Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  In the parking area beyond the checkpoint we ran into the mayor of Jayyus, who offered us a ride in his pickup truck. As we climbed in, Abdul-Latif said, “Sometimes they keep you in that pen until past closing time, until all the taxis have left.” He pointed to a clump of bushes next to the lot. “Once I had to sleep there, next to those.”

  There was only one more checkpoint to navigate on the way home, but the relatively clear road didn’t improve Abdul-Latif’s mood. We came to an intersection where, he said, the week before, soldiers at a flying checkpoint had collected everyone’s IDs, kept them for more than an hour, and then dropped them in a pile on the road. This prompted a mad scramble that had only amused the soldiers. Without an ID no Palestinian over the age of fifteen can go anywhere.

  ———

  Nearing Jayyus, we passed a giant mound, more than fifty feet high, of what looked like construction debris and other refuse. I’d seen nothing similar in my travels around the West Bank and asked Abdul-Latif about it. He’d almost stopped noticing it, he said: it was actually a garbage dump used by settlers. The citizens of Jayyus had protested for years about the seizure of the land and the use to which it had been put; he himself had become involved in tests of polluted groundwater near it. But what finally got it closed, he said, in May 2003, were complaints about the stench from Al Fai Menashe, a different settlement from the one that created it.

  Abdul-Latif’s mood improved as we passed under one of those metal archways from the forties or fifties, a sort of “Welcome to X” construction at the entrance to town that was, surprisingly, still standing. Other than that, Jayyus had much in common with other West Bank villages: dirt roads, a centuries-old street plan with few right angles, few buildings over two stories tall, shops without windows that open completely onto the street and close with big gates, a chicken here and a goat there, and political graffiti spray-painted on most walls. Abdul-Latif, lugging his briefcase, spoke about the commute with other men on their way home from work as we walked, i.e., about checkpoints and where and for how long they had been stopped. We passed an old woman dressed in black, baking flatbread in a low brick oven.

  Abdul-Latif’s driveway had been recently paved and his two-story house recently built. His three young children, playing outside, ran up to hug him as he approached. Inside he introduced me to his wife, and showed me where I would sleep; getting back to Nablus at this time of day was out of the question. He had the trappings of a happy life. But though pleased to be home and shaking off the day and its frustrations, Abdul-Latif was not happy. After a drink of water he showed me his office in the town hall and then walked me a few yards out to a hillside to show me something else.

  In the foreground were olive trees—orchards of this traditional crop surround many villages in this part of the world. Many are good-sized and laden with hundreds and hundreds of gray-green olives, their branches bent by the weight. It was nearing harvest time; in fact, one family was already picking. They had surrounded one tree and were picking it together, a cloth at their feet to catch any olives that fell. There was a basket nearby with some covered plates of food—this was also going to be a picnic. Abdul-Latif said many of his best memories were about family olive-picking.

  “The harvest is like a festival. My memory is full of these days—I did it maybe twenty years,” he said. His family would build a small wood fire nearby to heat water for tea. “I still remember the look on my father’s face when he saw how the olives were every year. Because that decided how we would live—schools and food and everything.”

  But thinking of olives lately involved a lot of pain. First there was the price, depressed by the loss of Israel as a market since the intifada, the cost of exporting olives from an ever-more-isolated Palestine, and the decreased buying power of Palestinians in a depressed economy.

  And then there was the loss of trees. And that’s what the view spoke to. The olive orchards spread down the hillside and across a burnished plain, toward Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. I could see hundreds of trees, maybe thousands. But at the foot of the slope the sea of trees was rent by a road across the red earth, and a fence.

  This was part of the “separation barrier,” constructed by Israel to stop bombers and also—since it was mainly built east of the 1968 Green Line—to augment its territory and shrink that of the Palestinians. In cities like Jerusalem, it was a high blank wall, but out here in the country it was like this: a fence with razor wire and sensors and then, running alongside it to the west, a smooth new dirt road with a deep ditch on the uphill side to thwart anyone who might try to breach the line with, say, a big truck. What looked like a road shoulder, Abdul-Latif explained, was a soft-dirt zone where soldiers could look for footprints.

