IF THEY LEAVE THEY WILL BE SENTENCED TO DEATH BY STONING.)
The husbands must still be hereditary Samaritans. The animal sacrifices remain, in accordance with Abrahamic ritual, and are now held off-camera to avoid Israeli activists who view pretty much all aspects of Samaritan culture as inhumane to man - which means to woman - and beast.
Jacob’s Well can be dismissed, now as then, as a gimmicky hole in the ground; then “as a parcel of ground bought for a hundred pieces of silver”, now as a bait for the gullible waiting for the rattling money tray of a Greek Orthodox impostor. But as one comes out a few shekels lighter one sees across the road the Balata Refugee Camp.
One’s image of a refugee camp is of rows of tents housing the victims of what one hopes is a temporary refugee crisis: Darfur, for example, or Haiti after the earthquake. Balata is a permanent fixture, now sixty years old, of concrete apartments and tarred roads, streetlights and wheelie bins: it is a suburb of Nablus, although there is nothing suburban about it. There’s too much aid pouring in for it to be a slum, physically, but mentally it is very much a slum. Much against Mr. Farki’s better judgment we walk through Balata, and in a low voice he gives me a running commentary: “the heaviest population in Arabia, about thirty thousand people, also, they say, the densest population of Israeli spies. In the first intifada the Israelis were caught by surprise, in the second they knew exactly which houses were making the rockets and blew them up. Didn’t even wait for the bulldozers. More free money pouring in here than anywhere in Palestine, and that means anywhere else on earth. Look, UN everywhere, MSF, WHO, this-aid, that-aid spending money here everywhere. Best education, best health in the West Bank. Thirty thousand people live here, nearly all born here. Would you leave? It’s a holiday camp not a refugee camp.”
Well that seems a bit harsh. Certainly the evidence of aid is everywhere and it’s easy to see Balata as a hotbed of victimhood - the sort of self-perpetuating cycle of dependency where the NGOs need the victims as much as the victims need the NGOs. The aid figures are indeed quite staggering: US$1.25 billion a year is being shoveled into Palestine as a whole for the benefit of four million people - and proportionately four times of that amount per person in the UN refugee camps. But there is real anger here too, even if self-defeating anger: posters of Yasser Arafat posing with Saddam Hussein (Arafat supported Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, among his many other great judgment calls), endless graffiti, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian ayatollah posters, listless youths loiter- ing menacingly around. Menace is in the air; the youths cannot tell if we are Israeli rubberneckers or part of a new NGO and so, rather reluctantly, stand aside as we walk past.
We come across a proper organized tour: a dozen young idealists - I tell the tutting Mr. Farki there’s no point in being young if you are not an idealist - from northern Europe. How do I know where they are from? I tell a disbelieving Mr. Farki that I know because they are wearing cotton not poly something and so aren’t American. He says he will remember that piece of useless information - and he will. They are being shown around by a young tall Palestinian tour leader wearing fatigues and a red keffiyeh. It’s the Yasser Arafat look but without the gun. Mr. Farki says there’ll be a gun somewhere on him - they’re all armed, bored and armed. There are few cars but endless aid vehicles. Mr. Farki would have the whole farrago closed down tomorrow, and by tour’s end he wasn’t talking so softy. Time to move on.
Half way to the caravanserai’s next camp, then known as Lubia but now called al-Lubban al-Sharqi, we pull over into a new roadside diner. Hannibal, Missouri in the Occupied Territories. After another prayer break and over coffee I ask Mr. Farki what is to become of the Balata refugees. He agrees that the brighter ones move out as soon as they can but they are still stuck in Palestine. The Arabs countries around have always talked up the Palestinian cause while ignoring it completely when the time comes to keep the promises. Jordan, the post-1948 occupying power, already has a Palestinian majority, and the Hashemite ruling minority emphatically don’t want any more. Egypt refuses to have anything to do with the Palestinians in Gaza, although they have at least a moral responsibility for their predicament and could easily absorb them. Lebanon already has three million Palestinians and has such a delicate political and religious balance that it does not even allow them citizenship or the right to vote. Syria, while happy to arm them through Hezbollah in Lebanon, refuses any Palestinian refugees even though they have space enough to accommodate them. Israel certainly won’t have them. The sad fact is that from 1922 when the British Mandate first mooted Palestine as a possible country - and there had been no mention of it as such at all up till then - the elusive country’s Arab neighbors have at best let down and at worst betrayed their Palestinian Arab brothers at every turn.
