Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  It did not take the Israelis long to find out where Saadat and his gang were hiding: in Yasser Arafat’s HQ building in Ramallah. They already had Arafat’s compound surrounded as part of Operation Defensive Shield and they demanded Arafat hand the killers over. Eventually a deal was brokered in Washington as a part of the endless peace talks that the gang would be held in the jail in Jericho under British and American guards. For good measure the Israelis tried them in absentia in a military court in Ramallah and sentenced them to various terms of hard labor.

  Fast forward four years and the imprisoned killer/hero Saadat was elected an MP in the Palestinian elections. The Israelis claimed he did not even know he was standing and they may very well have been right. The election was won by Hamas, who claimed that its first priority was the release of Saadat and his associates from Jericho. Actually that was their second priority: the first was blowing Israel off the face of the earth, or as they more charmingly put it, “the overdue destruction of the infidel Zionist entity, too long a cancer in our midst”. Even this second priority was too much for the Israelis who were already unhappy enough about Saadat’s gang being in what was portrayed in the Israeli media as an Anglo-American holiday camp with no evidence of any hard labor. It also did not help that photographs of the jail, the old British barracks dating from the time of General Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, showed an attractive clinker built residence, with a/c units much in evidence. It helped even less that the inmates were always on Al-Jazeerah complaining about Zionist imperialism. And now they were about to be released! Operation Bringing Home the Goods was duly launched. (I’ve applied to the Israeli Army to be Officer Commanding, Operation Thinking Up Silly Names but so far have not yet heard back.)

  Early on the morning of 14 March 2006 the American and British guards left the compound on convenient errands in Jericho, U-turned further down the road and headed for an agreed Israeli checkpoint. This was the signal for Operation Bringing Home the Goods to hit the road. Within an hour the barracks were surrounded by 100 troops. Others troops joined, helicopters joined, tanks joined, bulldozers joined. The bulldozers started tearing down Allenby’s old walls and the Apache helicopters fired into the compound to create a bit of the old shock and awe. Inside the jail 200 prisoners and guards trembled and took cover as best they could. When the onslaught stopped the Israeli commander offered safe passage to anyone who wanted to leave. The prison officials and guards - and many of the prisoners - came out in their underpants with hands held high. Saadat and his gang, and sixty- five other prisoners took over the armory. Saadat wasted no time in calling Al-Jazeerah: “Our choice is to fight or to die. We will not surrender. We are not going to give up, we are going to face our destiny with courage.” But by nightfall he chose to face his destiny with discretion rather than courage and led the prisoners out, again in their underpants with hands held high but this time with Israeli film crews recording their humiliation. In all fairness to Al-Jazeerah it was on their news straight away. There were riots all over Palestine and Tony Blair had to lie again to the House of Commons, this time about the disappearing monitors.

  ***

  There is, of course, an important archaeological site at Jericho, known as Tel El-Sultan, but it strains the imagination to see that it was once a city. As Twain put it: “Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin.” Quite so, in fact it looks to the uninitiated like a pile of dried mud, which in a reductionist sense is exactly what it is.

  Twain recounts the old biblical myth: “When Joshua marched around it seven times, some three thousand years ago, and blew it down with his trumpet, he did the work so well and so completely that he hardly left enough of the city to cast a shadow.”

  The famous battle scene has biblicists and mythologists baffled, although archaeologists are certain it never happened as there was no city at the time of Joshua’s famous trumpet voluntary. Numerologists insist the significance is in the number seven which has well-known occult layers of meaning.

  To recap: Every day for six days Joshua ordered his priests to blow their rams’ horns while other priests and soldiers carried the Ark of the Covenant once round the city walls. Then on the seventh day the priests marched seven times around the city. That done Joshua ordered the soldiers to shout and the rams’ horns (the famous trumpets) to blow and the city walls came tumbling down. The soldiers then marched into the city and massacred every man and woman, young and old, ye verily even all the oxen, sheep and asses.

