by Mark Thomas
‘No problem,’ says the owner, placing a tray on the table in front of us. ‘Do not worry at all. I understand.’
‘You must know who we’re talking about then,’ says Phil.
‘I hope you don’t,’ I add, ‘and I hope you never do.’
‘Today!’ I pronounce to Phil and the hotel owner over the harp music the following morning. ‘Today I declare war on paper!’
‘What?’
‘Why not, Phil? We’ve had war on drugs …’
‘Which we lost,’ he adds, looking like a true veteran from that particular conflict.
‘… I declare war on trees and all the derivatives thereof. My rucksack is stuffed with human rights reports and I get more every day. So no more documents, no more reports, no more paper.’
‘A war on paper would make the acronym WOP.’
‘What?’
‘WOP. You’ll be fighting WOP.’
‘WOP.’
‘It sounds racist.’
‘OK, I declare a jihad against paper!’
‘That still has its own problems …’
‘OK then. A battle against paper!’
‘And that’s BAP! You have gone from WOP to JAP to BAP.’
‘Look, I just don’t want any more paper. OK?’
‘OK, but does that include maps?’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
Maps are my weak spot. I love them. Phil once innocently suggested we use a TomTom, but only once. A good map is a thing of beauty, something to be gazed upon and stared into for meaning. None of it helps with direction and I still get hopelessly lost but that is not the point; what matters is the time spent dreaming over it. My favourite analysis of orienteering actually occurred on a wet family holiday in Cornwall, when my son said, ‘Dad, you may know where you are going, you may not. But the best map-readers know when their families have had enough.’ It is true that my family has had to endure more than its share of this pastime. When asked why the route of the ramble stuck to walking alongside the Barrier, my wife had replied for me, saying, ‘Because he’s shit at map-reading.’ So I wonder if I am holding it upside down again when my map shows a hole in the Barrier. Right at the back of East Jerusalem; a serious hole too, a gap two kilometres wide, so it’s obviously not foxes. I phone the authorities to report it but they say they are already aware of it. I phone Ray Dolphin and say, ‘The UN map shows a hole in the Wall.’ Fortunately, working for the UN in the West Bank isn’t too demanding so he has some time to explain what is going on. The hole looks to be a connecting point from Jerusalem to a planned extension of the Barrier. On the map, its shape is that of a speech bubble that starts at the gap and inflates deep into the West Bank, gouging out a large chunk of territory and taking it for Israel. Is this another example of the Barrier being used to grab land? I wonder. Or are my map-reading skills oversimplifying things?
On a sunny afternoon, Ray drives me to the break in the Barrier or, as Dr Seuss might call it, the ‘gap in the map’. It is a clear day and from the hillside vantage point the countryside unfurls under a cloudless sky of perfect blues. It is the ideal spot to compare the cartography to the reality.
‘Right,’ says Ray, as he flattens a UN map on the top of a parapet wall. ‘The Barrier started in 2002, but there was no official route for a whole year. Construction started but it was an entire year before the route and plans were published, which is strange.’ Not for Lambeth Council it isn’t, but I take the point. It does seem odd that the Israeli government should employ thousands of people to build a massive military barrier in order to surround the West Bank and when asked to produce a plan of it responds by hissing, ‘Shhhh, it’s a secret!’
Tapping the map in confirmation, Ray says, ‘What we have here is the latest map from June 2006, as approved by the Israeli Parliament. This enormous bubble here wasn’t in the first official routes. This only appeared in 2005.’
‘Three years after they started work on the Wall.’
‘Yes. The proposed route of this bit of the Wall now encircles an enormous amount of land, over fifty square kilometres. This area is larger than the municipal area of Tel Aviv, and 30,000 settlers will effectively be brought into Israel, because this proposed bubble will join the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to Israel.’
Ma’ale Adumim is a city settlement to the east of Jerusalem. Like the other illegal settlements, it will find itself encircled by the proposed Barrier, thus extracting it from deep within the West Bank and placing it on the Israeli side.
