Ted Conover

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

  We walked through the cafeteria and a building where psychology was taught, then browsed the many outdoor tables set up in a plaza by student organizations, most of them political and Islamist. “Kha-li-doon!” cried one of my guide’s friends in greeting. There were many posters of shahidi, Muslim martyrs to the occupation—young people of college age. These were especially prominent around the building that belonged to the engineering school, and I asked Khaldoon about it. “One of the most recent martyrs was an engineering student,” he explained. “Everybody here knew him.” I asked him about the various student tables. “Many of them are student government,” Khaldoon said. “It is controlled by Hamas, here and at every university.”

  “Do you support Hamas?” I asked him.

  “Mostly,” he said.

  “Do you support the martyrs?” I asked.

  “Well, I would never be a martyr,” he replied, “but some of them I admire. Have you heard of the one known as the Engineer?” I said I had not.

  “Yahya Ayyash,” he explained. “He was very cool. He studied here at Birzeit—engineering. But the nickname came from his work with bombs. He would sneak into Israeli towns disguised as a Jew. Then he himself was assassinated by a booby-trapped cell phone in 1996. It blew up his head.” Now I knew who Khaldoon was talking about. Ayyash had masterminded bombings that killed many, many Israelis in the days right after the Oslo Accords.

  We left the university for a neighborhood not far away where Khaldoon shared a small house with his next-youngest brother, Tarak, and another student. The house was plain and barely furnished except for some large abstract oil paintings by Tarak. They had a puppy, which had pooped on the floor and nobody had cleaned it up; this upset Khaldoon. A partially disassembled computer was playing music in Khaldoon’s bedroom. There were weeds behind the house. After the two brothers stopped arguing about the state of the house, I spoke for a while with Tarak. I would stay only for the night, I confirmed; then I’d accompany Khaldoon to Hebron. As we talked I looked more carefully at the clear vial that hung from a chain around Tarak’s neck: Had something moved inside it?

  He smiled and lifted it from his neck to give me a closer look. Inside it were two very small scorpions. Tarak had put them in the vial face-to-face, and periodically they attacked each other. “One day one of them will kill the other,” he observed matter-of-factly.

  ———

  “You should ask people, on roads, how do they feel?” Khaldoon said to me. “I feel terrible. What if the roads are closed? What if I get caught in a cross fire?”

  We were heading south from Ramallah on the 60 Road, which skirted the east side of Jerusalem, then Bethlehem, and then arrived at Hebron, the second-largest city (not including Jerusalem) in the West Bank. It was Friday, and our destination was his parents’ house, where we would spend the weekend.

  As our service taxi passed near the now abandoned British Police checkpoint on the 60 Road, Khaldoon pointed it out as a landmark, just as Omer had. For him, however, the checkpoint had a different name, Ayoon al-Haramia (Eyes of the Thieves), and the massacre of the Israelis by the mystery gunman was not a tragedy but a triumph. “Even on the Palestinian side we still don’t know how he did it,” Khaldoon said, beaming. “It’s like Spiderman!”

  Traveling on the 60 Road with Khaldoon made it seem like another land entirely. As we rumbled on in a succession of service taxis, switching whenever a checkpoint or a barrier required it, he kept asserting that none of the checkpoints was impregnable. Show me a checkpoint, he would say, and I’ll show you a way around it. The Qalandia checkpoint, between Ramallah and Jerusalem, was Exhibit No. 1: if you were willing to make a big detour and to pay about eight times the normal taxi fare, you could avoid it completely. South of Eyes of the Thieves we did just that, switching taxis at a junction called Arram and ending up in the taxi lot south of Qalandia. Our circuitous and costly route demonstrated why most Palestinians prefer to subject themselves to the checkpoint.

  Khaldoon near an end of the Israeli “separation barrier,” which was still under construction north of Jerusalem

  But in other places, Khaldoon told me, evasion was riskier. You could get around a checkpoint by taking a dirt back road or a remote footpath, but the army wasn’t stupid: knowing the net had holes, they sent out patrols to catch the fish who slipped through. It was like the stories Sameh had told me. Service taxis are regularly fined or confiscated when caught detouring around a checkpoint. Khaldoon nevertheless sounded defiant. “They close a road, we find a hundred roads!” he proclaimed. “We will make more roads! Anywhere!”

