Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  34 Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain, a Biography

  6: The West Bank

  e are more than unusually trepidatious about what lies ahead as we leave Israel and enter the West Bank. Bruno cannot accompany us (merciful gods, your pity is well placed!) as Israeli citizens cannot drive on many of the West Bank back roads. Instead he has been building straw dogs, hamming up the dangers with a little too much glee and some of it has stuck. Other Israelis have warned us that “it is outlaw country”, “not like here at all”, “do be careful” and “don’t stop for anyone”. As we drive up to the border area the Israeli side of the Galilean countryside seems to give off one last triumphant blast of luxuriance.

  The famous barrier - the Apartheid Wall or the Security Fence, depending on which side of it you find yourself - seems a bit half-hearted at this crossing, and there’s hardly any movement at all, in or out. To the right is an imposing concrete IDF barracks, complete with the usual turrets and watch-towers, liberally laced with razor wire and menace. Bruno drops us off with a final, cocky “take care over there” and we agree to meet at the Qualandia checkpoint just north of Jerusalem a week later.

  “You are spending twice as long as Mark Twain in there,” he says. This is true, but by then even the most enthusiastic Excursionist was keen to press on, put the desert and deprivation behind them and arrive at the mother lode, Jerusalem.

  “I know, but there’s something about a warzone that pulls me back to them,” I reply. “Look, if it’s too weird I’ll give you a call. As the good Doctor said, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” It’s hardly as if we’re going to Outer Mongolia.”

  “Ha, Outer Mongolia, you should be so lucky.”

  Outside the car is air is stagnantly hot and heavy - and rather bored.

  All over Israel there are signs in three languages: Hebrew, English and Arabic, but here at the Wall/Fence there are none. We see an elegant Arabic woman and her skipping children come out of a railed-off area and head for a waiting Audi. Hats and shades on against the heat and glare we head for the turnstiles under a raw concrete lintel stretching across the entry zone. Still no signs, but one route turns this way only and the other route turns that way only - but up close that way only has a concrete slab blocking it, so we take Hobson’s Choice and choose the one that turns this way only. The turnstiles are thick and functional, heavily galvanized and heavily sprung. There is just enough room in each turnstile quarter for one person; you have to put your luggage in the quarter in front and push it through, or in the quarter behind and pull it through. Gillian isn’t strong enough - and she’s hardly a weedy weakling - to push against the turnstile and push herself and her bag through in tandem, so I have to tango the turnstiles to take our mini caravanserai through. With much scraping of bags and scuffling of shoes and cusses of profanity we manage to pull and push our way through the first turnstile.

  “That was tight,” I say, “I wonder how a heifer gets through.”

  “There aren’t any heifers,” Gillian replies. This is true, we haven’t seen one obese person all the time we’ve been in Asia Minor. The philosophy of Bella Figura is alive and well in the Middle East.

  We shuffle forward to the next turnstile. Still no signs and no one around; various cameras stare unfeelingly towards us. We repeat the ungainly exercise of manhandling two Anglo-Saxons with their hand baggage and luggage through the obstacle course.

  “Weird,” I say, “I presume those camera are working.”

  “I hope not, we must look a terrible sight by now.” She’s right, we must.

  Five minutes later we are out of Israel and into the West Bank. We have just passed through three turnstiles and seen no one. It is rather disappointing, having prepared for an in-depth interview and been shown an open door, or at least three open turnstiles and an obstacle course.

  I look around for the promised white Chevrolet Nubira. Of course, I grumble to Gillian, it isn’t a Chevrolet at all but a horrible thing called a Daewoo built in Korea. Some bright suit at GM thought they’d sell the Chevrolet brand short on the off-chance of shifting some dodgy Daewoos.

  She tells me not to be so obsessively, compulsively disordered, or something like that.

  The first car we see is in fact the Daewoo masquerading as a, oh never mind. First person we see is our new Ferguson, Mr. Farki. I had contacted a friend of a friend in the British Embassy in Amman, Jordan, and asked him about a Palestinian driver and interpreter. He had suggested Mr. Farki, a fine man used by the Brits whenever they need a driver. Mr. Farki and I had spent so much time haggling on the phone that it would have been cheaper to pay him what he wanted in the first place rather than to have to pay half as much to Vodafone as well.

  As Bruno said, the New Pilgrims moved through the West Bank at a good pace and all we heard from Mark Twain about our first stop, Jenin, was that he arrived there late one evening, Saturday 21 September to be precise, and left early the next morning. We can see from contemporaneous prints that Jenin then was a tiny village of a mosque and a few shacks, but just before entering Jenin there is still standing a Greek Orthodox Church in the village of Birkin. Knowing the New Pilgrims’ habits I imagine they would have stayed there, and Mr. Farki’s first stop is Birkin. Like all good Greek Orthodox churches this one is locked; it is also clearly unused as is the village of Birkin. No sign of bomb damage; no sign of a plague; no sign of ethnic cleansing, just no sign of life. Mr. Farki reckons they’ve all up and left for Jenin.

