The other side

Nothing's wrong

Canadian teenager with gun, Tel Aviv, taking part in a Birthright Israel tour

Jericho. Mount of Temptation. Forty days for Jesus on these rocks. Today, I'm riding the cable car. Me and Khaled, Jamilah and Abdullah, our guide. Last sun shreds the black sky as we descend. Jamilah and Khaled steal a kiss.

Rockets are falling. Jamilah's mother calls. She is crying. Come home, come home.

We stop at the checkpoint outside Jericho, going into Israel. Khaled is driving, I'm with Abdullah in the back. A soldier looms into the window. Khaled winds it down and hands over his blue ID. The soldier takes it, looking slowly into the car. 'Where are you all from?'

'Yafo - she's English.' Abudullah takes my passport and gives it to the soldier, who pages through.

Silence. We sit there. Jamilah straightens her hair.

'Get out of the car.' The soldier points to a lay-by. 'Over there.'

Everyone gets out except me. I can't move the seat forwards. I'm trying to get out and another soldier with dark brown eyes, about 19, looks in. 'Where are you from?'

'London.' I'm still trying to move the seat. 

'Do it.' The soldier indicates to Abdullah.

I get out. We stand. Soldiers pace around the car and look inside. There are five of them, armed.

'What's in there? Open the back,' one of them says to Khaled, as if to a dog. He's nervous, Khaled, I can tell from the way he's trying to open the boot, small by the soldier's bulked-up green. It opens, then falls back shut - Khaled fetches a stick to make it stay. 'What - you've come to hit me?' the soldier sneers. 

Abdullah is pacing. His chest expands as if about to explode. 

'Look relaxed,' Jamilah says. 

'Come this way,' a tall blond soldier tells me. Shit. I go.

'What are you doing here?' he says in English.

'I'm doing a photography project in Jaffa and she - I motion to Jamilah - is my student.'

'She's your student?'

'Yes.'

The blond is translating for the brown-eyed soldier, who seems to be his superior. 'She's the teacher. They're doing a project in Yafo,' he says.

'Yes,' I hurry on, 'photography - we're doing a project.' 

'And everything's OK? You're all right?'

'Fine, fine.'

The soldier looks at me for a moment, then over at the others by the car.

'Nothing's wrong? Are you sure?'

'I'm fine.'

'OK. You can go.' He hands me my passport. 'Sorry... Sorry for the questions,' he says.

Street art, Palestine

Last week I went to Ramallah. Here is some art from the city centre:

 

'We shall write poetry to pass the time. In the glory of the tyrant shall we play'

'I shall not cry, for sadness I shall no longer embrace'

'God is great'    (the Iraqi flag)

'When will people see Handala's face? When Arab dignity is no longer threatened, and when the Arab individual regains his freedom and humanity.'

 

More on Ramallah soon. Thanks to Nizo for translation from the Arabic.

Israeli in Bethlehem

‘It’s complicated – where I’m from depends on who I’m talking to. If it’s an Israeli, then I say I’m from Israel and I live in Jerusalem; if I’m talking to a Palestinian then I say I’m a Palestinian, I live in Bethlehem, but I have a blue ID.’

Alex is explaining his identity to me. We’re driving in his pick-up towards the alternative Bethlehem checkpoint, where I might have to show ID – and strictly speaking, I’m not allowed in. That’s because I’m Israeli, and according to Israeli law, I can’t enter areas under Palestinian Authority control. It’s to keep us safe, they say.

We pass a red sign in Hebrew saying Israeli citizens not allowed beyond this point. Alex checks my blue ID – my Israeli identity card. He wants to make sure I don’t have an army number. I didn’t do the army, and I didn’t have any idea that a number on my ID would show it – but Alex does. ‘If you’re ex-army, then it’s really dangerous to come here,’ he says. ‘For Palestinians, you could be a spy.’

