Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel's Separation Barrier. For Fun.

by Mark Thomas

  All the while, Jamal moves carefully and calmly, with measured steps, over the concrete crust of the footings. Every few steps, however, he hits the Barrier with the side of his fist. Bump. A slow and deliberate hit, it hardly makes a sound at all, just a soft bump. He neither mentions nor draws any attention to this act, over and above the attention the act draws to itself. Bump. Then he walks on. Bump again. Each time he draws his fist back into the swing of his stride, then bump. There is no blood, cuts or apparent bruising, and I wonder if it is a mental tick. Or an affectation? Is this an act? I have come to think that Jamal simply refuses to accept the Barrier. He refuses to normalise it and refuses to live with it, and each blow is a reminder of that: with each bump he marked his failure to comply.

  We finish the walk sitting in the street by a closed grocer’s shop, while some kids go to find the owner. My head droops between my knees, dripping sweat into a pool: the final hills were too hard and the sun too hot for a perfect walk. Even the tai chi disciple Jamal seems to buckle and he says, ‘I might have an ice cream,’ as the shop owner appears. Phil has taken off his straw cowboy hat to wipe his brow with the back of his hand, and reveals his fading highlights. I am so sunburnt I could present a daytime quiz show, while removing my bag has revealed a salt outline on the back of my T-shirt in the shape of the rucksack.

  ‘You’ve killed a tortoise!’ calls Phil and, sure enough, it looks just like the crime-scene chalk marks for the murdered reptile. Over the course of the walk I have actually removed at least three tortoises from the middle of the road, saving them from certain grisly vehicular doom, while today Phil and I saw the tiniest tortoise we had ever seen: small enough to make two grown, sweaty men say, ‘Ahhh, loooook!’ These hills are covered with tortoises, and they’re easy to spot in the scrub and thorn bushes. When I was being shown around Bil’in after an encounter with the Israeli army, the fields were full of empty, plastic, round, black tear-gas grenades. Going to kick a muddy one I realised just in time that it was a tortoise. Another time, our guide Fadhi had picked one up and, pointing at its central ridge on its shell, said, ‘Say this section is the West Bank, and these sections around it are Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. We have five million Palestinian refugees in these countries. Now the Jordan Valley is on a geological fault line, so one earthquake and the refugees would flood home into the West Bank, and the issue of the refugees’ right to return would be solved once and for all.’ I prefer to think that his was a political lesson about refugees rather than one of geology or humanitarian relief but, nonetheless, it took place on the back of a tortoise shell.

  The second of our three days on the trip south of Bethlehem takes us to the predominantly Christian village of Beit Sahour. ‘I am really looking forward to meeting the manager of the YMCA,’ I said to Phil, looking around to see if the words were coming out of someone else’s mouth as I spoke them.

  We meet Nidal Abu Zuluf on a country lane on the outskirts of Beit Sahour. He is polite and courteous and looks like a head of year teacher. He leads us up the lane to the hilltop compound of a deserted Israeli military base. It contains a handful of army buildings, old offices and barracks: long, low, hollow shells with no doors, frames or fittings, empty of everything but dust, dirt and bird droppings. The grubby white walls are sprayed with graffiti proclaiming, ‘Israel belongs to the Jews’ and, ‘The Jews will keep this land.’ But there has been work done here recently: a new path, rubbish tidied and the ground cleared.

  ‘The army confiscated the land here in the seventies, built a military base and the entire area of Beit Sahour was shelled from here in the Second Intifada. Many buildings were totally destroyed, including the YMCA building.’

  ‘Israel shelled the YMCA?!’

  ‘We are part of the neighbourhood and they shelled the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Why did they shell the neighbourhood?’

  ‘To defend themselves,’ he says dryly, rattling a bunch of keys in his hands.

  The military left the base in 2006 and with support from the US government the local council built a recreation park on part of the site, just a short distance from the empty barracks and the graffiti. The park has AstroTurf football pitches, a restaurant, and spaces for people to bring their own barbecue, as well as a theatre. Everything was going well until 2008 when, one day out of nowhere, the settlers arrived.

