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

by Mark Thomas

  Returning via the tunnel to the village side of the highway, Issa takes us to the access road from the village onto Road 443; or it would be an access road, if it were not for large and incredibly heavy concrete cubes placed in a line on the tarmac. Each one is one metre across and there are two lines of nine blocks across the road.

  ‘This once was the main road in and out of the village,’ says Issa.

  The immediate area carries the detritus of no-man’s land: charred remains of a small fire, soot marks against the concrete, empty bottles, blue plastic bags and cigarette butts. The army was not able to line the blocks on the grass verge next to the road, presumably because they could sink or slip in the rain or be dug out, so the verge is well used as a path, judging by the dirt line around it.

  Along with five other villages, Issa, who was then mayor, took legal action in June 2007 against the army’s decision to shut the road to Palestinians, and in 2009 they won: the High Court declared the army should open the road.

  ‘It is a great feeling to win but I knew in advance they would not listen to us,’ says Issa. ‘The soldiers refused to open it.’26

  The peculiar thing about this deserted road is that, for a dead end, it is remarkably alive. As we talk, a car with yellow Israeli plates lurches with alacrity towards us; it looks like it has turned off Road 443 by mistake. It gets halfway up the access road, realises what it has done and stops sharply near the barrier. Ha, I think, well, that’s one Israeli who didn’t know about the Israelis-only rule. The car U-turns with a scrunch and gives one short beep of its horn. Seemingly from nowhere, two Palestinians suddenly dash through a gap on the muddy verge. With casual haste they half walk to the car, glance around, jump in and slam the doors as it revs quickly away, turns onto the highway and is lost in traffic, all in the time it takes for me to blurt out, ‘Whoa, those guys must be busting into Israel!’

  ‘Probably,’ says Issa calmly. ‘Or they will if they don’t get stopped at the checkpoint.’

  ‘Does that happen often?’

  ‘All the time. This has become a kind of unofficial customs checkpoint.’

  With that, two white vans pull up, one on either side of the blocks. Men start to unload kitchen cabinets and cupboards from the village side, stacking them on the blocks, while men from the highway side load them into the other van, that has Israeli plates. Deftly, they move with the same cautious haste as the workers who sped away only moments before.

  Hands in the pockets of his camel-hair coat, Issa moves confidently among the men, chatting to them. ‘He is a carpenter from the village,’ Issa explains. ‘He has done this work for someone in the Ramallah area, but he cannot take the work there himself because the road is sealed. So he has to pay for this man’ – pointing to the Israeli van driver – ‘to deliver it for him.’

  ‘How much does that cost him?’

  ‘I have asked him and he said it doubles his costs, but he has to work and what can he do? So he has to drive here, unload and reload, and if the army comes they will stop him. That is why they hurry.’

  For a closed road, it is an exceptionally busy one. More men lurk near the edge of it, smoking quietly with their eyes on the road. Another car arrives and two of them slip by and drive off. Then a pick-up truck eases itself past the army barrier. With a scramble of spinning wheels it heaves its way onto the Palestinian road and into the village. No sooner than it has gone, than a massive lorry parks up on the highway side with a pneumatic hiss and a metallic squawk. Leaving the engine running, the driver gets out for a cigarette.

  ‘Are you delivering or collecting?’ I ask over the rumble of the ticking-over motor.

  ‘Delivering. Dates.’

  ‘‘What?’

  ‘Dates.’ he mimes eating the fruit.

  ‘Ah. OK, dates. How often do you deliver here?’

  ‘Depends – once a week, twice; sometimes once a month.’

  ‘Do you worry about the police?’

  ‘If they come it’ll be bad for me, of course.’ He shrugs but seems relaxed. It’s business as usual at this informal customs point. A grocer’s van arrives to collect the dates: both vehicles fling their doors open and, with shrill reversing alarms bleeping wildly, back right up to the blocks, the Israeli lorry practically mounts them. Standing on the barrier between the two vehicles, a man starts loading the dates straight onto the back of the Palestinian van. The grocer waits by the cab, and while his son loads the fruit I ask, ‘How is this organised? Who do you organise it with?’

  ‘Simple. I phone the factory where they pack the dates, tell them what I want, give them the time and place, and they send the lorry over.’

  ‘You arrange this with the factory?’ I say, amazed that the Israeli company has organised a drop-off at a road block.

  ‘Yes. They are in Tel Aviv. We are dependent on them. And today they put up the price of dates by six shekels a kilo,’ he says indignantly. ‘Why? Because they can do it and I can do nothing. Last month they put up the price by five shekels. If I complain they say, “Go somewhere else.”’

  With that, he goes to sign for his fruit, finish the paperwork and get his receipt; like he would for a normal transaction. We stay for a further forty minutes watching cars go, people arrive, lorries unload and pack; we even see an army jeep appear, though it veers away onto the highway at the last moment. Eventually, however, I look at my watch and say to Phil, ‘We really should get going.’

  ‘Yes, but what a weird place.’

  ‘OK, let’s go,’ says Mohammad, clapping his hands together.

  ‘We’ve got to get to Jerusalem in two days,’ I say, pulling out the map.

