Where the Line is Drawn

by Raja Shehadeh

  I was never one to go for national or religious symbols, never liked waving the flag or wearing the keffiyeh or a cross. Yet there was more to it than that. I was aware that one begins thinking it is possible to live many lives but ends up having to choose one and is distinguished and shaped by it.

  Henry chose to live in Israel and this had enduring consequences. I choose to remain in Palestine and resist the injustice by fighting through the law and writing on certain subjects in a certain way. This has meant that other lives and other sorts of writings which I had hoped to do could not be done. A time will surely come when the memories of what I failed to do will come to haunt me.

  Perhaps for Henry it was different. How he saw himself is best expressed by a poem he once sent me in which he wrote:

  I want to be untied

  Sailing like a kite set free

  Pushed by a wind, going no where

  But can anyone live like that?

  13

  Israel at My Doorstep

  Ramallah, 2009

  As the years went by, the border closed in on us. Israel drew closer and closer to Ramallah. By January 2009, Israel was a mere five kilometres from my home. It had been ten years since I could walk in the valley near my house or drive down the road to A’yn Qenya, to enjoy the spring there.

  It started in the summer of 1980. I stood with Jonathan Kuttab, the co-director of Al-Haq, on the summit of one of the hills above Ramallah, enjoying the view of numerous hamlets to the north. As we feasted our eyes on the hills rising and falling below us, like the ripples on a lake, we whispered to each other how beautiful it was lest we be overheard by covetous settlers who would grab this gorgeous hilltop for one of their settlements and deprive us of this view. Just a few months later our fears proved right. Work on the settlement of Dolev began and it became home to a few thousand Israelis. Yet even though we could not walk up the hill, we could still hike in the valleys below, undisturbed.

  I remember discussing Dolev with Henry, who told me that it was a small settlement of peaceful, pious Jews, lovers of nature who had named their settlement after a biblical tree. They refused to surround it with barbed wire like other settlements. Why should they need to, they argued, when they wanted to live in peace with their neighbours? As settlements went I didn’t think too badly of them, with their low, unobtrusive buildings that did not spoil the view.

  Then came the first intifada.

  The settlers from Dolev used to pass through Ramallah on their way to Beit Eil, the headquarters of the Israeli Civil Administration, where many of them worked. Their children went to school in a settlement also called Beit El. To avoid getting lost in Ramallah, the army had marked the settlers’ path through our town with a yellow line. This was a clear violation of our space but I was willing to let it go. Then, when the intifada started, they had to employ an armed escort after people started to throw stones at them.

  On 8 October 1990, after the massacre at Al Aqsa when Israeli police killed some twenty Palestinians and injured over 150, some settlers on their way home shot at the window where my wife was standing. Had Penny not ducked, the bullet would have struck her in the head. We kept the shrapnel as a memento mori.

  On 26 March 1991 a Dolev settler, Yair Mendelssohn, was killed driving back to Dolev. It was claimed that a Palestinian had shot at his car, which had swerved down into a steep gully. For three days, 40,000 people were punished for the death of one Dolev resident by being forced to stay at home, away from their work and schools. All along both sides of the road to their settlement, olive trees were felled for the security of the settlers, ancient stone walls were demolished and cars parked by the houses of Palestinian residents on Tireh Road were damaged by settler fire. We were then living on this road and were fearful of what the settlers might do next.

  A little later, as I was walking in the area, I came across a bulldozer destroying centuries-old terracing and uprooting the olive trees there. I thought they might be widening the road, but shortly after, on another walk with two friends from the UK, we saw on the outskirts of Ramallah a large boulder painted with the words ‘Yad Yair’, which means ‘Memorial for Yair’. It was high above the road, only eight kilometres north of Ramallah and on a plot of land that belonged to a resident of the city. It was a shrine dedicated to the memory of Yair Mendelssohn.

  We noticed in the strata of the rocks at the side of the road, near where the boulder had been propped up, pockets of what looked like tubular rocks. I thought they must be fossilised roots. What else could have penetrated into the rock in this manner? I argued. I imagined that the roots had dug into the rock for support and in search of water, then remained embedded there for years, centuries, until they had become part of the rock. We scraped away a thin layer of soil and tried to pull out a piece. These round stumps, each as thick as a thumb, were not difficult to extract and I managed to get my piece, showed it to the others and kept it with me. We continued on our walk, but, as we turned the corner, an army jeep stopped abruptly and the soldiers came down carrying their weapons.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked us.

  He had thick curly black hair and wore a purple T-shirt underneath his army fatigues. His socks were also purple. He had a soft, almost shy look in his eyes, very unlike the glazed stare of the professional soldier. Clearly he was only a reservist.

  He could not understand what we were doing in the hills. He looked at us and said, ‘This is a closed area.’ Then, pointing to me, ‘He knows this.’

  I refrained from saying anything. The soldier did not seem to take much interest in me. He was trying to figure out the other two, the English man and woman who were so bold as to be walking unarmed in these hills, where they could easily be mistaken for settlers and harmed.

  ‘This is a closed military area. You cannot come here without permission,’ he said.