At the main checkpoint everyone shows ID. But not here. This one lies on a road connecting Israel to the settlements. Once Israel’s separation wall is finished, no Palestinians will have access to this road, and the checkpoint will be closed. Here, they only check you if they think you’re Arab. We drive right through.

Later, but only later, Alex tells me that none of his Jewish friends from the Hebrew University would ever come and visit him in Bethlehem, in his four years there. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Too scared,’ he says. ‘Kidnapping. To some people out there, an Israeli is the ultimate prize. Did you see what happened to those two Israelis who got lost in Ramallah?’ He doesn’t have to fill me in. I’ve seen it – the footage of Palestinians waving bloody hands to the crowd after tearing the two Israeli reservists apart.

But that’s later. For now, he just says: ‘If anyone asks you, you’re only British, you have a visa. Show your British passport. Hide your Israeli ID. Don’t tell anyone here that you have any connection with Israel.’

I honestly think he’s exaggerating. But he lives here, and he knows.

At Alex’s house, we eat special Easter cookies, called ma’amul. The family has lived here always. They have a family tree going back 500 years. But Alex was born in Jerusalem – hence the Israeli ID. He’s allowed access to Bethlehem because he has family and property there. It is two days before Good Friday. His grandmother explains that the cookies are meant to remind us of the sponge the Romans gave Jesus on the Cross, to slake his thirst. The sponge was – what is the word? – we try to translate it from Arabic – saturated. Saturated with vinegar to stop the torture of his thirst.

The cookies are filled with nuts. I remember stories about Jesus from school. Jesus and Easter. It’s also Passover – Pesach. Ido told me the word in Hebrew for Easter – Pascha. Jesus’ Last Supper, I think, was a Passover meal.

‘How does it feel to be here?’ Alex asks.

A million miles from Israel, is how it feels. But I’m not sure I can say this, as his grandmother is sitting at the table, and I’m trying not to show anyone I have any connection with Israel, so I satisfy myself with ‘so different from Jerusalem’.

‘Yes, very peaceful,’ he says.

‘Isolated.’ I bite into the second cookie on my plate.

Outside the Bethlehem Bible College we meet Tariq, friend of a friend in London, who is going to show me around. Alex and Tariq are both Christian Arabs – which matters in this part of the world, where mixing is not especially popular, and it is of acute importance to which community you belong.

Tariq has lived in Bethlehem all his life.

‘What’s it like?’ I ask.

‘It’s the best place in the world.’

He drives around very fast pointing out Herod’s castle, where the shepherds were sitting when the angel came and told them Jesus was going to be born. The wall seems to be everywhere, covered in graffiti. We heart you Palestine. Your anger is a gift. I hate Israel. The graffiti’s mainly in English, a bit in Spanish, French.

‘It’s getting worse every day,’ he says 10 minutes later.

‘Why?’

‘The occupation. People can’t get into Israel – they don’t have permission, and so they can’t get there to work. They lose half their income, and the tourists don’t come any more, since the second intifada – they are afraid.’

Har Homa settlement, a clutch of bright white houses, stares right back at us from a neighbouring hill.

‘That land belonged to people from Beit Jala, Beit Sahor and Bethlehem,’ says Tariq. ‘They took the land – my family had land there. They took most of it, and the rest they will take soon. Well, they don’t just take it – they have a law in Israel, that if you don’t use the land for 15 years then it’s not yours any more. Then they stop you from getting to your land so you can’t use it…’

I ask him if the IDF still come. ‘They come whenever they want. According to the Oslo agreement, they shouldn’t, but they do. No one will stop them.’ He nods at a narrow alley – ‘two days ago it was full of Israeli soldiers…’ What do they do when they’re here? ‘Nothing – just walk around. Whatever they want.’ They also arrest wanted Palestinians, Alex later says.

We stop at the old city and get out of the car. There are pictures of men with guns in front of the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, pasted to the walls. I can’t read them but I know what they say. These are Palestinian men who died fighting Israel. They are called martyrs by the Palestinians. A young boy passing by sees us standing there and shouts shahid – the Arabic word for martyr.

