I could not understand what was happening. Who was shooting and were we the target or did we just happen to be in the way?
I looked around me to see if something else was going on further down the hill, but could not see or hear anything. The shooting intensified. I decided we must be the target. But why?
Since the PLO took over in Ramallah the Israeli army had not been venturing into the town. It was unlikely that those shooting at us were Israeli soldiers. But then why would the Palestinian police shoot at us? Could it be because they took us for settlers? If so, I could correct this mistaken impression.
I raised my hat and waved it, shouting as loud as I could, in Arabic: 'Why are you shooting at us? Stop shooting, for God's sake, stop, stop.' But either my hat was not impressive enough, or my voice did not carry, or perhaps they just did not care either way, for the shooting continued.
'They can't think we're settlers,' Penny gasped. 'They wouldn't shoot at Jews. It's too complicated. So stop endangering your life.'
The shooting continued mercilessly, giving us no respite, no time to take a breath, to think calmly of our next step, to manage, somehow, to escape. A hail of bullets whizzed overhead, struck the rock right in front of where we took shelter, sending splinters up in the air. It seemed likely that some of the bullets would ricochet and hit us.
When finally there was a brief lull I tried again. This time I stepped forward. Perhaps showing my person would be more impressive than waving my hat. I turned and looked up. I could see them. Two young Palestinian men in jeans standing on top of one of the unfinished buildings brandishing their guns at me. They could see me, I was sure of it. I thought that now they had seen me they would stop. But they didn't. I threw myself back at the rock just in time as the young men showered us with more bullets. I now became convinced they were not going to stop until they got us. As I crouched behind that rock I was not sure things had really improved since the days when Israel's direct rule had ended. Our ordeal lasted for twenty long minutes.
After the guns fell silent, we waited another five minutes before we slid away on wobbly knees, heads bent, keeping close to the rocks on the terrace wall, tired, distracted and despondent. When we got to the road, we walked down towards the Palestinian checkpoint at the end of Tireh road, not far from where we were almost killed. We wanted to report what had happened to the soldiers there. The first young man in fatigues we met had the decency to listen. He could see how shaken we were. He confirmed that he knew there were two young men shooting in the hills. He must have heard them. But then his older and more senior colleague joined him and asked what the matter was. The younger Palestinian began to recount our story but the senior official did not want to listen. He made a gesture with his hand to silence him. He sent us away, refusing to speak to us or hear our report.
For days after this incident Penny kept telling me that I should tell the Muhafiz (the Palestinian Governor) what had happened, that I should lodge a formal written complaint. I considered the matter very carefully. For most of my working life I had been urging people to use the law to submit legal complaints. But now I was reluctant to take any form of legal action. From my knowledge of the Oslo Accords and the local law I was fully aware that there was a failure to delineate the distinction between criminal action punishable by the law and legitimate action taken in resistance to the occupation. This blurring of the margins meant confusion and a legal vacuum that made it impossible to know under which law the action of these young men would be punishable or to whom one should direct one's criminal complaint. Nor could I find a law that established and regulated the functioning of the armed forces on which I could base my complaint. With so many unknowns how could I draft the complaint? Then one day the Muhafiz, who has known my family for many years, happened to come to our office to discuss a matter with my partner regarding a civil case in which he had an interest. I took the opportunity to tell him of what happened in the hills. After I finished he became visibly nervous.
'You shouldn't go to the valley,' he said. 'The shabab [young men] are always shooting there. That's where they practise. Just a few days ago they said we haven't shot for a while and went shooting.'
He called his murafiq (guard) and asked: 'When did you last go shooting?'
'Tuesday.'
He turned to me and said: 'You see. That's the day you told me the incident happened. Isn't it so?' He spoke again to his murafiq. 'Where did you go shooting?'
'Behind Tireh, near the Mustaqbal School.'
'You see. It's close to where you described.' He asked his murafiq, 'What time?'
'Eleven at night.'
'We were shot at much earlier,' I said. 'And we were not behind the school. We were further up. Not far from the checkpoint. They mustn't do this,' I said. 'There are shepherds there and others who walk in the hills. I have been walking for twenty-five years. Nothing ever happened to me in these hills. I never had to worry. People should be encouraged to walk in the hills. It will increase their attachment to their country.'
The Muhafiz didn't agree. 'You shouldn't walk,' he repeated in a concerned paternal tone. 'It's much too dangerous.'
'Perhaps your soldiers thought that I was going off for a fling with a foreign woman,' I suggested. 'And they wanted to spoil it for us. But really, I with my bald head and Penny with her greying hair. Not much of wild youth there.'
'Khisarah ala Ramallah ['Pity Ramallah'],’ the Muhafiz said, standing up.
I don't know what he meant. Did he feel embarrassed that he was helpless to do anything? Did he feel sorry that I, the son of his friend, Aziz Shehadeh, who in his time was one of the most powerful men in the community, should be reduced to a situation where, when he's shot at in the hills, he can do nothing about it? I don't know, I never asked.
