On the hill west of the village the settlement of Dolev, established some decade and a half earlier, had outstanding views and a better-organized and funded local authority that applied Israeli law. The Jewish settlers had no relationship with their Arab neighbours. The Israeli authorities had declared the area in which A'yn Qenya lay a nature reserve called Shemurat Delavim. It was prohibited to litter such areas. But nothing was done to manage the refuse from the Arab village that was destroying the beautiful valley. Perhaps the Israeli authorities were hoping that the village of A'yn Qenya would somehow vanish.
Dolev was not a dynamic settlement. For a relatively long time, as Jewish settlements go, it had remained confined to the top of the hill. Its population did not exceed 2,500 inhabitants. The hill on which it was established had been forested and the settlers had planted more trees between their houses which made it blend better with its surroundings than other settlements. Had this been the only settlement in the area the matter would not have been too serious. Good neighbourly relations could have developed in time between the two communities. But Dolev was only one in an ambitious master plan that called for clusters of settlements linked by a network of roads, wide and straight, that connected the inhabitants to the coastal plain in the shortest possible time. To realize these plans required extensive reshaping of the hills and more destruction than had ever before been wrought on them.
For many years I had been monitoring the orders issued by the Israeli military government declaring parts of the West Bank nature reserves. The first order, number 554, was issued on 16 July 1974. Since then it had been amended at least twenty times. Wadi Qelt was one of the first such reserves. At first I was pleased that legislation was being introduced to protect these spectacular spots, even if it was coming from the occupier. At last the military were doing something beneficial for the land. It was comforting to know that construction and road building would not be allowed and that the natural flora and fauna would be protected. But my hope that the order was made for our benefit was dashed when another related order was passed in 1996 forbidding entry into the so-called area C by non-Israeli nationals without permission from the military governor. All nature reserves were in area C and so, legally, were now out of reach for us Palestinians.
I was aware before we began that the route Mustafa and I were planning to take was prohibited to us. We did not have permission from the military governor to walk there and if we came upon soldiers we could be arrested. A Jewish settler also has the power to make a citizen's arrest. We had to be careful of both. I was certain that Mustafa, like most Palestinians, was unaware of this prohibition. Before we started our walk I considered telling him but in the end decided against it. One anxious person on this lovely walk was enough.
After crossing the piles of garbage at the top of the hill we walked down through a newly ploughed olive field to the wadi. We found the footpath along the stream and took it. It was such a rare pleasure to walk by water in these dry hills. To our right we could see 'raq Es Sahel, the impressive cliffs popular with rock climbers. We continued to amble along in silence, listening to the gurgling water as it made its slow way between the rocks, when suddenly I heard a ring. I was startled and Mustafa was embarrassed. He reached down and pulled up his trouser leg to reveal a mobile phone, which he had attached to his leg in an effort to conceal it. I had insisted on no phones during our walk. I was annoyed by this disruption but realized I had to accept that my friend could not stay out of contact. He was a politician and the conversation revolved around his party. Even for the few hours of the walk he could not stay away from it.
The valley where we walked was relatively wide, a swathe of green cutting through the dry hills. It stretched all the way to Ramallah and was the wadi that Abu Ameen would use to get to his qasr in Harrasha. Nearby was an excellent path going north, connecting A'yn Qenya with the villages of Birzeit, Kober and Mizr'a Qiblieh. They lay beyond the two escarpments of 'raq El Khafs and 'raq El Khanouq which were visible to us as we walked. To the south stood Dolev and beyond it the smaller hamlets that were scattered between the hills all the way to the coastal plain and eventually the Mediterranean Sea. The field to our right as we strolled by the stream was cultivated with olives. It was partially shaded by the hill on which Dolev stood. The newly ploughed ground between the olive trees was dappled with spots of shade and light where the sun shone through the branches.
The settlers in Dolev must be unused to seeing walkers strolling down the wadi. Village people do not take walks for pleasure, just as leisure swimming was not common in poor communities living by the sea, simply because there was no time for leisure. I knew there were armed guards around the settlement and wondered who they'd think we were if they happened to look down. I hoped they would not shoot at us or come down and arrest us.
Now our path crossed the wadi. We were able to ford the stream by stepping on wet rocks, catching up with the path on the other side of the narrow valley. The path continued in a north-westerly easy climb beyond the ploughed field into other fields planted with olives that had not been pruned, forcing us to stoop and push our way through their woody branches. Perhaps it was safer to be in this field, concealed by the trees from the watchful eyes of the settlement guards. The unploughed earth here had an abundance of wild flowers mottled with the shadows of the clouds. We stepped back when we saw a number of partridges scurrying away from us on their short legs, until they found a way of flying out of the intertwined branches to feed on seeds in other fields.