  As he spoke, I felt my thumb-like fossil and remembered that it amounted to a weapon. The soldier was bound to keep it as evidence of my hostile intent should I be arrested. Under Israeli military law, stone-throwing was a serious offence.

  Shortly after that incident, the army set up an outpost and road barrier there, stopping cars and pedestrians using the road. Then the army expropriated hundreds of acres of privately owned land south of the outpost, reaching to the last houses on the outskirts of Ramallah. The land had been surrounded by barbed wire with no compensation paid to the owners. Our hills were being prepared for yet another Jewish settlement. I had witnessed this process before in other parts of the West Bank. This time it was only a short distance from where I lived.

  I also discovered that the fossil I had extracted from the area was not the petrified root of a tree but coral. There had been a reef once close to where I lived. Water had submerged this area long before Arabs or Jews settled here.

  After the Oslo Accords, the settlers from Dolev stopped using the road with the yellow line. Instead they raised funds from their supporters in the United States to construct a road that cut through the valley and the hills connecting their settlement north-west of Ramallah with Beit El to the east. That winding road, which was illegal, scarred the land, destroying much of the beauty in the wadi and along the terraced hills. The Israeli army deemed the road too dangerous and prohibited the settlers from using it, replacing it with a wider and better-designed road to the north that caused even more damage to the Ramallah hills.

  This was a time of extensive Israeli settlement. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank more than doubled. Most of this took place in what the Oslo Accords designated as Area C, comprising more than half of the West Bank. The area around Yad Yair did not fall within that category, but when the Israeli government began at the start of the new century to construct a wall around the West Bank the settlers in Dolev became concerned that they might be stranded on the Palestinian side of the barrier. They increased their efforts to raise more money to build a network of illegal settlements that now dot the hills north of Ramallah
and form a ring around the city.

  Years earlier I had asked a resident in the village of A’yn Qenya in the valley adjacent to Dolev whether they were being harassed by the settlers.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They live their lives and we live ours.’

  ‘Do they pass through the village?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Every morning, very early. Before sunrise they drive through towards Ramallah. They seem to have a place of worship up on the hills near Ramallah. They drive up and stay there until sunrise, then drive back.’

  I wondered about this. I had been feeling that our hills were spared more settlements because there was no mention of Ramallah in the Bible and so any claim to possess this land on religious grounds would be a stretch. What I hadn’t realised was that the Yad Yair shrine was turning into a new place of worship – much as the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994, had become a venerated site.

  I was able to find out how the settlers felt about their place and mine on these hills when in May 2008 I took a walk with Quil Lawrence from the BBC. We started from Mizraa Qiblia and went down to A’yn Qenya. Just as we reached the centre of the village a car stopped. A man with a yarmulke was at the wheel and next to him another with side locks. Quil greeted them in Arabic. The driver rolled down his window and asked what we were doing here. I thought he had mistaken us for Israelis who had lost our way.

  ‘We live near here,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Ramallah.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We live near here.’

  He could see Quil recording the conversation.

  ‘You are recording me?’ he asked.

  Quil said he was a journalist.

  ‘Do you have a card?’ he asked. Then, ‘Let’s call the army. I don’t need your card.’

  We were being interrogated by someone with no authority to do any such thing, so I asked, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am no one.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  In his poor English he answered, ‘I’m different from you. I’m living here. Really living here, not just like you.’

  ‘What does “not just like you” mean?’

  The settler, who lived in Dolev on the hill just above where we stood, didn’t answer and proceeded to call the army on his mobile phone. He had their number. They were his army and were there to protect him against me. They would respond to his call, not to mine. The area was off bounds to the Palestinian police and technically, by walking in these hills without a permit from the Israeli military authorities, I was breaking the law.

  A Palestinian van driver stood nearby. He had been wondering throughout this exchange whether we were settlers, but then he recognised me because he had once given me a lift.

  ‘Just come into the van and leave him alone,’ he said, indicating the Jewish driver. ‘I know him well and he is always making trouble.’

  We got in. The settler drove ahead and tried to block the road with his car. After some five minutes, he thought better of it and moved away. Further up the alternative dirt road that had been opened by the villagers on their own initiative after the closure of the older road leading from Ramallah to the village we found three jeeps that had created a mobile checkpoint, but it was only stopping people entering A’yn Qenya and we passed through unchecked.

  The van driver said he might get into trouble. The man we had encountered was a notorious settler called Flicks, who always came to the village, blocked the road, threw stones at the houses and once threw fruit juice at young men standing by the side of the road. He always went through town on his way to pray at Yad Yair.

  The words of the settler stayed with me: ‘I’m different from you. I’m living here. Really living here.’ He had that glint in his eye as if he knew something that I didn’t. What could it be? Did he think he had a special dispensation from God?