  Mr. Farki found an inscription in Hebrew declaring the site of the city to be from 8000 BC making it the oldest city in the world. There is evidence of a sacking in around 2300 BC, a rebuilding thereafter and a final destruction by fire in 1600 BC. When Joshua’s retinue arrived there were no walls to blow down nor - bad luck for him and the boys - residents to massacre. The city was repopulated in around 700 BC but slowly abandoned as residents gravitated towards the site of the new city, where we just had lunch, after that.

  It’s only a few miles from the dead city to the Dead Sea and we set off musing about the number seven. Mr. Farki knows it plays an important part in the Sufi mystical tradition and somehow would have the same Abrahamic roots as the Joshua story. All very interesting but I must say I am looking forward to having a float in the Dead Sea, what Mark Twain called “a funny bath”.

  ***

  There’s not much funny about it now. There didn’t seem to be too much funny about it then either: “The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, around the Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a scorching, arid, repulsive solitude. A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the spirits. It makes one think of funerals and death.

  “It was a funny bath. We could not sink. You can lie comfortably, on your back, with your head out, and your legs out from your knees down, by steadying yourself with your hands. You can sit, with your knees drawn up to your chin and your arms clasped around them, but you are bound to turn over presently, because you are top-heavy in that position.

  “If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a stern-wheel boat. You make no headway.”

  One of the other Excursionists wrote in his diary that “Mr. Twain rode his horse in and fell off it.” Mr. Twain’s explanation for this unfortunate mishap: “A horse is so top-heavy that he can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side at once.” Oh dear, Mr. Twain.

  ***

  The shore from which they swam, on the north-west corner of the Dead Sea nearest to Jericho, has now been nastily developed into a hellish resort for Russian mud-bathers. Let me explain. The Wall/Fence and the checkpoints have effectively killed off the casual floater visitors from Jerusalem - only fifteen miles away - who used to make up the bulk of the tourists. In fact, hardly any foreign tour groups come because of the Wall/Fence’s unpleasant- ness and reputation for delays. Fine, you might think, nice empty Dead Sea in which to float. Not so. All around Jericho are settlements, settlements on every hilltop. Something else I hadn’t realized until this afternoon: the houses on the settlements are arranged in a spiral around the hilltops, like wagons in a circle, as if to say to outsiders: “Just you try!” There’s not a lot for the settlers to do except pop down to the Dead Sea and have a float.

  First they have to go through another wall of sorts: the entry to the resort. Gillian resents the fact that there’s a resort here at all, and so does Mr. Farki. Her objections are on the grounds of tastelessness, his on the grounds of illegality. I find it hard to disagree with either of them. Someone has just fenced off a fine piece of shoreline, put in some turnstiles, bought some hideous old disco CDs and enormous ex-disco speakers, made a gift shop out of a tent, inserted a beer stall and numerous loungers and sat back and counted the money. You can tell you are back in Israel - even though of course you aren’t - by the almost Parisian stand
ards of rudeness, by the scowls and snarls. It’s bad enough for us but Mr. Farki has to endure looks of racial indignation as well.

  As these settlements are disproportionally populated with Russians, it’s mostly Russians who staff it and who float - even the one thin one floated. There are signs in Russian everywhere and those are Russian voices ordering more food and beer - and covering themselves in mud.

  “Disgusting!” says Mr. Farki.

  “I never thought I’d hear you agree with a European Jew,” I say.

  “How so?”

  “They all hate the Russians. Think they’re gross.”

  “They’re peasants,” says Mr. Farki. “And they’ve got a much better deal from the Jews than the Palestinians.”

  “But they are Jews,” I say.

  “Some are; some aren’t.”

  I look over at the family opposite and have to agree. She is disgustingly fat and covered in mud - as if that was going to do her any good. He is thin except for a pot-belly, balding with a bad haircut and has a nasty habit of picking his nose and swallowing the snot. The two children are running around out of control, which only encourages the mother to shout at them, and they, seeing that they are being noticed at last, are encouraged to run around screaming even more.

