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

by Mark Thomas

  ‘Who does the burning?’

  ‘Dealers, merchants – they buy cables or tyres or sometimes cars, you know, useless ones or old cars; they get them from Israel, bring them here and burn them.’

  ‘How do they get the cars in from Israel?’

  ‘Oh, stand by the checkpoint and you’ll see Israelis selling cars there, and some Palestinian dealers have permits to go into Israel, too. They buy cars and bring them back here.’

  Two more young boys, their faces covered in soot, wait at a polite distance as if instructed. The man on the rock throws them half a glance and though he is open and polite, he seems mindful of them.

  ‘So what do you do here? Do you do the burning?’ I ask.

  ‘No, I don’t burn. I get the scraps they have left,’ he says, with a wave of his hand. ‘They take the big stuff and I take the scraps they cannot be bothered with.’ Opening his rucksack he reveals the day’s haul: a nest of twisted wire and other metal knick-knacks.

  ‘How much do you get for that?’

  ‘Twenty-four shekels a kilo,’ he says. About £4.

  ‘How much can you get in a day?’

  ‘Two or three kilos.’

  ‘You must catch a lot of smoke and fumes,’ I say.

  ‘I have seven kids and they have to live. I will do whatever is needed, smoke or no smoke.’

  With that he gets up, slings his bag over his shoulder and, as he is going in our direction, walks with us. Yunes and I set off first and our new friend lags slightly behind. It is Phil who catches him wave again to the boys, directing them to skirt the lane and follow us from the fields.

  ‘Ask him if those are his kids,’ Phil whispers, and I do.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, and there is a pause. It is long rather than awkward.

  ‘Do they work with you in the smoke?’ I ask eventually.

  He nods. ‘They join me sometimes when they are not at school, just for a couple of hours.’

  The lane from the hills to the outskirts of the village of Idhna is neatly lined with stacks of stripped-out computers; piles of their plastic casings lean against a low stone wall. The man in the black overalls is called Bassem and he walks with us, his children now alongside him, no longer banished from our presence.

  ‘Before the Wall you could work in Israel and make money,’ he says. ‘Now it depends on permissions and I have not worked in Israel for six months.’

  ‘What work did you do?’

  ‘Picking lemons and grapefruits and oranges, but if someone offered me a permit to work on construction, I worked on construction.’

  ‘When you got your permit,’ I ask, ‘did you pay for it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  This is no innocuous enquiry about administrative charges. Israeli companies often use Palestinian sub-contractors, agents or gang masters to organise Palestinian workers. The agents charge the workers up to half their wages for the permits and as no one officially crosses the checkpoint without a permit, the workers pay. I had met an organiser from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions a few weeks previously, and he’d told me, ‘The agents are a serious problem; they can charge up to fifty per cent commission. There are no rights or holidays or work clothes provided by the factories because they don’t employ the workers; they employ the agent. The money goes to the agents and then the workers get paid after the commission … The Palestinian Authorities are trying to make agents illegal but they are very powerful.’ Further proving his point, yesterday I had had a cup of tea with a builder employed in Gush Etzion. He had showed me his permit and explained, ‘I pay 1,500 shekels a month for this permit and that leaves me 1,800 shekels to take home.’

  ‘When do you pay the commission?’ I asked.

  ‘It is taken out of my money before I am paid.’

  So I ask Bassem, ‘When you got your permit, how much did you pay for it?’

  ‘It depends on how many days a month I worked, but between 1,300 to 1,500 shekels.’

  ‘About forty per cent of your wages?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. People have to do it; they have no other choice.’

  ‘Where was the agent from?’

  ‘He is a Palestinian living in the West Bank. He employs fifty to sixty people so he gets a lot of money … We have no other choice but we know this is stealing, legal stealing.’

