'You want to turn us into ghettoes in our own land. We've been through that in Europe. Never again.'
'Then if you want to expand over the entire land will you allow us to buy or rent in your settlements?'
'No. These are areas for Jews.'
'Let us assume that your settlements are built on what you call public not private land. What people would agree to have areas of their country carved out and given to members of another nation and not even be allowed to share the land?'
'But you're not a nation. You never had your own government.'
'Are you going to repeat the famous position of Golda Meir, that we Palestinians do not exist?'
'No. I didn't say that. I know you exist. I can see you standing before me. And I know you are not Israeli. You exist, sure enough. But you don't have, you never had a national presence in Eretz Israel.'
'And you did?'
'Yes, we had a kingdom right here in Judea.'
'That was more than three thousand years ago.'
'So?'
'So with the exception of small communities in Jerusalem and Hebron there were no Jews living in the West Bank since that time. The land has been continuously populated predominantly by Arabs. Does this not count in your eyes?'
'It took the Jews three thousand years to return to their land. It's the only country we've got. And you want us to give it up?'
'You want the whole of the land to yourself and you're not even ready to share it. Don't you think this is discriminatory?'
'What's discriminatory about it? What's wrong with what we're doing? You want to walk? We have designated areas as natural parks which we forbid anyone, Arab or Jew, from building on. You and us can enjoy these areas.'
'I have not been able to enjoy these hills since your people came. I walk in fear of being shot at or arrested. There was a time when this place was like a paradise, a cultivated garden with a house by every spring. A small, unobtrusive house, built without concrete.'
'And then the Jews came like the serpent and ruined everything in the idyllic garden. You blame us for everything, don't you? But it doesn't matter. We've learnt our lesson from our long, tortured history. Here in our own land our existence is not premised on your acceptance. We've long since found out that we have to be strong if we are to survive here.'
There was little to say after this. But I made one last effort to alert him to what was being done to the land by those who claimed to love it. I said:
'The way it's going we'll end up with a land that is criss-crossed with roads. I have a vision of all of us going around and around in circles. Whether we call it Israel or Palestine, this land will become one big concrete maze.'
He said nothing. He was still holding my wet hat. We were both standing up.
'Would you let me have my hat?' I asked. 'I want to continue with my walk.'
He stepped forward. I reached out and took the hat, turned my back and began walking. I could feel the settler's presence with his gun behind me. Then I heard him calling after me to stop. It felt more like an order which the law, his law, gave him the power to enforce. I feared for the worse. But when I turned around I realized he was not threatening me. Instead, he gestured at his nergila.
'Would you like to smoke with me?' he asked.
I was taken aback by his offer. But I knew from experience that often the first impulse is the best one to follow and my intuition on this occasion was not to refuse.
I found myself a comfortable stone, and stretched my legs towards the water next to this settler on the bank of the little stream we each call by the same name, after the same tree, pronounced in our different ways, and accepted the nergila.
As the strong stuff began to take effect, the memory of another sarha in these same hills came flooding back to me. That time I was with my friend Bishara in Wadi El Wrda at dusk. We sat on rocks by A'yn El Lwza below the cyclamen rock, not far from here. We had taken a long and satisfying walk and were resting before turning back. The sun was setting, the shadows cast by boulders were growing longer and denser. The colours were changing, transforming the hills we knew so well into a more muted world that we felt we had all to ourselves. Crossing our field of vision, like a phantom of the approaching doom, came a short man who was walking with long deliberate strides as though he was taking measurements. In the clarity of the moment I suspected the worst, tidings of a terrible future for our beautiful hills. A short time after this, work began on the settler road connecting Dolev to Beit Eil, which passed along the exact path this man had traversed. He must have been working for the Arab contractor who executed the work on behalf of the settlers. The hills were never the same after that.
We passed the mouthpiece between us and the smoke gurgled through the water. I inhaled and listened to the soft murmur of the stream as it slipped through the rocks and the birds singing and all the sounds and sights that I had blocked out. I began to feel guilty at what I was doing, willingly, sharing these hills with this settler. But then I thought: These are still my hills despite how things are turning out. But they also belong to whoever can appreciate them. If I postpone my enjoyment of them I might never achieve the sarha that I have sought for so long. As the Arab poet who was berated for drinking wine after the murder of his father said: Al Yawm khamr wa ghadan imr ('Today the wine; tomorrow is another day').
All the tension of the times, the worry about going through area C, the likely prospect of encountering soldiers or settlers, or getting shot at or lost was evaporating. With every new draw at the nergila, I was slipping back into myself, into a vision of the land before it became so tortured and distorted, every hill, watercourse and rock, and we the inhabitants along with it.
This young man was an artist at preparing a good nergila, I thought. He had talent.
'What's in this?' I asked.
'It's hashish that has been opiated.'