Not far from where we walked we saw two young men on horseback riding through the hills. It was a beautiful sight. We followed them with our eyes and saw that they stopped just below the hill where Dolev stood, at a stable belonging to the settlement. The track we were following diverged from the wadi that circled the Dolev hill and led to what appeared to be a country club where Israelis and tourists could come to enjoy our lovely hills.
As we neared the top of the hill the clods of soil began to feel wet even though there was no spring nearby and it hadn't rained. We soon realized that we had walked into the open sewers of the Jewish settlement of Talmon to the north. This settlement might have had a rubbish collection system but it did not have one for treating sewage, which was just disposed of down the valley into land owned by Palestinian farmers. We tried to step lightly so as not to drown our shoes in the settlers' shit. As we trudged through the soggy ground we met two boys who showed us the way out of the bog. We noticed they were taking us away from the paved road and told them that was where we were headed.
'It's too dangerous,' they said.
We asked them why.
'The settlers,' they said. 'If you're walking and they drive by they swerve and hit you. They ran over Mazen. And if an army jeep comes they shoot. No one uses the road.'
We insisted and they reluctantly came along. I thought they might be exaggerating the danger as boys are wont to do, but I could tell by the way they behaved that using the road leading to their village was to them an adventure. I noticed that they made sure they were flanked by us and stayed on the side of the road, pricking their ears to hear if a settler car or an army jeep was approaching, presumably so that they could run back to the hills. All along the way they rambled nervously, going from one terrifying tale to another about what the settlers had done.
'Abu Nabeel has been unable to get to his olives over there,' the younger one said, pointing to a field which we had just crossed. 'He has been unable to plough. Every time he tried the settlers shot at him and drove him and his sons away.'
I did not notice any Palestinian cars passing by. I thought this was curious.
'Do the people in Janiya ever drive along this road?' I asked.
'They can't,’ the older boy told me. 'The entrance to the village is blocked.'
When we got to the road leading to the village we could see the concrete blocks the army had placed across the entrance, a barrier which no one was allowed to remove. I wondered whether the villa
gers would be allowed to ride a mule or a horse on the road, if they happened to own one. I suspected not.
From the point of view of the settlers these measures were necessary to protect them from stone throwers. So convinced were they of their moral superiority that they proceeded to use their practical immunity from prosecution to intimidate their neighbours. Some used their firearms to shoot and kill Palestinians in cold blood. From as early as 1982 incidents of settler violence were documented by Al Haq and others. But Israeli prosecutors rarely took action against the settlers, much as human rights groups, Israeli and Palestinian, lobbied for this.
Janiya was a larger and richer village than A'yn Qenya. A substantial number of its inhabitants had emigrated to the United States, where they had done well and were sending remittances to the village to help out their relatives. We walked up the asphalted road leading to the centre and, after asking around, were directed to the path that led to the next wadi. Before us spread the gorgeous Wadi El Ghadeer (the brook), which was wider and much more lush than Wadi Dalb. Again, as in A'yn Qenya, we came upon piles of garbage at the edge of the village. The walk down was a steeper incline than any we had taken so far and it led to grassy fields. As we walked down we could see and hear bulldozers turning the ground northeast of the village as they broke the bedrock to prepare the foundations for the new settlements of Talmon Beth, Harasha and Horesh Yaron, next to the already existing Talmon. I tried hard to block out the sound but it was impossible.
It was curious that we did not find any villagers working on their land here. Traditionally these were agricultural villages. Within a few decades the inhabitants have been intimidated, their life made unsafe and many of their fields expropriated, and they have been turned into construction workers building the settlements which stood on land that once had belonged to them. These were the beginnings of new times, a new relationship to the land and the destruction of the hills as I knew them.
When we got to the wadi our path turned northward and we were now too low to be able to see the construction work taking place above us on the hills to the east. We were walking on a lush green swell cultivated with chickpeas when we came upon an adobe structure. It was freshly painted in white and stood out starkly from the sea of green. It was the maqam of Nabi Aneer. The maqamat (plural) are tombs of revered sheikhs (elders) or local saints. Usually a small domed structure would be built around the tomb, where locals could go to pray and meditate. Mustafa and I spoke in hushed voices as we approached. When we reached the door, we looked in but it was dark inside. When our eyes adjusted we could see a bearded man sitting in total silence. We quickly pulled ourselves away for we did not want to disturb him. He had left his shoes outside and was squatting beneath the dome, meditating.
We moved away, walking in silence along the path that now began to climb southward towards the high village of Ras Karkar, one of twenty-odd throne villages in Palestine. These were the seats of rural nobility who, with the weakening of the centralized Ottoman authority, collected taxes on its behalf and achieved great political and socio-economic power in their local areas. Those who failed to pay had their land expropriated. The village was originally called Janiet Sheikh Sam'an after the sheikh who governed it. He had built a citadel in the village and lived in it. During the First World War the village head sided with the Ottomans. After they began their rule over Palestine the British punished him by changing the name of the village from Janiet Shiekh Sam'an to its original name of Ras Karkar. The Arabic word ras means head and karkar is a skua. But since these birds are not indigenous to the area it is more likely that the British were thinking of the other meaning of the word, which is to burst out in laughter.
