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

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  First published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group company

  Copyright © Mark Thomas 2011

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  contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Read this now!

  PART ONE: THE FIRST RAMBLE

  One of Many Reasons for the Fence

  1 – As I Walked Out

  2 – The Al Aqaba Village Green Preservation Society

  3 – DIY

  4 – Farming Today

  5 – After-school Detentions

  6 – Albert and the Lion Giraffe

  PART TWO: THE SECOND RAMBLE

  The Commute to Work

  7 – If It Looks Like a Duck

  8 – Anthony Perkins’s Shorter Cousin

  9 – Settling In

  10 – The Pope of Demographics

  11 – My Comforting Staff

  12 – Happy Birthday

  13 – Mark in Wonderland

  14 – Hard Travellin’

  15 – The Tunnel of Human Shit

  16 – Sinless and Casting

  PART THREE: JERUSALEM AND THE FINAL DAYS

  Odeh

  17 – Our Man

  18 – Sheikh Jarrah

  19 – God’s Estate Agent

  20 – The Tragic Roundabout

  21 – All Smoke and No Mirrors

  22 – The Man Who Drew the Barrier

  23 – The Road to Beit Yatir

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  Notes

  To the four women who made this possible:

  Jenny, Margaret, Nava and Susan.

  read this now!

  Epiphanies simply are not what they used to be. They used to involve being blinded by spiteful gods or screaming in overflowing bathtubs, but on my road to Jerusalem there was no great road-to-Damascus moment. When I decided to walk the length of the Israeli Barrier (the ‘Wall’), to use its concrete and wire as a route map across the West Bank, the dawning was slow and gradual. The light bulb that went on over my head was an environmentally friendly one, so there was a prolonged period of darkness eventually followed by a dim yellow light that appeared slightly sickly.

  While the notion to hike the West Bank arrived gently and without fuss one afternoon in 2009 the transformation of the idea into an obsession was rapid and total. I even gave it a name: ‘Walking the Wall’. Time in the diary was set aside for ‘Walking the Wall’, my computer had a budget file for ‘Walking the Wall’, a map was stuck on the wall under the title ‘Walking the Wall’, but, most of all, I talked to a lot of people about ‘Walking the Wall’.

  The first person whose advice I sought was a friend from teenage years called Tony. Talking to him first was essential, as he might live in Stoke Newington and have the usual worries about work and children but he regularly goes on holiday to North Korea. In fact, he recently took his fifteen-year-old son to the Mongolian plains for a month to live off yak butter, and hunt with eagles. With a track record like that, he was exactly the person to discuss walking in a territory under military occupation: if he had said that the idea was ludicrous I would simply have called the whole thing off.

  Unsurprisingly, Tony approves as we chat over a Formica table in a Charing Cross Road deli. Wearing three days’ worth of stubble, he slouches over a cappuccino, skimming the froth off with a teaspoon and slurping chocolate powder.

  ‘How long is it?’ he asks.

  ‘The wall? Quite long.’

  Tony fires a look through his glasses at me that suggested any serious traveller would know how long their journey was going to be.

  ‘Hundreds of miles,’ I stammer, ‘at least … but not silly hundreds.’

  ‘Not thousands, then.’

  ‘No, not thousands, no.’

  ‘That would be silly,’ he says wryly.

  ‘These hundreds are very reasonable.’

  ‘Walkable hundreds?’

  ‘Oh, very.’

  Tony stirs his coffee, before mischievously asking, ‘Do you think you’ll find out how long it is before you go, or would you rather it was a surprise?’

  Stung by my lack of knowledge, I found five simple facts that I wish I had known in the café. I commend these facts to you, and recommend that these are the ones you retain:

  1) The Israeli Barrier already virtually encircles the West Bank; when finished it will surround the Palestinian territory and its population completely.

  2) Currently 415 kilometres of the Wall’s planned 723 kilometres1 have been erected since the decision to build it was taken in 2002.

  3) The length of the finished Barrier will be over twice as long as the boundary of the West Bank, which is only 315 kilometres long (some readers are currently thinking, ‘Why is the Barrier twice as long as the thing it is going round?’ The rest of you need to keep up. The answer is that the Barrier snakes in and out of the West Bank, all the while taking in Palestinian land. The West Bank has, in fact, lost nearly ten per cent of its land, which is now on the other side of the Wall – the Israeli side).

  4) This is a simple and good fact to use: the route the Barrier takes is illegal. It was found to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. The ruling said: ‘The wall … and its associated regime are contrary to international law.’*

  5) The last fact is that the boundary of the West Bank is called the Green Line.2 It is internationally recognised and forms the basis for the International Court of Justice’s ruling that the Barrier’s route, which crosses over the Green Line, is illegal. Israel has consistently refused to recognise the Line, although strangely it comes in handy for demarcating the extent of Israeli law and the start of military law in the Occupied Territories (the West Bank). Just remember that Green Line = boundary and you’ll be fine.