  There had been harbingers of the fence construction. Surveyors had placed markers and tape, and spray-painted stones. Soldiers came and showed the mayor where it was going to be, indicating the olive trees that would be destroyed to make room for it. “Some of those trees were six hundred years old,” he told me. “Some old men, they had been tending those trees for sixty years. They came and were crying.”

  The land on the other side had not been officially made part of Israel, he said—though the water rights effectively had. A limited number of Palestinians with traditional ties to the land were still allowed to go to their trees, though now it was difficult: there were only a couple of gates across the road, and the hours of passage were strictly limited. As the sun was about to set we saw an Israeli jeep with two soldiers approach one of the gates, near which some villagers had congregated. Within minutes, two carts drawn by donkeys and laden with olives had also appeared. Slowly they all passed through. Then the soldiers drove away.

  The 202 Paratrooper company’s base sat perched on a rounded hilltop, part of a bevy of rounded hilltops arrayed like beads on a string, some fifty miles southeast of Jayyus, and just off the 60 Road. This was also a contested area. On the sides of some hills were Palestinian villages, and on the tops of other hills were Israeli settlements, illegal under international law. It was easier to tell the villages from the settlements at night, when you could see that their lights were irregularly spaced and of varying brightness and color, with one prominent green light marking the mosque, whereas the lights in the settlements were regularly spaced and consistent in brightness and hue. This was because the settlements had been built subdivision-style, with many identical units.

  The settlers had for years felt most unsafe not in their houses but out on the roads. Part of the 60 Road had been dubbed the “Highway of Death” four years earlier, according to Marc Prowisor, the security chief for the Shilo settlement, which I could see clearly from Omer’s trailer. Many settlers had been shot at on the 60 Road and at least twenty-two had been killed. When a family of four from Shilo was attacked on the road (the parents were killed; the babies somehow survived), the settlers demanded protection from the Israeli army, and got it. Owing to the diligence of soldiers like the ones from 202 Paratrooper, Prowisor said, the road was much safer now.

  I asked Omer how his unit had managed to reduce the number of attacks on the 60 Road. A combination of measures, he said: checkpoints, intelligence, raids on homes, and making the soldiers’ presence known in various ways—by simply driving through villages, or by making use of the talents of his sniper squad. When I asked what, exactly, the snipers might do, he told me this story.

  A month or two before, just after his company had moved into its base (which is known as the 773 Outpost, because it sits 773 meters above sea level), reports came in that stones were being hurled at night from a nearby hill at settlers’ cars traveling on the 60 Road. Omer sent a squad of camouflaged snipers out to investigate, and one night, using special optics, they caught a twenty-year-old Palestinian man from the village of Sinjil in the act. They shot him just below the knee with a high-powered rifle. Oddly enough, Omer was standing by with a military doctor, and five minutes after being shot the man was being treated by the same army that
had just maimed him. An Israeli ambulance took him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where the government paid for his treatment. Part of the man’s leg had to be amputated, but the point was that he was alive, and could serve as a living warning. “Every day now his village will remember what happened,” Omer said.

  I asked Omer whether it had been necessary to shoot the man at all. Couldn’t the soldiers simply have arrested him, or given him a stern warning? Omer found my questions puzzling. From his point of view, he had acted with restraint, because “legally we could have shot him—to kill.” The man’s actions posed a lethal hazard to those riding on the 60 Road; people could have been killed. In fact, as Omer reminded me, in March 2002, not far from where we were standing, a Palestinian sniper had opened fire on a 60 Road checkpoint known as British Police (after those who built it), killing seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians with an ancient rifle. The sniper had never been caught. British Police, which was near a stand of tall pines, was now abandoned, but the incident, like so many others in this part of the world, was far from forgotten.