‘It’s over there,’ says Ray, turning slightly and pointing to apartment blocks on the horizon. ‘That’s Ma’ale Adumim, over in the hills.’ He points to the map once more, and an area called E1, a controversial development plan to extend from the northeast of Jerusalem, deep into the West Bank to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Once completed, it will connect the two cities into one large urban sprawl extending across the West Bank. Not only will it ensure there is no room for natural growth for Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem; it will also irrevocably cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and break the West Bank in two.
Richard Makepeace, the British Consul General, had explained one of the hazards of this type of expansion when we had walked with him earlier: ‘Every additional settlement that is built, every settlement unit – whether it is in Jerusalem or elsewhere in the Occupied Territories – that is a problem that has to be overcome in reaching a final status deal.’
With its plans for 3,500 housing units, the super settlement of E1 has the potential to be the biggest of those problems and, as such, is opposed by the whole international community. Even George W. Bush, a man not noted for his caution or his love of Arabs, was opposed to it. It takes an exceptional plan for George W. Bush to be the voice of moderation. In fact, there has been so much international pressure and condemnation that the Israelis have been forced to freeze construction. But, as Ray explains, the Barrier provides the perfect solution to this problem: ‘It doesn’t really matter that E1 is on hold at the moment, because once this part of the Wall is complete, E1 can be in-filled at any time.’
I start to notice places across the hills where the foundations for the proposed route look to have been laid already. It will not take much to get the Barrier up once the orders are given.
Ray sighs as he goes on to explain how Palestinians will be totally hemmed in by the Barrier and settlements. ‘And,’ he stresses, ‘this is a political problem because the idea of a two-state solution relies on having a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel … with some kind of capital in East Jerusalem. Clearly it is going to be impossible to have a Palestinian capital if East Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the West Bank.’
The fact that the proposed route is a land grab and brings 30,000 settlers onto the Israeli side is just the start of its purpose. If built, it will cut the West Bank virtually in two and will take East Jerusalem – a critical component to any peace process – off the negotiating table. No wonder the Israeli authorities did not publish its map until they were three years into the building work. It’s a declaration of war.
It is perhaps ironic that in a country without formal or internationally recognised borders that everyone seems to have their own map. It is less surprising that Arieh King has two. One, a piece of photocopied paper, is a planner’s drawing of property boundaries, while the other is a biblical map kept in his heart (and thus less true to scale). He clutches them both as we stand on one side of a valley somewhere just north of the hole in the Barrier. It is three days since we first met God’s estate agent and he has taken us to a site he hopes to see developed. It is, rather chillingly, part of the E1 corridor. We are on the Israeli side, at the top of a hill. Directly behind us is the Barrier, a mere 100 metres or so away. In front of us, on the other side of the valley, lies French Hill, an Israeli settlement between East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. Between the Barrier and the settlement is a valley full of scrub and, I suspect, landf
ill. This land is Arieh’s battlefield in his struggle to turn the Palestinian city of East Jerusalem into a Jewish city.
‘You want to build from the other side of the valley up to here, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘A Jewish neighbourhood?’
‘There is room for some Arabs,’ he says kindly.
‘How many: what percentage?’
‘Eighty–twenty.’
‘Eighty per cent Jewish, twenty per cent Palestinian.’
‘Most of it Jewish and part of it Arab, because Arabs own part of the land.’ Unfolding his piece of paper, Arieh goes through the racial ownership of the land around us: ‘There are more than thirty plots, we have one plot there, one plot here, two plots there … This one is owned by an ultra-orthodox family; they bought it twenty-five years ago as an investment thinking it would by now be a Jewish neighbourhood. This is owned by an Arab …’ Charming as it to sit and sift through the racial dynamics of property ownership, the real intrigue of this site lies to the east: ‘This is the best place to connect Jerusalem to E1 and Ma’ale Adumim,’ he says, pointing towards the Dead Sea and Jordan. ‘This is the only way Jerusalem can be one urban area.’
