by Mark Thomas
‘I have a small grocery store here,’ Kesab says with the air of someone going back to the beginning. ‘If I want to bring merchandise into the village from the West Bank I have to give the Israeli civil administration a list of what I want. Sometimes they say, “You ask for twenty sacks of floor. This is too much.” You understand? They tell me how much flour I can bring in.’ He laughs and in a final attempt to make me see his point he says, ‘Eggs.’
‘Eggs?’
‘Eggs. Sometimes people are not allowed to bring in eggs through the checkpoint.’
‘Eggs?’
‘Eggs.’
What possible reason could there be for this? What nefarious act can you commit with an egg? The worst thing I can think of doing with an egg is shoving a poached one between two damp bits of bap and calling it a McMuffin. Admittedly, we do throw them at politicians back home but that is normally regarded as filling in time between elections. What possible threat is an egg?
‘The soldiers look at an egg and treat it as if it is drugs.’
‘Eggs?’ I still find myself captured by the inanity of it. ‘Treating eggs like drugs?’
Does the Israeli army think eggs are habit forming; that they lead to a dependence on other dairy products? Are eggs a gateway to cheese?
‘Eggs?’
‘And chicken.’
‘What?’
‘Sometimes people cannot bring in a chicken through the checkpoint.’
‘Well, naturally, there might be an egg in them …’
‘You can choose between waiting for two hours until they make all the enquiries and see if you actually are entitled to bring a chicken in, or throw it into the garbage and cross the checkpoint without it.’
‘Is this a policy?’
‘It depends on the officer. Every officer in the checkpoint decides whatever he wants.’
Everyone in the room is now looking at me: Kesab; the village councillors on the high-backed chairs; Michael on the sofa; even Kesab’s son, still standing between his dad’s knees. They are all looking, waiting for me realise that this village is totally controlled by the Israeli military, down to the last egg.
I leave the village council to their business, and wander down to the sheep pens, chatting to villagers and admiring a rose bush growing by the side of one of the huts. Half an hour later, the meeting over, Michael comes to find me, his sleeves rolled up and his jacket slung over his shoulder, and we start to stroll back towards his car. I ask him the most obvious question: why are the Israeli military doing this?
‘Is it a case of the famous Sharon quote?’ I ask.
‘Which one?’ he says, laughing.
I try and remember it as best I can, ‘“You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away … I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.”17 Is this what is happening here, is this that policy in action?’
Without pause, Michael says, ‘In the Seam Zone [the area between the Barrier and the Green Line], no question about it. The civil administration is doing everything it can to create the desire in these people to leave their lands. Then, if they leave, the civil administration can say, “Well, it was their wish.” This community has been offered a chance to leave many times.’ He throws his jacket in the back of his car. ‘Israel wants the Seam Zone to be Palestinian-free. They don’t want Palestinians living in the Seam Zone as then it will become an Israeli territory … So the Wall has nothing to do with security! If the Wall was about security it would be placed on the Green Line and it would separate Israel from the West Bank. The Wall was a genius tool to grab more land for Israel with as few as possible Palestinians in it.’
With that, it is time for Michael to go, leaving Phil and me time to take a final look around. Just then, a young man appears, ‘Would you join us for coffee, please?’
He gestures to his shack, which is a one-room hut with two chairs and a small table under the shade of some tin sheeting.
‘Thank you,’ says Phil.
‘Shokran,’ the young man replies, and he disappears inside. Normally when calculating the schedule for the day, I will add forty-five minutes to an hour for Palestinian hospitality. So frequent and persistent are the offers of tea and coffee that I have started to refer to them as the, ‘Palestinian Roadblock’: Israel has checkpoints, the Palestinians have hospitality ‘blocks’, and neither are easy to get past. But this place is different. Sitting on the stoop, we could be on the front cover of every blues album ever made.
