Ted Conover

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

  I told him about the Mexicans who sneak into the United States, seeking better-paying work, but noted the different quality of that migration—it involved an international border and raised questions about national sovereignty. Here migration looked different: the soldiers weren’t keeping West Bankers out of Israel, they were merely keeping Palestinians from moving around too much. It reminded me of the way officers run a prison like Sing Sing: by dividing it up into discrete pieces, and forbidding or restricting movement between them. The twin goals of such a policy, I believe, are punishment (not giving prisoners too much freedom) and self-preservation (inmates who can move around can mass and organize, while inmates who are immobilized cannot). Self-preservation is particularly relevant where you are outnumbered: the only way you can run a prison where inmates outnumber guards fifteen or twenty to one is with plenty of locks, gates, and fences.

  I asked Sameh if I could go with him when he returned to Jerusalem the next day. At first he laughed, but then he saw I was serious. “We might get dirty, and you might have to wait a long time,” he said. I told him I didn’t mind. He used my cell phone to call a friend, who would accompany me by taxi to Sameh’s mother’s house. We would leave from there around eight a.m.

  The house was about two hundred yards from the Beit Iba checkpoint, where Abdul-Latif had been so humiliated—but we’d be backtracking and heading south, so I wouldn’t have to go through again. Sameh’s mother, in a dusty black dress, took one look at me and disappeared behind a piece of fabric that hung over the doorway to the kitchen. Sameh went back there a few minutes later and brought back tea—the first and last time I was served tea by a man in Palestine. There was a large photograph of his deceased father on the wall, and one of his nephew, who was in an Israeli jail. He had done two years of a four-and-a-half-year sentence. Sameh ignored my question about the nature of the crime, but told me the nephew had liver and hearing problems and had recently lost an eye: “They wouldn’t take him to the hospital, after he got punched. They are trying to kill him slowly.” On the table was a Bible—why did I keep assuming all Palestinians were Muslim?—and a thin black looseleaf notebook. Sameh opened it to two typewritten pages in plastic sleeves. These pages, in English, were translations of two adjoining pages, in Arabic. Sameh had written those originally, and an American journalist he had met two years before—indeed, he said he had dated her—had translated them and put them on the Web. They were an essay titled “Palestine in the Storm.”

  Israel’s occupation has created an unprecedented storm upon Palestinians. The worst storms are checkpoints, placed between each city, village, and road…. Every city and village has become a prison and a closed military area for anyone who wants to enter or exit these places. … If they try to return home, to work, to a hospital for treatment, there is always someone waiting on the edge of every city and village…. They humiliate and beat and kill.

  He hadn’t gotten married, he told me, because he was not yet well enough off. But he had been fixing up his room in preparation for the day. We climbed up an outside staircase and he showed me: it was lovely, with a domed stucco ceiling, and white and blue floor tiles in geometric patterns. He had done the masonry work himself, he said.

  The cab was waiting and we got in. We passed through three checkpoints on our way back to the south side of Nablus, two of them temporary, set up next to army tanks. None delayed us more than fifteen minutes. On the southern edge of Nablus was Balata, the refugee camp that Omer had told me about raiding. Sure enough, idling on the road alongside the camp was an IDF Storm, the same model as Omer’s. Tank tracks corrugated the debris-strewn pavement nearby. How did all these rocks find their way onto the road here? I thought to myself. The answer arrived seconds later when our driver swerved to avoid a group of children who approached the Storm and heaved stones at it.

  Ahead loomed Hawara, the large terminal checkpoint where Omer’s troops had intercepted the bombs. I paid the taxi driver and Sameh and I got in line, which was about forty-five minutes long. As we inched toward the front, he showed me his ID card, a special one called a magnesium card, he said, that could be read by a machine and showed he was in the good graces of the army, didn’t cause any trouble. Even so, he admitted, he was pulled out of the line about four times out of five here, because technically he wasn’t permitted to travel in this direction.

  We stood. We shuffled. Sameh reported what others around him were saying—that, with the assassination of a leader of Hamas in Gaza the day before, the soldiers were skittish today, worried about retaliation.