Most of the pictures show blank eyes, posed with the gun before death. We pause in front of each so Tariq can translate: ‘He died in Bethlehem Easter 2006. April 9^th, 2006. He was from the camps in Bethlehem, I knew him.’ As we round a corner I see a picture unlike the others. They are all chilling – looking into the eyes of a man days before his death. But this one has an intimacy different from the rest. Surely a shahid is not supposed to look so sad and gentle? Where did all that toughness go?

The wall is everywhere, jagged diagonal blocks cut every view. ‘All the towns are surrounded,’ says Tariq. ‘Hebron, Ramallah… but in Bethlehem you see it.’

The oppressive atmosphere lifts as we enter the Nativity Church – the place where Jesus was born. Two Palestinian policemen hunch outside with the huge guns – no one does security in the Middle East without a big, fuck-off gun. Don’t the small ones kill just as well? Tariq says they’ll ask me where I’m from and ask to see ID. I prepare myself, but they don’t say a thing.

The church is nearly 2,000 years old. Orthodox chanting fills the air – a service is in progress under hundreds of gold lamps and coloured lights. Only 15 per cent of Bethlehem is Christian now – it used to be nearly 80 per cent, but the Christians are leaving to find a better life abroad. Bethlehem is mainly Muslim now.

Downstairs in the basement was where Jesus was born. An Irish woman with a plastic baby shows me where the manger was. She cradles the doll in her arms and kisses it. It has been blessed. You must kiss it, she says, holding it out. I kiss it. ‘Are you married?’ she asks. I tell her no. ‘God bless you,’ she says.

‘Ok lady, that’s enough,’ says a priest with a knitted woollen hat.

‘Thank you father,’ says the woman, handing him back the doll. He puts it away in a cardboard box.

Tariq’s family came here from Syria, 600 years ago. His grandfather’s grandfather is buried here in Bethlehem and he can visit the grave. ‘Usually, because we don’t have so much room, they move the bones. But my great great grandfathers were all, most of them, priests, so they’ll never move the bones.’

Outside, Tariq points out the entrance to the church – it used to be much bigger. From a wide arch it’s been bricked up to a stoop-down five-foot hatch. ‘Because the Muslims came,’ he says. ‘I don’t know when – 700? With their horses, to ride inside the church, to conquer the Christians.’

We eat falafel, for which Tariq pays with shekels bearing the words for the redemption of Zion, under the eye of Har Homa, whose white roofs hang between the church and the trees.

Tariq can not leave Bethlehem. He has Palestinian ID. Alex has Israeli ID and he can go where he likes but Tariq is trapped. When the roads are open, he can travel to Ramallah, Hebron, Jenin… Nablus. But they were closed for the first two years of the second intifada, and open to private cars only since Christmas. It didn’t used to be that way – they could travel to Tiberias, Jerusalem, Haifa – well inside Israel. Tariq remembers going with his father. But the second intifada changed it all.

Tariq will never be allowed into Israel. He’s blacklisted after time in an Israeli jail. He was 18 days inside, 11 in solitary in a six by eight-foot cell. They did not beat him. Someone he knew was selling weapons. After questioning, they released him without charge.

He does not complain, just tells me the facts. He doesn’t need to spell it out. Sadness saturates this air. Frustration, longing and loss saturate this place.

At the checkpoint on the way out, Alex throws a breezy erev tov at the soldiers, and we sail right through. As we head to Jerusalem on the darkening road, Alex tells me: ‘My father says the best time was under the Israelis, where there was no Palestinian authority. At least then we could move about and do what we wanted, go where we wanted. Yes, it was occupation, but things were orderly. Now it’s just a mess.’

This is when he comes out with all the kidnapping stuff, and about the Israeli soldiers that got torn apart. When I get back to Israel, I go to my neighbour Eyal. I tell him that I was in Bethlehem. Assaf and his fiancée are sitting there. ‘You’re brave,’ they say.

