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

by Mark Thomas

  Introductions are made, a quiet spot located and Mohammad says, ‘I will ask a question, if you don’t mind, about unemployment …’

  Before he can finish, Mamoon says, ‘Look around you, look how many men are sitting here who should be working. Some are farmers, but many are workers who used to work in Israel before the Wall.’

  ‘What about Jerusalem?’ Mohammad continues. ‘Lots of people used to work there, I think?’

  Mamoon nods with eyes wide: ‘Of course, this village is very close to Jerusalem. Maybe eight hundred men used to work there before the Wall.’

  Given that any Palestinian wanting to work in Israel has to get a permit to cross the checkpoint, I ask, ‘Currently, how many men have permits to work in Jerusalem?’

  ‘Around twenty.’

  ‘Only twenty?’

  ‘Most workers did not get permits. There were a few attempts by people to climb over the fence into Israel, but most of these guys got arrested because there are cameras everywhere …’

  ‘We know.’

  ‘… while there were some who tried to hide in the garbage trucks to smuggle themselves across.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sometimes, they even try to get into Jerusalem using the sewage tunnels. They go underground, from Beit Hanina.’

  ‘They crawl through sewage tunnels!’ I repeat in disbelief.

  Mamoon looks round the room. ‘All of these men have families and they have to earn money. They have to get to Israel any way they can.’

  We sip tea for a moment. Mohammad looks at his watch, aware that time is ticking on, when I ask, ‘Could you arrange for us to talk to some of them?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The men who have tried to cross the Wall, could we speak to some of them?’

  Mohammad looks at me. ‘The schedule?’

  ‘Not right away. It will take time to arrange,’ nods Mamoon.

  ‘Then we can come back later,’ I say, as Mohammad almost imperceptibly shakes his head.

  Later, when the rain has stopped and the evening has a brief hour of sun, we return to meet Mamoon and a dozen men. Our meeting point is a half-decorated rooftop patio littered with plastic seats and paint pots.

  ‘Is everyone OK with talking about crossing into Israel?’ I ask the crowd, and Mohammad translates to this mini-mob of all ages.

  ‘It is fine,’ says Mamoon.

  ‘Well, can I ask who worked in Israel before the Wall?’

  ‘We all did,’ say half a dozen voices.

  ‘And how many of you have permits to cross into Israel for work?’

  They all shake their heads to a man, moaning, laughing, waving their hands and grumbling, ‘None of us.’

  ‘So do you cross into Israel illegally?’

  Eyebrows and voices are raised to answer. ‘Yes, of course,’ shouts one.

  ‘What other choice do we have?’ says another.

  ‘Maybe you could take us in your car next time,’ suggests a voice from the back.

  ‘But how do you cross? Where do you cross?’

  The group answer as a chorus: ‘Beit Iksa.’

  Mamoon explains, ‘Beit Iksa is a place to the east of here where they have not built the Wall.’

  ‘There is a gap,’ someone says.

  ‘There is a valley and trees at Beit Iksa,’ Mamoon continues, ‘and at about 2 a.m., they try to cross using the trees to hide. It is only a few hundred metres into Israel.’

  A man with stubble like black sandpaper and a collarless leather jacket says, ‘The soldiers are there every night, too, trying to catch you. If they catch you, you could get two months in jail and they fine you, too. Maybe 1000 shekels.’

  ‘Sometimes if the soldiers catch someone, they will not bother with court.’ A balding man with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his fleece picks up the tale. ‘They will take him into the trees and break his hands or legs.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, more in shock than questioning mode.

  And the mini-mob nods its collective head and sighs.

  ‘But getting across is just the first part of the problem,’ says Mamoon. ‘Once across you have to get a bus or a taxi, but if the driver thinks you are an Arab they will call the police. Soldiers get on the buses, too, and the driver might tell them, “There is an Arab in seat twenty,” or whatever. Or the driver will flash his headlights at an army jeep and the soldiers will come on and take you.’

  ‘I heard people hide in tankers and garbage trucks to cross; have any of you done that?’

  Nearly everyone laughs with the chuckle of the guilty; even the smokers at the railings turn to smile.