  I was starting to believe him when our service taxi stopped at Al-Quds University, in East Jerusalem. Across the street a panoramic view of the city had been replaced by a long section of Israel’s new security fence—a blank, imposing structure that ran along the edge of the school’s dusty playing fields. The original plan had called for the wall to cross the fields, rendering them useless, but it was revised after U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice intervened. At that moment only one panel remained to be installed before the stretch of wall was complete. “You’re not going to make a road around that,” I commented. Khaldoon gave me an unhappy look and said nothing more on the subject for the rest of the trip.

  Soldiers waved our taxi through the checkpoint outside Bethlehem known as the Container (a shipping container placed there by the army had for years been its signature feature). Checkpoint vigilance varied a lot from day to day, Khaldoon explained. A little further along, the road ended with a series of earthen barriers at a place called Al Khadr. We had to leave our cab, walk fifty yards or so over the mounds and past vendors of food and clothing, then climb into a new taxi. (Every barrier seems to produce this: a market and a taxi stand.) Khaldoon said the barrier was only about a year old. I was confused: Would the army install a barrier solely to inconvenience people? But Khaldoon explained that we were about to get back on the 60 Road, here used mainly by settlers, and the army tried to limit Palestinian traffic on it as much as possible. The closest thing in the American experience, I thought, was being near an interstate highway that you couldn’t get on because there was no entrance ramp nearby.

  The 60 Road, only two lanes wide, had many small slabs of concrete erected along the shoulder where it overlooked Palestinian villages near Etzion—“to keep the people from shooting settlers,” Khaldoon said.

  Outside Hebron, Khaldoon used a cell phone to alert his father, Awni al-Khatib, that he would have to pick us up downtown. His dad called right back to say that traffic was so stacked up at the checkpoint near their house that it would be hours before he’d be able to get there. An alternative rendezvous point was picked. As we approached the city, the taxi dropped me and Khaldoon by the side of the road. We climbed a five-foot-high earthen barrier (another of the hundreds built by the army to keep Palestinian vehicles off main highways like the 60 Road) and hiked a quarter-mile or so down a back street to meet Khaldoon’s father.

  Awni, an engaging, outgoing man in his early fifties, welcomed us into his Volkswagen Polo, where we also met his youngest son, Muhammad. We drove about ten minutes to an intersection that was in total gridlock with long lines of cars and trucks.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  But Khaldoon had a different reaction. “No, no—we’re home!” he exclaimed. He clambered out of the VW, threaded his way across the road through the bumper-to-bumper traffic, and opened what turned out to be the gate to the family’s driveway. After about five minutes the drivers nearby were able to make enough space for the VW to squeeze through, and we pulled through the gate and into a parking area. “You see what we have to put up with,” Awni said, as Khaldoon closed the gate. I didn’t at first, but then Khaldoon explained: those cars and trucks were all queued up for the local checkpoint, a hundred yards down the road. “When they set up the checkpoint, they don’t put in enough soldiers,” Khaldoon observed. “People have to wait a long time.”

  Awni is a scien
tist with a doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Florida at Gainesville. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Utah State University and was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Oklahoma. He and his wife have four sons and a daughter. They all lived in an apartment block for years after they moved to Hebron, where Awni helped establish a science program at the university. (He proudly told me that the program had grown from thirty-six students at its inception to one thousand today.) His promotion to vice president of Hebron University had enabled them to build this gracious house, perched on a hillside on the edge of town, with a balcony, flower gardens, and views of an olive orchard across the valley.

  But then the problems had started. First was the news that the road that the house fronted, which its driveway opened onto, was being converted to a settler passage, the 35 Road toward Gaza. Like most settler roads, there was no actual prohibition on Palestinian-plated cars; it was simply that, as Awni explained, “There is no longer any place in Hebron I can get to on that road.” It was a limited-access highway, in other words, and the only places it led to were Israeli settlements. The driveway was now weed-strewn and useless.