Each side is the other’s mirror: terror and the terrified. I remember Tariq’s final words, before we said goodbye: ‘They are there, the Israelis. They will never leave. They can do whatever they want and no one can stop them. And they do not want us here.’

Hebron

It’s a bus-full, maybe 30 of us, leaving from a parking lot in Jerusalem, out into the whitewashed hills. We are travelling Road 60, which crosses the West Bank, cutting Israel into two, on the way to Hebron. Michael and Yehuda from Breaking the Silence, a group of soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories, are here to give us ‘a much-needed perspective on the West Bank’.

Passing a Palestinian refugee camp on our left, we arrive at the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The Israeli flag flaps above a sentry post and a sign in Hebrew advertises new-build homes. This town is home to 6,500 people – mostly new immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A subsidised, bulletproof bus takes 50 minutes from here to Jerusalem, and they get discounts on their taxes too.

We wait at the entrance while the Kiryat Arba security forces (‘a militia’, says Yehuda) decide whether to let us in. Briefly, I wonder why we are not travelling in a bulletproof bus. ‘It’s the same story every time,’ says Yehuda, who runs these trips to Hebron fortnightly. ‘They already know us but they make us wait for the police. They don’t have the legal right, but we don’t want to cause a fuss, so we wait.’

After about ten minutes we are allowed in, and follow a dinky-toy police van to the centre of town. We pass Palestinian neighbourhoods and an army base. Religious Jews are languid under the boulevard shades. It’s quiet and clean. A bus with blacked-out windows passes us and I catch a glimpse of shadow Hassidim sitting rigid, like dolls. Meir Kahane Park is on our right. Inside, says Yehuda, is a shrine to Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians, before being beaten to death, in Hebron in 1994. On the shrine someone has written: Here Baruch Goldstein was killed, pure of heart.

Before 1948, Michael explains, Jews and Arabs co-existed in Hebron – co-existed, that is, until 67 Jews died in a massacre in 1929. After that, there were almost no Jews in Hebron until Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, and the families who had left after the massacre asked to return. Prime Minister Ben Gurion said no, but a year later, settlers got permission to visit Hebron for Passover and after the holiday refused to leave. Eventually, the Israeli army let them stay.

We're in Hebron now. Since 1997, the city has been split between Israeli and Palestinian Authority control. It is home to 150,000 Palestinians and 650 Jewish settlers, with 500 Israeli soldiers protecting the Jews. We follow an Israeli-only highway towards our destination –  Israeli-controlled central zone, H2. A clean brown road bisects the view: it’s for Jews to reach the Tomb of the Patriarchs, burial site of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There is no one on this road.

Groups of Palestinian men walk the street, pointing; a little girl stands and stares; a donkey, a cart, and a boy who mimes throwing something at us, then sticks out his tongue. There is graffiti in Russian and a camouflaged house – Arab, but the upper floor occupied by Israeli army, its inhabitants forced down to the ground. There is not a sound.

Army policy is to avoid conflict between Jews and Arabs by creation of ‘sterile zones’. This means that areas are cleared for Jews, and Arabs must make their way through the city by alternative routes. In 80 per cent of central Hebron, Palestinians are not allowed to drive: they travel by foot. Arab stores posing a security risk to settlers are closed. Other parts of H2 are entirely off-limits to Arabs, even to those who still live within the Israeli-controlled zone.

As we drive, I see no civilian, neither Arab nor Jew, just groups of border police in sunglasses and sage uniforms, hanging out in the shade. A woman in white hijab ducks into the side of a house, and then I spot a Jew, pale with a bright orange kippa, kneeling to tie up his shoe.

We have arrived, and descend the bus to stand in a town square. Behind an orange plastic waist-high barrier, Palestinian women pass. There is a mini-road block at the barrier’s end, but the barrier itself divides the road we stand on into two: we are walking the same road as the Palestinians – just that they are on the other side.

