When we finally arrived at Selma's place ten minutes late we found her waiting at the street corner outside, freezing. Between chattering teeth, she managed to say that she never knew Ramallah would be so cold.
'What did you expect?' I asked. 'It's higher than Jerusalem. The temperature is always at least one or two degrees lower.'
'But the fog, and the humidity. It's like living by the sea. Tunis was much warmer but this fog today reminded me of some of the winter days there.'
'We're open to the sea. There are no buffers. If you look on a clear day from the roof of your building you would be able to see all the way to Tel Aviv. It isn't really that far.'
'However much I read about this place and heard from people and looked at photos I could never picture it.'
'Were you never here? Not even before 1967?'
'My family is from Safad and after 1948 we ended up in Beirut. I never visited the West Bank.'
She then added that in 1974 she joined Fatah, the main Palestinian resistance movement. She had lived a life so different from mine. Her husband, Isam, was a military commander with Fatah who now supported the peace between Israel and Palestine. He could not return to the West Bank without Israeli approval, which was taking a long time to be processed. I asked her whether there was any indication when he would be coming.
'He's still waiting for his Israeli permit in Amman. But you know how they are, they promise and then renege. I have been living on my nerves, preparing the apartment but not knowing whether we will ever live in it together. It's the worst state to be in.'
'Would you stay if he is not allowed to come?'
'I've been thinking a lot about this. Every morning I wake up missing him yet feeling so fortunate to be back in Palestine. The new re-created Palestine. I never thought I would live to see the day.'
I listened with annoyance at Selma's false idealism but kept my mouth shut. We had to stop at the first checkpoint on the road to Jerusalem.
For newcomers like Selma the natural history of this place begins in the present. She would not know, unless I pointed it out, that until a few years ago there was no barrier between Ramallah and East Jerusalem, which were then almost one city. So a reluctant pedagogue, I felt duty-bound to explain all this to Selma. At the same time I resented the fact that I had to be the guide and preferred to nurse my own thoughts and feelings as we travelled first to Jerusalem.
I never imagined the West Bank could be closed off from Israel. But how short memory is! I grew up when Jordan was in control. There was a strict border with Israel and I could never visit the 1948 areas of Palestine which had become Israel. But since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and the removal of the borders with Israel I began to think of the country as one. Now new borders were being marked out unilaterally by Israel, ones that did not follow the historic green line between the West Bank and 1948 Israel.
As we descended towards East Jerusalem by the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood I realized that the beautiful Dome of the Rock, for many centuries the symbol of ancient Jerusalem, was no longer visible. It was concealed by new construction. This was by design. Not only had Israeli city planners obstructed the view of this familiar landmark – they had also constructed a wide highway along the western periphery of Arab East Jerusalem, restricting its growth and separating it from the rest of the city. Highways are more effective geographic barriers than walls in keeping neighbourhoods apart. Walls can always be demolished. But once built, roads become a cruel reality that it is more difficult to change. No visitor would now sigh, let alone fall on his knees as many a conqueror and pilgrim in the past had done, upon beholding the Old City nestled between the hills. Now contorted, full of obstructions, walls and ugly blocks, it is a tortured city that has lost its soul.
We drove through a tunnel that burrows beneath Mount Scopus, shortening the distance between the settlement of Maaleh Adumim and West Jerusalem. Then just after we began our descent into the Ghor (depth), the Arabic name of the depression in which the Dead Sea lies, the settlement itself came into view. It was built over the site once occupied by the great Byzantine monastery of St Martyrius. The name of the settlement means the red ascent, after the colour of the rocks. It had started as a temporary labourers' camp for an industrial park being built there. Low retaining walls intended not to block the view encircled the heights. The instruction given by the Israeli government to the town planner who designed the city was to build a town that was 'as big as possible'. This was scrupulously followed and the settlement that was created now has a larger municipal area than Tel Aviv. The architect's plan was to treat the hills over which the town was built as resembling the palm of a hand. He placed the town centre in the middle with the terraced houses serried on the 'fingers'. The valleys in between remained open. The general plan of the town was of a series of rings mounting each of the hills with those living inside never having to cross the internal roads. The slopes by the road were dug out to stagger them and prevent an avalanche of rock, soil and debris from the heavily worked heights. The building of this settlement was part of a plan, initiated by Golda Meir's government in the 1970s, to 'strengthen the capital'. Thirty years on Jerusalem has grown from a compact city of 37 square kilometres into a huge metropolis spread over 120 square kilometres. But the intention to increase the Jewish population in relation to the Palestinian did not work. Over the past two decades 300,000 Jews have left the city because of its poor planning, keeping the proportion of Arabs to the Jewish population steady.
A Scottish writer, William Dalrymple, gave an apt description of Maaleh Adumim as 'Milton Keynes transported into the landscape of a medieval Italian fresco'. The settlement had destroyed for ever that dramatic confrontation which had defined the physical and historic environment of the Holy City between the arid barren land and the fertile populated region. This was what gave Jerusalem its uniqueness as the last outpost of human civilization before the wilderness.