  I then understood that we had come in the back door; Awni smiled as he watched me figure it out. With no road access to the front, he had had to figure out a way to park his car in back. The house sat on a slope, its flat roof roughly the same elevation as the back road we had come in on. His front driveway thwarted, Awni had come up with an ingenious solution: he had built a concrete bridge to span the gap between his roof and the back gate, which was located on the road we had entered by. We walked around the house so he could show me the engineering involved, and then took a seat with Khaldoon on a shaded patio outside the living room. Latifa, Awni’s wife, who was a schoolteacher, served us hot tea with a smile but didn’t stay to join the conversation.

  The settler road had very little traffic, so at least the front of the house was quiet. But the odd thing was the succession of men, single or in pairs, who scrambled furtively past the garden every few minutes, prompting wild barking from the family’s German shepherd. Occasionally they would nod our way, but mostly they did not; their goal was invisibility. “They’re getting around the checkpoint,” explained Khaldoon. He was referring not to the settler road in front of the house (which the evaders also had to cross, after winding through the olive orchard across the way) but to the occasional checkpoint that clogged up the local road in back—the same one that had made Awni pick us up outside of town. As long as the evaders didn’t get caught, they’d save a lot of time.

  Khaldoon and I watched television, and then Latifa and Majdoleen, Khaldoon’s sister, served dinner to Awni, Khaldoon, Muhammad, and me. I had hoped the women would join us at the table so that I could get to know them but that was not the custom; after serving us, they returned to the kitchen. When we were finished Awni asked if I would like to meet a friend of his who was a journalist and I said certainly, so he invited over Khalid Suleiman, and we again retired to the patio for tea.

  The Khatib residence in Hebron. When the front driveway (out of the frame on the right) was rendered useless by the conversion of the road in front to a settler highway, the family built a bridge (left) to another street behind the house, allowing them to park on the roof

  The visit got off to a good start. “I’m a Sooner!” said Suleiman by way of greeting: he, too, had attended the University of Oklahoma, where he met Awni. And he sported a baseball cap. But quickly it became clear that Khalid might not be an alumnus the university would be eager to claim. His master’s thesis in journalism, he told me, was an examination of anti-Arab racism in Leon Uris’s novel The Haj. I told him that I had known Uris but never read the book, and could practically see his lip curl.

  The United States, he said, had a huge bias against Arabs. This was evident in books like The Haj (I later read the book and saw he had a point) and Margaret Truman’s biography of her father, Harry S. Truman—“See for yourself, it’s on page 169,” Khalid said. (I later read the book and could see no bias at all.)

  “How is it that you remember the actual page number?” I asked him.

  “Because so many people like you ask me about it,” he replied.

  People like me? I wondered. He barely knew me.

  The Israelis admitted their own racism, he continued, quoting Moshe Zimmerman, the head of German studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who once called the children of Hebron’s extremist settlers “Hitler Youth.” (Zimmerman said he had made the comment after listening to a “radio interview with the children of settlers from Hebron on the first anniversary of the murder of twenty-nine people in a mosque by Baruch Goldstein. The kids said: ‘Goldstein is our hero.’… These children are trained like the Hitler Jugend to think ideologically without criticism. They are led to believe in racist views of themselves as the master race superior to the Arabs.”)

  “But you can’t claim that people with extreme views represent a culture,” I said. “Uris didn’t speak for the American mainstream on the subject of Arabs—and that was a minor novel of his. Zimmerman is seen as an extreme leftist in Israel.”

  Suleiman brushed those comments aside. My country was Israel’s puppet, he said. We had a bit of a discussion about that idea. With any suggestion of disagreement on my part, Suleiman grew more heated; he wanted to vent, and wasn’t interested in real discussion. Not everything he said was absurd (“When will we see the house of an Israeli bulldozed for his having killed a Palestinian?”). But as I pressed him on his views we finally arrived at his bottom line: Khalid declared that he was in favor of an Islamic caliphate—strict Muslim rule of the world. Contrary to the beliefs of some in the West, he said, the Middle East would be a lot safer and more stable if many nations had nuclear weapons, instead of just one (Israel). Then, at least, there would be mutually assured destruction.