  ‘Now the whole place is under pressure from the settler movement, in particular from a group called the “Woman in Green”,’ says Nidal.

  ‘They’re settler activists?’ I ask, to clarify.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The settlers have been here, claiming the land is theirs, and we have had demonstrations against this. If it becomes a settlement they will want the entire area, because settlers need buffer zones and natural extensions and watchtowers and such like.’ Holding his arm out to lead us away, Nidal says, ‘Come,’ and jangles his keys again like a caretaker.

  This is not an unfamiliar story in the West Bank: the army confiscates land and, on leaving, settlers take the land over.

  At first, soldiers kept the settlers away from the old base, but then they started to give them escorts as the settlers tidied up in preparation for the day when they move in: in February 2010, the military declared their old base in Beit Sahour a closed military zone and therefore out of bounds to Palestinians. This removed any impediment to a new settlement being created.

  The settlers might claim the Bible gives them this land, but Nidal is part of a significant Church movement that challenges that ideology and, sitting in the shade of a fig tree, he explains a little of Beit Sahour’s history: ‘As Christian Palestinians, we have always been involved in the national struggle for freedom, peace and justice.’ In 1988, nearly a hundred people of Beit Sahour threw away their Israeli-issue ID cards, handing them to the mayor and demanding he give them back to the Israelis. ‘We said we don’t recognise the Occupation and will not be identified by ID cards given by Israel. A year later we went on tax strike.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Beit Sahour.’

  ‘All of Beit Sahour?’

  ‘All of Beit Sahour. We said we would not pay tax so they can buy bullets and tear gas. We are not going to pay for the Occupation.’

  ‘How did the Israeli authorities react?’

  ‘They placed us under siege for forty-one days. They entered our houses taking TVs and fridges. Then they entered businesses. It became a battle of wills between the people of Beit Sahour and the Israeli army. The soldiers were desperate to get someone to pay; they were even reduced to asking people to pay just one shekel, so they could get a receipt and say, “So and so paid.”’

  Nidal’s point is a simple one, that Beit Sahour’s Christian community is very much part of the non-violent Palestinian struggle, and this is echoed in the wider Palestinian Christian community. The current campaign to emerge from the Palestinian Christians takes a different direction from the tax strike and pass card actions, however. Given the propensity of the settlers to insist the land is God-given, a group of theologians and lay people, including Nidal, drafted a theological response, challenging the religious foundations of the settlers and, therefore, the Occupation itself.

  ‘Religion is often abused by politicians and used to justify injustices. It was done in South Africa when the Protestant Church in the Netherlands justified apartheid theologically,’ says Nidal, handing me a glossy pamphlet (and thereby landing another blow against the jihad on paper). ‘The Kairos Palestine Document was launched in December 2009, and it represents the schools of theology in Palestine. So we had Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Anglican Lutherans and even Baptists, coming together for the first time to draft this document.’

  Getting that crowd in the same room is a feat akin to herding vipers with cooked spaghetti. Coming from a family of preachers and vicars as I do, I know well the potential for schism and splits: I turned my back on it long ago, opting instead for the calm unity of left-wing politics.

/>   ‘This is a new theology,’ continues Nidal. ‘The resistance of love. We declare that the Occupation is a sin against God and humanity and that any theology that justifies the Occupation and its injustices is a heresy.’

  I might have left religion a long time ago but the roots run deep, and the ringing bell of liberation theology can still turn my head. With my face visibly lighting up, I say, ‘Is the object to get this into mainstream church thinking?’

  ‘Yes, we want to make this a mainstream idea and we want to stop the Bible being used to justify the Occupation and the settlers.’

  ‘Are other churches endorsing this idea?’

  ‘Yes, churches from all around the world have endorsed it, even the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. But we call on everyone to join the resistance of love, to target the occupiers to help get rid of their evil. We love our enemy and this is the Lord’s teaching. To this end, we ask the world to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign until Occupation ends.’