  I made it through after a mere five-minute conversation with a soldier behind a Plexiglas window. Sameh, I could see, got shunted off to an open holding pen, where he sat along with a dozen other men about his age. There was no place, really, for me to wait. I perched for the better part of an hour on a concrete traffic divider until I got too hot in the sun, and went to buy a soda near the cart of a vendor who had an umbrella.

  As I drank, a white van pulled up and a number of Israeli women climbed out, clipboards in hand, cameras around their necks. These were not settler women, in the characteristic long skirts and head wraps, and it took me a moment to figure out what they were. Then I saw the logo on the van door: Machsom Watch. Machsom means checkpoint, and this was the watchdog group of women, most of them from Jerusalem, who went to observe their country’s soldiers in action at checkpoints, and try, by their presence, to prevent abuses. It was an impressive initiative, but the addition of middle-class women with concerned expressions and clipboards to the harsh tableau of the checkpoint made it all seem extra surreal.

  I sat and sat and sat. I stood and walked around and sat again and wondered how many security personnel were watching me and waiting to see what I was doing there. I had been at this checkpoint with Omer just a few days before; that made me feel a little less alienated, but just a little. Then I noticed a soldier I had shared a few words with, an immigrant to Israel from India. He was bright-eyed, one of the few soldiers who did not look tired, and I went up and reintroduced myself. We chatted and I made an appeal for Sameh: I knew him a little and he seemed like a good guy, I said. Was there any chance his case might be expedited?

  Fifteen minutes later, Sameh was free, and we were looking for one of the stalwart Mercedes station wagon group taxis, which lend the West Bank an air of tattered elegance. “What did you tell them?” he asked me.

  “I just said I thought you were okay.”

  Our cab headed south, but within minutes our driver got a signal from another driver coming from that direction, and turned around: there was a two-hour delay ahead at the Tapuah Junction checkpoint, Sameh explained, so we’d detour. He continued, in a sort of triumphal tone that I heard several times among West Bank Palestinians: “If the next checkpoint is closed, we’ll find a way around that, too. The Israelis want us to stop, but we’ll keep going!” So we set off on a good but long and winding road to the east. The driver said the fare would rise from 13 to 17 shekels per passenger (roughly US$3.25 to $4.25), but nobody complained.

  We passed through many villages, and on and off paved roads. We turned left on 505 and right on 458. Shortly, we were stopped by special police in a blue jeep. One of them made an attempt at humor: seeing how hot it was in the crowded cab, waiting in the sun, he said to me, “Tell the driver to turn on the AC.” As he knew, there was none in the old car. So perhaps he was more cruel than funny. Later, when he returned my ID, he said, “Have fun in Qalandia.”

  Our plan, however, was to bypass Qalandia. It functioned as an international border; without the right ID, Sameh would never get past there. So, just before, we changed to a minivan cab and headed to Anata, a suburb on the northeast side of East Jerusalem. Though he wasn’t allowed to be there, no wall or fence—yet—prevented a West Banker from entering the city on this side.

  The cab continued south. To our right, we could see cranes lifting into place large slabs of concrete that were new sections of The Wall. When compl
ete, it would separate East Jerusalem from West Jerusalem, continuing the same work accomplished by the fence near Jayyus. Armed guards supervised the constructions, and I asked Sameh why—were the builders of the wall subject to attack? “Not the workers, really, but the project—their equipment, their machines. No, the workers—the workers are Palestinian.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, of course they are Palestinian. We do all the work. We even build the settlements!” He pointed to a billboard across the highway, announcing a future Israeli settlement in the way an American builder might advertise a new subdivision: the sign pictured a wide street, lawns, pretty new houses. I was struck by the parallel with American prison history: the first cell block at Sing Sing, where I worked, was built entirely by inmate labor, prisoners brought down from New York’s second prison, Auburn, to build Sing Sing, its third. The building in which, of course, they would be locked up.