  A few months later I saw cars passing along the old road to A’yn Qenya that had been closed for many years. It looked as though the road had been completely reopened. I walked to Yad Yair to see what had become of it. It was deserted. Metres of barbed wire, cleared and levelled land, cement blocks. That was all. I saw a sign with ‘Yad Yair’ on it in Hebrew. I thought I should get my camera and photograph it. Then I saw another wooden sign that had been thrown on the ground. On it in Hebrew were the words, ‘Blessed are those who come to Yad Yair.’ I thought I would take this back with me as a souvenir, but when I bent down to pick it up my heart began to pound and I began hyperventilating. By stepping down to pick up this placard belonging to the illegal settlement I was attempting to break a huge barrier of fear that had been gathering over many years. I was all alone on the site, there was no reason to feel afraid and yet I couldn’t help myself. My body was shaking like a leaf. I lifted up my head and stood there under the clear blue sky trying to breathe deeply. When I finally regained control over myself, a profound sense of defeat came over me. I realised I could no longer walk on this land without feeling that I was crossing into forbidden territory.

  A short time passed and it was as though Yad Yair had never been. The outpost had been the initiative of a few families from Dolev and was not incorporated in the larger plan for Jewish settlements in the area. Because it was situated on a steep hill so close to Ramallah, the army was not interested in preserving it. They moved their base closer to Dolev and decided to dismantle the outpost. The settlers claimed that in doing so the army had ‘desecrated’ the land. ‘We are certain that we will return and settle Yad Yair through our determination and patience,’ they vowed. ‘The army will not frighten us, nor prevent us from reaching [Yad Yair].’ Grass and weeds were all there was now. Nature was already beginning to take over, as nature always does.

  The Jewish settlers didn’t give up. On 29 July 2012, the eve of Tisha B’Av 5772, a day of fasting commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, a number of them came to the site and proceeded to ‘recite mournful odes for the destruction of the Temple’ from the Book of Lamentations. The Jewish Press, an American weekly newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, claimed that around fifty men, women and children had attended. Another photograph attached to the report showed two men with a small number of children. The young man in the foreground was wearing sandals and shorts. His wheat-coloured face had a tight-lipped, sombre expression. He closely resembled the son of a builder who did some work for me at the house, who looked just as unhappy. Much as I tried to find out why the builder’s son was taciturn, I couldn’t get him to speak. Perhaps this young man in the picture was hoping to find satisfaction and fulfilment from becoming observant. His head was bent over the Torah, which he clutched in his hands intently.

  The slightly older man, bespectacled and also wearing an air of sadness, seemed like a caring father embracing two younger children. He read to them from a book. He did not look sinister, but paternal and mentoring. It was an intimate portrait of a loving father showing his kids the way and of an older boy, perhaps a disaffected neighbour or a brother, who had also come along. Except for where they sat, I would have admired the intimacy of this scene.

  In another report, while decrying the role of the army in destroying this outpost, the settlers emphasised its strategic importance in blocking the spread of Ramallah, my city.

  14

  Lunch at Everest

  Beit Jalla, 2013

  We felt a great sense of achievement and relief when we reached the Everest Restaurant. To get there we each had to take a different route, depending on whether we were Israeli or Palestinian. Even though it was July 2013 and many years had passed since the second intifada, Israel had not revoked the restrictions on our movements. The Palestinians had to wait for forty minutes at the Qalandia checkpoint. Our Israeli friends, on the other hand, had to take the road from Jerusalem to Gush Etzion, passing through a short tunnel and then over the longest bridge in Israel. They had to drive next thr
ough another, much longer tunnel under the Palestinian city of Beit Jalla and through a checkpoint that allows only Israeli traffic to pass. They continued straight until they reached a roundabout where they doubled back before reaching another checkpoint, turned right and followed the road to the settlement of Har Gilo. But before reaching the settlement, they had to take another right turn into Beit Jalla. They then drove all the way up to the Everest Restaurant, located on the highest point in the area.

  We were about twenty-five people and we were there to celebrate the release of Judy’s grandson Natan from five and a half months in prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli army. But there was another reason for the gathering, which we had to keep secret from Judy. It was her eighty-fifth birthday. The reason we had chosen this venue was because it was the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis could meet without the Israelis going through a checkpoint with a red sign forbidding them from entering a Palestinian city.

  Natan was a slight, unassuming young man whose great influence, he said, was his grandfather Haim, who had left his studies at Harvard to volunteer for the Palmach. He had been drafted into the US army, serving from 1944 to 1946, and his encounter with the extermination camps in Europe led him to support the Zionist cause. But he was wounded during fighting in Palestine and returned to Harvard a blind man. Still, he managed to complete his doctorate in linguistics and published a study of the languages used by Muslims, Jews and Christians in Baghdad.

  We were all curious to hear from Natan what he thought about the Israeli army and why he had decided to refuse the draft. For someone so young, he was highly articulate, telling us that he was not a pacifist but a conscientious objector. I had read an interview with him in Haaretz in which he told the reporter:

  It is essential to be obstinate and speak your truth, down to the last comma. That is the only thing that can influence society when it must decide on issues of principle and forgo manipulation. I am against lying. Lying is wrong in every situation − and especially in the case of military service. The IDF really likes to get people who refuse to serve to say, ‘I am depressed-crazy-handicapped, etc.’ So it is important to underscore that my refusal does not stem from mental reasons.