Our chap emerges with a tray and on it is a pair of truly splendid coffee cups. They are old and art deco, the saucers white with sculpted curves, the cups fluted with thin, silvered rims and silver wings for handles, like a thirties design for a plane freight delivery company. They are perfect and delicate. Just sitting here holding one feels special.
On this hillside of tin and mud, there is a sense of pride and propriety that is rather calmly defiant. No matter how many times the water is cut off, no matter how many demolition orders are placed on a building, people still bring out the best china for guests.
‘You were right,’ says Phil.
‘About what?’
‘You said there was something admirable in the pioneer spirit, about building communities in inhospitable places.’
‘Ah, but I was wrong, because I thought we would find it in the settlement.’
‘Right sentiment; wrong place.’
‘Indeed.’
And we sit back, sipping coffee from the most beautiful cups I have ever seen.
______
* I think the lawyers use other legal phrases.
** As the village is on the Israeli side of the Barrier residents are permitted to bring their cars from the village through the checkpoint and back.
chapter 8
ANTHONY PERKINS’S SHORTER COUSIN
In most circumstances there would be something uniquely undignified about a man on the wrong side of forty-five carrying wet wipes for personal use. But they form a vital part of the morning checklist, made up of items to locate by frantically unpacking each and every pocket of the rucksack.
‘Checklist’ is probably an over-formal description of a process that is essentially a freestyle swearing competition thinly disguised as a last-minute memory test. It is a seventies TV game show for foul-mouths involving the words: compass, map, suncream, cock, torch, pacamac, arse, hat, bastard, fuck, first aid, fuckfest, pen, shades, water bottle, piss breath, Tupperware, wet wipes, notebook, shit-stick, cock burn, wank and sandwich, although there is a strong improvisational element as to the order in which they appear.
The daily routine of ransacking the rucksack to check our kit is one of an increasing number of rituals. Every morning liberal doses of insect repellent are applied followed by suncream, working on the basis that if I get sunburn the last thing I want is insect bites. Every evening I clean my boots, stuff them with paper when wet and slather them in dubbin when dry. Every day I check to see if the repairs to my boots are holding up as the only thing keeping them from turning into flip-flops is superglue. I’ve started checking my feet, too. They have never warranted much attention before, but every evening I peel off my socks and peer down at a pair of crumpled white things, wondering why I have been given a dead man’s feet. Part of this new obsession is due to increasing paranoia about having to stop the walk because of something embarrassing like corns. So the medical kit carries foot-care products and medicated talcum powder.
I am not sure if I want to know what medicated talc does exactly, but it does conjure up thoughts of live things in damp places, and the phrase, ‘Could some of my medical students come in to see this?’ Every morning and every night there is always a small cloudburst of medicated talc in the room, accompanied by a coughing yelp of, ‘Where did I put the clean socks?’ This lurking fear of having to stop the walk because of something stupid also extends beyond worrying about in-grown toenails and the like
, to encompass the horror of a groin strain incurred by over-stretching on the hillside terraces, or worse, returning home because of chafing. I have visions of friends querying me on the possible scenarios for my sudden reappearance: ‘Deported by the army or death threats from militants?’ and being forced to utter the words, ‘No, it was insufficient absorbency in my underwear and a sweat-related friction rash.’ So, powdered, scrubbed and defoliated I set out each morning.
We quickly leave the settlement of Alfei Menashe behind us. Crossing to the Palestinian side of the Barrier from here will make for a couple of good days’ walking. The mornings are hot and I am grateful of any wind that finds us, but we have plenty of shade and, with a few exceptions, the going is light. Two shepherds – in their teens but only just – are guiding Phil and me through this part of the ramble and they leave us puffing on the terraces as they scamper around the hillsides, playing soldiers. Holding sticks against their shoulders, crouching behind boulders and walking through olive groves as if they are on patrol, they shout into their collars as if they have walkie talkies and crouch behind boulders.