  ‘Yes,’ someone says. ‘And cars, too.’

  ‘Who has crossed in a car?’

  ‘I have,’ says one young man, shaking his head in embarrassment. ‘I was caught in the boot of a car at the checkpoint. My friend was driving and he was released, which is unusual, but they kept me at the checkpoint the whole day. Every time a soldier walked past me they would kick me or slap me. They kept me there until evening and then let me go.’

  ‘Didn’t they jail you or take it to court?’

  ‘No, I was lucky.’

  Time has passed and the men start to break away. It is time to finish.

  ‘Well, thanks for your time …’ I start.

  ‘There is one more thing,’ says Mamoon. ‘Once you have crossed into Israel and got the bus without being caught, you can work all day and when you have finished the employer might say, “I have no money, I am not going to pay you,” and you can do nothing. They will say, “If you do not go, I will call the police.”

  ‘Is this common?’ I ask, sensing the communal response. ‘Yes,’ says the depleted mob.

  The oldest man points to the man with the stubble: ‘He is taking his ex-employer to court to get his money. And that was with a permit!’

  ‘I worked for eleven years,’ explains the man with the stubble, ‘and one day there was a suicide bomb that went off somewhere and I arrive at work and the Israeli employer says, “I don’t want you, I don’t need you; you are fired and I am not going to pay you.”’

  His testimony finishes this strange rooftop meeting, and we say our thanks and leave. The encounter with Mamoon has gripped me, hearing about the risks Palestinians take just to earn a living.

  It has been one of the most compelling days on the walk: unexpected and intriguing. Best of all, Mohammad is gracious enough never to mention my fit of pique and the abandonment of my beloved schedule.

  The next morning Phil chimes at the window like a man restored his sight: ‘Chickens. Sun. Trees, lovely trees. Mosque. More trees. Cloud. Fluffy cloud.’ In layman’s terms, this means the storm has passed but we should expect an overcast and breezy day.

  Better weather is welcome, not least because we are scheduled to walk with Samia, a university lecturer and co-founder of Ramallah’s only group of ramblers – the past few days’ weather has kept everyone else indoors, including her, but today we have agreed to meet under the fabulously named ‘Star and Bucks’ in Ramallah city square, then drive back to yesterday’s finishing point to start the day’s walk.

  ‘How will I recognise you?’ I had asked.

  ‘I will be wearing my walking jacket.’

  A walking jacket in Ramallah is, it turns out, a distinctive item and Samia is easy to spot, particularly as the jacket is accompanied by a woolly hat, walking boots and nothing less than a lightweight aluminium hiking pole.

  ‘Samia.’

  ‘Mark,’ she replies, and I immediately feel a bond of rambling kinship.

  We quickly leave the city and return to the pathways and goat trails of the hills. Samia is a lecturer in Economics in Birzeit University and walking is her passion.

  ‘Do you have a name for the group, like the “Ramallah Ramblers” or something?’

  ‘Nearly,’ she laughs. ‘We are called “Shat-ha”, which means “a walk in the wilderness”.’

  ‘Hiking seems a
rare Palestinian pastime, so what made you start the group?’

  Samia answers with the thoroughness of her profession, ‘Well … One of the reasons is that the space we live in is contracting, due to the building of the settlements, the Wall, the checkpoints, et cetera: you can’t drive for more than twenty-five minutes in the West Bank without hitting a checkpoint. So the space is suffocating. We live in enclaves surrounded by either the Israeli army or the settlements or the Wall. And we thought, one day, that one way of expanding the space is to walk, because when you walk you can walk for hours in the hills and stretch this very suffocating limited space to make it seem bigger. So we’re trying to create the illusion of a more free and open space for ourselves. A way of trying to dodge reality, really, and … Oh, hold on.’

  We have walked onto some boggy ground and she steps to the side, avoiding the small mire before us.

  ‘I think we can cross it,’ I say, attempting to daintily tread through the sinking mud and grass the way only men my age and size can – namely, by failing.

  ‘There. Just a little mud on our boots.’ I say on the other side.