  At dusk one evening I went out with Omer and two of his men on a patrol of two Arab villages near the base, Sinjil and Jiljilya. Omer drove the Storm, a special armored jeep with bulletproof windows and flatproof tires. The narrow road on which we were driving, much of it dirt, wound its way up a hill and past the simple whitewashed houses of Sinjil, the first village, where a soldier pointed out to me a wall on which a map of Israel and the West Bank had been painted—the whole of it filled in with the green, black, and white stripes of the Palestinian flag. For the soldiers this was unmistakable evidence of the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, and a clear sign that we were in enemy territory.

  None of the soldiers had told me what to expect, so the flying rock took me totally by surprise. With a bang it bounced off the roof of the Storm and skittered across the hood, making me jump. We had left Sinjil, traveled maybe two miles across an arid, vacant hillside, and were just coming into Jiljilya. I looked through the Storm’s thick windows to see where the rock had come from, but nobody was in sight. On either side of the road, however, were the remains of a makeshift barricade that had been constructed by locals; once it had spanned the road, but now it was a ruin of rocks, boxes, chairs, and a television. “I think we won’t go all the way in tonight,” Omer said, turning the car around at the other end of the village.

  Only later did I learn that Omer considered it unsafe to proceed with only one truck. That was the next evening, after I had asked whether we might go back and drive in farther. Though he couldn’t come himself, Omer okayed the trip, sending me out in the Storm with Adam, an experienced driver, and Rooey, a radioman. We were followed by other soldiers in a Humvee driven by a young woman who, like about a quarter of Omer’s troops, was an immigrant from Russia. Speaking Hebrew, the soldiers chatted to one another and to the base on their radios.

  The chatter stopped when the first stone struck the Storm with a bang—once again we were passing the scattered remnants of the barricade in Jiljilya. I jumped, but Adam drove on, smiling ruefully. “Even for us the first one is always a little scary,” he said. “The first one?” I said.

  Then two more stones hit the Storm, while others flew by, barely missing us. This time I saw where they were coming from: a bunch of kids behind a wall. But the soldiers ignored them, and we drove on to a third village, Abwein.

  In Abwein, five minutes later, I heard a loud, shrill whistling for the first time—the signal Palestinians use to communicate that army vehicles are on the way. Another round of stones rained down on us, but our two-vehicle motorcade kept moving, neither speeding up nor slowing down, and Adam’s face was expressionless.

  “Why are we here, exactly?” I asked him.

  “Just to show them we are here,” he said. In other words, I thought to myself, intimidation.

  Soon we reached the end of the road—the army had placed a big earthen mound across it. Such strategically placed road closures (as opposed to checkpoints) are common all over the West Bank; the army uses them to restrict access to roads favored by settlers, and to increase its control over Palestinian districts like this one. We started turning around, which took a long time on the narrow street, especially for the Humvee. “You mean we have to go back the way we came?” I asked. Adam thought this question was funny.

  Numerous rocks pelted the Storm over the next few minutes, and again as we neared the tumbledown barricade in Jiljilya. There was no exit from the road we were on, and the rock throwers knew we’d have to retrace our route. “Is that all they’ve got?” Adam muttered as we rolled slowly through the hail of stones. That was when a Coke bottle filled with engine oil smashed against the windshield and I discovered, from the patches of dark oil on my arm and pants, that the Storm’s seals weren’t perfectly tight. I looked back to see what the Humvee would attract and saw a Molotov cocktail explode right in front of it, drawing a straight line of flame diagonally across the road between us.

  Both vehicles stopped. Adam turned on the windshield wipers of the Storm and cursed when they managed only to smear the oil. “I wish they’d hit us with the cocktail instead,” he said. The Humvee began to turn around, heading back in the direction we’d just come.

  “What are they going to do?” I asked Adam.

  “If they can catch them, they can shoot them in the lower legs,” replied Rooey, the radioman, from the back seat. From the military’s perspective, throwing a Molotov cocktail is aggression of a higher order than throwing stones. Shooting to hit the lower legs is standard practice if the provocation is violent but not likely to be lethal. (There is an Israeli children’s game, like dodgeball, in which the object is to hit your opponent below the knee.) The Humvee disappeared for ten minutes as it rumbled around the back streets of Jiljilya, but then returned in our rearview mirrors; it had failed to catch the throwers.

  Omer’s armored jeep, known as a Storm, back at the base after a bottle filled with motor oil shattered against my door

  Back at the base Omer let his concern show more than usual. “The bottles and the rocks are normal, but the Molotov cocktails—that hasn’t happened before on that road,” he told me. “It says something very serious about them, about how ready they are to attack us. Molotov cocktails really can make a car explode.”

  “But aren’t the armored vehicles immune?” I asked.

  “Well, in theory,” he replied.

  A day later Omer invited me to come along as he and a handful of soldiers set up a middle-of-the-night flying checkpoint along the deserted stretch of road between Sinjil and Jiljilya. It was about two a.m., very dark and very quiet. A few steps from the checkpoint we could look west to the Mediterranean and see the bright lights of Tel Aviv. The scale here was so small.

  There were almost no cars to be seen. But even when there’s “a very low probability of actual contact with terrorist activity,” Omer said, “checking a road in a random manner causes uncertainty, making it practically impossible to say when and where you can sneak out of a village without being checked.” He continued, “Working in various times and places lowers the level of threat faced by our forces.” When the first car finally approached the checkpoint, Omer’s soldiers turned powerful spotlights on it at the last minute and appeared to scare the driver almost to death. The driver told the soldiers that he was a pharmacist returning from a late-night restocking of his shop, and he was very accommodating of their requests to search his trunk, his back seat, and under his hood. Another hour and only two cars later we headed back to the base.

  My waiter in the restaurant in East Jerusalem—the Arab side—was a young man named Sameh who looked like either a weak and skinny Lance Armstrong or else country singer Lyle Lovett with much less hair. Sameh, about thirty, saw me talking to the restaurant’s owner—we had a mutual acquaintance—and soon was telling me he was from Nablus. Oh, I was planning another trip to Nablus, I told him, recalling my recent visit with Abdul-Latif.
He said I should look him up and so I did.

  I bought him dinner at the rooftop restaurant of my hotel, the nicest in town. Only two floors of the multi-story hotel appeared to be in use; the rest were all dark. Sameh came over about seven p.m. We sat at a table next to two middle-aged women who ordered a water pipe; it gurgled softly as we ordered, reminding me of the guttural sounds of spoken Arabic. The night was mild and it should have been a lovely scene up there on the roof garden, but this was Nablus: across the valley we heard occasional gunshots, and could see the flashing lights atop emergency vehicles. Sameh said most of the lights belonged to IDF checkpoints—he would have to pass two of them to get back home that evening. He pointed to a spot in the distance where he lived with his mother, a widow whom he supported with his earnings. Waiting tables at a restaurant like this, he said, the best in Nablus, you might earn 1,200 or 1,500 shekels (US$350–$440) in a good month (or $200 in a more ordinary one); but in Jerusalem, you could earn twice as much, plus tips. That’s why he worked there, even though he was illegal.

  “I don’t understand,” I interrupted. “Why are you illegal? East Jerusalem is the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, right?”

  Yes, he explained, except that Israel had assigned West Bankers a different status from Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Most were not allowed to work in East Jerusalem.

  “So how hard is it for you to get there and back?” I asked. Sameh commuted every couple of weeks.

  “Sometimes not bad—just a few hours. But sometimes very, very hard.” Soldiers would sometimes stop him at particular checkpoints, make him wait for hours, and then turn him back. Occasionally he was tempted to try and walk around, as on the evening when, on his way home but finding the Hawara checkpoint closed, he hiked up Mount Gerizim. The soldiers who caught him beat him up, he said, and held a pistol to his head.