  Bassem invites us for tea with his family. The kids drag plastic chairs into the garden, someone arrives with a kettle full of hot tea, someone else arrives with a tray of glasses, and the youngest is paraded and we all clap her cleverness as she walks, waving a toy in her fist. Bassem shows us the chickpeas growing in the small garden and his even smaller workshed, a long cupboard at the side of the house, full of sacks and buckets where he separates the different types of metal: copper, iron, zinc, aluminium and brass. On the floor of this shed, a blackened board holds a tangle of metal rings, components, wires, springs, sprockets, bolts, nuts and bits of foil for him to separate and pick out later. He offers to show us the next step of the scrap-metal food chain – the dealers – and he leads us into Wadi ar Risha, where scrap-metal merchants, one after the other, line what is essentially a country lane. Lorries and trucks bounce up and down it, pulling in and out of yards, some heading for the fiery hill.

  ‘He will be going to burn,’ says Bassem, pointing at a van with tall sides. He then points to a line of coaches stripped down to the frame: no windows, tyres, seats or even engine, just the chassis and frame; a coach graveyard. ‘This guy does cars and coaches,’ he says, and then, pointing across the street, ‘This guy does a lot of copper.’

  When it is time for Bassem to go, we say farewell and he leaves us in the middle of the noisy lane, in the corridor of scrap metal merchants. One yard has long, thick iron pipes sprawled on the ground; another, industrial water tanks laid side by side; while the next is packed with cars. The air is thick with the noise of grinders, cutters and hammers. Compressed-gas bottles stand on trolleys, dangling their tubes and decked with gauges and regulators. JCBs drive at piles of metal, mounds of gutters, folded panels, beaten sheets, frames, stands, bedsteads, iron grids, pipes and wire while young men wearing gloves wrench at snagged edges.

  Other yards are stacked with broken white fridges and cookers, or dull black pipes and fittings. Every yard has a system of sorting boxes: bins and skips for each different type of metal. A massive truck lumbers down the road with hollow clanks and echoes coming from its empty container, ready to be loaded. Through the gates of another yard we see a group of men sitting under a barn roof breaking open gearboxes and tearing at drive shafts. The youngish owner shouts hello and comes to talk to us by the roadside.

  ‘What do you do in your yard?’ I ask him.

  ‘Car engines. We break them up and the rubbish left over we burn on the hill,’ he says, nodding at the smoking mountain in the distance.

  ‘Do you ever worry about the health risks?’

  He laughs and growls the words, ‘Pure cancer!’

  Another lorry trundles past, creaking and rattling.

  ‘Is burning cables and cars legal in Israel?’

  He chuckles, ‘It’s illegal whether it is in Israel or Palestine; that is why we burn in secret.’

  I nod at the hill. ‘It’s not a secret.’ Just then I see a car speed past with another car, of equal size, strapped to its roof. The top car’s engine is out and the wheels are off, but apart from that, the bottom car is doing a two’s up and driving down the lane. No one pays any attention so I presume this is normal and, once I have stopped gawping, the scarp-yard owner carries on: ‘The burning is at one or two o’ clock in the morning and it is always done next to the Barrier, where the Palestinian police cannot reach it. We put one or two people to watch the roads and if the police do, by chance, come by, we put the flames out and everyone runs away.’

  As he finishes another car drives by, this time with two teenage boys lying on the bonnet and covering the windscreen. They lie straight out and rigid, arms b
y their sides, laughing wildly as the driver leans his body out of the side window to see where he is going.

  The ramble heads south. It is night by the time we come off the Barrier and come to a village. Yunes has spent the past hour tirelessly detailing how exhausted he is, and Phil kindly listens to him for me while I map-read in the dark.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘I think I might do.’

  ‘Good, I will phone Saddam Hussein to come and pick us up.’

  Fortunately, I am lost. We enter the village and almost immediately someone asks us to take tea with them: the night sky is out and yet a complete stranger offers us hospitality. Sitting outside his house in the cool air, the man of the house fetches chairs, the children fetch tea and Yunes smiles, happy now that he is sitting down with a hot glass of black, sweet tea in his hand. Our host is middle-aged and his wife has come to sit with us, in the type of floral housecoat my grandmother would wear, and a hijab.