  I’m convinced this is where they camped. It’s an old village so there must have been a well. It’s on a main road - in fact the old trunk route from Damascus to Jerusalem. The church has decent grounds and they would have felt safe there. The curious, well quite curious, point about Birkin today is that somebody clearly looks after the church’s grounds. All around is dust and decay, the flags on the church’s poles are barely hanging by their last threads, the locked gates are down to the rust, yet the garden is kempt, the courtyard swept and the shrubs tended. Curious, but only quite so. Like the Excursionists, on we press.

  Mr. Farki is about seventy, has worryingly thick glasses for a driver and wonderfully thick white hair for a seventy-year-old. In spite of his looks he isn’t at all absent-minded and is as learned on matters Middle East as a professor. He always wears a waistcoat a size too big for his wiry frame. He speaks excellent English, thank heavens.

  He grew up and qualified as a “financial supervisor” in Jordan and moved to Jerusalem when it was still part of Jordan and when Amman was still “very much the backwater”. He was twenty-five; two years later Jordan was part of the losing team in the Six Day War; it lost Jerusalem and had the West Bank annexed. Unable to guide in Jerusalem he moved to Ramallah, the proxy capital of Palestine. He still has a Jordanian passport. Did he ever think of moving back to Jordan? Oh, he goes back every year to see his family but he prefers it here, intifadas and all - too many Palestinians in Jordan, he says with a straight face. And financial supervising? He shrugs, “That seems like a lifetime ago when all I wanted was money. Now I am a tour guide and Nosy Parker. Guiding is more enriching at my age.” An Arab with irony; I can see we are going to get along.

  Yes, and we are now on the outskirts to Jenin. No longer a one-mosque-and-three-shack village, Jenin is a bustling market and administrative town of a hundred thousand souls, half of whom seem to be pre-teen and laughing about it. The night before I had read that the West Bank has the highest reproduction rate of anywhere in the Arab world. Sometimes one sees a statistic and thinks “that’s a damn lie”, but here seems to be the proof.

  Ah, and it’s good to be back in an Arab traffic jam. The noise, the fumes, the blaring horns, the shouting drivers, the laughter, the feigned insults, the gestures. In Israel traffic is well ordered in a strangely Hunnish way. Each car has its solo driver, it
s windows up, its aircon on; the roads have painted lanes, to which the cars adhere. Verge-side flowers are planted and automatically irrigated. Coming in to Jenin we see each car packed with families yelling through open windows, the roads are covered in litter - whoops! there goes another Coke tin - and the sidewalks, well there are no sidewalks and if one does manage to appear it will soon have a car parked right across it. Near the center we see a skip, but it is so overloaded with rubble and rubbish that it would take an archaeologist to level it off. Later we find that rubble and rubbish are the West Bank motif. The whole chaotic scene is positively heaving with life - and the humor and futility that defines human endeavor; Mark Twain source material, in other words.

  ***

  Nearly twenty miles ahead of us lay our second Excursionists’ stop, what was then still known by its ancient Roman name of Samaria, but is now called Sebastia. The Excursionists “climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria from whence, no doubt, came also the celebrated Good Samaritan. Herod the Great is said to have made a magnificent city of this place, and a great number of coarse limestone columns, twenty feet high and two feet through, that are almost guiltless of architectural grace of shape and ornament, are pointed out by many authors as evidence of the fact. They would not have been considered handsome in ancient Greece, however.”

  Quite. One becomes rather blasé about Roman ruins and expects them to be in a state of at least imaginable repair, but preservation has not been too kind to poor old Samaria. Mark Twain wrote that “There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy handfuls of old Roman coins at a franc a dozen”.

  ***

  It is in the token souvenir shop that I find out what has happened. The man behind the counter is trying to sell me old Roman coins but at a little more than a franc a dozen. I wonder if they are the same coins that Mark Twain was offered. The seller speaks excellent English and is a seamless authority on his coins. “This one is from the time of Agrippa the First, but this one, now this is a Widow’s Mite from the time of Jesus. I have a bigger Widow’s Mite here, but it’s older so less valuable.” How valuable? “Eighty dollars. Three years ago it was worth sixty dollars; they are an excellent investment.” Not as good an investment, I thought unkindly, as the little chap out the back knocking them up for you.

  “I’m not interested in coins,” I say, “but I am interested in you.You speak such good English. How come?”

  He unburdens himself over Arabic coffee. I love the way there is always time to spare in Arabic cultures. He is Ibrahim Sharif, a Lebanese citizen. He worked in his uncle’s hotel in London for twenty years. When the Israelis took over here in 1967 they made Samaria a proper Archaeological Park, and his sister-in-law, a young widow, already had a stall here. She was in the right place at the right time. With Ibrahim’s help her coffee stall became a restaurant and souvenir shop. There were coach loads of tourists for twenty years. Then in the mid-1990s came the Oslo Accords and Israel had to give Samaria, now Sebastia, to the Palestinians. Not for the first time I hear that when an Arab inherits an Israeli project he destroys it and so it was with the Archaeological Park - but not so much destruction, I suggest to Ibrahim, as neglect, death by a thousand cuts.