  The Christian Church is calling for the end of the Occupation to save Israelis involved in the Occupation from committing a sin: for all my rationalism and lack of immortal soul, at times like this I wish I had a ‘Hallelujah!’ to give. I like the concept. I like the theology and I like the idea of calling Netanyahu a heretic, out of love.

  *

  Today is the last of the three days of our route south of Bethlehem and Al-Khadar and we are walking with Marwan, an old hand at working with international solidarity activists, and Isshaq, a young translator from Ayda refugee camp. We wend our way across the countryside, stopping for water at farmhouses, picking oranges and rescuing tortoises that neither know nor care they are in danger. We don’t do it for the praise and adulation: ‘It’s all part of the job, ma’am,’ we say, and walk on.

  On the approach to Bethlehem, the wire and electronic fencing of the countryside Barrier gives way to the concrete urban Barrier, and the most intensely graffitied route we have come across. ‘In my programme for Internationals I bring them here and get them to paint a message of solidarity on the Wall,’ says Marwan.

  I reply with that most English of lies and say, ‘Oh, how lovely.’ In fact, the Barrier is covered in asinine, cliché-ridden shite: ‘Love conquers w(all)’, ‘Walls can never crush the human spirit’, ‘One Wall, two prisons’, ‘When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws are free.’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I groan quietly, and whisper to Phil, ‘It’s like Hallmark-does-graffiti.’ It is, therefore, an utterly joyous delight to find the words, ‘Netanyahu is a cunt,’ sprayed in foot-high blue letters. Some may find it infantile, crude and aggressive but fuck it, he’s a heretic. There is another piece of graffiti that is easily my favourite. We follow the Barrier to a Muslim cemetery where the gravestones are overlooked by cameras and watchtowers, and camouflage netting is hung across windows. We walk through it to a road that leads downhill and under a large wooden arch: the entrance to the Ayda refugee camp. Over the arch is an enormous metal key, the most potent of symbols for the refugees (many families still have the keys of their homes in Jaffa or Haifa after fleeing from them in 1948). We walk under the key and the arch, past the cramped homes and alleys, and past the arts centre that runs an outdoor film festival – it paints a section of the Barrier white to project on to, then paints over it again when the festival is at an end. We go past the stone masons and goods yards, where the men stand in tracksuit bottoms, vests and sandals; past the wasteland, past the sheep grazing on rubbish, and kids playing. There, on a long and high stretch of the Barrier written in massive, white letters are two words: ‘OPEN SESAME.’

  Isshaq, it transpires, studied in England and speaks brilliant colloquial English with the kind of London accent that could feature in a bad Radio 4 comedy sketch about poor people. Walking through the hilltop town of Beit Jala, he proclaims, ‘Oh, man, this is a seriously dodgy area.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, ’cos the Wall is not finished here and the crossroad goes in and out, so there are a lot of drug dealers up here, innit.’

  By comparison I seem to have turned into Bertie Wooster: ‘Good Lord, where’s the bloody thing gawn? Phil, we seem to have run out of bally wall.’

  The hill road joins the main highway, which flows north into Jerusalem and south to the Dead Sea. As a result, it has a large checkpoint filtering the traffic. Just beyond the point where these two roads merge, the Barrier restarts. It just begins. A tall cantilevered concrete wall begins and it feels as if you can simply choose right there which side you might wish to live on.

  ‘I am not too cool about this,’ says Isshaq, walking in the shade of the Barrier on the Israeli side. ‘I got a bad feeling about this, man, I’m telling you.’

  ‘It will be fine. I have walked along here before and the Israelis will not stop us,’ insists the older Marwan, who promptly walks into a sign forbidding pedestrians.

  Back on the Palestinian side, the ground returns to the cement lava flows where concrete has been poured for Barrier foundations. Homes perch above us on the other side of the gully but offer no shadow, and the sun is hard and bright as we stumble over rubble, rubbish and refuse, wandering by old armchairs, tyres, boxes and an odd assortment of discarded children’s toys – plastic dinosaurs and toy sheep – scattered bleach bottles, burnt coils of wire and a dead dog.