‘Why is it so important for Jerusalem to become this one urban area?’
Arieh looks at me, wide-eyed: ‘Because we are in a struggle for the future of Jerusalem, and one of the ways to protect Jerusalem is to stop it being divided. One way to do this is to connect one hill to another, one neighbourhood to another neighbourhood. To connect Jerusalem to E1 and to the city of Ma’ale Adumim.’ Then, lowering his voice almost as if he is worried others might hear, he confides, ‘If we will not do that, the other side, the Arabs, will; they are trying to connect the Arab villages.’
The notion that his urban plan will effectively cut the West Bank in two and destroy any peace plan can only be a cause of joy to him. Arieh has no intention of seeing a Palestinian state, as such a thing would be, ‘the end of a Jewish state’. Anyway, peace doesn’t seem to be his bag: first and foremost, the land is his and Palestinians have no right to it.
‘The Bible is your map, isn’t it?’ I ask him.
‘Yes. What is yours?’
‘The one cartographers drew.’
‘No. I believe in what God tells us …’
‘OK, so where are Israel’s borders, then?’
‘The Hiddekel.’ He shrugs.
‘The Euphrates in Iraq; that is Israel’s border?’
‘It is where it should be. This is what God promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’
‘Well, good luck with that.’
‘No, no, God will do it.’
‘Do you seriously envisage a day when Israeli settlements will go all the way from here into Iraq?’
‘Absolutely.’
And a part of me thinks, Go on, do it! Off you go. I’d like to see the Israel Land Fund open an office in Iraq. After a dictatorship, war with Iran, the Gulf war, the US and UK invasion, military occupation, mass privatisation, civil war and sectarian conflict, what Iraq could really do with is a Zionist estate agent. The image of Arieh King driving into Iraq with an Israeli flag flying from his scooter is an appealing one.
‘Tell me,’ I ask, ‘if God promised you all this land and he wants you to have it, why did he put all these Arabs in the way?’
‘It could be to encourage us to do something; could be to wake people up to think about the reason they are here,’ he says, before conceding, ‘I don’t have answers to everything.’ So it would appear that Palestinians are here to remind Zionists to remove them: a Post-it note for their own expulsion. ‘They have a mission that God gave them,’ he says, ‘but I do not know their mission. I know that God gave us a mission and I know that I need to do the most that I can in order to complete this mission.’
In a city where property and planning laws are weapons, Arieh is not only on a mission from God, he is fully armed too.
______
* Arieh doesn’t smoke
chapter 20
THE TRAGIC ROUNDABOUT
I have a confession. I missed the Barrier. Not in the literal sense, as it is hard to escape the nine-metre-high concrete wall that carves its way through neighbourhood after neighbourhood; but I felt stuck in Jerusalem. I missed the walk and most of all I missed the hills with the fleeting glimpses of freedom they promise. Jerusalem was cramped and weird. It was packed with tourists, traders, the devout, the deluded, the armed and variations thereof. The centre is crammed with yuppie shopping malls and Christian coach trips offering a chance to ‘walk in the footsteps of the prophets’ complete with a full-size crucifix with wheels on the bottom to hook over one shoulder and walk the stations of the cross. You can’t hire a crucifix without leaving a deposit, which suggests someone got a little too fond of theirs and took it home (if you ever visit a Jerusalem swingers’ club and find yourself strung up on something with wheels, you’ll know where it came from). So it is great to be away from Jerusalem and out on the Barrier again. It is spring, the grass is bright, the birdsong clear, the sun is up and the boy hitting the donkey with a stick has reappeared.
‘Suncream?’
‘Yeah, I’m done,’ says Phil.
‘Water?’
‘Two bottles.’
Everything feels right today.
‘It’s three days to get south of Bethlehem. We’ve got a full bar of Kendal Mint Cake, half a tube of suncream, it’s light and I’m wearing sunglasses.’
‘Hit it,’ says Phil.