I was fully aware of the looming tragedy and war that lay ahead for both of us, Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jew. But for now, he and I could sit together for a respite, for a smoke, joined temporarily by our mutual love of the land. Shots could be heard in the distance, which made us both shiver. 'Yours or ours?' I asked. But how could we tell? We agreed to disregard them for now and for a while the only sound that we could hear was the comforting gurgle of the nergila and the soft murmur of the precious water trickling between the rocks.
EPILOGUE
THE MASKED SHEPHERDS
Ramallah to a'yn El Lwza
I met Louisa Waugh in Edinburgh. She is a writer, and had written a book about Mongolia, where she lived for three years. She told me of her interest in coming to Palestine as a volunteer, and I helped her find work with Palestine Monitor, an online human rights publication, which was established by my friend Mustafa Bargouthi. Before arriving in Palestine amid the crises and conflicts of June 2007, she was commissioned by the Glasgow Herald to write a piece to coincide with the publication of Palestinian Walks. Quite reasonably she wanted to take a walk with me. I thought it would be best if we walked alone in the hills, even though I was aware that this might not be prudent during these tense times. After some juggling of dates we arranged to do the walk on Friday, 13 August (some might say a bad choice). The weather was pleasant and we decided to leave late in the afternoon. It was not going to be a long excursion; Louisa said she just wanted to get a sense of the hills.
We could not begin walking from the starting point of many of the walks described in the book because the area is now chock-full of high-rise apartments – some grandiose, some half-built, others still construction sites. Rubble from all cascaded down the hills. So my wife, Penny, drove us to the present edge of town, which overlooks the Jewish settlement of Dolev in the distance and, below it, the Palestinian village of A'yn Qenya.
We reached a promontory and looked down at the valley described in the second walk, bordered by that destructive settlement road which had been built in the mid-1990s to connect Dolev with Beit El, but which was now used only
by Israeli army vehicles. For a long time the prospect of meeting with the army had deterred me from walking in this valley, but today was the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, the Jewish weekend. I thought there was less likelihood we would meet Israeli army jeeps. We stood looking down longingly at the invisible valley, and I asked Louisa whether she wanted to continue. I had enjoyed many pleasant walks with a Palestinian hiking group in the spring to more distant valleys, and now that we were here I was even less sure it was a good idea to descend this valley alone. But Louisa said she would very much like to, and I was curious to learn what had become of the land where I used to take weekly excursions throughout the 1980s. We began our descent down the steep track through the terraced hill cultivated with hundred-year-old olive trees.
The last rain of the season had fallen on these hills in early April. As expected, everything was dry, except for some succulents and the poterium thorn we call natsh, which covered the ground around the grey limestone rocks. In the distance we could hear dogs barking, and we exchanged ideas about the best way to behave should they be wild. Louisa said one has to run at them and scare them away, not showing any fear: 'They're so good at detecting fear,' she told me. I thought they should be approached with a many-pronged branch, which they would perceive as a number of attackers coming at them. The natsh, I said, could serve this purpose. She told me that the biggest problem of walking in Mongolia was being attacked by wild dogs, some of which were rabid. But the dogs we heard sounded far away and did not give us opportunity to test our different defence mechanisms.
We arrived at the spring of A'yn El Lwza (Spring of the Almond Tree), the abandoned qasr a little distance away. Across from us was the beautiful rock that early in the year is studded with cyclamens. The spring itself still provided much-needed water for the flocks of goats and sheep that grazed in these hills. The water had made a small, murky-green pond in which we heard frogs and saw thick growths of spearmint and the common reed. But the meandering path nearby was almost totally obliterated, blocked by the large boulders that had fallen from the terrace above when this illegal road had been built in 1992. A beautiful spot that had remained unchanged for centuries had been destroyed with no one raising a storm. I sat down on the dislocated rocks trying to recall how it used to be, silently lamenting the destruction of our once-beautiful valley. I wondered how it must all seem to a newcomer like Louisa who had not known this valley before its ruin.
At any moment an Israeli army jeep might drive on the road above and see us. They would order us up and arrest us. This valley is part of what the Oslo Accords call area C, where Palestinians may not venture without a permit from the Israeli military authorities. Of course we did not have one. But I did not want to dwell on this prospect, and instead tried to concentrate on those earlier memorable afternoons when I had sat by the spring after a long walk, watching the light from the setting sun shine at various angles against the terrace walls.
As we rested, Louisa told me of her impressions of life in the Palestinian Territories. 'You Palestinians,' she said, 'are always waiting. You wait at checkpoints, you wait for permits, and you have to get to the airport so early to make sure you can go through. Your life is a series of waiting episodes. How can you take all this? Why aren't you screaming?'
Philip Larkin addressed this question to 'the old fools' undergoing the indignities of old age. For me, it brought to mind Ghassan Kanafani's Men Under the Sun, a novella about Palestinian workers who are smuggled in the back of a closed container from Iraq to Kuwait and are eventually stifled to death. Kanafani also asked why didn't they scream? Perhaps we had screamed for too many years to no avail, and all that Louisa could see now was a silently enduring nation: all of Palestine waited.