‘I love action movies,’ one lad says over his shoulder to me, and I shoot him a ‘dad’ smile. His friend waves his arm forward and shouts, ‘Company, move out! Search and secure the area!’
They run to some nearby branches, ducking under the lower ones while I look up for signs of the Israeli army near the Barrier, slightly concerned that they might mistake the sticks for real guns.
‘Let’s move further this way,’ I call out, motioning away from the wire and watchtowers.
‘Received and understood!’ one of them shouts, before they race across the terrace towards a field dotted with poppies. The boys vanish ahead and I take a moment to sit on a clump of rocks to drink some water. The sight of the flowers is captivating. Their stems yield in the soft breeze, while their brief red petals turn and twist. Next to me a single poppy shudders in gentle gusts that ripple the grass around it and I happily while away ten minutes watching the field and its fragile beauty, thinking of nothing, engrossed in the waves of the wind and the spots of red that seem to go on and on. I realise I am happy and that if I could, I would shut my eyes and sleep long here, breathing the air full of the smell of soil and grass.
In the next village, Habla, we stop by a row of shops. ‘This area is funded by the European Union,’ says one of the shepherds.
‘Including the shops?’
‘Yes, this shop, too,’ he says, pointing at the coffee and falafel shop.
‘EU-funded falafel! We have to get some.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ says Phil politely.
‘And miss the chance to piss off UKIP! Are you mad?’
We get a bag each and two for the shepherds.
Arriving at the village of Deir Ballut, the Barrier continues its way south. We take a left. Our route goes east, further into the West Bank, along the proposed route of the second ‘finger’ – the Ariel Finger – the planned corridor that will jut out from the Green Line almost at right angles to it, and run some twenty kilometres into Palestinian territory to Ariel.
According to Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the settlement of Ariel is ‘an integral, inseparable part of the state of Israel’18 – a statement easily contested with the most rudimentary map. Ariel is clearly in the West Bank and clearly some twenty kilometres over the Green Line. However, the Barrier is to surround the settlement of Ariel and rejoin the existing Barrier. A future Palestinian state is being whittled away with wire and brick. A nick here, a settlement there: bit by bit, picked at, gouged at, and eroded by the flow of Israeli expansion, these ‘fingers’ take more than land. They take with them the possibility of a viable state.
At the very eastern end of the Ariel Finger is the only bit of this planned Barrier yet built. It runs some ten kilometres around the tip and is nicknamed ‘the fingernail’. If I am to walk the Barrier then I should walk the ‘fingernail’, too.
The settlement of Ariel started in 1977 with just two army tents erected on a hill near a Palestinian village. A year later, Ron Nachman, Ariel’s future mayor, led a group of forty families with Israeli government backing out to the hillside in order to build a city. The place now has a university with 10,000 students and a population of about 20,000. This is where I will walk and stay, in a city built in the heart of the West Bank: an illegal city about to be surrounded by the condoning military embrace of the Barrier.
We are staying in Ariel in a bed and breakfast for a few nights. It is in a quiet street, decorated with tidy lawns and Toyota trucks parked neatly along the roadside. It feels like a suburban new town but it’s getting late. We are only five days into this walk but it is out first proper sighting of hot water on tap and I drag my rucksack from the taxi with high hopes of clean sheets and a shower. Having rung the doorbell, we wait in the front garden next to a plaster seagull and an Israeli flag until the door opens.
A small, cross man with hard, confused eyes leans back in the doorway to examine me. I have stayed at a number of guest houses over the years, but never before has my arrival been greeted by the owner trying to stare me down. In the ensuing silence I fumble for a scrap of notepaper to check the address and find it just as the small, cross man says, ‘Mark?!’
‘Yes.’
He gives me another long look. The owner of the B&B is obviously a ‘character’, with all that entails. There is something disconcerting in his lack of height or rather, the way he looks up at me and down on me at the same time. Finally, sounding as if it is against this better judgment, he says, ‘You’d better come in.’