The old Jerusalem–Jericho road we used to take until recently has a history dating back thousands of years. According to the Gospel, Jesus passed along it, stopping in present-day Azariah (Bethany) to raise Lazarus from the dead. A series of monasteries and churches mark Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem. Before the Israeli government built the wall that separates parts of the West Bank from Israel and annexes others, we travelled through East Jerusalem along the old city wall up to Ras El Amoud, where the view of the old city with the glittering golden Dome of the Rock mosque was spectacular. Then the descent to Jericho began along winding narrow roads. After Azariah and Abu Dis there was only a turbulent sea of yellow hills more like moon craters with a thin shaving of green growth during the late winter months if the rain happened to be plentiful. This central region of the West Bank is described as a plateau but is actually formed of horizontal layers that have been gently folded, a denuded ridge in which strata lean against each other, dipping in opposite directions. During the secondary era of geological time a period of folding occurred which resulted in the central hills of Palestine being lifted above the level of the sea. The folding was less severe in the south, where the ridges were simple though often of immense size. If one compares the topography to a groundswell produced by a storm at sea then the waves in the north were large, frequent and confused but in the south more gentle with a greater distance between them. That same subterranean phenomenon can be seen above ground. How like the sea these folds of hills we were passing were: waves with great troughs between them, until you approached the escarpment at the end of the Jerusalem wilderness that formed a great high wall bordering the Ghor.
The dual-carriage road to Jericho used to be winding and dangerous, as it should be, cutting through the wilderness connecting the ancient city of Jerusalem high up on the hills with the oasis of Jericho, the oldest town on earth and the lowest, lying 258 metres below sea level. Just after the ruins of the El Khan El Ahmar (the Red Khan), which is also referred to as the Inn of the Good Samaritan, I used to wait when I was a child for
us to reach the cave by the side of the road. When he was not in a hurry, my father would stop the car and I would get out and quickly scramble up the small hill and look down. Except for the first few steps, which were lit by the light from outside, the rest was dark. As I concentrated on the cave the sound of traffic behind me would disappear in the background. It was said that this cave had stairs leading all the way to Jericho. But even in my imagination I did not dare go beyond the threshold and wander deep into this forbidding opening. I would remain standing precariously on the slippery slope, totally mesmerized, until my father's impatient calls broke through the silence and sent me hurrying back to the car to avoid upsetting him.
To make the road run straight and do away with its many curves, the new Israeli-built highway now cuts through the hills. I have no idea of the fate of the cave. It has probably been blocked by an Israeli bulldozer using mouthfuls of debris from one of the butchered hills. I also missed the coloured strata that flowed like veins through the rocks: brown, charcoal, purple, dark red and yellow. With the hills massacred you could no longer see the layers of rock. The colours seemed to have run, staining with swabs of pigment the exposed sides of the rocks through which the road ran.
'I never thought the Jewish settlements we heard so much about would be like this,' Selma announced from the backseat.
'How did you think they would be?' I asked.
'Temporary dwellings just to mark a presence, not like these stone houses with gardens and trees. They look so permanent and huge. What's the population of this one on the hill up there?'
'Maaleh Adumim must have something like 25,000 people by now.'
'This is almost as big as Ramallah.'
'The PLO waited too long. Negotiations should have started a long time ago. It only got more complicated with time.'
'As if the PLO didn't try. It was Israel that refused to negotiate with us,' Selma said, her voice betraying her annoyance with my self-righteousness.
My mind strayed again to the Master Plan, as it sadly is wont to do at moments when I'm enjoying the landscape. Israel had planned to settle 80,000 Israeli Jews in the central region of the West Bank by 1986. Despite huge economic incentives only 6,000 had been convinced to settle by the target date. But under the Oslo Agreements the PLO agreed to keep an area equal to about a third of the West Bank, referred to as Area C, outside the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. It did so without questioning Israeli claims that most of this area was public land. Israel presented this to its public as tacit recognition by the PLO that the land, most of which Israel had already registered in the same Land Authority where Israeli state land is registered, would remain with Israel. This gave the settlement project a great boost. The average Israeli citizen came to believe that agreement had been reached with the PLO to designate Area C for Israeli settlements. They felt safe enough to invest in the settlements and move their families to them.
I told Selma what I thought of the Agreement.
'Don't be rash in your judgement,' she said. 'The Agreement might not be perfect but it gives us a footing on the land. Once the PLO is here everything will change. You just wait. These are new times.'
For the first time I felt like those Palestinians who stayed in Israel in 1948 must have felt when they argued with us after the 1967 war. They would tell us: 'You don't know a thing about Israel. We can tell you what is coming: land expropriations, biased zoning that will strangle your towns, and unfair taxation that will impoverish you.' And we would look with condescension at them and think they had lived for so long under Israel that they had become colonized, unable to think beyond their narrow claustrophobic reality. They probably think Israel is the whole world, we would comfort ourselves. Not only have their lands been colonized but their minds as well. Who wants to listen to the vanquished?