As we turn off the new road and head a quarter of a mile up the dirt track to al-Lubban I pull some sheets of paper out of my portfolio and read them to Mr. Farki.
“This first is from Mark Twain, dated 22 September 1867. ‘We got so far ahead of the tents that we had to camp in an Arab village, and sleep on the ground. We could have slept in the largest of the houses; but there were some little drawbacks: it was populous with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly, and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two donkeys in the parlor. Outside there were no inconveniences, except that the dusky, ragged, earnest eyed villagers of both sexes and all ages grouped themselves on their haunches all around us, and discussed us and criticized us with noisy tongues till midnight. We did not mind the noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost an impossible thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking at you.’
“And in his notes he wrote that ‘Slept on the ground in front of an Arab house. Lice, fleas, horses, jackasses, chickens and, worse than all, Arabs for company all night.’ Sorry about that last bit Mr. Farki.”
“Don’t worry,” he laughs, “I’m used to it by now. Typical American journalist. Sorry about that last bit, Lord Ian.”
“Touché, mon brave, touché. Now Mr. Farki, what do we make of this? From Al-Jazeerah, no less. Dated 6 May 2010. It reads: “Illegal Israeli Settlers Torch Mosque South of Nablus”:
A group of illegal Israeli settlers entered the mosque at Al-Lubban Al-Sharqiya, gathered flammables, and set them alight in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Head of the local council of Al-Lubban Jamal Daraghma said residents living adjacent to the mosque heard cars approaching the building at 3 a.m. Residents said the group tore curtains from the walls and threw several copies of the Qur’an into a pile on the mosque floor and set it aflame.
The village is surrounded by three illegal Israeli settlements; Eli, Shilo, and Ma’ale Levona, built on Palestinian lands and the abutting illegal communities consumed more than 30 percent of the village lands, confiscated to build the settlements.
The Israeli Tel Aviv daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted the mosque’s imam as saying that residents were waiting for the investigation of the Palestinian police but noted the history of settler antagonism in the village.
“It happens all the time,” says Mr. Farki. “Not usually mosques, but orchards and groves. The settlers will never have enough until it is all theirs.”
I pull out another cutting from the same Yedioth Ahronoth: “Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Tuesday blamed hardline Jewish settlers for a fire that gutted a West Bank mosque, saying it threatened US-brokered efforts to revive the peace process... ‘President Abbas condemns the burning of the mosque in Lubban ash-Sharqiya by extremist settlers and said the responsibility for this criminal attack lies with the Israeli government because the Israeli army protects the settlers,’ his office said in a statement.”
By now we are in the center of the village and easily find the mosque by finding the minaret. It is still covered with rudimentary scaffolding and most of the repairs appear to be complete. Mr. Farki leads me to a group of wor
kers, and one of them takes us to a half open door across the street. Inside are two other men. Greetings all round. As the eyes adjust to the darkness it seems we are in a barbershop. Only Mr. Farki speaks English and he’s busy speaking Arabic and soon voices are raised in the Arabic way: all friendly enough, I’ve learned it’s just the way they talk to each other.
In the corner a tiny raised TV is blaring out a daytime soap opera. None of the women on screen are wearing headscarves and most of them are crying.
The men on the TV are shouting at each just as loudly as they are in the barbershop. Mr. Farki sees me looking at the images and tut-tuts “Abu Dhabi” before re-joining the decibels. From the street a young boy arrives with tea.
A few minutes later he returns with four brown paper bags. Soon we are all scooping up hummus, mtabbal and falafel with pita breads. No one seems to draw breath, even in mid-mouthful. I am reflecting: amazing really, here we are, a Jordanian and two Brits, one even a woman, turn up unannounced in this tiny village in nowhere-in-particular, find a random local, he brings us to meet more random locals and in no time we are all eating together like long lost friends. Mr. Farki stands up, taps his watch and says we should go. “Don’t tell them where we are going next,” he says rather unnecessarily. “As if... ” I reply.
In the car juddering back down along the dirt track I ask him what all that was about.
“Israeli settlers,” he says, “taking over the olive groves. They come in the night and cut down the trees. Some of the trees are hundreds of years old.
Then their militia prevent the farmers going there. The farmers have lost heart anyway. It’s their families’ land going back to Turkish times. It’s so sad they cannot bear to look.”
“Militia?”
“Yes, unofficial of course. Each settlement has a militia to police itself and keep the Palestinians out. The militia go on raids together. If you see a white four-door pick-up truck with Israeli plates it will be militia.”
“But why? Why cut down the trees? Isn’t a bit self-defeating?”
“It’s an old Ottoman law dating from empire days. If the land is not used for three years the owner loses it. The Turks wanted the farmers to grow crops so they could raise taxes. Now Israeli settlers cut down the trees so the owner cannot use the land, then they fence it to stop him going there. If he tries, they punish the village. That’s what the mosque fire was all about. That’s what they were telling me.”
“A punishment?”
“Yes, the settlers bulldozed two fields and fenced them but did not patrol them. Then they discovered the villagers had cut through the fence and planted some citrus crops, just so the land was used. Some of the olive trees the Israelis tore down were five hundred years old. As punishment they set fire to the village mosque.” “Who are they?”
“The biblical fundamentalists. The militia. They are the same.” “And the police?”
Mr. Farki just gives a short laugh and shakes his head. “There is no justice here. We say Wild West not West Bank. The Orthodox Jews just wear these people down. You’ve seen them, they are simple folk. The Jews just push, push, push. They know there is no law. There is no one to stop them.”
It’s only a short drive to our next stop, the archaeological site of Shilo, but we cannot drive all the way there. Politics again. The site is now part of the Shilo settlement and as such off limits to Mr. Farki and his would-be Chevrolet. I say that I thought he had a Jordanian passport; he says he does, but the problem is the car - it has white Palestinian number plates, and only cars with yellow Israeli number plates are allowed anywhere near, let alone in, a settlement. He drops me a few hundred yards from the entrance, tells me they will have been watching him stop and us get out. We agree he’ll go back to see his new friends at al-Lubban and I’ll call him to pick us up here when I’ve had a look at what Mark Twain saw.
***
What Mark Twain saw was: “About daylight we passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested three hundred years, and at whose gates good old Eli fell down and ‘brake his neck’ when the messenger, riding hard from the battle, told him of the defeat of his people, the death of his sons, and, more than all, the capture of Israel’s pride, her hope, her refuge, the ancient Ark her forefathers brought with them out of Egypt. It is little wonder that under circumstances like these he fell down and brake his neck. But Shiloh had no charms for us.”
***
Apart from the unpleasantness on arrival, the archaeological site is a wonder to behold, and not the pile of rubble and rubbish that Mark Twain saw. At the Visitor’s Center one is given coffee and cakes and invited to watch a video. The twenty-minute video explains the biblical rather than actual version of events. The storyline is that in 1165 BC the Ark of the Covenant was buried here until it was lost in a fire three hundred and sixty-nine years later. The visitors are then invited to follow a tour around the site.
Dozens of young Judaic enthusiasts from around the world are digging their summer holidays away as they have been here these last forty years. Vast inroads have been made into the ground. Everywhere one sees sifters sifting and diggers digging while supervisors supervise. Flow charts and clipboards and cameras and tripods abound. After fifty years they still haven’t found any evidence that the Ark was ever there or that there had even been a fire which finished its spell there. I ask a young sifter where she is from. New York. Has she, have they, after all this ferreting around found anything, Ark-wise, fire- wise? No, but we will.
Sorry, but highly unlikely. It seems churlish to point out to one so young and bright and bushy tailed but biblical scholars have now placed the traditional version of the ten commandments36 - and we saw on the road to Damascus that there are three other versions spanning hundreds of years - as coming from several hundred years after Moses had his one-to-one with his God. Moses’ chances of actually putting them in an Ark would appear to be a somewhat fanciful; almost as fanciful as the one-to-one with his exclusive god actually happening in the first place, and almost as fanciful again as him blatantly ignoring his god’s own second commandment when describing said ark.
Of course it’s a myth, and nothing wrong with that; everything right with that. The Bible37 frequently uses the Ark motif to indentify divine emotions which cannot be explained any other way. What has always intrigued mythologists most about the Ark is why it suddenly just disappeared from Judaic folklore. It was last seen in Solomon’s Temple and after that it is not mentioned at all - curious considering its pivotal function prior to that. The Ethiopian Jewish tradition has it that one of Solomon’s sons and the Queen of Sheba brought it there. The Book of Revelations suggests it is in the Temple of God in Heaven in a vision. The South Africans, Zimbabweans, Yemenis and Irish all claim they have it, while the Knights Templar swear they took it to Languedoc in France. A stately home in Warwickshire in England is also thought to be a possibility. I can hear Mark Twain laying claim to it now: price of entry a dollar, first prize one viewing, second prize two viewings. Roll up! Roll up!
At the top of the archaeological site is a covered viewing platform. It has a commanding view of the countryside around. The new highway, busy with traffic, snakes through the valley below. They land is green and fertile. On every hilltop is a village. I dig out the map to check where we are, and where al-Lubban is. Then the names on the map ring a bell from the Al-Jazeerah article: Eli, Shilo, and Ma’ale Levona. These are the villages on the hilltops, settlements all, that sacked the mosque.
There is no issue so divisive in Israel and no issue so detested in Palestine as the settlements. For liberal Israelis the settlements are an affront on any number of levels. For secular Israelis they are highly subsidized stumbling block to any peace deal. For poorer Israelis they are a massively expensive waste of welfare resources. For financial Israelis the heavily discounted mortgages are a source of constant foreboding.
For biblical
Israelis, like the settlers in Shilo, there is ample biblical justification not just for establishing themselves on the lands of Judea and Samaria but also for driving the unbelievers out. In fact, Shilo is a good example of the process. After the 1967 Six Day War the Defense Secretary, Moshe Dayan, declared: “We have returned to the hills, to the cradle of our people’s history, to the land of the patriarchs, the land of the Judges and the stronghold of the Kingdom of the House of David. We have returned to Hebron [the site of the tombs of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their wives, and King David’s first capital] and Shechem [where Abraham had erected an altar and where Joseph was buried], to Bethlehem [King David’s birthplace] and Anatot [Jeremiah’s birthplace], to Jericho [as conquered by the Israelites as they entered Canaan under Joshua] and the fords of the Jordan at the city of Adam.” He didn’t need to mention the other, more poignant conquest: East Jerusalem with the Old City at its center, David’s second capital and the site of the First and Second Temples and the capital of the Jews for a thousand years before Christ.
Shilo-ites didn’t need reminding or prompting. Sponsored by Gush Emunim, a messianic Judaic organization that believes that as a result of the Six Day War the Jews had unwittingly delivered to themselves the speedy delivery of the long awaited second messiah, they set about settling. All they had to do is meet their god halfway: occupy and build on the land promised to the “children of Israel” in the Hebrew Bible and their god will speed up the messiah process.
You cannot fault their gusto. After Dayan they were told by Ariel Sharon, speaking on Israel Radio, that: “This land is ours; God gave us the title deeds. Grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.” They were only obeying orders (Dayan and Sharon have some form together: in the 1953 Qibya massacre Dayan told Sharon to “blow up some outbuildings and get out”. In his autobiography Sharon writes: “The orders were clear. Qibya was to be a lesson. I was to inflict as many casualties as I could.” He subsequently massacred sixty-nine Palestinians in their houses.)
Innocence and War Page 20
