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

by Mark Thomas

  Over his twenty-five years serving in the Israeli Defence Force, Tirza reached the rank of colonel and was part of technical staff for the famed and failed peace talks with Arafat and Barak. It was his job as the Barrier’s route master that brought him both prominence and notoriety. Today, in a pair of wraparound shades and a black suit, Tirza looks like a salesman trying to look like a secret service man. Despite being ex-army he’s not the classic outdoors type at all, if anything he is the classic indoors type. But he is amiable enough and the charge for today’s tour is $5,000 cheaper than the ex-minister’s.

  I start by asking him, ‘If you’re not working for the government and are not in the army any more, why do you do the tour?’

  ‘Because no one is showing the government’s point of view,’ he explains. ‘There are extremists from the right wing against the Wall who do tours, and then the left wing put the Palestinians’ case, but you cannot hear the government’s viewpoint.’

  Today Danny is both tour guide and driver, and he takes Phil and me through the traffic to a hillside at the edge of the Gilo settlement in East Jerusalem, a settlement built on land illegally annexed by the Israelis. To the UN and the rest of the world Gilo is an illegal settlement. To Danny and the Israeli authorities, it’s a suburb of Jerusalem.

  We get out of the car and he takes up position on a terrace overlooking the valley below. He straightens his suit jacket, tugging at creases, then he leans on the terrace’s white railing. In front of us, on the other side of the Barrier, is Ayda refugee camp in one direction, and Beit Jala in the other.

  ‘I will start with a story. I like stories,’ he says, and he begins factually. He tells of how the Second Intifada was characterised by wave after wave of Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israel with cruel and bloody impact, how the public mood in Israel shifted towards some kind of barrier and, how the then prime minister Sharon procrastinated, fearful that any decision to draw a line would have political fall-out. He emphasises the public frustration at the government who appeared to be standing by while the suicide bombers kept coming. ‘Then, one morning in Gilo,’ he continues, ‘the place we now stand, a suicide bomber crossed the short distance between the refugee camp and here. Each morning, thousands of illegal workers came across to work in Israel, so it was easy for him to cross, get to the main street and get on bus number 31. It was full of children and he blew himself up just in front of the school. Nineteen children were murdered and sixty-two people were wounded.’

  Danny was called to the prime minister’s office that evening, along with the police and other army officers. ‘He shouted at us, “I gave you so much money, I gave you so many policemen – how can something like this happen?” I asked him, “Please come and see with your own eyes.” So the next morning we were here. Thousands of illegal workers were coming from the West Bank to Jerusalem and he saw it for himself. I asked him, “What are your orders? If you don’t let us build something on the ground, we cannot stop it.”’

  Accordig to Tirza, two weeks later, the government took the decision to build a barrier.

  ‘That was the moment when I got the mission to design the exact route of the security fence,’ says Tirza. It is a compelling, moving story, but while there is no shortage of horrific incidents that could have triggered the final decision to build a barrier, the one Danny relates doesn’t appear to have happened. There are two possible attacks that come near to his description but they occurred after April 2002, when the decision to build the Barrier was made. Perhaps he got confused or misremembered, or just rounded off the edges of the facts to fit the tale.

  We drive over to the next location for his tour, near the checkpoint into Bethlehem, and stand on a slip road next to the Barrier. Here the concrete is nine metres high and in the middle of it is an approximately seven-metre-high steel gate, which hangs on large industrial casters and slides open by rolling along an overhanging girder.

  ‘I’ll start with a story …’ says Danny. It transpires that this gate is a special gate. ‘It is opened only three times a year, for the traditional nativity parades that Christians have. There is one day for Catholics, another day for the Orthodox, another day for the Armenians – we let those patriarchs go to Bethlehem in their traditional way.’

  I obviously don’t display enough enthusiasm for the point he is making so Danny says it again: ‘This gate is opened only three times a year and is closed the rest of the time … We are not changing any religious traditions by building this security fence.’ He stands back, smiling, gesturing to the Barrier as if to say, ‘Look at the special Advent calendar door we gave them.’ I realise that he wants to demonstrate how considerate Israel is by showing off one door open for three days in a barrier that will surround an entire population all year round.

  ‘The other story here is the checkpoints. You know that at first we built checkpoints on the main roads.’ He shakes his head. ‘You cannot check people in the street, it’s humiliating.’

  ‘So is the checkpoint designed for dignity?’ I point away from the Christian gate to the massive checkpoint behind me.

  ‘This checkpoint was not only designed for dignity but service. It works very well. It is built so that at rush hour, approximately 3,000 people can cross at this checkpoint in an hour.’

  ‘And how long does it take for people to get through individually?’

  ‘At rush hour, I think you wait in the queue for fifteen minutes, and then it takes five minutes to cross. It’ll take you twenty minutes to cross from one side to the other.’

  When I have crossed checkpoints, it has taken anywhere between forty minutes to an hour and forty minutes, and that is not during the ‘rush hour’. In 2008, there were sixty-one checkpoint closures when no one could cross; shut down completely for either security reasons or Jewish holidays. And I have witnessed the checkpoints at 3 a.m., like the one at Qalqilya, when men arrive just to get a place in the queue for when the checkpoint opens at 5 a.m. I stood in the smoke and smells of the food stalls that have erupted around the checkpoint as hundreds of workers rush for a place in line. Did I really not see these things?