The green grass on both sides of the path was so high it dwarfed us as we walked west, far away from any village or settlement. We were surrounded by open fields in hills that, except for the few narrow roads built long ago, must have remained unchanged since biblical times. For a long time my enjoyment of these hills has been impaired by a preoccupation with the changes in land law relating to them. But such man-made constructs can be diminished if looked at in a particular way. Viewed from the perspective of the land they hardly count. A road makes a scar in the hills but over time that scar heals and becomes absorbed and incorporated. Stones are gathered to build houses but then they crumble and return to the land, however large and formidable they might once have been. Monumental Crusader castles in a dilapidated state dot the land, as do the ruins of other empires that have prevailed in this region. Empires and conquerors come and go but the land remains. As these thoughts crossed my mind, I could not help but wonder whether this long-term perspective was simply another justification for having curtailed my activism, or a reasonable defence against Israel's positing of these changes as permanent and incapable of ever being altered. I realized that the stronger the attempt at impressing me with their permanence, the more my mind sought confirmation of their transience.
Thinking in the long term made it possible for me to separate 'the present' from the rest of time and thereby realize that what Palestine and Israel are now would not necessarily be for ever. I was here on earth for a relatively short period and after that time passed, life would go on without my points of view, biases and fears.
In 'Carmel Point' the poet Robinson Jeffers asks whether nature cares when 'the spoiler has come' and answers:
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff – as for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Mustafa has known me for a long time and must have noticed how this line of thinking had changed me. At one point in the course of our walk he turned to me and asked: 'Tell me, how did you get over your anger?'
I was surprised by the question. I had not realized that I was coming across as a less angry man. At first I did not know how to answer and merely replied: 'By accepting the fact of our surrender and moving on.'
Almost immediately after saying this I was aware that I had left out the most important factor. More than anything else it was writing that was helping me overcome the anger that burns in the heart of most Palestinians. In my memoir, Strangers in the House, I had written about the experience of my parents and grandparents in the Nakbeh of 1948. Through feeling and expressing their pain, as well as my own, over that wrenching past I was able to liberate myself from the yoke of something that had so dominated my imagination that I found it difficult to go beyond it. My own experiences were dwarfed by the enormity of what had happened before I was born. It was also true that since I had redirected my energies from activism to writing I found I was more in my element. I had never been entirely comfortable as a political activist. Conditions had imposed that role on me.
'You think the deal was that bad?' Mustafa asked.
'This is not the first time we have arrived at defeat that was trumpeted by the leadership as a victory,' I replied. 'Our history is rich with similar instances. The price of living a lie is too high for me. I'd rather face facts and take stock. Israel has won this round. It will take many years to undo the harm of Oslo. We might be able to gain valuable time if we face the fact of our defeat.'
'I'm under strong pressure from my party to accept an invitation to join the government. You cannot begin to imagine how insistent they are. They say it is the only game in town. I agree with you in thinking it is doomed but there are huge rewards from joining – high governmental positions, money, power. It's like holding back the trophy which everyone can see and wants to get at. I've tried. I did everything I could to tell them what I thought of the Agreement and the Authority. It will destroy our future chances i
f we go after easy gains. I am certain of it. What I'm less sure of is the alternative. What role could we play if we are not in government?'
'The same role you've always played, as opposition.'
'But we did this when the occupation exercised all civilian powers.'
'You don't have to relate to the Palestinian Authority as the enemy. What I'm suggesting is that you see it as a passing phenomenon and prepare for the next stage.'
'And what do you think that would be?'
'The continuation of the struggle. The Agreement was an act of surrender. In its wake there is more heightened settlement activity than before. The Israeli side's understanding is that they have shared the West Bank, giving us areas A and B and leaving C for themselves. This is why they have declared it a closed military zone and are proceeding to fill it up with settlements.'
'Area C is closed? I didn't know this.'
'It's been closed by military order since 1996.'
'Then we are here illegally.'
'Absolutely.'
'And our Authority is silent. They've done nothing to challenge Israel over this, as if the issue doesn't concern them.'
'They probably don't know about it.'
'But they should. Aren't they, the government, responsible? How can they not know?'
We were in agreement that the most important work that could now be done was the empowering of civil society. This sector, Mustafa thought, had a strong role to play in countering the excesses and mistakes our new and inexperienced government would be making. He was an astute enough politician to know that he could not criticize the Oslo Agreement while in government. To join would be a trap, like selling his voice.
Palestinian Walks Page 16