  Now the archaeological site is in a sorry state and becoming sorrier. Vandals have graffiti-sloganed the columns and one can see a process of archaeology in reverse: the dirt and dust are starting to reclaim the columns and capitals on the ground.

  Some things have improved though; whereas Mark Twain noted that “The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious”, one can have no such complaint today: apart from Ibrahim and his family there are no inhabitants. But there are inhabitants above: the new conquerors - the new Romans – the Israelis, who have built a conspicuous settlement above Sebastia. Mark Twain finished with: “We were glad to leave this hot and dusty old village and hurry on.” Again, quite so.

  Twain’s version of “hurrying on” bears no resemblance to how we can hurry on today. Already only a few miles into our West Bank journey we are amazed at the quality of the roads and the infrastructure. Everywhere one sees the presence of foreign aid: USAID in particular, but also “Funded by the European Union” signs along the highways with individual projects from Holland, Italy and Spain - and these are just the ones we have seen on the first morning.

  Mr. Farki explains that the aid taps are turned on and off by the donors’ reactions to events on the ground. After Oslo in the mid-1990s aid increased dramatically as part of the process. The intifadas turned it off again. Then Yasser Arafat died and the taps turned on again. Then the Palestinians voted in Hamas and the taps were off again. Then they managed to restrict Hamas to Gaza and now aid to the West Bank is on again.

  “Mr. Farki, would it be fair to say the Palestinians have a marked tendency to shoot themselves in the feet? I mean intifadas, Arafat, Hamas, Black September, always saying no to any peace proposal. It all seems rather counter-productive.”

  “Yes, Lord Ian, but don’t forget the Palestinians are poets. Truth is a higher ideal than compromise. Better to lose with honor than win with shame. That’s one of the reasons I like living here.”

  “Fair enough. By the way, how about I stop calling you Mr. Farki and you stop calling me Lord Ian?”

  “What would you call me?” he asks. “What is you first name?”

  “You would not be able to say it, so Farki is easier.” “Well I could try, what is it?

  “Hudhaifah al Din.” A pause. “Lord Ian.” “As your prefer, Mr. Farki.”

  Zooming along the shiny new USAID road, with fertile agriculture all around and a large irrigation project being built by “the Friends of Palestine, Brazil”, we reach Mark Twain’s next stop, Nablus, in only half an hour. It would have been twenty-five minutes but Mr. Farki has a rather disconcerting habit of stopping in the middle of nowhere and whisking a well-used purple patterned prayer rug out of the trunk and performing his prayers by the side of the road. He’s not alone in that regard.

  Nablus, often but not always known as Shechem in Twain’s time, was famous then for two reasons: it was - still is - the holy mountain of the Samaritan sect and the site of Jacob’s Well. Now we must add a third reason; opposite Jacob’s Well is the Palestinian refugee camp of Balata, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the largest single UN activity in the world.

  ***

  The Samaritans held a particular fascination for Mark Twain: “I found myself gazing at any straggling scion of this strange race with a riveted fascination, just as one would stare at a living mastodon, or a megatherium that had moved in the grey dawn of creation and seen the wonders of that mysterious world that was before the flood.”

  The Samaritans follow an older religion than Judaism, and believe that their Torah was given directly by Abraham rather than a later, sanitized version - as they see it - given by Moses to the nomadic “Tribes of Israel”. Their rules of religious and secular behavior are even more esoteric than those of ultraorthodox Judaism, or as Mark Twain wrote: “For thousands of years this clan have dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and having little commerce or fellowship with their fellow men of any religion or nationality.”

  The Samaritans today are just about clinging on: “This sad, proud remnant of a once mighty community still hold themselves aloof from all the world; they still live as their fathers lived, labor as their fathers labored, think as they did, feel as they did, worship in the same place, in sight of the same landmarks, and in the same quaint, patriarchal way their ancestors did more than thirty centuries ago”

  Mark Twain was clearly suspicious about some of their claims: “Carefully preserved among the sacred archives of this curious community is a MSS. copy of the ancient Jewish law, which is said to be the oldest document on earth. It is written on vellum, and is some four or five thousand years old. Nothing but bucksheesh can purchase a sight. Speaking of this MSS
. reminds me that I procured from the high priest of this ancient Samaritan community, at great expense, a secret document of still higher antiquity and far more extraordinary interest, which I propose to publish as soon as I have finished translating it.”

  ***

  Half of the only six hundred Samaritans remaining can be found in two villages on the foothills of Mount Gerizim, their sacred mountain, just outside Nablus. With their white robes and red fezzes the men make a numinous sight. Of the women there is no sign. Within the last generation their religious leaders, all hereditary, have countered the interbreeding problem by relaxing the rules on marriage for husbands but few modern Jewish women are willing to go through the degrading menstruation tabus35 and childbirth stigmas, amongst many other humiliations, that are part of the Talibanesque Samaritan culture. It reminds one of how ghastly it must have been for women at the time of the invention of any of the patriarchal Abrahamic religions.

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