  After explaining who we are, I turn to the husband and say, ‘Do you mind if I ask where you work?’

  ‘Oh, he works, he works in Israel,’ his wife says.

  ‘That’s good; many don’t have jobs. Construction?’

  ‘Yes, I am a builder.’

  ‘Did you have to pay for your permit?’ I ask, slipping into the old conversations of the morning.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I am lucky as I work for a Palestinian who is a good man and does not charge for the permits.’

  ‘Oh, that is good. And unusual.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees.

  ‘Ask him what time he gets up to leave for work,’ says his wife.

  I know it’s a loaded question, but still ask, ‘What time do you get up for work.’

  ‘One thirty a.m.,’ he answers glumly.

  ‘He has to get up at one thirty because there are no buses,’ his wife bursts out. ‘So he has to get a taxi service with the other men and they get picked up in turn and taken to the checkpoint, so they can start queuing to get through in time to start work at eight o’ clock. When he gets home he is tired, he has no time for the children; he has no time for me. This Wall is ruining us.’

  After tea, the family help organise a taxi to take us back to Beit Ummar. Silence reigns on the drive. Oncoming headlights rise and fall in the cab, throwing light onto us, only for it to slide away moments later. Yunes has been smoking a cigarette out of the window, but as he rolls it back up he turns to me and says, ‘I support non-violent resistance now. But it was not always the way. I used to think that only violence will free us. It hasn’t and that is why I am trying to see if non-violence will work. I am trying it. But let me tell you something important: even those people who have always believed in non-violence, there is not one of them who at some point has not felt the rage in their heart, the rage that says, “Do to them what they have done to us.” Not one.’

  The road back into Beit Ummar is covered with burnt tyres and stones. The fourteen-year-old boys are still out roaming the main street, shouting at each other. Everyone expects the army to raid the village tonight, and the atmosphere is tense. Queuing to buy fresh falafels fished straight from the pan of bubbling oil, one of the lads who had attempted to drag Phil off this morning spots his camera again and runs over, ‘You missed it. You missed it all!’

  chapter 22

  THE MAN WHO DREW THE BARRIER

  A former government minister involved in the construction of the Barrier, had indicated he would be available to take me on a tour of the Barrier and do an interview for a fee of $5,000. This seemed a bit steep. For that money you could book Uri Geller for the whole evening and still have change for a tribute band. The former minister’s offer was abandoned after I had indicated which orifice I would like to pay the money into.

  The ‘tour’ industry is a growth area in Israel and the West Bank: guided trips conducted by experts, ex-experts, soi-disant gurus and ideologues. Politicians and UN staff do them, the religious right do several, and the Israeli left have a tour of house destructions. I’ve been on a few, too: I’ve toured kibbutzim, colleges and police outposts; I even toured a reconstruction of a thirties wooden settlement fort, though the tour guide there was oddly defensive (I thank you), and ended up saying, ‘Look, don’t quote me on the facts; I might have got some of the history wrong’; a sentence that had particular resonance, I thought.

  Another tour I do is with the commander of the Israel Border Police, the infamous MAGAV. Nava has excelled herself in arranging this interview and trip around the Barrier, and comes with us for the day.

  The commander is an enormous, muscle-bound chap with the straightforward air of expectant authority: when we drive up to a massive steel military gate that does not open when ordered to, he simply gets out of the Land Rover and gives the huge doors a couple of hefty kicks, in the same way my father would hit the TV as if this might repair the problem. For the commander, the Barrier is something to show off, and he drives us round it, taking us for tea on the roof of a police station so we can appreciate it, too.

  Turning to one of the military watchtowers along the Barrier he tells us, ‘We have the place totally covered; the cameras on one of these can see everything from six kilometres away.’

  I bite back the urge to say, ‘We know we’ve been photographed by one.’

  This is clearly the commander’s first outing with ‘the media’, and he gets a little carried away, going severely off-script in a hitherto unfamiliar spirit of openness. As we drive past a checkpoint, he suddenly barks an impromptu command at us: ‘Come into the checkpoint. You’ll see for yourself how efficient this is. Bring your camera.’