  In the back of Danny Tirza’s car, on the way to the final location for his tour, he reveals that we share an unusual kinship: ‘I have walked the whole route on foot,’ he tells me. It is a strange connection to have with him, that we are both members of a select group who Walk the Wall; he’s the only person I know of who has walked the entire proposed route. The thought softens my attitude to him and I reproach myself. Knowing he’d walked where I’d walked, I wonder why Tirza has not seen what I have seen. Perhaps he’s more concerned with self-justification – he has, after all, had demonstrations outside his home; letters in the press against him; and the Barrier has been ordered to be re-routed four times by the Supreme Court under his ‘watch’.

  Our final journey to the third location is slightly longer, and with time on our hands, I start to ask about the Green Line.

  ‘International condemnation of the Barrier is largely based on the fact that it crosses over the Green Line,’ I say.

  ‘But what is the Green Line? It is not a law, it is not an agreement, it is not a border; it is nothing.’

  Nothing? Not quite. The International Court of Justice finds the Barrier illegal because it crosses the Green Line. The international community (including the British government) finds the settlements illegal because they are over the Green Line. The Green Line demarks where Israel should stop, even if it does not mark where Palestine should begin. The Green Line is not ‘nothing’. Neither is Tirza’s statement that it is. For the Barrier’s cartographer to say the Green Line is nothing goes some way at least to explaining why the Barrier roves over it so readily.

  Tirza glances at me with the distracted exasperation of Dixons’ customer services and explains why it does not matter that the Barrier is over the line: ‘When we have peace, we will build a new border that will be agreed between the sides. A border is something that is agreed. We will
take the fence back to the place where it should be.’ He insists that the Palestinian land captured by the Barrier and placed on the Israeli side remains Palestinian: ‘We are not changing the status of the land. That the fence is built here doesn’t mean that the area is not part of the West Bank.’

  Except that, in practice, it does. I have seen settlements that have been built on the land taken by the Barrier. How can that land remain unchanged when someone else has built a house upon it? All along the West Bank I have seen farmers unable to get to their land because of the Barrier: technically it might currently be their land but its status has changed. After all, if someone takes your newspaper and craps on it, is it still your newspaper when they hand it back?

  Perhaps I should have expected this. The Israeli Supreme Court accused Tirza of misleading the High Court in his testimony and instead designing the line not on security grounds but for land. But even so I am fascinated by how his vision of the Barrier is so radically different from my experience. It is not that he is a fantasist; frankly, he hasn’t the imagination. But as he sits in the driver’s seat in his wrapround shades that are too young for him, he cuts a figure that is not quite of this world.

  We stand under an arbour on a hill for the final part of the tour, overlooking East Jerusalem, a city he tells me belongs to the Jews. While he gets his maps out and before he starts a new story, I say, ‘When I walked the Barrier, I encountered a lot of incidents that very simply took away people’s dignity.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s taking people’s dignity.’ So I ask about At Tira. He remembers the village instantly.

  ‘I built that tunnel under the road,’ he says, referring to the tunnel the schoolchildren have to walk through to get to school. ‘It is very complicated there.’

  ‘But the children share that tunnel with drain water and sewage.’

  ‘No, there is a step there. You have seen it?’ he says, seeming to register for the first time my experiences during the walk.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s like a box and there is a step that, if you walk on it, the water goes down and …’ He appears to try to visualise the tunnel, wanting to remember which side the ledge appears on. He gestures that the sewage will flow one way and then holds out his hand where the step, his step, should be. Placing it in his mind. ‘I tried as hard as I could to get all the details, but this was a very big project … even down to the detail of this step.’ It is a moment of doubt, the only moment of doubt I have seen from him throughout his tour and, like the steel door in the Barrier that is opened only at Christmas, it serves well to highlight the rest of the edifice.

  Tirza gets out his maps and continues, by now condemned by the petty planning of his step. He is seemingly unaware that his effort to alleviate the children’s experience while forcing them to share a tunnel with human shit is nothing but an admission that he knows how wrong it is.

  chapter 23

  THE ROAD TO BEIT YATIR

  When Michael Mankin gets out of the taxi in a quiet, out-of-the-way Palestinian village, the first thing that’s obvious is that he’s taken off his kippah. He looks around, consciously straightens, then unconsciously hunches again. His half-smile turns into a half-tick which lasts about the same time. There’s only one other car in the square and some old men sitting by a shop, but Michael can’t wait to get out of it.

  On the edge of the village, the fields open onto the hills. With a shrug of his shoulders he looks around, then carefully descends the short rocky way onto the track.

  ‘When you look at that,’ I say to him, ‘you can take a deep breath and understand why people call it God’s country.’

  ‘I don’t see it,’ says Michael.

  ‘You don’t see the beauty?’