Perhaps one of these three days will be the walk, the perfect walk. The omens are good: an easy walk, through city and then country, and all in good company. Jamal Juma, the coordinator of Stop the Wall, is walking with us today and it’s good to have him on the walk as he has not long been released from jail. His arrest at the end of our first ramble had shaken us and caused international stirrings, as he is a prominent organiser and non-violent campaigner.
Jamal has a tai chi class to get to tonight and he rambles like he is already in the class: with the concentration of a drunk and the coordination of the sober, exactly what you need for tai chi.
‘Did you expect to get arrested?’ I ask.
‘Oh, yes. The Israelis had been targeting non-violent activists for six months: first the young activists in the villages by the Barrier, then the Popular Committee Organisers; then they arrested my colleague at Stop the Wall, and I expected they would come.’
Jamal has an infectious smile, a worn face and ears that are not afraid of coming forward. ‘As soon as Intelligence took me, they said, “Jamal, we have watched you for a while and, look, now your file is this big.”’ He holds up his finger and thumb, three or four inches apart.
‘If your mime is anything to go by, that is a big file.’
‘They said, “We are going to keep you for a long time. Nine years. But if you cooperate you will get four.”’
‘What for?’
‘They said I was in contact with terrorist groups.’
‘Did they name them?’
‘They said Hezbollah. I laughed so hard when they said this, and said, “What would I be doing with them; I am an atheist! How do you make this connection? Check my file, you know I started in politics as a communist.” Then they named everyone! I was seeing Hezbollah. I was seeing ETA. I was even seeing the Zapatistas in Mexico! I said, “Wow! I am really an international terrorist!”’
‘Did they charge you with anything else?’
‘They charged me with incitement, of travelling abroad and threatening the reputation of Israel.’
‘But Israel already has a terrible reputation: how can you threaten it? What could you have done? Say, “Israel is reasonable and pleasant”?’
‘I said, “I am campaigning against the settlements and the Wall. These are illegal and threaten peace and security. So take me to court for this.”’
Jamal was released without charge after twenty-seven days, but he believes that he and other peaceful activists have
been targeted for a specific reason: ‘Our struggle over the past three or four years has been non-violent and has attracted strong international solidarity, like the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.30 We moved the argument. We said, “Israel doesn’t want peace; the state is racist and isolates people from each other, and from their land.” Israel thinks that by attacking the grassroots resistance, it will stop the international solidarity.’
We ramble on the concrete foundations of the Barrier into which the slabs are set. The Barrier flows over the countryside, through villages, onto main roads, up alleys and cutting across people’s back gardens. As it flows so do we, climbing over makeshift fences and waving apologies at the residents. Some gardens grow flowers to the edge of the concrete footings, but they all erect their fences up to the Barrier itself, marking out their land in its shadow, as if to say, ‘Enough! Halas! You have taken enough.’ Our route is a tour of humiliations and attempts to normalise life alongside this most abnormal of structures. In the village of Nazeria, for example, a blue metal door suddenly appears in the Barrier.
‘This is for the kindergarten,’ explains Jamal.
The kindergarten is on the Israeli side, so children only have fifteen minutes each morning to cross here to get to the Lego.
Another section of the Barrier has knitted people’s homes into the very fabric of Barrier: concrete slabs run up to an apartment block, which then becomes the next part of the Barrier. Every single window and opening is covered with grids and grills. Bars are bolted into the brickwork, the roof lined with wire.
‘They forced them to be part of the Wall; to function as part of the military.’ The Barrier moves from concrete slab to home and back again, a patchwork of cement and brick, using homes as military quilting.
This is a fractured and abnormal landscape, where homes become barriers, children play under watchtowers, and parliaments are stillborn: in Abu Dis, the magnificent stone building that was to be the Palestinian parliament sits in the midst of a compound behind locked gates, old newspapers and dust blowing around the empty space. Biblical in size and Arabic in design with its arches and towers, it is a suitable home for law-makers. But the Palestinian state never came. So it sat unfinished, unfurnished and empty until the local university bought the building.