For twenty-five years I had studied the development of the Israeli sovereign legal language in the West Bank. I monitored how the Israeli state was being extended into the Occupied Territories through the acquisition of land and its registration in the Israel Land Authority. How large areas were being defined as Israeli Regional Councils and included within Israel. How the planning schemes were changed, how one area after another became to all intents and purposes annexed to Israel, and our towns and villages were left as islands within those Israeli extensions, fulfilling Ariel Sharon's promise made in the early eighties that Israel was going to leave 'an entirely different map of the country'. It was all done ostensibly through 'legal' manoeuvres, using the law in force in the West Bank because formally speaking the West Bank was not annexed to Israel. To understand and fight this was my war.
We passed an Israeli army jeep that had stopped a number of Palestinian cars. Soldiers were checking documents; one driver had been made to leave his car and stand by the side of the road. Selma was surprised: 'Aren't we in the Palestinian Territories? What right does the Israeli army have to stop Palestinian cars?'
I tried to explain that, under the agreements, Israel retained jurisdiction over the roads, then added: 'Do you know that the entire scheme for the new roads serving the settlements was being challenged and for many years the Israeli courts could not rule on the matter? After Oslo they closed the case with a short ruling to which no one paid any attention. So many new roads are now being built in our land for the benefit of settlers. There are no legal challenges even when we are prevented from using these roads. Do you remember the memo I wrote the leadership about Road Scheme Number 50?
'Your memos were hard to translate,' Selma told me. She complained that my sentences were too long.
In his memoir, Mahmoud Abbas, the principal Palestinian negotiator at the Oslo talks, writes that he believed the delegation in Washington, which used English as the language of communication, was too concerned with words. To cut through all this crap, he went into secret negotiations in Oslo with the Israelis that ended with the signing of what came to be known as the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian negotiators at Oslo did not seek legal advice. All the experience and knowledge of Israeli legal manoeuvres gained from years of monitoring and challenging Israeli tactics were dismissed simply for reasons of style. The message was clear: the only struggle that was recognized was that carried out by the PLO outside the Occupied Territories. Like Selma the PLO negotiators did not have a real sense of what the settlements were about. And so the Accords the PLO signed saddled us with the Israeli legal and administrative arrangements that envisioned an unequal division of the land between Arab and Jew.
'Did you ever seriously believe your legal challenges could have forced Israel to stop its new road system let alone the settlements?' Selma asked me from the backseat, her voice patient but strained.
'Perhaps not, but then Israel could not claim to be acting legally.'
'Big deal!'
Spurred on I said: 'And all these illegal military orders issued by Israel in the course of the occupation which the Agreement consolidates?'
'What military orders? The occupation is over. Can't you get it into your head that these are new times?'
As we drove further down to Jericho we passed the fledgling new settlement of Mitzpe Jericho. The language of conquest was writ large over the hills, over the wilderness, in every corner of the land. Everything signalled our defeat – from the earlier rows of settler apartment blocks piled over the dry pink hills forming the city of Maaleh Adumim to this latest settlement venture in the wilderness. When I travelled with our delegation through this area during the period of negotiations in Washington, DC, on our way to the Allenby Bridge across the River Jordan, none of these settlements were here. They had doubled since the Oslo Accords were signed.
I couldn't help myself; I had to evoke the Master Plan. I said: 'Do you know that the Master Plan for this area calls for the extension of the Jewish settlements almost to Jericho? The wilderness from Jerusalem to Jericho would all be settled.'
'So? Have we not got jurisdiction? We can use it to annul them.'
'Then you h
aven't read the agreement and don't know Israel if you think it can be so easily tricked.'
'Why be so worried about the settlements?' Selma asked. 'We too will expand. Investments will pour in and we will create a new reality. You just wait.'
'How can we when Israel retains control over most of the land?'
'We'll work on what we have. Buy homes in the settlements and turn everything on its head. Remember these are new times.'
I was beginning to be annoyed by Selma's repetition of her 'new times' mantra. Her words kept echoing inside my head trapped by the clogging of my ears as we continued to descend to the lowest point on earth. New times indeed, I thought to myself looking out of the window at the sprawling new settlements invading the once bare hills.
I kept track of our descent by reading the blue tiles stuck into the rock marking the depth we had reached. The first read 200 metres above sea level. As I drove, my mind strayed, over the extent to which Selma was unaware of the destruction of the Palestinian legal case by the Oslo Agreements and what this meant for our future. The next strip of tiles read 'Sea Level'. I glimpsed it just as we reached the turning in the road before the hills parted to reveal the first view of the Dead Sea. For decades a Bedouin has stood at this point, with his camel colourfully saddled, waiting to give tourists rides over the once pristine wilderness, a fixed tableaux in a fast-changing universe. Selma excitedly pointed him out to us. There was pride in her voice, as though she had made a discovery. Perhaps she saw him as a symbol of Palestinian sumoud (steadfastness), proof that we were still masters over these lovely hills. How could anyone be so irresponsible as to express pride in a dreary time like this? Could she really be unaware that the Palestine she had returned to had not been liberated? How could she not see this?
Palestinian Walks Page 11