Another six years and another Intifada, and again I went down to that same valley. This time I was with a Palestinian-Dutch poet, Ramsey Nasr. I had met him at a poetry reading held at the Divan Coffee Shop in Ramallah and invited him for a walk in the hills. He was very excited because he liked fossils and hiking. We hired a taxi to take us to the narrow road that leads to the waste water purification plant behind Mustaqbal School. Then we walked down the narrow road.
It was about four in the afternoon. The day had become cloudy but it was not yet raining. New buildings and roads were quickly being built in the terraces below the Birzeit University Housing Development. I expected building would soon reach all the way down to the wadi. The altar rock with the dinosaur footprints did not have long to survive, I thought. Already many of the paths I had walked were covered by the rubble dumped down from the higher terraces. Eventually we managed to get beyond these mounds of loose dirt and rocks, found the path and began following it. We talked as we walked and got to know each other. Soon we arrived at the first large rock, which I remembered was close to my rock with the fossilized footprints. I looked for it but could not find it. Meanwhile I could hear dogs barking not far away from the appropriately called Wadi El Kalb (the dog). I wondered how many there were and whether they would attack us. I asked Ramsey to stay put as I criss-crossed the terraces looking for the rock. Then finally, much further down than I remembered, I found it. By now the barking dogs were getting closer. They were wild, in a pack, and might be rabid and dangerous. I cut some stems from dead natsh and carried them with me, thinking that if the dogs attacked I would have something to defend myself with, another important use to which natsh can be put.
At first Ramsey was not overly impressed with the rock. But then when I pointed out to him its different features he began to see how it could be the imprint of a dinosaur's foot. I wondered whether he would turn our adventure in the endangered Ramallah hills into a poem in Dutch. He wanted to take pictures. He was slow and took his time. The light was fading. Raindrops were beginning to fall and the dogs' barking was getting closer. I kept my ears tuned to the dogs, hoping we could leave before disaster struck. Ramsey was admiring another stone with root fossils. I offered
it to him. He hesitated. 'Take it,' I said. He did and thanked me as if it belonged to me. He was very polite.
Finally he was done. He had taken all the pictures he needed and we started walking up. I was armed with my natsh and he carried his plastic bag holding an Arabic dictionary that he had bought that afternoon for his father and the rock with the fossilized roots. I hurried on ahead of him.
'Good host that you are,' I heard him call, 'would you give me a branch if these dogs attacked?' He must have been as concerned about these dogs as I was.
'No,' I said jokingly. 'It's every man for himself in these hills.'
A short while later I heard him say in his soft voice: 'Look up! There are soldiers. They have guns.'
I had been too busy negotiating my way between the rocks to notice.
'Soldiers? What kind? Israeli or Palestinian?' I asked, somewhat breathlessly.
I looked up. There were men in fatigues silhouetted against the horizon a few terraces above, pointing their guns down at us. Whether Israeli or Palestinian, soldiers look out of place in these hills, as perhaps they do on any hill, anywhere in the world.
What could have brought Israeli soldiers into Ramallah? What did they think was happening here?
But when I looked more carefully I realized the men looked too passive to be Israeli soldiers. I greeted them in Arabic. At first they didn't respond. I decided to walk slowly towards them trying to remain as calm and composed as possible, suppressing my anger at their intrusion of our walk.
When I got to them, I told them who I was. They asked what I was doing.
'Walking,' I said. I didn't want to tell them more.
It was now raining hard.
'Can we see identification?'
I took out my wallet, which luckily I was carrying, pulled out my lawyer's card and showed it to them.
'What are you doing walking in this weather, at this time?' they asked, as though this was a place of extreme danger, the valley of the shadow of death.
'Walking,' I repeated. Then added: 'We went down to see a particular rock with dinosaur footprints.'
I thought the dinosaur might interest them. But they were not impressed.
'How did you know we were here?' I asked.
'It's our duty to protect our guests. We thought this foreigner was being kidnapped. We have surrounded the area. We have people on the other side of the valley as well.'
He pointed to the hills across from the valley up from A'yn Arik. They had clearly mounted a military operation to capture me and save Ramsey.
He radioed the other soldiers. 'It's OK,' he told them, speaking into his walkie-talkie.
I was still carrying the natsh I had picked up for protection from the barking dogs. 'I hope you didn't think this was a gun,' I said.
He dismissed the insinuation with a gesture of his hand. But he did say he suspected there were others down there with us, a whole troupe involved in the kidnap operation.
'I often come to walk in these hills,' I said to the man who was doing all the talking and seemed to be the commander. He was compact and short, not much taller than me, with dark black, intense eyes, and wearing soldier's fatigues. 'In fact I was once here with my wife, it was 1999, and some of your soldiers shot at us.'
'It was over on that side,' the soldier pointed out. 'I was there,' he said, smiling impishly.
'You could have killed us,' I said.
Another soldier added in a strange defence: 'The hills are dangerous, we have found many corpses here.'
As we all stood there in the dark, with the rain now pouring heavily, I reflected on that dreadful afternoon six years ago. I never thought I'd ever meet one of the men who shot at Penny and me and almost killed us. He didn't seem particularly sorry, and certainly did not apologize, though I was not expecting him to after all those years. Still I was grateful to be reminded that for every story there is an ending.