  We passed a Bedouin encampment on the left; centuries of humankind seemed to compress here. We passed the Sharfat refugee camp on the right and then we got out. Walking quickly, I followed Sameh across a street on the right and onto another that led up a hill. Sameh, carrying his two heavy plastic shopping bags, threaded his way between houses. We reached the top and I followed him down the other side. There, as we came down the dirt hillside to a boulevard-like street, we saw a large group of men crouching behind a cinderblock wall, occasionally peering out onto the street. From behind, especially given the arid climate, it looked for all the world like a scene of Mexicans slipping through a U.S. border town.

  “Who are they afraid of?” I asked.

  “Police!” said Sameh. “It’s East Jerusalem, but they look for West Bankers, especially near the big roads.” He pointed to a man across the street with a walkie-talkie. “A cop?” I asked. Sameh shook his head. “Arab Israeli. He’s helping those guys with a ride.” We waited behind a wall fifty feet or so behind the men in question. In a few minutes a van pulled into the parking lot of the strip-mall store at street level; on a signal, the men all rose and jogged down the hill into the van. It drove away and the man with the walkie-talkie disappeared.

  “So who’s coming for us?” I joked. Sameh asked to use my cell phone to try a driver he knew, but the man didn’t answer. A Jerusalem taxi driver caught carrying a West Banker was liable for a 15,000-shekel fine and three months in jail, he said. Still, he thought, we’d be able to get a ride. “Okay, then. Ready?” he asked.

  “Here’s goes nothin’!” I said.

  We walked down to the street and stood there, waiting to hail somebody, watching another group of illegals closer to the larger intersection a short distance away. It was a fraught fifteen-minute wait until a driver stopped for us—he must have known, but he stopped, anyway. We passed under the highway to French Hill.

  I had told Sameh, more than once, that I wanted to go all the way to where he lived in East Jerusalem. But to my surprise, the driver pulled up in front of the Palestinian-owned hotel where Sameh worked and where we’d met. “No, no, no,” I said to Sameh, “I’m going to where you live.” He was clearly reluctant. My journey wasn’t about me, I said, it was about him, and it wouldn’t be complete until I saw him get home. He thought about this briefly and then gave the driver new directions.

  We arrived at a multi-story office/hotel building that looked mostly closed; like my hotel in Nablus, parts were undergoing renovation or simply were not used. Sameh paid the driver and we walked into the empty but air-conditioned lobby.

  Sameh chatted in Arabic with a couple of other West Bankers sitting on a couch, probably explaining me to them. Then he smiled and said, “So now you have seen it. My home in Jerusalem.” He reached out to shake my hand goodbye.

  I took him aside. “Sameh, this is a lobby. You don’t live here. Where is your room?” This time he looked as if he was expecting the question I had just asked. For some reason he consulted with the men he’d been chatting to. Then he said to follow him.

  Instead of taking an elevator, we climbed a staircase to about the sixth floor. The stairwell was barely lit, and opened onto a hallway that was completely dark, though there were people around, other residents. Light poured into the corridor as different men peered out of their rooms and greeted Sameh, staring at me. He opened the door to his own room. It had two unmade single beds and he sat down on one of them. “Here,” he said, gesturing at the space, defeated. There wasn’t much to it—only some clothing in small piles, a couple of books, a flashlight, and maybe fifty empty liter bottles of water. He explained: The floor had no water.

  “And no electricity?” I ventured.

  “Well, there is, but we don’t want to use it.” Then he confessed the whole story: the workers lodged here illegally. The Palestinian owners knew they were here, but outsiders couldn’t, so no lights could shine through the windows at night. One aspect of the occupation is strict Israeli control over new construction; building permits are extremely hard for Palestinians to obtain. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the government’s apparent goal is to prevent Palestinians from expanding or even refurbishing space they own in Jerusalem. This use of the building wasn’t, well, kosher. “But it’s very inexpensive,” he said.

  I asked Sameh about his chances of getting a better ID card, one that would let him work in East Jerusalem legally. “It’s very difficult,” he said. “You have to help the army.” What did he mean by that?

