Palestinian Walks

by Raja Shehadeh

  The olive trees at the bottom of this wadi stood in flat, freshly tilled soil. We considered this the midway point of our walk, after which we would begin our ascent back to Ramallah. We ate apples as we discussed the future of the legal struggle. We plotted how through legal action we were going to frustrate the whole of the Israeli settlement project. We would raise money for legal aid to challenge every land expropriation order and put a stop to this charade, which claimed the settlers were only taking land that belonged to no one.

  As Jonathan and I talked, I looked around. I was fond of the rocks here, with the grass bunching up around them. They looked as though they had burst out of the ground, small islands perched on a sea of green. The hills spread before us, leaning back comfortably, creating a wide valley. The ruin of an old collapsed qasr stood to our right. In winter, when the water seeped down from the hills it drained into a narrow channel between the rocks. The path ran by its side. More flowers would bloom here than anywhere else in the hills.

  We were aware that the main argument the Israeli military was using was that non-registered land in the West Bank was public land. This could be used to settle Israeli Jews. The implications were calamitous. According to this interpretation of the land law, the only non-registered land that truly belonged to Palestinians was that over which they could prove use either by living on it or continuously cultivating it for a period of not less than ten years. All the rest was public land. This would render Palestinians living in the West Bank squatters, not rightful owners. The only rightful owners, according to the Israeli government's version of law and history, were the Jews, who could trace their entitlement to the land from time immemorial, just after the dinosaurs became extinct. Legally this position was not sustainable. And yet it was not being challenged. Most Palestinians boycotted Israeli courts, where these challenges could be presented. The settlers could comfort themselves that they were not taking anyone's private land to establish their settlements.

  Jonathan, with his Afro hairstyle, bright white teeth and long fingers, stressed every word. His eyes would widen when he wanted to emphasize a point, black intelligent eyes that sparkled. 'We must challenge these claims,' he announced, speaking loudly for all the hills to hear. 'We know what is right. We must not make it easy for Israel to take our land. We'll bring hundreds, thousands, of cases before their courts until we exhaust their system. Can you see it, going to Nurit at the military court with boxes of claims and seeing her surprise at this barrage of new cases that she has to process? I love it. I feel so excited by the prospect.'

  We did not lose enthusiasm after we completed our walk. Al Haq established a special legal aid fund to help those who could not afford to bring their cases before the military courts and hundreds were submitted.

  One of the first recipients of legal aid from the Al Haq fund was the farmer Sabri Gharib, who lived in the village of Beit Ijza, south of Ramallah. He was known to us because his was the very first sworn affidavit Al Haq obtained in 1982. In it he had testified about the relentless harassment by the settlers of Givon Ha'hadasha, which was being established next to his land. This included preventing him from cultivating his land, shooting at him and his children, threats to demolish his home and repeated night arrests by the Israeli military.

  Sabri and his family stood their ground. Their ordeal lasted for over twenty-four years. It was still continuing when I visited him in May 2006. Despite the incessant pressure he had managed to stay in his house at the top of the hill. But now the settlement surrounded the house from three sides. A wire fence was built around the house leaving him a passageway only a few metres wide. He was able to save only a fraction of his agricultural land; the rest was taken over by the settlement. The current issue that was absorbing his attention when I visited was that the Separation Wall Israel was building would cut him off from his village and the houses he had built for his children down the hill. He would end up on the side of the settlement, an unwelcome Gentile in the midst of housing planned only for Jews. He was now contesting the path of the wall at the Israeli High Court of Justice, adding another case to the numerous earlier challenges he took to that court expecting justice, only to be rebuffed time and time again. Sabri and I were standing outside in the sun looking at the settlement through the wire fence built around his house. He was telling me about this latest case when we saw an old man walking his Labrador on the other side of the fence. I tried hard to catch the man's eye. I wanted some indication of how he felt confining his neighbour in this way, but the man would not raise his eyes from the ground. He went solemnly through his walk, keeping pace with his dog, never showing any recognition of Sabri or his guest.

  The resilience of Sabri, whose name itself means patience, was legendary. But the long gruelling struggle against the settlers, the World Zionist Organization and the military government supporting them was taking its toll on him. Though he still had fire in his big black fearless eyes as he spoke with courage and confidence about his plight, his health was deteriorating. It was only on my last visit that I discovered that Sabri, who had ten children, was an only child. He had inherited from his father the large area of family land which he was determined to preserve and pass on to his children. I also realized that the courageous fighter was not concerned with nationalist issues. He believed only in two constants, God and the land. Not to fight in every way possible to hold on to his land was sacrilege.

  In those early days of our legal struggle before the big settlement thrust that began in the early eighties, Jonathan and I could fantasize how we were going to save the hills of Palestine from Jewish settlements. We were both dreamers, confident that we had the energy and the determination to make our plan work. We were challenging the very basis of the Israeli government's land acquisition policy. We also wanted to exhaust the military court system and hoped to delay the settlements until the cases had been heard. Now some twenty-five years later those times seem aeons away. How complicated and dismal the future has turned out, with the land now settled by close to half a million Israeli Jews, living in hundreds of settlements scattered throughout our hills and connected by wide roads crossing through the wadis. And more recently a wall has looped around the 'settlement blocs', destroying the beauty of our hills, separating our villages and towns from each other and annexing yet more of our land to Israel, demolishing the prospect for a viable peace.