There was an unusual sound coming from the terraces above, as though someone was striking the dry bushes with a hard object. It was not a sound that an animal could make. I wondered who was up there. A few minutes later, two young men appeared. Their faces were covered by a kufieh, the black and white chequered Palestinian scarf, showing only their eyes. They were armed with long, thick clubs, and came towards us.
First they asked us for water. Then, after drinking, they asked: 'Where are you from?'
'From Ramallah,' I answered, but felt I was not believed.
'Why did you come here?'
'To walk,' I said, and realized they were even less convinced. The prospect of taking a pleasure walk during times like these must have seemed preposterous to them.
'But you know it is dangerous to come here.'
'Yes, I know about the settler road and the army jeeps.'
'Then why did you come?'
'I've been coming here since before you were born, before this road was built. What business is it of yours?'
'It's our duty. We have to keep guard and know who comes here.'
A feeling came upon me that the familiar valley was no longer mine. The settler road above was quiet. No vehicles passed over it. It bordered the valley, framed it, but it was no longer the only despoiler.
The young men looked to me to be in their late teens. They must have been adolescents during the second violent Intifada. All they knew was upheaval and chaos. They could have no memories of this valley as the safe pastoral place that I had known for many years. They must have thought that anyone coming here could not be aware of the dangers, so could not possibly be from here. They repeated the question. 'Where are you really from?'
I again said I was from Ramallah.
'Can we see your identity card?'
I produced my lawyer's card.
'And hers?'
'She is English.'
'Can we see her card?'
But Louisa was not carrying an identification document. It was my mistake. Had we been apprehended by the army she could have been arrested. The law here requires that one must always carry identification.
I explained we had not planned on a long walk. She had come without a purse.
But they could not understand this. They grew up under the requirement that one had to carry identification papers. The privilege of being free of these documents was reserved for the occupier, so she must be one of them.
'How do we know she isn't from the mukhabarat [Israeli security service]'?
'Because she is with me. Would I walk with her if she were one of them?' As I spoke I eyed them directly each in turn. I noticed that the shorter one had a kinder manner, the taller being angrier and more aggressive. I addressed my responses to the former. After a short pause, I said in my best drawing-room manner: 'It was good to meet you, but now we must be on our way.' And I proceeded to walk away with Louisa in front.
We had hardly walked a few steps when we were called back. This time the two young men were less polite.
'Where do you think you're going? We can't let you go without ascertaining who she is. It's our duty to our Tanzim.'
In Arabic this word can mean an organisation or the militant youth group within Fatah. I didn't know which they meant and did not want to ask.
'We have been appointed to keep watch over these hills and report on who comes here. We cannot let her go before we know who she is.'
'I told you she is English. She has come to Palestine to volunteer. Why would the Israeli Mukhabarat send anyone here? Can't you see she doesn't look Israeli?' I was thinking of Louisa's red hair, but having said this I realized that these young men had no way of knowing how an Israeli woman would look. The only Israelis they had seen were soldiers.
'Why then is she here?'
'I brought her here to show her our beautiful hills. When you came I was describing to her how the place looked before the settlers built this road. You are too young to remember it. But this place was like a little paradise. Can you imagine these boulders without the rubble that has been spilt over them from the road, and the path before it was concealed by these falling rocks?'
They listened to what I was saying but did not seem interested. They were consumed by the insecure, turbulen
t present. It was all they knew. The past was clearly another country.
Patiently, I argued with these masked boys that I could vouch for Louisa's innocence and that they must let her go.
'We cannot,' they said. 'Except for you we should slaughter her immediately. It is Halal [religiously justified] for us to kill the guilty English.'
I looked into their eyes imploringly. They were watery and unsettled like those of many an adolescent. 'What are you saying?' I asked. I was doing my best to control my fear and anger, not to let them know how I felt. Having lived under occupation for forty years I could rely on my long experience in this regard.
'Didn't you say she is English? The English are the cause of all our troubles.' Then they turned to Louisa and asked: 'Do you know Balfour?'
Louisa looked puzzled and asked me: 'What are they saying about Balfour? Concealing a smile, I said: 'They are asking whether you know him?'
The older one continued: 'Do you know Blair? Do you know Alan Johnston?'
I laughed. I wanted to make a joke of this. 'How can you blame her for what happened so many years ago?' I pleaded.
'Aren't the English killing the Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan? Tens of thousands of innocent children are being killed because of her. Except for you we would kill her right here and now.'
'But you can't hold her responsible for the actions of her government. She left her country to come to ours to volunteer her services. Does this not mean she is against these policies?'
'We don't know who she is and why you are with her. Is she your wife?'
I said she wasn't.
'Then how can you walk alone with a woman down here? Islam does not condone this.'
In as lofty a manner as I could muster, I replied: 'But I trust myself and you must not impugn any immorality or this would be disrespectful of me. Do you think I am here for an immoral purpose?'
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