  Just as I expected Ton
y to react sympathetically, some of my family, I suspected, might not. My mum lives in a bungalow in Bournemouth and has her thermostat set two degrees below care-home level. She is a devoted and wonderful woman who happens to read the Daily Mail and would have been happier if all the clothes I took had had nametags with the words, ‘Mark Thomas – Hostage’ sewn into them. By the time I left for the airport she had essentially written her television appeal for my release, and was looking forward to meeting Terry Waite.

  Others (friends, colleagues and people who had been in the same room as a Muslim in the last ten years) managed to discuss the trip without mentioning the words ‘Al-Qaeda’, ‘gaffer tape’ and ‘diet of hummus for five years’. But no matter what their perspective, everyone I spoke to about ‘Walking the Wall’ did offer advice on the journey, usually concerning the walking aspect of it. A neighbour and geography teacher cheerily suggested, ‘White spirit to keep your feet hard,’ as we chatted in the street, and a friend I had travelled to India with and who sounds like a retired colonel said, ‘Two words. Double. Socking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s how they got to the Arctic. Double socking. Stops the rubbing.’

  People wanted to be helpful and encouraging but usually had little, if any, practical knowledge of the West Bank, and so in the absence of that would give me hiking tips. That was until I met a complete stranger at the theatre one evening who, amazingly, turned out to know the head of the UN Human Rights team in Jerusalem. She had his phone number to hand and duly passed it on.

  She also recommended blister plasters.

  Some offered views on my personal motives for doing the walk, as it transpires that any forty-seven-year-old male whose behaviour deviates from the approved script is struggling with mortality and existentialism, apparently.

  A friend called Nicky said, ‘I thought a midlife crisis normally involved sports cars or motorbikes?’

  ‘I can’t drive,’ I replied.

  ‘So it is a midlife crisis, then.’

  Confused, I asked, ‘How can rambling be a midlife crisis?’

  ‘You’re at that age.’

  ‘I’m forty-seven years old.’

  ‘Exactly!’ she said in triumph.

  Shortly before setting off, I bumped into fellow London comic Mark Steel, in the BBC canteen. Although the location sounds unpromising, I knew that if anyone could offer a political perspective it was he.

  ‘What have you got coming up then?’ said Mark, asking the perennial question comics ask of each other.

  ‘I’m going to write a book.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, on what?’

  I told him and he laughed, spluttering in disbelief.

  ‘Why can’t you just write a joke?’ he blurted out, in his London twang. I grinned, powerless before his coming tirade. ‘Oh, no, you couldn’t write a joke …’ he started, red-faced with incredulity, ‘… because anyone could do that. You have to have a mission. You have to make it difficult. You have to do something that no one else would do. I’m going to walk to Afghanistan …’ he starts impersonating me, ‘I’m going to walk to Afghanistan but to make it interesting I’m going to do it with no shoes AND find Osama bin Laden. But not just that, ’cos anybody could do that, that is not enough of a mission, no, I’m going to find him, take him prisoner, build a cabaret club in the caves, get an entertainment licence from the Taliban, open a venue, then strap him to a chair and make him laugh. I will force Osama bin Laden to laugh, but not just laugh, I will make him laugh so hard his cock drops off and I will have defeated Al-Qaeda and only then will I be happy because I will have done something no one else has.’ He paused and looked at me, shaking his head. ‘Fucking hell!’ he finished. ‘Just write a joke, go on stage and do it!’

  Others were even more brusque in their questioning.

  ‘Are you walking on both sides of the Barrier?’ asked a woman who worked for Amnesty International in the West Bank cataloguing human rights abuse, which in these globalised times is the nearest you can get to ‘a job for life’.

  ‘Yes, that’s the plan: to walk on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side.’ The idea was to walk the entire length of the Barrier, crossing back and forth between the two sides at checkpoints along the way. In this manner I hoped to experience as much of the Barrier’s effects and talk to as many of those involved as possible.

  ‘Good. You should see both sides. How long are you giving yourself to complete it?’

  ‘Six to eight weeks should be enough.’

  With a brief, non-committal shrug she said, ‘It should be.’ She didn’t need to add the words: ‘… but you are utterly ignorant of the situation so this “six to eight weeks” is an arbitrary amount of time plucked at random: you could have used exactly the same amount of factually based analysis and arrived at the answer “Blancmange” and it would be just as valid …’ She didn’t need to and didn’t. Instead, she asked flatly, ‘Why are you doing it?’