  ‘Ah,’ says Samia. ‘Now the hike is baptised.’

  For all of my fondness of Phil and Mohammad, it is great to be walking with a walker. The experience is just different. She has a similar manner to Fadhi, our guide from the start of the walk back in the Jordan Valley: she is keen to halt a discussion on divestment politics to find wild asparagus growing between cacti, and happy to resume again once we have eaten. But, most of all, she has given thought to the whys and wherefores of rambling.

  ‘Do you ever walk near the Wall?’ I ask.

  ‘Never,’ she replies, immediately. ‘This is the first time I’ve walked by the Wall around here. The purpose of our hikes is to relax and enjoy ourselves. Thus the first criteria is to try to avoid the settlements, settlers, the army, the Wall and the checkpoints. Of course, we are not always successful; we found even when we used the maps we would sometimes run into “outposts” …’

  The best way to describe an outpost is this: all Israeli settlements on the West Bank are illegal under international law, while ‘outposts’ are also illegal under Israeli law, too. When Israeli law says an Israeli settler is acting illegally, you really need to watch out, and so ‘outposts’ are ‘unplanned’ and ‘unapproved’ settlement expansions, and are thus uncharted on maps.

  ‘… and once we walked upon an outpost by mistake and the settlers attacked us, pointed guns at us and brought in the army. They accused us of spying, of taking pictures because we wanted to bomb them. The cameras were confiscated and it was a big mess. So you don’t want a close encounter with settlers or the army because the consequences could be very grave. So, really, we walk to escape.’

  At the mention of escaping, I tell Samia of the stories Mamoon and the workers had told me about trying to cross the Barrier.

  ‘It is something many of us have had to do.’

  ‘Have you crossed the Wall illegally?’ I say, surprised that a lecturer would need to do so.

  Samia nods. ‘I was invited to speak at an American university and had to get a visa from the US embassy in Israel. But there was some security alert and the Israelis were not giving permits to cross the checkpoint. So I paid someone to take me across. There are Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, with Israeli cars and number plates and you pay them a fee and they will drive you across.’

  ‘Didn’t the soldiers stop you at the checkpoint?’

  ‘Not if you look Israeli. So that is what we did: we had to dress up to look Israeli. They hung a Star of David from the rearview mirror, put a copy of an Israeli right-wing newspaper on the dashboard and the woman in the front seat dressed like a young Israeli soldier. So she had on tight jeans and a T-shirt, trainers, and bunched her hair into a ponytail. She was wearing shades and she put her feet up on the dashboard, with her arm leaning out the window, and chewed gum. She looked really arrogant. And when we drove up to the checkpoint, the soldiers just waved us through. They didn’t stop us or ask for our ID. They just waved us through. This is what the soldiers think their fellow Israelis look like.’

  I am not sure we have managed to escape the reality of life under the Occupation and the Barrier today. The arrival of a border patrol jeep, blaring its siren at us, intruded upon our reverie. But the day has been full of good moments: the fun of the four of us sharing a picnic by a natural spring; of wandering on a hillside of scrub and finding a place covered in orchids, and marvelling at their pink and white petals. I am not sure if it is possible to lose oneself in a ‘perfect walk’ here; to experience the feelings of freedom that brings. But, as we cross the rim of a valley on descending pathways, along the fields and crops lush and fresh from the stormy rains, deep green on the red-brown soil, Samia breaks the discussion suddenly with a hushed, urgent hiss of, ‘There!’ as a deer breaks cover, dashing through streaks of sunlight across the terraces. We stand in silence as it disappears at a clip.

  ‘I think I will suggest that the hiking group make an exception and walk here, near the Wall,’ she says.

  chapter 15

  THE TUNNEL OF HUMAN SHIT

  The next morning, as Phil scratches his goatee with morning rigour and recites his list of seen objects at the window, I randomly swear at misplaced equipment. The past two days have been damp and sweaty enough for me to grumble, ‘I will be so pissed off if I am the only rambler to go to the Middle East and get trench foot.’ Added to this, the pile of dirty washing in the corner of the guest house room has started to attract fruit flies and I cover yesterday’s T-shirt with talcum powder in the belief that while it won’t mask the smell, it might sow the seeds of doubt in the nostrils of the inhaler.