  Phil picks his bag up and says, ‘Couldn’t we just hitch a lift?’

  ‘Here we definitely could,’ says Mohammad. ‘Do you want me to ask?’

  ‘No, we have to walk …’

  ‘… and we have to keep to the schedule,’ says Mohammad. ‘But sometimes things happen. You can’t plan everything.’

  ‘One thing I am going to plan,’ I reply, ‘is that when the next person tells me the Barrier stops suicide bombers, I will tell them how many people I have seen cross into Israel, easily and under the radar.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Mohammad. ‘If you are determined and desperate enough, you can always get across.’

  It occurs to me that suicide bombers might have those qualities.

  Each day, a chance encounter yields another story, which is both exciting and frustrating as we are held hostage by the schedule. I worry we will never complete the ramble with the time lost to offers of coffee and the tales told while drinking it. Equally, I regret the stories we have missed, the tales half heard and my ill-mannered haste in the face of hospitality, dashing in panic to reach the day’s destination. There are too many times when the momentum of the walk leaves these stories echoing in our footfalls.

  From At Tira, we leave the unofficial customs point and the tunnel of waste to catch up with ourselves again. We watch the Barrier tumble over the hills like a roller-coaster, the tarmac and wire riding the bumps in a long, smooth line. One thing is for sure: when this Wall comes down, the Palestinians will have one hell of a skate park on their hands.

  We wander by it into Beitunia, a town nearly named after a flower. In this instance, a miss is as good as a mile. Along the valley, a lake sits calmly, flatly, and long, a vast expanse of floodwater between two shores of houses. Field after field is flooded, along with a handful of blackened trees standing leafless and forlorn in their midst, while patches of dark, thin reeds break the water’s reflection like stubble.

  Across this impromptu lagoon is a single road, raised and somewhat lonely. Mohammad, Phil and I wander across it beneath a sky that is clear and blue after having emptied its contents upon the land. We meander over the path enjoying the eerie sense of space.

  Once we are on the opposite shore, we return to the Barrier. We are walking to a village called Rafat to meet a man called Fadhi, who has experienced the situation
of not being able to cross the Barrier despite his daughter being ill.

  In some ways, this is a story we have half heard on earlier parts of the walk. Back up north, for example, on the first ramble, we heard it when we stayed with the local mayor, in the small village called Anin. His living room had been full of men from the village and I had been sitting next to a charming though frayed-looking and tired man, who had introduced himself as a doctor.

  ‘What happened to your friend in the corner?’ I had nodded to a patient on a makeshift bed.

  ‘He was working very high up on a building and he fell and broke his shoulder.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘He is my cousin.’

  ‘Well, he is lucky to have a doctor for a cousin,’ I had said, smiling. ‘It must be very useful and comforting.’

  He had paused expertly before saying, ‘I am a gynaecologist.’

  ‘Oh,’ I had said, stumped for an instant, but then his warm smile had broken out beneath his moustache, inviting me to laugh. After we had drunk tea, he said, ‘We run clinics here, and they have to be good; the hospitals are far away and if there are complications, sometimes women cannot get across the Wall for hospital.’ He had paused, and then continued: ‘You know, we must be the only place in the world that has three sets of statistics for childbirth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We have figures for home births, hospital births and births at checkpoints.’

  ‘That is astounding,’ I had said with genuine shock, but as the evening had run on, and as our start the next morning was early, I had forgotten, among the plethora of other stories, the doctor’s words. It was only later, when I checked the statistics from the Red Crescent Society, that they had sunk in. Pregnant women needing hospital treatment on the other side of the Barrier are subject to delays, and often prevented from crossing. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, more than sixty women have been forced to give birth at checkpoints, with five women and thirty-nine babies dying as a result.

  We heard another echo of this story, of how the Barrier affects public health, in Jayyus, the village where the children had been rounded up at night. We had walked to the Barrier where the slopes were steep and rocky, and had met an old man called Osman. He lived twenty metres from the familiar wire and military road, his home perched on the hillside.

  ‘You must come and have tea,’ he had said, as he slouched against the wind, his thick, grey hair protruding from under his woollen hat. He was a cracking chap with more smiles than teeth, and hands that were big and worn like tree roots. We had walked down to his hut, which had a corrugated roof covered in rocks to keep it from blowing off, when suddenly soldiers had quickly arrived on the Barrier, metres from us, and shouting, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I live here,’ Osman had shouted back.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘They are having tea with me,’ he said, with a dismissive wave of his gnarled hand. After the soldiers departed, we had stood looking at the hills, and Osman had told us: ‘This land is my land, and on the other side of the Wall. But if I want to go to work on it I need permission and I have to cross through the agricultural crossing gate, which is a long way from here.’ The gates are opened by the army at certain set times: normally, an hour in the morning, shut, and then reopened in the evening. So at certain times and only with permission can Osman use the agricultural crossing gates to work on their own land.

  ‘You know, a few years ago, my father was working on the other side of the Wall. He was eighty-five, and he had permission – he was planting trees and picking olives – and he fell. My older brother saw him; he is metres away but on the other side of the Barrier; what can he do? He can do nothing. My father, he crawled slowly to the gate and asked the soldiers to open it and they refused. They did not open the gate until the official time in the evening. We took him to hospital; he had broken his legs and back.’