  Gradually, the homes recede, the slopes crumble and a cityscape emerges – Al-Khadar – a panorama of white apartments decked with black water tanks, minarets and a football stadium. Slowly this falls into our view and then from it.

  A small plain now spreads beneath the Barrier, fields and crops dot the land, vines twist in perversely neat rows and olive trees line the descending terraces. From the path, we watch the Barrier curve out in front of us in a long arc and then swing away. Running alongside it is a ledge of dried mud and bursts of sprouting shrubs, and we suddenly notice that the Barrier has changed. Gone are the dull grey slabs and in their place are panels of moulded brick, held in place with metal uprights: a concrete version of a wooden garden fence. Only taller, and with a watchtower in the middle. Not a lot, but some thought has gone into aesthetics, as the bricks are a pale ceramic pink colour, with a double course of grey ones running through the middle of the Barrier.

  ‘Is this the middle-class version of the Wall?’ calls Phil.

  ‘It’s like cladding.’

  ‘It could be the Lakeside version of the Wall.’

  ‘Or posh festival fencing.’

  ‘Barratt Wall?’

  ‘Ikea Wall?’

  Ikea is perhaps the closest description, not in style but in reputation, as the Barrier suddenly stops again. It appears to have run out of panels. The Barrier simply ends, unfinished, with just a couple of drainage tubes tied onto the final metal upright. I poke my head around the final panel, looking round the corner onto the Israeli road, tempted to call out, in a neighbourly fashion, ‘Yoohoo, anyone in?’ It is an odd sense of trespass, this urge to call. ‘Hello, Israel, I’m returning the jump leads I borrowed …’

  A boy-with-donkey rides from the Israeli road onto the Palestinian track, as if none of this matters. Stepping around the end panel, my sense of trepidation gives way to a strange feeling: relief. The Barrier has finished and it is a relief not to have it. Yes, it is only for this section and it will start again at some point down the road, but it is a feeling of relief all the same. As this feeling grows, we start to play, nipping from one side to the other, back and forth in one step, singing: ‘I’m in the West Bank, now I’m in Israel. I’m in the West Bank, now I’m …’ (Actually, the Barrier here crosses the Green Line so we play, ‘I’m in the West Bank, now I’m in the West Bank. I’m in the West Bank, now I’m in the West Bank …’ but you get the point.)

  The foundations for the continuation of the Barrier, however, look set, judging by the clear trail that marks its way across the hills: this is the route the Barrier will take.

  ‘It’s a depressing tho
ught that this is only a temporary gap,’ I mutter.

  ‘But, being positive about it, this is only temporary Wall,’ says Phil.

  The break in the Barrier here runs along the boundaries of the Gush Etzion settlement block – the oldest of the settlements in the West Bank, and one which Israel believes is ‘in the consensus’, meaning that in any final-status deal with the Palestinians, Gush Etzion is not for negotiation, it stays over the Green Line and will become part of Israel proper. Numerous court cases brought against the Israeli government have halted construction work on the Barrier, but this time it is not only the Palestinians who object; many settlers do, too. Some object on ecological grounds that it damages the environment, and some fear the Barrier is a border, a stop on their dream of Eretz Israel, of claiming all the land God promised.

  Tonight there is to be a settler demonstration in Gush Etzion, called by the ‘Woman in Green’, the people trying to settle the old military base in Beit Sahour. Their leader is Nadia Matar and the organisation got its nickname from the colour of the hats they wore when demonstrating against the peace process.

  I have been on a lot of demonstrations over the years, from ‘Stop the Invasion of Afghanistan’ to ‘Start the Invasion of Jersey’; demos of over a million people for ‘Stop the War’; and demos where there was no one but myself calling to ‘Ban Surrealism’. I have been on silent, candlelit vigils outside the Home Office, and I have demonstrated to ‘Stop Star Wars Missile Defence’ at a US base in Yorkshire where police on quad bikes chased fellow demonstrators dressed as Princess Leia and Chewbacca across the moors. I can sniff out a weird demo at 150 metres, and this settler demo kinks my nostrils from a mile back.