  Sameh in his secret room in East Jerusalem, after we traveled from his mother’s house in Nablus.

  “You ask them and they say, ‘Well, what can you do for us?’ And they mean, Who can you tell us about that is planning an attack? Who can you tell us about that is smuggling contraband? Who do you know in Hamas? That is how you get your card.”

  I had not known—and yet it was very familiar. I taught Sameh two words in Engish he didn’t know: “snitch” and “rat.” It was how things run in a prison, how we did it at Sing Sing: you want some help, you give some help. In other words, you give somebody up. And then, God help you.

  At a lecture I gave at a college in rural Pennsylvania, students in the audience asked what I was working on. A book about roads, I said. Which ones? they asked. A road in Peru, I said, a road in the Himalayas, one in the West Bank. … A student’s hand shot up. “Why the West Bank?” he asked. “To understand how roads work in a military occupation,” I replied. At a reception afterward the student who had asked about the West Bank came up and we chatted. His name was Ahmed al-Khatib. “I live in Hebron,” he told me. “My family is there, though my father studied in the United States. You should go talk to them when you’re there.”

  I liked Ahmed. He was far from the Mediterranean, practically the only Palestinian in freezing rural Pennsylvania, because the college had given him a lot of financial aid. His goal was a Ph.D. in biology (his father’s Ph.D. was in chemistry). He seemed politically moderate, and had done a lot with Seeds of Peace, an organization that involved Israeli and Palestinian teens in joint activities in the hope of fostering trickle-up peace and understanding.

  So I did seek out his family. Ahmed, the oldest of four brothers, first put me in touch with the second brother, Khaldoon, an intense, skinny, handsome, hyper, and somewhat haunted young man who was a third-year psychology major at Birzeit University in Ramallah. He had also worked as a freelance graphic artist, and had worked on network servers for a company that did internet support. Khaldoon gave me a fast walking tour of Ramallah that was very much road-related. Outside the city’s former police station (it had been blown up by Israeli missiles after Israeli spies were taken into custody and killed), he showed me the tracks in the pavement left by Israeli tanks. A couple of blocks away at Al Manara, the central square—where four statues of lions, each representing an old Ramallah clan, were arrayed around a stone lighthouse—he showed me the wrought-iron fencing that he said was destroyed every time Israeli military vehicles rolled in.

  We took a service tax
i the short distance between Ramallah and the university, a stretch of road often blocked by checkpoints when tensions were high, said Khaldoon. (In fact, a checkpoint that had been in place for almost three years had been removed the previous December.) At night soldiers at the Surda roadblock, as the checkpoint was known, would close the road with barriers, preventing the passage of vehicles but not pedestrians. Khaldoon lived near Birzeit and around midnight would head home from his computer job in Ramallah along this same stretch of road. “There would be no soldiers I could see. But everybody knew that Israelis were out there, looking around with nightscopes.” The passage was terrifying and thrilling. Khaldoon said it always reminded him of the night he was home in Hebron, walking downtown, when a red dot from a rifle’s nightscope fixed on his chest. An IDF sniper, he was certain. “I would feel so sure it was going to happen here that I would move—like this.” Khaldoon showed me the ducking, weaving walk he developed, suddenly dropping his head and moving his body sideways, hopefully thwarting any soldier who had him in his sights, left-right, left-right.

  Birzeit University, founded in 1924 but largely built in the 1970s, had the outward appearance of a well-funded American community college: numerous multi-story buildings faced with the same tawny stone. Of course, it was anything but. Like all Palestinian universities and many schools, it had been closed for five years during the First Intifada, 1987-1992, by order of the Israeli military. Even now it was closed sporadically. As our taxi pulled into the entrance drive, Khaldoon pointed to a spot on the main road. “When they want to close it, they park one of their trucks here,” he said of the military. “Sooner or later, somebody will throw a rock at it. They’ll respond with tear gas. And that will be it”—meaning that the tear gas would result in even more rocks, providing the army with an excuse to close down the school.