Phil hunches in contrition and whispers, ‘Sorry.’