  With that he seemed to take a breath. Latifa appeared and poured us all more tea.

  I was wondering how a person embracing this ideology could possibly function as a journalist. It was difficult at the moment, Khalid replied; his permission to travel had been revoked by Israel after he had filed a story in Egypt for al-Jazeera that evidently provoked someone in Israeli intelligence.

  “So how do you do your work?” I asked. He said from home, but I knew that would be impossible for most journalists and could see that, more than many, he was a prisoner. With that his anger became more recognizable: he was like many I had met who were incarcerated at Sing Sing, radicals who fulminated, who pontificated.

  Awni had been conspicuously silent during most of this. I sensed he mainly wanted to expose me to his friend’s views. Still, I was glad when he finally stepped in, preaching moderation. “I do not want to see Muhammad cornered by the hatred,” he said. That’s why he had his youngest son taking Hebrew lessons: because coexistence was inevitable.

  “I do not follow the hatred path. I think it is wrong on both sides,” he said. He didn’t like suicide bombings, in part “because it suggests a people cannibalizing itself.”

  Looking into the future, Awni said he didn’t think that Israel could afford endless conflict. “They depend on Jewish immigrants, and immigrants aren’t going to want to move there if it stays this bad.”

  I enjoyed talking to Awni, but trying to speak with Khalid had been an exhausting and upsetting end to a long day. I took one of the twin beds in Khaldoon’s room, and when the lights were out I replayed in my mind the conversation with Suleiman. It reminded me of nothing so much as an encounter I’d had in a Tel Aviv laundromat two weeks before. I had left Omer’s base for the weekend and was staying in a hotel. But my jeans were stained by the oil that had splashed through the window of the Storm the evening I drove through the Arab villages with Omer’s men. A friendly older woman at the laundromat hailed from Detroit, and she offered me advice for getting the stains out. “How did you get them?” she asked.

  Her husband, a retiree, also from
Detroit, sitting in a nearby plastic chair, overheard my answer. “Arabs are animals,” he growled. “You’re not even safe from them in the U.S. anymore.” The comment had infuriated me and soon the husband and I were in a loud argument. The wife tried hard to separate us. “Some people will never see eye to eye” was her take on our dispute, and that night in Hebron it resonated with me: extremism was all around me here, a wall all its own, impermeable to discussion.

  Khaldoon and I watched television news in the morning, after which he observed that, given the several Palestinians killed by the IDF in Gaza the night before, it might be a good idea if we were to leave Hebron before the midday mosque services let out. And there were a few things he wanted to show me first: his friend’s clothing shop; the Ibrahimi Mosque where the crazed settler Goldstein had murdered all those worshipers (and wounded about 125 others) in 1994; and the old town center, now a hostile enclave of settler extremists protected by the army. As we ate a breakfast that included labne (cream cheese made from yogurt) spread on pita, Khaldoon observed that the checkpoint was up again: a trickle of people were stepping gingerly through olive groves down the hill across the way, preparing to dash up the hill by the house—skirting the checkpoint, in other words. We would have to pass through that checkpoint to get into town, so we left early to allow extra time.

  The line of cars and trucks was already long. We walked alongside the vehicles to the underpass, where two soldiers stood before a crowd of maybe forty Palestinian pedestrians. A third stood guard up on the hill, by the 35 Road; I knew three to be the checkpoint minimum. Only one soldier, a red-haired young man who looked to be about twenty years old, was examining documents.

  People were allowed to approach the soldier one at a time. Being American, I discovered, did not speed things up. After more than half an hour, when I finally got the nod, the soldier examined my documents and then stepped close enough to whisper in my ear that it was dangerous in town. “If I were you, I would climb up there,” he confided, pointing to the settler road up the embankment, “and hitchhike out of here.”