  With that, he jumps out of the army van and jogs, completely unannounced, into the Zaytoun checkpoint. The sudden arrival of their boss sends security guards scuttling in wide-eyed anxiety. They instinctively run behind the commander, caught between shock, obeisance and the impulse to stop Phil and me pointing cameras everywhere, while we trail in his wake, attempting to wear the looks of, ‘We’re on the guest list: Commander plus two.’

  Leading us through the turnstiles, the commander turns to us and booms, ‘Film whatever you like!’

  Having been detained numerous times for doing exactly this, we need no further invitation and film everything that doesn’t move and a little of what does. We even go into the inner sanctum: a bomb-proof room full of computers, metal detector screens and biometric readers.

  ‘Go ahead and film. It is OK,’ he says as the staff all stare at him, their eyes saying, ‘But … but … but!’

  The commander then orders us out of the room again and goes over to stand by the conveyor belt of the bag scanner, next to two worried-looking Palestinian boys who are clutching a large cardboard box. ‘Look at the bomb! Come look at the bomb!’ he guffaws, pointing into the box. Inside are two cowering rabbits, which had just gone through the metal detector. ‘This is the bomb!’ he laughs heartily. The officers laugh but the boys look terrified. Then, with his trademark abruptness, the commander shouts, ‘Come on!’ and leads us back down a corridor to the exit.

  Back in the van he slouches in his seat, cheerfully chatting, shouting occasional instructions to the driver and making pronouncements: ‘We’ve killed the terror,’ he says, gesturing out of the window towards the Barrier.

  I put to him an assertion I had heard several times on the walk: ‘We’ve met a lot of people along our walk who have said that it was not the Barrier that stopped the suicide bombs; that the Second Intifada either burnt itself out or was crushed militarily.’

  ‘The reason the Intifada failed was because we finally decided to fight it,’ the commander replies easily. ‘We started fighting the Palestinian military, Operation Defensive Shield. It was a combination of the two, fighting and searching for terrorists inside the Judea and Samaria area [the West Bank], and building the security fence. A combination of the whole thing; and the fence is part of it.’

  We bounce along the military road. Phil is in the front, filmi
ng, the army translator and Nava are at the very back of the van while the commander and I occupy the middle seats.

  ‘If it was up to me, the whole thing would be concrete,’ he continues.

  ‘The Barrier?’

  ‘Yes, the whole thing would be concrete and I said this, but it was too expensive.’

  Only some five per cent of the Barrier is concrete wall; the rest is a standardised formation of wire, electric fence and military road.

  ‘Why did you want the Barrier concrete?’ I ask.

  ‘When you have a fence that is not concrete but wire, you can see through it, and this creates a lot of tension.’ I notice Phil stiffen as the commander says this. ‘When you have a fence, a child sits there and gets many thoughts in his head. But when there is a wall, you know the other side is there but you don’t care what is on the other side. You don’t see it, you don’t know it; you don’t care. Ah,’ he says, and turned to the driver, ‘we are going up the hills.’

  With that he is on to another topic, pointing and declaiming.

  Later, when the tour has finished and we are sitting in a tiny café in the East Jerusalem back streets, Phil fiddles with his goatee, grimaces and says, ‘You know what I thought was the most chilling moment of all today?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look, he is a policeman; this is his job and this is what he does, that is not the problem. But when he said he wished the whole Wall was concrete; that was chilling. He is saying, he believes, that if we don’t see each other there will not be a problem. You think you can make a problem disappear because you do not see it?’

  The tour with the commander some days ago is but a prelude to the main event: today’s tour is special because our tour guide is Danny Tirza, the man who drew the map of the Barrier and, in his own words, ‘was the one who designed the route’.

  It is his route we have been following all these weeks; each footfall we have taken is tied to this one man who plotted the Barrier’s course, it is he who wove it in and out of the West Bank taking land and depositing settlers safe on the Israeli side. On a daily basis, we encounter the impact of his decisions and climb the track he drew.