  Alone and without Jonathan I did not stop for long on the rock that marked the halfway point of the walk. I continued down the valley, which had now narrowed and was called Wadi El Kalb (the dog), where the water would tumble during the heavy rains. But I did not walk down that narrow wadi. I stayed to the left of it, following a path which was green and meandering, a happy path with rocks to step on to avoid squashing the young grass and delicate crocuses that lay between.

  I continued on this path for some ten minutes until I got to A'yn El Asfourah (the bird) on the left-hand side of the wadi. To cross to it I had to walk over wide rocks which were mossy, wet and slippery. Next to them and close to the ground was a cobweb of the green delicate leaves and yellow buds of chamomile. In the shallow ponds I could see tadpoles wriggling through the water. There was a drop down to a lower level of the valley, where in heavy rain waterfalls developed. Here the path forked. It continued southward up the hill called Jabal El 'qda, behind which was the village of A'yn Arik, famous for its sweet spring water and pomegranate trees.

  I took the path that continued down Wadi El Kalb to A'yn Qenya. Here it was narrow and overgrown with shrubs. I walked alongside the wadi, hopping over rocks that had been smoothed by the water washing over them in winter. I calculated that it would take me two days to walk to the coastal plain from here.

  What would it have felt like if all the refugees of Lydda and Ramle who were forced out of their towns that hot July day in 1948 were to have walked through these hills and valleys back to their cities? Israel would not have allowed them to stay, but perhaps the symbolic return would have helped reliev
e the inherited horror of that exodus and the disgrace of being forced out of one's home. It would have been a symbolic return journey, a reverse exodus to wash away the shame of that first forced expulsion. Perhaps after it the two sides could have negotiated the other aspects of the problem. It was good to dream of this even when I knew it could not possibly happen. It was not uncommon for me to think of crazy schemes walking in these hills.

  Where the old narrow road from Ramallah to A'yn Qenya approaches the path in the valley I came upon cliffs which it was not possible to clamber over. They stood in a cluster like a gate blocking the wadi. The rocks from the east where I approached were packed closely together in an overhang, forming a sort of canopy below which one could take shelter from the rain and sun. I circled around these cliffs, joined the valley on the other side and continued my walk through Wadi El Kalb towards the A'yn Qenya spring which has given the village its name.

  A'yn Qenya was a small village of fewer than a thousand inhabitants where the houses did not have running water. Every morning the women and children took their buckets and walked to the spring to fill them up with water. Someone had a donkey which could transport two buckets at a time, balancing them on each side of its belly. It trotted slowly uphill over the stony path to make the delivery. When it was not on duty the donkey could be seen tethered by the road in the centre of the village. Recently it had given birth to a lovely young donkey, who stood quietly next to his mother, his head bent down, looking as happy as only a donkey can.

  I can still remember the very first walk I ever took down to this village, when we spent the night sleeping on the very rocks on which I now stood. It was the summer of 1969. I was participating in the Ramallah Boy Scouts' work camp, the only time in my life I ever did. One evening around midnight a group of us decided to walk down to A'yn Qenya. I don't know why, perhaps because that evening we had had to listen to the defeated arguments of the Israeli-appointed mayor of Ramallah, who had been invited to address us. His sloping shoulders moved up and down when he chuckled over his own jokes, causing his arms to swing. No one else smiled or even agreed with any of the points he was making. Or perhaps we set off on our walk simply to prove that we could. We were at that age. None of us knew the way.

  Israeli soldiers had come through these same hills as conquerors two years earlier. Perhaps we thought we would be re-conquering the territory by overcoming our fear of the dark abyss. There certainly was something liberating about the adventure. The night was still. There was no moon to light our way. We were eight young and uncertain men in the dark and for the first time I understood how it was possible to feel comfort in numbers. The thumping of our boots was heavy and persistent. It came as a warning to all other creatures inhabiting these hills to move away, stay clear of our path if they did not wish to be crushed. One of us, Jad, cut a branch from an old tree and held it in front of him menacingly. None of us would admit fear. There was no question of stopping. After scrambling in the hills for a few hours we were exhausted. We had lost our way. We sprawled on some large slabs of rock and immediately succumbed to a deep slumber. It was not a prudent thing to do but we were young and adventurous. We only woke up with the sun and the sounds of morning: the braying of donkeys, the bleating of the sheep and the distant shouts of the women calling on their children to fetch water from the spring. Despite the pain in my neck and the back of my head from using a rock as a pillow, I still remember how I was carried away by those crystal-clear village sounds reverberating across the valley. I remember wondering whether people in the village were as fond as I was of this morning chorus. Was this why they spoke so loudly to each other? Or was the reason more practical, simply a way of communicating across the hills between houses scattered on either side, using the human voice to make up for the absence of telephones?

  And then there was the enticing smell of taboon, bread that the villagers baked themselves on hot stones. It was cold and humid in the early hours of the morning and we were hungry. We followed the smell through the village and the women who were doing the baking generously offered us some loaves.