  Put that bluntly, I stammered jollily, ‘Well, well … for all sorts of reasons really … but I suppose I shall really find out when I get there.’

  ‘Huh,’ she had replied, in a manner suggesting that I could not be more stupid if I had replied, ‘Trifle.’

  Why did I want to do it? Well, I love rambling, I am fascinated by Palestine and Israel, and I like doing normal things in abnormal situations. In my mind, nothing made more sense than Walking the Wall. Palestine compels the attention of everyone from Barack Obama and Desmond Tutu to bin Laden and back again. For me, though, it asks seemingly contradictory questions: how and when will a people be free; and yet what must a country do to protect itself from suicide bombers? I have sympathy with the Palestinian cause but despised the methods of the Second Intifada’s and, for a while, like many, I simply switched off about the whole issue. The war on Gaza in December 2008 changed that and with a reacquired curiosity I found myself wanting to find out more about the West Bank and, in particular, the ‘Wall’. Why was it put up in the first place? What does it do? How do people cope with it? And what is going to bring it down? The only real certainty I have is that, at some point, this wall will come down.

  Although I refer to ‘Walking the Wall’, strictly speaking my walk would be a ‘ramble’. It’s a fantastically English word, full of playfulness. A ramble can be an aimless stroll or an organised route or both, as the word manages to both embrace and undermine seriousness at the same time. I could be talking or walking or both. And what could be more English than rambling, with the possible exception of an irrational hatred of the French, and a lust for the death penalty? Indeed, what could be more subversively English than rambling? In 1932, over 400 ramblers took part in a mass trespass in Derbyshire at Kinder Scout: in defiance of the police, they walked onto the moorland to ‘take action to open up the fine country at present denied us’. According to the Guardian, the walkers – mainly from Manchester – sang ‘The Red Flag’ and the Internationale on the way, trespassed on the land, fought the gamekeepers, had tea, and strictly observed a self-imposed no littering policy. Later that evening, five of them were arrested and the event went down as a milestone on the road to the ‘right to roam’, which was introduced legally in 2000. The story conjures images of the everyday and the extraordinary, of the dubbining of boots, Thermoses of hot tea and hundreds of people breaking the law to ‘open the fine country’. It is, for me at least, a perfect example of an event that defines Englishness, where hundreds of working people risked arrest in order to enjoy the view.

  If one of the attractions was walking and the second was Palestine, the Wall was the third. I was in Berlin just after that wall came down, and was struck by how suddenly it fell: a structure that had seemed so impenetrable, so permanent, seemingly crumbled in a moment. Then there is Morocco’s ‘Berm’ (which, as everyone knows, is one of Inspector Clouseau’s best gags). But it is also a 2,700-kilometre-long military structure erected across Western Sahara by the Moroccan occupying army, in order to keep the 250,000 refugees li
ving in the desert from reclaiming their homeland. I have stayed with Western Sahara’s native Sahrawi refugees in the Algerian desert and was gripped by their belief that one day they would get their homeland back.

  Walls like these are an admission of the failure of politics: when the solution to a problem is to throw a wall around it, discourse has come to end and graffiti artists might as well scrawl upon the damned thing: ‘WORDS FAILED US’.

  *

  The Israeli authorities operate tight control of the Wall: after all, having gone to all the trouble to put it up, they are hardly going to piss off, leave the key in the door and an honesty box for any drinks out of the fridge, that would be tantamount to handing operational control over to English Heritage.

  Along the Barrier there are a series of checkpoints to control movement in and out of the West Bank. The Israelis compel Palestinians to apply for permits, many of which are refused, if they want to leave the West Bank (Israelis, however, do not require permits to enter or leave the West Bank); and they must also show their ID card, which is green for West Bank Palestinians. Even car number plates are colour-coded: Israeli cars have yellow number plates and West Bank cars white and green. Nor are West Bank vehicles allowed past checkpoints: Palestinians predominantly cross on foot, getting transport to, and then from, the checkpoint.

  Things happen by separation walls, for all this control, which do not happen elsewhere: people behave differently in these places. What seems impenetrable is nearly always more porous than imagined. The very structures built to keep people out become the havens of those most adept at getting in. These places become the frontline for different struggles, for better lives, for more money, a way out and more overtly political struggles, too. The area around these structures is often just plain fucking weird. Which of course is an added attraction.

  All of this created in me a compulsion to Walk the Wall, although I would learn to explain this venture to friends more succinctly by asking, ‘What better way of understanding a conflict about land and identity could there be, than walking it [the Wall] and talking to people?’ But I also had a small confession that I would only mention in a whisper and only after checking the coast was clear. It was this: I want to find a really good walk.