  It’s the fourteenth day of the second walk and our route starts where we had left it the night before, in a village north-west of Jerusalem called At Tira. At the edge of the village is Road 443, a four-lane highway that links Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by passing through the West Bank. Although it is built on confiscated Palestinian land, this road is not for Palestinians. It is for Israelis and those with Jerusalem IDs only: a club-class settler road not for the likes of the native hoi polloi. It has been shut to Palestinians since 2000 when a spate of attacks on the road left six Israelis dead. To ensure that Palestinians didn’t sneak back onto the road to enjoy the tarmac privileges and rights reserved for Israeli drivers, the army blocked all access roads from any Palestinian villages that led to Road 443. This effectively sealed in the communities – all that the Palestinians now have to connect with the rest of their homeland is an old, single-lane hill road, which means that what was a twelve-minute drive into Ramallah now takes an hour and a half; longer if the weather is bad.24

  Phil, Mohammad and I stand looking down at Road 443 with Issa, the ex-mayor of At Tira. He has recently stood down but was one of the group of local village mayors who led the legal battle against the Israeli-only road.

  On the other side of the highway is the village’s boys’ school. For the Israeli architects, the school presented a major problem: how to allow the Barrier to surround the neighbouring Israeli settlement of Beit Horon, maintain an Israeli-only road, and still allow the Palestinian children access to their school. How could the children cross the road if they were not allowed to set foot upon it? How could they cross a barrier they weren’t allowed within 150 metres of? The Israelis very kindly built them a tunnel.

  Issa, all straight back and hands clasped in front, regards the kids meandering to school with a patrician eye. Some run and play, a couple share crisps from a bag, another is reading last night’s homework; all of them wrapped up against the morning chill. The kids walk from the village to the hillside, scramble down a dirt track, walk along the edge of Road 443 and take a stone stairway down to the tunnel that leads under the road.

  ‘We should walk with the children,’ says Phil.

  ‘You want to go to the school? That is not a problem; I will arrange this,’ Issa says, then calls to two youn
gsters who happen to be walking past: ‘I want you to take these with you to the school; don’t worry, they are friends. Show them the tunnel. You are in charge. OK?’

  The kids are self-conscious with concerned faces, red fleeces and light blue rucksacks donated by UNICEF. One looks up as if he wants to say, ‘I’m only nine.’ The other wants to say, ‘I can’t do double bows in my shoelaces yet.’ But they both nod.

  When Mohammad asks, ‘Is this the way you always come to school?’ they look up at him, wide-eyed and alert, and say, ‘Yes,’ with quiet voices.

  Along with a growing crowd of children, they lead us along the dirt track at the side of the road, which is busy with on-coming rush-hour traffic, and down the stone stairs to the tunnel under Road 443. It is not a grand affair this tunnel, nor a friendly one. There is no consideration that children walk through here on their way to school: there are no tiles, murals or even lights; it is merely a concrete hole with less finesse than a council inspection point. It is small and dark and I can touch the roof with my hand easily, and both sides if I stretch out my arms. The tunnel is divided in half by two narrow channels – the one raised slightly above the other is where the children walk. No one walks in the lower channel.

  ‘What happens there?’ Mohammad asks, pointing at the lower channel.

  A child with a black woollen hat answers, ‘Water. This is for drainage. But when it rains sewage comes down, too; sewage from the settlement.’

  ‘The sewage just runs down here,’ adds his friend, who is wearing a baseball cap.

  ‘Sewage,’ I find myself repeating out loud.

  ‘It smells really bad,’ says Woolly Hat.

  ‘In the summer it stinks,’ says Baseball Cap.

  We walk through and the cars above us drive on. Emerging onto a narrow path, it is a matter of metres to the school itself, and we are met by teachers who had seen us coming down the hillside. Introductions are made and tea is drunk, while the headmaster explains that the Israeli army has placed a demolition order on the school toilets.25 Apparently, the Israeli authorities are happy for the kids to walk in a tunnel next to human shit but not to let them have a toilet.