  It was early on in the Israeli occupation. There was so much we still had to learn. Unlike the Gaza Strip, there was little armed resistance in the West Bank. The suffering was more subtle, from having to endure the shame of defeat. I was sixteen and wanted to express my full potential and strength. I was a romantic, striving for some sort of heroic role. I could not accept the mayor with his shaking shoulders, who advised us to be sensible and give up any thought of resisting, but neither did I know of a viable course of struggle. I was shackled by the prevailing fear and insecurity. I was on my way to university and was not sure how my life would turn out. My only certainty was that it was going to be here in Palestine. I was already resolute that I would never run away. Now, over a decade later, still a romantic, but not a hero, I arrived at the spring when the sun was still shining.

  Stretching beyond, on the western hill, were the orchards and cultivated fields. The water of the spring collected in a pool which was used to irrigate the fields. Above this green section of the hill there were a number of stone houses, all deserted. They were surrounded by enormous oaks and pines. They had terraces with gorgeous views of the hills. No one had lived in these houses since the occupation. I could not see a road connecting them to the village, they could only be reached on foot, or by donkey or mule.

  The sun was moving behind the hill to my left and I walked through the village in partial shade. I thought I would walk up the forested hill that bordered the village in the north and then turn back. As I approached, a herd of grey gazelles leaped ahead of me, making their way to the top in no time.

  Perhaps it was the gazelles in flight that gave me the idea. I found myself wanting to race the sun so as to catch its last rays at the summit before it disappeared. I was not sure how much time I had but whatever it was I was determined to make my rendezvous as a finale to this gorgeous day. I took off my jacket and shirt and ran up, naked to the waist. I was enjoying the bite of the cold wind on my bare skin. I had to twist and turn to avoid the numerous stones on the path. I felt like a horse placing its hoofs carefully to avoid spraining its ankle. I did not pause even when I was short of breath. I was determined to see the sun setting over the sea of Jaffa.

  I made it. I got there just in time, panting heavily. The air was dry and fresh. Lower hills spread below me like a crumpled sheet of blue velvet with the hamlets huddled in its folds. There was Janiya, Deir Ammar and on the highest hill the attractive village of Ras Karkar, all spread below me. The further away the hills the smaller they looked. The most distant was dark blue, like a little pond. One hill interlocked with another in a slow, gentle slope down to the coastal plain and ultimately the sea. I was standing on the highest hill before the drop. It felt as though I was by the edge of that table plateau in the centre of the West Bank of which Beit 'Ur and Albina's land constituted just another corner. I continued to take in the view as the last rays of the sun were making their final slow journey dropping gently into the horizon, which I could barely make out in the haze. I tried to hold my breath until the last sliver of the orange sun disappeared and all that was left was the pink light reflected by the clouds that scattered in the big sky all around me. At this moment the wind began to pick up as it always does after the sun has set.

  I was unaware that this would be the last time I would be able to stand here on an empty hill. Shortly afterwards the Israeli authorities expropriated the land and used it to build the settlement of Dolev.

  When I look back now at those years in the eighties when I could walk without restraint, I feel gratified to have used that freedom and taken all those walks and got to know the hills. There was one walk that I had always planned which to my great regret I never got round to taking. It would start from the west of Ramallah, through Beitunia to Wadi El Mahkwm, passing north of Beit 'Ur. In the course of preparing for the Albina case I had become familiar with that region west of Ramallah through the vi
sits I made to my client's land. The path continues through the central hills, emerging in the coastal plain and on to the blue Mediterranean Sea. I had planned this walk so carefully. Now with the settlements and the Separation Wall it was impossible.

  The Albina case had been one of the first land cases I handled. I had good evidence and high hopes that I would win it and manage to save the land and thwart the plans for building a settlement next to the village of Beit 'Ur. I can well remember how this case came to me.

  I was in court for another case, one involving a contract, when an old lean man, the salt of the earth, pulled me by the hand.

  'You are François Albina's lawyer,' he asserted.

  It was not a question. He had made his investigation and he was seeking me out.

  'What of it?' I asked.

  He then told me that the settlers had come for the land.

  I can still hear the low bass voice of the old man tugging at my elbow: 'The settlers are moving in. You must do something about it.'

  The old man was the Mukhtar (village elder) of Beit 'Ur El Fauqa (Upper Beit 'Ur because there is another village close by to the south which is called Beit 'Ur El Tahta). In the village, Albina was locally known as 'The Christian'. Next to the land of 'The Christian' was the land of 'The Jew'. The two plots were at the south-eastern border of the village, restricting its growth. During the Jordanian regime, the area owned by The Jew was placed under the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property (a governmental authority established by statute that protected land owned by Israeli Jews in the area that came under Jordanian rule after 1948), which fought valiantly to protect the land from trespassers. François Albina's father, Antoine, who had died a few years earlier, had bought the land in the early forties because he liked its location on top of one of the highest hills overlooking the coast. It might have attracted his attention on one of his drives from Jaffa up to Ramallah, where he lived, because it was right next to the road.