  ‘How long was your father waiting before they opened the gate?’

  ‘About three hours.’

  I’d forgotten about this story, too, because an hour later I was interviewing a twelve-year-old about his arrest by the army, checking his story with various accounts from around the village and, two days after that, I was home for Christmas. But walking over the tarmac track that runs across the mass of floodwater at Beitunia, I remember these stories as we go in silence. Having left them behind, these tales have caught up with me as we move across the water to the shore, to the Barrier and then on. Our destination is the village of Rafat, on the outskirts of the city of Ramallah, a city home to politicians, NGOs, aid workers and the West Bank’s metropolitan elite. As we get nearer to Ramallah, you can sense the disposable income level rise with the increase in billboard sites. The Barrier here reverts to a concrete wall, but Rafat is small and far enough from the city to be a quiet place.

  At a typical Palestinian home, a single storey house of not-quite-white stone blocks, Fadhi is waiting for us in a small conservatory attached to its side. The sunlight comes in through the glass and he sits, perched on the sofa, as children hurry to fetch tea. He is a youngish man, a teacher, with glasses and a soft wispy beard.

  ‘So, tell me about your daughter,’ I say.

  ‘Well, when she was born there was a problem,’ he replies in a soft voice.

  ‘Sorry, but could you speak up a little?’

  He mutters slightly flustered, ‘Two weeks after she was born, she was transferred to hospital in Jerusalem. It was very bad; the doctor said she was in a serious condition and she might die. But I was not allowed to see her. They would not let me cross the checkpoint to get to the hospital in Jerusalem.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  His eyes widen and Fadhi shakes his head. ‘l was so worried I couldn’t work, I couldn’t eat. For fifteen days she was in hospital.’

  ‘Did you apply for permission?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Now my daughter is six months old and still has to go to hospital; I have applied five times to the authorities and they have refused each time. I even went for a meeting with Israeli intelligence and still they refused to give permission.’

  ‘She still has to go to hospital …?’

  ‘Once a month, at least.’

  ‘Who takes her?’

  ‘My wife, but she has to get a permit to get through the checkpoint each time.’

  Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Fadhi beckons me to drink. Tea has arrived, brought out by one of his other children, a six-year-old boy who stands straight and silent, holding an oversized tray that is covered in small glasses full of steaming tea. He stands patiently as he has no doubt been told to do so. Like any father of a newborn, Fadhi looks tired but he flashes the child a small smile. His story is a small tale, one of many.

  After tea the urgency of our schedule dictates we leave. Farewells are exchanged and hands shaken, and once again I leave too hastily. Later, I find out that the international NGO Medicin du Monde estimates one-third of the villages in the West Bank do not have open and free access to medical facilities.

  As we return to the Barrier to follow its path into the city, I say to Phil and Mohammad, ‘You know what gets me? That all of this is done in the name of security.’

  ‘Ah, they call it security, yes,’ says Mohammad.

  Well I reckon they are right. Because when you make kids walk through tunnels of human shit and stop a father seeing his sick baby, then I reckon you will probably need that security.

  chapter 16

  SINLESS AND CASTING

  Have you ever wondered what a militarised meat-packing plant might look like? No? Nor me, to be honest, but on the off-chance anyone should ask, point them in the direction of the biggest checkpoint on the West Bank, Qalandiya.

  ‘If you want to get into East Jerusalem at that checkpoint, allow yourself between forty minutes to an hour to cross,’ Palestinian friends had told me, although they could have added, ‘Prepare for the crush, don’t take anything mor
e fragile than a brick, and make sure you floss, out of politeness.’

  The main street from Ramallah leads to the concrete watchtower, splattered with paint and scorch marks, that overlooks the queues of traffic into the checkpoint and the massive shed through which most have to cross by foot. Inside, Palestinians press into numbered pens, each with a single caged turnstile at one end allowing one person through at a time to have their ID checked and belongings scanned.

  I work my way into a pen and hover at the edge of the fray. When the light above the turnstile turns green, a buzzer sounds, and everyone heaves forward. I am instantly pulled into the crush. The light returns to red again and folk reassemble their limbs at the appropriate angles. We are all wedged against each other, pressed into a close proximity that is somewhere between a January sale and sex. I spend much of the next forty minutes looking at a builder’s face. He is taller than I am, with two missing upper incisors, a lot of ear hair and a Real Madrid bobble hat. At one point, the warmth of this squeezed mass makes me sleepy and I rest my head on his chest for a second, before snapping bolt upright, reddening, muttering ‘Sorry’ and checking his fleece for drool. Just near the bars of the caged turnstile the builder and I are forced to separate. I find my torso going in one direction and my legs in another, caught awkwardly between two people and the gate. A young man kindly eases himself out of the way to allow me through, twisting to make room for me and therefore forfeiting his place. It is a moment of civility in the enforced brutishness of the checkpoint. ‘Thank you,’ I say to him in English and Arabic.

  He nods his head politely and says, ‘You are British?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply to his face, barely six inches from my own.