3
ILLUSORY PORTALS
Qomran, the Dead Sea and Wadi El Daraj
For many years I continued to contest acquisitions of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements before Israeli courts. As the Albina case had shown, even with the best of cases there could never be outright victories. What kept me going was the possibility of reducing the area of land which the often overzealous Custodian of Israeli Government and Absentee Properties claimed. I also believed that Israeli actions in taking Palestinian land should not go unchallenged. Successive Israeli governments continued to pursue a policy of settling the Occupied Territories. Billions of US dollars were spent on the project, money that sometimes had to be diverted from needy sectors in Israel itself. The Master Plan for the Central Region of the West Bank was followed with no less ambitious master plans for the north and the south. The government did all it could to implement them fully despite being in violation of international law.
Land acquisition was not the only prerequisite for settlement. Land use planning for their benefit was just as important. Its aim was to designate most empty land for their future use, isolate Palestinian population centres, and fragment their territorial continuity by encircling them with settlements. To achieve this, Regional Plans for the West Bank prepared during the British Mandate were altered and outline plans for most of the Palestinian towns and villages were prepared in great haste in the late eighties. These consisted of plans crudely drawn by felttip markers on photocopies of aerial photographs. Their main purpose was to determine the boundaries within which Palestinian urban development would be confined. Simultaneously outline plans for the Jewish settlements were being prepared with precisely the opposite objective. They reserved the maximum area of land for future development. Under the cloak of law, a highly discriminatory, segregated town-planning reality came into effect. I challenged the legality of these schemes during the last years of the 1980s.
The head of the Planning Council for the West Bank was an Israeli settler who was ideologically dedicated to the settlement project. Even when Palestinians found the financial resources to hire a town planner to prepare proper plans for their village, the Planning Council rejected them and held on to their crude drawings, which confined the village within a border drawn around existing construction. When I asked the head of planning how the village was expected to provide plots for the future expansion of its inhabitants, he would answer with a straight face that they could build up. The image of our beautiful villages in the undulating hills crammed with skyscrapers horrified me.
These developments were forcing me to rethink my strategies. Clearly the legal challenges were ineffective in curbing or even slowing down the extensive Jewish settlements. It was necessary to go beyond the framework of Israeli law and courts. When the Madrid International Peace Conference convened in September 1991 I welcomed the prospect of peaceful negotiations as the only possibility of regaining our usurped land.
But Israel had prepared well for what was coming. They succeeded in confining the scope of the negotiations to 'talks on interim self-government arrangements' for the Palestinians. The settlements, the land designated for them and their administrative and legal links to Israel would be outside the scope of the conference. To enable the Palestinian delegation to argue convincingly the case for the inclusion of these issues was not going to be simple. The head of the Palestinian delegation asked me to help in devising a legal strategy to meet this challenge.
I studied the matter, made my proposals and travelled to Washington, where the negotiations were being held with great expectations. I soon discovered Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO, instructing the delegation from Tunis, had different concerns. His main aim was to secure recognition for the PLO. Three years later, in the Declaration of Principles, this was achieved at the price of keeping the settlements out of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. This authority also had no power to change the village and town zoning schemes or repudiate Israeli claims over the land acquired for the settlements. I was dismayed and horrified. With one blow, political expediency led to
the acceptance of all the illegal changes we in the Occupied Territories had been struggling to nullify for over two decades.
Yet despite their fundamental flaws, the Oslo Agreements were accepted by most Palestinians. When I expressed my oppositional view I was categorized as a rejectionist. To increase the popularity of the Accords, international funding flowed into the Occupied Territories aimed at distracting the population from continuing the struggle to end the occupation. Large grants became readily available for non-governmental organizations to carry out what was called democracy training, encouraging the illusion that Palestine had achieved self-determination and all that was lacking was for the population to be better schooled in democratic practices. With Israel still controlling the majority of the water resources, expensive programmes were introduced to teach people to conserve water. The huge capital infusion into the Occupied Territories meant that most people were willing to put aside the nationalist agenda which had dominated their lives for the previous quarter of a century. My eyes were opened to how fickle people can be and how it was possible to bring them to relinquish passionately held positions. The settlements which had been at the heart of our struggle against the occupation were all around us, Israel was continuing to expand them and establish new ones on our land, and yet people argued that the Oslo Accords provided the way for the future peace between us and the Israeli people.
Amongst the few concessions Israel was willing to make was to allow the return of a number of PLO cadres into the Palestinian Territories. Selma Hasan was amongst them. She had worked in Tunis as translator for Mahmoud Abbas, the chief Palestinian negotiator in Oslo. Naturally she was excited about visiting sites in Palestine. One winter morning Penny and I were planning to take a walk in the Dead Sea area and invited her to join us.
She had described the apartment block where she lived in some detail but we had a hard time finding it. During these two years since the signing of the Peace Accords, Ramallah, confined within the area allowed by the Israeli-approved town plans, had grown substantially. It was becoming more cluttered and shabby as new tower blocks built to house the newcomers were crammed within a small area of land. It did not help that the town was bathed in winter fog so thick I could hardly see my way.
Palestinian Walks Page 10