Eight soldiers armed with Uzis guard us as we walk. They are there to protect us from Palestinian snipers firing from the surrounding hills: two lead, two bring up the rear, and the others fan out to the sides. There is also a policeman, in blue.

We stand on a ‘sterilised’ road. Palestinians cannot pass from one side of H2, across this road, to the other, Yehuda explains. The call to prayer drowns his next words out, and, looking up, I see two young Arab men watching us from the balcony of a house on the other side of the orange barrier. The ground is made of dirt.

Mini-road-blocks, sandbagged with tight-stretched camouflage, box us in. Shut-up shops with rusting Arabic signs line the street and everywhere, on every door, are graffiti Stars of David in black, some with the word ‘occupied’ scrawled in Hebrew beneath.

‘An Arab family lived here,’ says Yehuda, pointing to a house on a patch of open ground. ‘After a Palestinian sniper murdered an 11-month-old baby, the settlers made the family’s life hell. The Israeli army tried to protect them – they tried to build an iron wall around their house, but the settlers broke all the equipment. Finally, they built a six-metre concrete wall around the house – but does the family live in their house today? No – because the only entrance is through a locked gate in the old city, to which the army holds the key.’

We are standing on the front line, where Arabs and Jews battle to hold their ground. Jewish children play: tiny girls in floor-length skirts, boys lounging in the sun. A street away, Muslim toddlers walk in hijab to the ground.

A jeep zooms past, soldiers hanging from its open back door.

Tacked to the side of a building, is a sign: ‘These houses were built on land stolen by Arabs after the massacre of the Jewish community in 1929. We demand our property back – the Jewish community of Hebron.’

‘Settlers see themselves as a continuation of the pre-1948 community,’ says Yehuda. ‘But the original community were not Zionist. The deeds to this house belong to a Jew who has said he doesn't want it to be occupied by a settler family at the expense of Palestinians who live here now.’

Yehuda and Michael have warned us we might get trouble from the settlers, who hate these tours, and sometimes throw abuse, or rocks. But so far no one’s approached. The settlers are just hanging out, or driving along slowly in pick-up trucks, whilst kids with pinched-up faces run about. But, I wonder, which one of them wrote Arabs are sand niggers on the shuttered-up shop in this sterilised street, next to the brand new Beit Midrash, squatting behind its barbed-wire fence.

We climb a hill to the Palestinian part of town. Children smile and say shalom, and the soldiers seem more relaxed: they kick back a little, chatting to the kids with the Arabic words they’ve learned. We visit a Palestinian home, and the owner tells us that settlers throw rubbish into his garden, and stones at the windows, so now he’s put up bars. His daughter is escorted to school, otherwise the Jewish children attack her with stones.

We sit in silence for a while. Then one of the soldiers asks me if I’m Jewish. ‘You have a Magen David,’ he says, pointing to the Star of David around my neck.

‘Yes, I am a Jew.'

I ask them how it is in Hebron.

‘Easy, easy,’ they say.

Yehuda reads us testimony from Israeli soldiers who have served in Hebron. ‘Occupation destroys the moral fabric of those who enforce it,’ he says. ‘Israeli men fragment their identity so they can be good fathers and sons at home, and brutal soldiers in the West Bank.’

‘Listen to that bullshit,’ says a young soldier with dark eyes.

As we leave through a pink sunset, another soldier, Yonatan, walks by my side: ‘Are you the only Jew?’ he asks.

‘No – my friend Dov is too.’ I nod to the front of the group.

‘Well, I’ll protect you and I’ll protect him,’ says Yonatan.

A hundred muezzins echo the call to prayer – not just one like in my Jaffa home.

We've reached our final stop – Tomb of the Patriarchs in the central square. Last to descend the bus, I see Yehuda in the midst of a fracas, surrounded by Jewish settlers, who are shouting: ‘Anti-Semite! You are worse than Hitler!’ Head bowed, Yehuda tries to dodge them, but every way he turns they confront him again. Police rush in and surround him. He is hustled away. The last thing I see his the black kippa on the top of his head.