We step into the house.
‘Welcome,’ he lies.
Dragged by his grumpy orbit we follow him into the living room. A huge fish tank burbles away behind the sofa, world championship skating is on the widescreen TV with the sound turned off, and the walls look as though they have had a collision with a trinket gift shop. Flags hang from them, as do rugs, daggers, swords, a ship’s steering wheel, clocks, barometers and plates – lots of plates.
With a slight Eastern European accent, the small, cross man introduces himself: ‘I am Natan. I run tours, religious tours. We have one tomorrow, four people want a special tour. I know all the places. I take them and show them. You like gardens?’ he asks, though it would be a mistake to think it a question. ‘Come, I show you my garden. Come, come.’
Conversation with Natan would just about qualify as a dialogue, but only on a technical point. Outside on a wooden porch stands a birdcage and a statue of the pissing boy of Brussels to which someone, probably not a master craftsman, has added a home-made concrete penis. The new penis is much larger and more erect than the original. Patting the boy on the head, Natan says, ‘It was too small,’ then leads us down some wooden stairs onto a small, sloping garden. He walks to one of the trees lit by a series of garden lights and says, ‘These are pomela. We still have a few fruit on the tree. See.’ The fruit look like large grapefruits.
‘You know why they call them “pomela”?’
‘No.’
‘Because of “Pomela” Anderson,’ he says, cupping his hands over imaginary breasts.
‘Pomelas?’ I say, not quite believing Natan is telling me tit gags.
‘Pomela Anderson!’ He asserts, eyebrows arched and cupped hands shaking with emphasis.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Ach,’ he says, and flips his hand dismissively before returning to his routine. ‘What is this?’ He holds up his middle and forefinger, his thumb pressing against them.
‘I don’t know.’
‘A dead Jew, because a live one would be doing this …’ and he starts to rub his thumb on his fingers, in the universal sign of money.
Ever the diplomat, Phil interrupts, ‘What is this over here?’
‘That?’ Natan says, turning to follow Phil’s sight, ‘Ah, this is Snow White.’
There, standing in the middle of a small pond, is a statue of Snow White holding
a basket.
‘She is guarded by her dwarves.’ As Natan says this, figures become apparent in the night-lights: little men around the pond. Great. So the small, cross man has a garden of gnomes guarding a virgin overlooked by a child with an adult’s erect penis. This is where we are staying the night: sleeping in a homoerotic Hitchcock thriller. We had been told that there was only one B&B in this city; the lack of competition is beginning to tell.
Dinner is served by Natan’s wife who smiles silently; my coping mechanism for the situation, too. Natan starts, ‘I am originally from Romania and when I split with my first wife I put an advert for a wife in a paper, that she should be a Romanian Jew.’ His wife smiles while he points his fork at her and continues, ‘She is Romanian but a Christian.’
That dealt with, he starts off on a new tack: ‘I was in the army in ’67.’ He nudges me and says with mock sincerity, ‘The Arabs wanted to drive us into the sea but we couldn’t swim, so we fought and we won. This is our land. And here we are.’ He stops and looks at Phil’s plate.
‘Are you eating the chicken?’
‘No, I’m a vegetarian.’
‘Good. More meat for me,’ he says, and spears another piece of schnitzel onto his plate.
‘Why are you here?’ he asks, actually waiting for a reply for once.
In the shock of the silence I say, ‘Well … we’re going to talk to a general called Shlomo Gazit …’
‘I know him,’ he shrugs, ‘in the army. I know him. If you see him tell him Natan says hello. Who else?’
‘Well … er … if the mayor has time …’
‘I know him, the mayor, I know him. He is a good man. Why else are you here?’
‘Well, I’m walking along the length of the Barrier, on both sides of it, and talking to lots of people as I go. Both Israelis and Palestinians.’
Natan stops and holds his fork aloft. ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinian.’
‘Er … there is. We have met them.’