  I ruminate to poor Mr. Farki who clearly can’t wait to leave - and we will when I’ve finished this beer. I bore him thus: “Imagine you were sitting up there in some deadbeat town in the Ukraine, in a horrible one-bedroom Soviet-era flat on the twelfth floor, you and the wife and the four kids, elevator broken, garbage collection out of the window, power on and off at someone’s whim, odd jobs for cash when you are not waiting in line, when an old friend pops in. Hey Comrade, he says, you remember that old farmer whose great- grandmother knew someone who was a filthy Jew? Yes, I remember, you say. Well, it seems these Jews have got their own country now and need to fill it up. Looking for anyone who will admit to having even the remotest Jewish connection. You can say you are her descendant. Why would I want to do that? you ask, imagine the shame. Are you joking? he says, it’s sunny all the year round, you get a free house with lots of other Russians around, they give you money and everything. There’s even a lake nearby. But I can’t swim, you say. You don’t have to, he replies, it’s a special lake - you just float in it. I’m going, he says, you should too, bring your family. What about your Lyudmila and the kids? you ask. They’re coming too he says and my brother Sergei the strangler. The prison is forging Jewish grandmother papers for all the worst prisoners, your old friend says, sees this as a good chance to offload them.”

  “I hate this place,” says Mr. Farki thinking out loud. “Everything is unnatural. You can’t sink in the water. It’s below sea level. It stinks of bad eggs. I hate these people too. Israel does not belong in the Middle East but we have to accept it now. But Russia? Why should they be here on Arab land? Half of them aren’t even Jews. And Arabs living like Russians peasants in refugee camps.”

  “Sounds like you want to leave,” I say.

  “Sorry, I know it’s on the list to visit. Aren’t you going for swim?”

  “You must be joking, swimming here? I might meet Avigdor Lieberman!”

  I empty the beer. Mr. Farki laughs. The Russian Lieberman would just be another bigoted dolt if he weren’t Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister. Born fifty miles from here he’d be a high-up in Hamas, calling for Israel’s destruction instead of a high-up in Israel calling for Palestine’s destruction. Both Hamas and Lieberman are products of democracy. Terrifying.

  “So we can leave?” Mr. Farki asks hopefully. “Is the pope Catholic?” I reply.

  “What do you mean? Of course he’s Catholic.” “I’ll explain later.”

  In the car I am reading a Jerusalem Post I found lying on someone’s old lounger at the resort from hell. I come across this story about an Israeli company called Ahava who make cosmetics featuring Dead Sea minerals and claim they are made in Israel, when in fact they are made in the West Bank/ Occupied Territories/Palestine. I read the piece aloud to Gillian and Mr. Farki:

  A call to boycott Israeli-made Ahava products in a Maryland beauty supply store backfired last week when pro-Israel activists countered by purchasing the shop’s entire Ahava inventory.

  When the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington found out that the pro-Palestinian group Sabeel DC had organized a protest and boycott call at Ulta in Silver Spring last Saturday, the organization sent out an action alert urging supporters to visit the store and buy Ahava.

  “They cleaned the shelves out. It was the best Ahava sales weekend the store has ever seen. They had to order an expedited shipment,” said Arielle Farber, director of Israel and International Affairs for the Community Relations Council. “The greater Washington community is not going to stand for this campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

  Rona Kramer, a Maryland state senator, was among those answering the Community Relations Council call. When she heard of the boycott, she though “it’s a good opportunity for the community to show its support for Israel.”

  Faith McDonnell, another area pro-Israel activist, was moved to show up on Saturday morning because she figured many members of the Jewish community wouldn’t be able to come due to observance of Shabbat.

  ‘“There were a lot of Christians who were standing with the Jewish people and Israel on this,” McDonnell said.

  The Sabeel DC Metro chapter that organized the action said it was held on Saturday morning to take advantage of the large crowds attending a farmers’ market held by the store.