Before I can move, there is a man in my face: ‘Anti-Semite! Go back home!’

It’s a second before I react: ‘What did you say?’

‘Anti-Semite – go back where you came from!’

‘Nazi!’ – this is from an older man, whose beard is long and white.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I say.

A group of Jewish men has gathered. Their women are nowhere to be seen.

‘Arab-lover!’

A policeman places himself between me and them, arms out wide, but I am so angry I cannot walk away.

‘You’re a disgrace!’ I shout, my face screwed up in fury.

‘Bitch!’ says a voice from the back of the crowd.

I step forward, part of me calculating if they’ll turn violent, part too livid to care. Raising one arm, I point a finger into the face of the nearest man: ‘You disgust me,’ I say. Then I step away.

Breaking the silence

False Dichotomies in Hebron

Winter in Qalandia

I am cleaning an old bookcase we found last night on the streets of Jaffa. It’s about midday, very humid, and my skin is filmed in sweat. I’m outside my front door, where we left the bookcase last night after dragging it all the way home on an abandoned pushchair that was lying in the dust by the side of the road.

We were at a play at the Arab-Hebrew theatre of Jaffa – Ido, Dani, Daniel and me. Beforehand, Dani and Daniel sat outside in the warm night selling radical journal Mitaam. Only two copies went.

Mitaam looks beautiful – the cover is pure white, with black Hebrew letters, and I know I will read it soon, thanks to ulpan. Already the street signs are starting to make sense, and the electricity bill, and the writing on the builders’ hoarding in the square is too.

The play, Winter in Qalandia, shows 24 hours in the life of a checkpoint, or in Hebrew, machsom. Hundreds of Palestinians pass to and from the West Bank through Qalandia, a few miles out of Jerusalem, every day. We watch at the invitation of Arab co-director, Adib – the theatre is a model of creative co-operation between Israel’s Arabs and her Jews. Tucked into the side of Old Jaffa, way beyond the ‘cultural centre’ that is Tel Aviv, it is underfunded and almost unknown.

I know about Qalandia because I’ve been there: seen the queues of Palestinians waiting to enter Israel, and the soldiers charged with regulating them. I’ve seen scuffles, waited for a friend who was held for two hours, and looked on as women from Machsom Watch shouted suggestions, pleas and requests to the soldiers deciding who can go and who must stay.

Winter in Qalandia shows a reality: desperate, angry Palestinians; callous or compassionate soldiers. Watching, you want solutions but there are none – just soldiers asking for permits, and Palestinians without them. The play elicits pity for them all, but does not tell me anything I don’t already know. I ask Ido whether this Jewish audience is learning something new. Maybe, he thinks. Ido has never been to a checkpoint – why would he? What would he cross to the West Bank for? And anyway, it’s illegal for Israelis to go unless they have special permission. Do they talk about checkpoints on TV, in the news? Guess not, we conclude.

In Europe I heard about them all the time – saw films, read about the suffering of those whose daily life they bisect. Checkpoints were the symbol of the conflict, its entirety, its sum. Here, I guess, it’s the other way around: the machsom is the last thing you will see, and then only down in Jaffa, far out of your normal way.

After they performance we talk to Adib. It turns out that he and Ido are both from Haifa, Israel’s other mixed (Arab and Jewish) city – other than Jaffa, that is. Ido tells me he feels embarrassed for being a Jew, then Adib says something about a Jewish man living in his uncle's house.

‘Oh, he took it over,’ Ido confirms.

‘No, no,’ says Adib, ‘my uncle is renting it to him.’

Adib hugs us goodbye and we step outside into the Jaffa night. On the side of a hill piled into a cart of junk sits the bookcase, covered in prickly brown dust. We wheel it home to my almost-empty apartment where, weeks after I have arrived, my books are still piled into an open suitcase upon the floor.

 Mitaam

Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa