by Stefan Gates
However, Alon warns me that his wife Rachel is very orthodox and practical and has refused to talk to me because, frankly, she can't see what good will come from me being here. As for my guide Efrat, a very secular Jew from Tel Aviv, she doesn't look too kindly on the settlers – she's especially incensed that she has to wear long sleeves and trousers to avoid offending them – and she dislikes Rachel before she's even met her. This is going to be interesting.
Alon speaks with spiritual, messianic and evangelical conviction about cucumbers, bread and war; he sees food as a key building block of his faith, but also a root cause for conflict. 'If you understood Hebrew you'd know the root word of war is bread. Lechem is the middle word of war, so in other words all wars are basically based on bread.'
The Zimmermans have nine children who take up the vast majority of their time, and Alon's kitchen is balagan (a filthy mess) according to him. But the kitchen has nothing on the bathroom where their son rears chickens. The little chicks have taken over half of it, running about next to the washing machine, spreading crap around the floor and over clothes. Efrat is astounded at the squalor, and she breathes through her mouth to avoid the smell.
Rachel storms into the room. She's a ball of energy, rushing around telling us that she can't see what the point of all this is anyway, before departing abruptly. I am instantly terrified of her. Alon sighs and takes us off to see his hothouses on an edge of the settlement, where I help him pick broccoli and prepare the earth for a new crop. It's sweaty work, and my hay fever makes my throat and eyes itch like the devil's own scrofula as I try to keep up with his phenomenal speed and energy.
We yank broccoli stems for several hours and chat about land and food. 'Of course food is the source of all our conflict,' he says, 'because food equals land.'
I ask him why he's willing to put himself and his family in such danger here in this outpost, and he explains, 'We've returned home to resettle the land that God gave to the Jewish people.' As the Itamar website puts it, 'We came here to LIVE and revive the ancient earth THAT HAS ALWAYS BEEN OURS.'
Alon wishes that they could just live in peace with the Palestinians, and that the fighting would end. I mention that that's easy to say, but he is living on land that the Palestinians say is theirs. He tells me that the Bible says this isn't true.
We give up the backbreaking work because Alon has to take his father to hospital, so we say goodbye and I ask him to convince his wife to speak to me. He promises to try. In his absence Moshe, the head of the Itamar council, packs me into his van for a guided tour of the settlement. It's a poor place by Western standards, and as Moshe tells us, 'People here live simple, frugal lives'. He goes on to say that Itamar is beautiful and peaceful, and he and his fellow settlers are fulfilling their biblical destiny. This would ring a little more true if I didn't have his loaded M16 jiggling around between my legs. He is defensive about the settlements, and is adamant that, 'Anyone can open the Bible and see that this is a land given to the Jewish people by God – to the Jewish nation.'
I tactfully suggest to him that the Palestinians also claim it as their own, and he replies, 'That's a great question – you are very well prepared with your questions,' and changes the subject. I don't pursue it; it's not easy, trying to discuss the politics of land while at the same time ensuring that we aren't kicked off the settlement.
Moshe takes me to the farthest, highest point of Itamar, passing various places where attacks and deaths have occurred, and we gaze at the spectacular valleys, overlooked by ominous-looking Jewish settlements that seem to crown every single hill and mountain-top. Nearby is the city of Nablus, notorious for breeding Palestinian fighters, and I ask him if he sees enemies when he looks down onto the Palestinian homes, but he says that he sees a struggle yet to overcome.
Moshe says, 'Every step we take we try to make peace. What we get in return is war, bloodshed, killing of innocent men, women and children.' He suggests I take a look at the Itamar website later, which I do. I find this hands-across-the-water attitude to the Palestinians: 'Why do you think the Arabs are willing to blow themselves up? Because they know the end is very near, the sands in Yishmael's hourglass have just about run out . . .'
I spend a long, hot sweaty day with Alon planting endless cucumbers. He tells me, 'If you dig in the ground deep enough, after you get below the remains of the Christian era and the Muslim era you'll find the dust of my forefathers here.' I try again to convince his wife Rachel to talk to me, and, after seeing how much I have helped her husband, she actually seems to be melting a little.
When I return to Jerusalem I call Alon again and he says that Rachel has finally agreed to talk to me.
Perdion
Rachel has suddenly become friendly and talkative, although she remains a little scary. She has a ferocious look in her eyes and a grin on her face that sits there whether she's berating her husband (she seems to do this quite a lot) or making salad.
I help her to prepare the food for tonight – chicken, cucumber salads and hummus – and she talks about food and faith. The Torah lays down strict rules for food preparation, and all manner of kosher rules 'about 20 or 30 per cent of the commandments'. I ask if she understands the rationale behind many of the rules, but she says she doesn't need rationality, 'People are always looking to explain things, but it's more important to accept the word of God.'
Rachel explains that tonight's ceremony is about redemption. I ask what the baby is guilty of, and she gives me a look, as if I've accused her grandchild of being evil. 'I don't mean that – it's just that if the child is being redeemed, it must be guilty of something. Maybe it's a symbolic guilt.'
She looks puzzled. 'Yes, I suppose so. Maybe there's a lot of sadness at the root of it all. In fact, there is. A lot of sadness.'
I ask if it's really worth living somewhere this dangerous. 'My children have been through one terrorist attack after another. I've got one daughter who's been in two terrorist attacks. She's had her face sewn up, she's had plastic surgery. This son has been in two terrorist attacks. All my children have had close friends killed, and that's how they live, they live here, they live deep in the ground.'
Her son is helping us cook, but he says that he doesn't like settlers and he doesn't like Arabs 'because both sides fight, both sides are extreme. Each side comes with hatred, you can see it in their faces. I don't like living like that.'
That night I join in the ceremony and eat some of the food we've prepared. There's a disappointingly low turnout – Alon had laid on an armoured bus to ship people in, but few people are brave enough to make it all the way out here into no man's land. A large, sweaty guy who's the spitting image of Borat's fat producer sings and plays the Bontempi keyboard at a quite remarkable volume, whipping the assembled throng into a fair old lather. There's much drinking, singing and dancing, and although the scholarly orthodox men drag me onto the dance floor, few people want to talk to me.
When the party ends, I help clear up into the small hours and then spend the night in a mildewed Portakabin, grateful that I've managed to spend three whole days with the settlers without being kicked out, but I must admit I've been disturbed by the experience.
Yanun
I head into the West Bank again, this time accompanied by the World Food Programme, to stay in Yanun, a Palestinian village just below the Jewish Itamar settlement. Most people in this village rely partly on food aid to survive. I am with a Mehjdi, a fast-talking Palestinian WFP employee who has drawn the short straw of accompanying me on an overnight trip.
Yanun is a poor farming community made up of subsistence farmers, mostly goatherds, who own olive trees, and who say they've been forced off a great deal of their land by local settlers. The houses are rudimentary but they have some electricity and running water. Yanun is at the head of a set of valleys that stretches out deep towards Jordan, and when the sun shines, the view is a stunning vista of ancient olive terraces flanking biblical hillsides (I know, I've used the biblical analogy a lot so fa
r, but it just works around here).
Our contact isn't there when I arrive so I sit under a tree to wait. Someone spots me and brings me a cup of wickedly strong coffee, then another family sends a pot of delicious sweet tea. It's a very different welcome from the one I got in Itamar.
After a short while Abu Nasim arrives. He's the head of the family that's agreed to show us around and put us up for the night. He's a smiling, furry-faced villager with a deep tan and wrinkled skin from years spent working outside, but there's a world-weariness about him, despite the smiles. He's just arrived back from Nablus in his illegal unregistered car, having taken his son to see a doctor about an infected eye.
Abu Nasim (which means 'Father of Nasim' – Nasim being his eldest son) welcomes us into his house and he and his wife Om ('Mother') ply us with tea and coffee. They introduce us to their two giggling daughters, then Abu Nasim takes us and his small herd of goats and sheep for a walk around his village. It's poor but beautiful and peaceful, and again there's a real sense that biblical tales were played out on this earth although the effect is spoiled by the army watchtowers that look down on Yanun. Abu Nasim says he has the feeling that he is always being watched. Halfway up a hillside, he stops us and says that if we walk any further we are likely to get shot by the settlers. He points to his olive trees that cover the hillside beyond. 'I can't harvest the olives from those, so they rot on the trees and go to waste.'
The settlers around here don't just protect their land: they also stop the locals from coming anywhere near them. I guess it's for security, and they have every reason to be nervous as they've often been attacked in the past, but it means that Abu Nasim and his family go hungry, and creates a huge amount of resentment. Whilst the settlers are bristling with weaponry, the Palestinian villagers aren't allowed to own guns, so they're easily bullied. It's no surprise, then, that they turn to militancy.
He tells me that the settlers make pre-emptive forays into the villages around here to frighten and threaten Palestinians. They particularly enjoy pointing their guns at the village kids to terrify them. At one point, two years ago, the entire village moved out after attacks and intimidation by the settlers became intolerable, but after a while they and a few other families moved back, defying the settlers. Four years ago a shepherd was stabbed to death while out herding his sheep and there have been many documented attacks by settlers. Abu says that the Israelis never bother to investigate the murders of Palestinians, but if a settler is attacked, countless Arabs are made to suffer.
We go to the highest house in the village and I want to go to the top of the hillside so I can see down to the valley, but Abu Nasim says, 'Why? You'll just get shot.' Call me sentimental, but I find it depressing that Abu's kids will never see the top of their own hillside.
We return to Abu Nasim's house for a lunch of hummus, flatbreads, goat's cheese and olive oil. He tells me that being unable to harvest their olives has made them poorer, and the lack of grazing area means they have to buy feed for their goats. 'We have shortages of cornflour, rice and sugar,' he says, and they can't afford to buy fresh vegetables or meat. His sons all suffer from mineral and vitamin deficiencies and they are constantly ill.
'Look at my daughters. They don't have any teeth. When my daughter comes home from school she says, "Mother, the girls at school keep asking me what's wrong with my teeth." Sometimes I just burst into tears because I don't know what to say. There's nothing I can do.'
I ask how they feel about living on food aid from the WFP. 'I am not comfortable getting it, but look at our situation: we cannot farm, we cannot have lots of livestock. We used to grow our own chickpeas and store them in large amounts; now we are given only a few kilos by humanitarian organizations. The main reason for our terrible situation is the settlement behind us. We are in a small jail like Abu Graib. The only way out is towards the front of the town. The rest of the land has been seized. We are now living on a little over I square kilometre. In my father's day we had 300 goats and grazed them around the village.'
His words sound angry but he has a shrugging, disbelieving demeanour rather than a militant one. During lunch, the boys cough constantly, and curl up on their mother's lap. She strokes them gently throughout the meal. After we've finished a boy comes running in to tell us that the WFP aid truck has arrived. The villagers get a delivery of CSB, fortified flour and sugar. Around 40 men and boys stand in the sunshine chatting and drinking tea and coffee as the rations are sorted, then they help each other carry the sacks to their houses.
I help to milk the family goats, much to the amusement of Abu Nasim's children. When you milk a goat, you have to remember that neither the delicacy nor the love that you show to your main squeeze's nipples are of any use to a sheep, goat or water-buffalo. These girls sport industrial-quality tits. Grasp the teat with confidence and use your palm to manoeuvre the milk from the udder into the teat itself, and then imagine that you're trying to get the last bit of toothpaste our of a nearly-empty tube. Squeeze hard, but not aggressively and out should squirt a gratifying burst of milk. Abu Nasim is watching and he tells me that he borrowed money to buy his flock of goats but now that the settlers have taken away grazing land he has to buy animal feed to keep them alive, and the only way to pay for it is by selling the cheese and milk to animal feed salesmen. He's stuck with a flock of goats that makes almost no money, and a loan that he may never be able to repay. He is distraught at his inability to make enough money to feed his children but at least they have cheese and milk, so they get enough calcium.
Om Nasim shows me how to make goat's cheese: after boiling the milk she adds a couple of drops of rennet, stirs it and leaves it for 15 minutes until it has taken on the consistency of set yoghurt. We take some small squares of muslin, wrap fistfuls of the nascent cheese in them and twist gently to squeeze out a little of the whey. The cheeses are laid on a board set at an angle, and more whey slowly drips down it into a bowl. We make about 20 wraps, and once they're done we immediately unwrap and rewrap them all, tightening them with a couple of extra turns as whey drips down our wrists. These are left for an hour, then we unwrap them once more. They now have the consistency of mozzarella. We unwrap and rewrap them again, checking that they are all exactly the same size, then cover them with another board and weigh it down. A couple of hours later, the cheeses are firm and tight, about the size of a packet of cigarettes, and ready to store away. We roll them in salt and put them in a bucket. The salt will remove more whey by osmosis and flavour the cheeses.
We eat some of the cheese that night for dinner. It is rich but blandly flavoured – like a good mozzarella but a little firmer. The mature ones are too dry and salty for me, but the ones we've just made are delicious and creamy inside. Abu and Om Nasim had wanted to cook me a special feast, but I ask them not to – I want to experience their normal life and eat the food that they normally eat, and I certainly don't want them to spend money on food that they can barely afford. Abu Nasim's clearly a bit miffed about this – his code of hospitality means he ought to treat me as an honoured guest – but he reluctantly agrees. So I eat the cheese, with hummus, some olives from his trees, bread and more olive oil.
After dinner we are joined by two young Polish men from a Christian ecumenical organization that helps keep an international presence in the village in an attempt to discourage the settlers from attacking Yanun or forcing the villagers out again. I make some balloon animals for the kids – I'm the world's worst balloon modeller, but they don't seem to mind.
Abu Nasim pulls out an ancient TV but can only manage to find one very fuzzy channel. It's running repeats of WWF wrestling, complete with maniacal voice-overs and ridiculous costumes. We sit in this ancient house drinking Arabic coffee and sprawling on cushions as the sun sets on the most fought-over, holiest land on the planet, whilst on the telly a man who looks like a pig on steroids appears to be smashing seven shades of shit out of what I can only describe as a spandex bat.
We bed down for the night in the roo
m we ate in – Marc, Mehjdi Nadir (our WFP driver) and myself – all sprawled out on cushions. Throughout the night the sons cough and splutter, and none of us gets much sleep.
By dawn the room smells pretty rank – the only thing for it is to go for an early walk, so I'm sitting writing this under an olive tree on a Palestinian hillside, shaded from the brutally clear morning sunshine. Whatever religion you are, I defy you to sit here on these crumbling olive grove terraces and not feel some sense of awe and history. Although there's a brief but palpable serenity, looking down towards the Great Rift Valley and across to Jordan you do get a sense, though it troubles me to admit it, that this land has been fertilized with blood, and that perhaps peace doesn't really belong here
The valley is beautiful, bathed in a sharp sunlight and hissing gently with insect life. The ancient terraces ring the hills and there's no movement or sound except for rustling leaves in the trees – until I hear the pop of a distant gunshot ringing out from one from somewhere above. Then, on the hill opposite me, a settler's JCB starts work pounding rocks on the scrubland and digging next to a watchtower. It looks from here as though they are laying out a new cul-de-sac of houses.
A man shouts at me. It's Rashid, the village mayor who's just back from taking his sheep grazing. He's waving at me and shouting 'Salaam, but he doesn't have time to stop. He warns me (using the international language of finger drawn across throat) not to go any further up the hill or I'll be shot.
I return to the house to help Om Nasim cook bread in her taboohn, a goat-dung fired oven. A deep hole has been filled with broken stones and floor tiles, then covered with a steel lid, on top of which is what looks like a pile of ash, but is actually a deep fire of goats' dung smouldering away. She tells me that it never goes out. She wipes away the surface ash, and underneath it's a furnace of bright red embers. Within this has been set a large iron pot half-filled with stones, and this is the oven. She lifts the lid and lays a piece of dough about 60 cm in diameter straight onto the stones, then replaces the lid. After four or five minutes, the bread is baked a deep, mottled brown, marked in places with a little charring, and smelling damn fine. She grabs it out with her bare hands despite the heat, and lays it down to cool, a few stones still sticking to the bread. It has a slight taste of goat's dung which I rather like.