  Paul Verduin, who coordinated the Saturday event and was one of 12 partici- pants, said he wasn’t disappointed by the outcome, which saw Ahava sales boosted.

  “We operate under the concept of witness. We’re trying to testify to the fact that Ahava is one of the products being sold in the US claiming to be an Israeli product when it is made in the West Bank,” he said, saying that Sabeel is a nonviolent organization that seeks a “just peace” between Israelis and Palestinians.

  In his letter announcing the boycott, Verduin described Ahava products as “made by West Bank settlers from natural resources stolen from the Palestinian people.”

  “That’s right,” says Mr. Farki.

  I read again:

  In a statement on the subject, Ahava countered that “the mud and materials used in Ahava cosmetics products are not excavated in an occupied area. The minerals are mined in the Israeli part of the Dead Sea, which is undisputed internationally.”

  Further, it states that Mitzpe Shalem, a West Bank kibbutz where Ahava products are produced, “is not an illegal settlement.”

  “They are all illegal,” Mr. Farki pipes up.

  I continue:

  Ahava North America CEO Michael Etedgi told The Jerusalem Post that despite boycott actions in California, New York and Texas as well as in Washington, DC, business has not suffered, nor has he heard from any company that plans to stop selling Ahava as a result.

  Verduin said that his Sabeel chapter intended to carry on with its efforts. “We will continue this until the Occupation stops,” he said.

  Outside the car the countryside... well, it cannot really be called countryside, the landscape, the wilderness “is not of this earth”.

  ***

  Often over the last weeks my heart has often gone out to the Excursionists and their caravanserai as they traversed the barren, arid Samarian scrubland and now this Judean desert, swaying through the liquid heat, squinting against the dazzling whiteness, holding high their parasols almost in desperation, jaded by the endless repetitiveness of the desolation, by the constant thirst and the unrelentingly discomfort. But even by the standards of what they have endured before, this must have been like riding through the very hell of Hades.

  “I cannot describe the hid
eous afternoon’s ride from the Dead Sea to Mars Saba. It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breath- less canyons smothered us as if we had been in an oven. The sun had positive weight to it, I think. Not a man could sit erect under it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this ‘Wilderness!’ It must have been exhausting work. What a very heaven the messy towers and ramparts of vast Mars Saba looked to us when we caught a first glimpse of them!”

  ***

  And so they are even to us in Mr. Farki’s dodgy Daewoo. The Excursionists’ ride through the breathless canyons must have taken them five, or even six, hours. It takes us half an hour and we give up on with the faltering a/c and open the windows, partly, as I explain to a reluctant Mr. Farki, “to get the real caravanserai experience”. It is more than unusual to travel through absolute nothingness but we see only sky, air and rock, empty of life, as if it had never rained. The road was a track in the dust and either side of it someone had laid forlorn way poles.

  When we first see the monastery of Mars Saba it is as incongruous as it is later to become magnificent. The first sighting is from about half a mile away as the car crests a mound: two desert-colored Byzantine towers rise up from the rim of a wadi and then disappear as the car falls into the next dip. Moments later the full extent of the architecture, the achievement of it all, becomes clear. Up close the wadi is actually a cliff face and the multi-floored monastery is somehow etched onto it as if in defiance of all known laws of gravity and reason. One is reminded instantly of a smaller version Potala Palace at Lhasa in Tibet, but the view of that is always looking up at the massive lower fortifications and buttresses; here one approaches the monastery from the side elevation and arrives at it from above. Standing on the lip of the cliff face we see Mars Saba falling away carelessly below in a tumble of inter-layered vertical connecting walls, blue domes, earthen cupolas, Hellenic crosses, spiraling cell doors and windows, shaded balconies and a host of random staircases. It’s hard to determine if it was all built at once by a divinely inspired genius or it is the creation of a Disney cartoonist or has grown organically, as it were, over the centuries as hermits left their caves for the safety of a structure - and hermits in caves became monks in cells.