  ‘I can’t see it.’ Michael is shorter than me and like much of the human race, skinnier, too. He has the stubble beard of an artist, the glasses of an accountant and the green hooded anorak of a careful shopper. ‘How can I explain it …’ he says, in an Americanised accent. ‘Look, even if [as an Israeli] you’ve campaigned for years against the Occupation, I go into that village and I look for … well, what I see is a potential threat and I know that is awful but that is what I see. It is awful but understandable. I am not upset with myself. But it is not a comfortable feeling and that is an understatement.’

  He begins to garble a bit, stopping and starting like a cut-price Woody Allen. It’s tempting to ask if he’d find it easier to talk lying on a couch.

  Michael Mankin was drafted into the Israeli army when he was nineteen, became an officer, served in the Nablus area and left the army at twenty-three. ‘I had a good time in the army, I enjoyed it. There were aspects I didn’t like, like shooting people, but I liked the camaraderie and the outdoors and feeling macho.’

  ‘Did patriotism play a part in you becoming an officer?’

  ‘No, it was probably more because of girls,’ he says, with a nerdy giggle.

  Michael is an activist in Breaking the Silence, the group of veterans from the Israeli army who collect and publish testimonies from soldiers. Each publication is on a theme, like Hebron, the Second Intifada and Operation Cast Lead. The aim is to show the reality of serving in an occupying army and what Israel is asking of its young men and women by conscripting them. The publication of these testimonies has caused considerable shock and consternation in Israel: Operation Cast Lead, for example, was the Israeli assault on Gaza that involved the use of banned white phosphorous on a civilian population. One soldier’s testimony read, ‘You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them,’ and in a publication on Hebron, a soldier spoke of protecting settlers who graffitied Palestinian homes with things like, ‘Arabs Out’ or, ‘Death to the Arabs’ and drew a Star of David, ‘which to me is like a swastika when they draw it like that’.

  A serving soldier comparing the Star of David to a swastika is probably one of many testimonies that led to Israeli legislation being proposed to cut off EU funding to groups like Breaking the Silence.

  Michael might have a slightly nerdy, nervy manner but he has a compelling honesty. As we settle into a pace along the fields, and Michael replaces his kippah, I ask him, ‘What exactly happened when you got out of the taxi back there?’

  ‘I took off my kippah because I don’t want them to identify me with the Occupation or settlers or military. The settlers can be violent here, and I don’t want my identity to make someone afraid of me.’

  ‘But something else happened …’

  ‘Look, you go in a place like that and you immediately make assessments of the situation. You saw there was a car that drove in and parked at the side; there were two guys in their twenties. We’re not talking about kids, we’re not talking about shop owners. Nor the ones who were sitting fifty metres back with their beards; they were fine. The little kids were OK. But the twenty-year-olds, they are potentially dangerous.’

  ‘Is this how the army trains you to assess these situations?’

  ‘Yes, although I am not sure I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t trained. Which is frustrating for me. But on the other hand there is a threat, and this is where it gets complex: it is a fact Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. I have been shot at, I have had stones thrown at me; it is not a pleasant experience. I have had friends who were killed and wounded and so on, as have most Israelis of my generation, and that is all there in the mix. All of this went through my mind the second I got out of the taxi.’

  The Barrier looks half-finished here, just a fence and a ditch, and running in front of it is a white railing of the type you see at racetracks. I quietly rename this place Hebron Downs just as an elderly gentleman trots into view on the back of a donkey. Michael snatches his kippah from his head, stuffs it into his pocket and greets the gentleman in Arabic as he draws near. This is by no means the first time Michael has been back in the West Bank since his time in the army, Breaking the Silence organise tours for everyone from foreign diplomats to Rabb
is for Human Rights, but his reaction here is curious.

  ‘Michael, why do you come out here?’ There is a pause. A very long pause. Even cricket fans would think, ‘This is dragging on.’

  Before us is a long, single track through the middle of a field that seems to go on for miles. ‘I feel comfortable here,’ he sighs. ‘This view of the road here, this landscape, is where I came of age and it is what I am used to.’

  ‘You served in this area?’

  ‘Not here but like here.’

  ‘It’s a familiar emotional map?’ I offer.

  ‘Yes, and because I am more in control of that emotional map, I make better decisions. I can be nice to people.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is how you want to be here, but don’t see how wonderful it all looks.’

  ‘I can’t see it,’ he says, simply. ‘I mean, I can see it but I can’t walk it.’

  ‘I understand our cultures and background are important in this, that I’m standing here as a confused liberal whining, “But look at the view”…’

  ‘Well, actually, it is a terrible view if you look at it. You don’t have anywhere to hide, it is all empty. First of all you notice that guy.’ He points to another old man on a donkey in the distance. ‘The army would say, “What is he doing there? The village is down there! Threat!” Then this is a problematic area because there’s nowhere to hide and that hill looks like a rough climb. Then there’s a wadi here and a wadi there, so where do you want to put your troops? Because “they” are going to want to cross this fence here,’ he says, pointing at the Barrier. ‘“They” want to get into Israel and we need to make sure they don’t, so you need to place your people here and place your people there … so that is what I see. Yes, it is pretty, but it is not what I see.’