If one soldier knew what the other thinks, there would be no war.
Jewish proverb
I remembered back to the first time I visited the West Bank in 2003. It was during the second intifada, when Palestinians revolted against the state of Israel. The construction of the West Bank wall had started the year before and tensions had been high. But after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, the stage of the conflict moved predominantly to Gaza. Israel had begun to withdraw settlers and soldiers a year later, but retained control over the airspace and the coast. In retaliation, Gaza began firing rockets at Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile in the north of Israel, an incursion into Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah attacks, escalated into another war there. A couple of years later, Israel invaded Gaza again to prevent the rocket attacks from Hamas, but in 2014, Egypt brokered a ceasefire. Though relations were still strained, things had calmed down to some extent in recent years. There had even been direct peace talks and global attention on the idea of a two-state solution.
But things had taken a turn for the worse in the last few days. After Trump made his announcement about moving the US embassy, Palestinians across the country had taken to the streets and started marching. There were protests and riots and stone-throwing and the Israel Defence Forces retaliated by shooting several of the agitators, much to international condemnation.
I met up with Saleh and Fadi again on Boxing Day. I wanted to try to get a balanced viewpoint of the current situation, and Saleh seemed to have his head screwed on, despite his very obvious physical and emotional wounds, caused directly by his involvement in Palestinian affairs. Fadi was a Christian and I hoped he would give me a more objective viewpoint too.
‘I was sixteen when it happened.’ Saleh showed me his mangled hand. ‘They left a bomb for us in a kids’ playground. It was inside a tennis ball.’
‘Who did?’ I asked.
‘The Israelis, of course. I guess it was the soldiers who’d made their own IED. People think us Palestinians are the terrorists, but they don’t realise what we’re up against here. The Israelis really hate us. They think the land is theirs, even though there are millions of us living here just wanting peace.’
‘What happened?’
‘I picked up the tennis ball and it exploded in my hand. They arrested me and blamed me for making it. I was put in jail for being a bomb-maker. They said I was a terrorist! I was just a sixteen-year-old kid.’ He looked at the floor, wiping away a tear.
‘Nobody will ever understand what it is like to live like this, behind walls, prisoners in our own country. We aren’t terrorists, we’re just people who want to be free. Of course, there are some trouble makers – there are everywhere – but I’m against extremists, whatever guise they come in. I suppose I’m a Muslim, but I’m not religious. I became disillusioned with Islam when Daesh started cutting people’s heads off. They give Islam a bad name, but I think any extremists should be expelled wherever they go. I will fight anyone that comes to limit my freedoms, whatever religion they claim to be.’
He shook his head in visible anger. ‘I heard that in England the Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas. Well, let me tell them this. They aren’t real Muslims. Jesus is a prophet in Islam and we should all celebrate his birth.’ He gripped my hand and looked me in the eye. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said sternly, ‘and screw anyone that says anything different.’
Saleh smiled. I thought back to the poor Pakistani shopkeeper in Glasgow, who’d been murdered by a fellow ‘Muslim’ the previous year for offering Easter greetings to his Christian customers.
‘But the Israelis are extremists, too,’ Saleh carried on. ‘I didn’t say Jews. I don’t mind Jews, but it’s the Zionists who want to invade our lands and build walls and separate us, that are the real extremists. Look at that.’ Saleh pointed at the infamous wall splitting the city in two. I looked up – the concrete monstrosity towered above the buildings and made it impossible to see what was on the other side. It was ten metres tall, covered in razor wire and CCTV cameras. ‘There’s even an automatic gun with a camera that can scan Palestinian faces and shoots them automatically.’
‘What?’ I asked in horror.
Fadi stepped in, shaking his head. ‘It’s a water cannon, it doesn’t fire actual rounds. It’s when protestors get too close to the wall.’
Saleh was on the verge of tears. ‘Don’t defend them, they’re evil, the Israelis. They try and kill us, even you Christians, they don’t care.’
Fadi shrugged. ‘Who do you think built the wall?’
‘What do you mean? The Israelis built it,’ I said, confused.
‘Who physically built the wall, I mean? You don’t think the Jews lifted a finger, do you?’
I hadn’t really thought of that.
‘No, it was built by Palestinian Arab labourers, who wanted the cash. They didn’t really think through the consequences. And the land that’s been “invaded” by the Jews. Do you think they actually turned up with guns and kicked people off? No, of course not. They bought it from Palestinians, who sold it for hard cash.’
‘Traitors!’ shouted Saleh.
‘Maybe,’ said Fadi, ‘but it’s true. You need to look at both sides of the story.’
I gazed up at the wall. It was covered in anti-Israeli, anti-American and anti-British graffiti. There were huge caricatures of Donald Trump and Theresa May and other political figures, as well as more nuanced messages and slogans. The faces of Israeli soldiers could just be made out from behind the veiled screens of the watchtowers.
Whoever was complicit with the construction, I couldn’t help thinking that walls solve nothing.
‘Let me show you the real problems,’ said Saleh. ‘I’m going to take you to Hebron and the front line.’
Fadi shrugged. ‘Go with him and see. Make up your own mind, just be careful. You don’t need me there. We Christians are a small minority here, and we live between the Jews and Muslims. We barely get a say in matters, but when you’re done, make sure you go to Jerusalem and see where all this started.’
I told him that I would. For the next couple of days, Saleh took me on a tour of the West Bank. We drove along empty highways that linked the notorious Jewish ‘settlements’, usually villages on defended hilltops resembling some sort of medieval fortress, with large walls, razor-wire fences and security cameras on every pole. All the houses looked alike – white stone-clad apartment blocks stacked on top of one another.
The Palestinian villages on the other hand were more roughshod and most didn’t have access to water and needed to store their own in rooftop bowsers. The wall, now an omnipresent sight in the geography of the Holy Land, appeared in segments. Contrary to what most people think, it isn’t a wall that simply encircles the West Bank itself; the wall is actually a series of walls, totalling some 440 miles long, often flanked by trenches and strips of no-man’s-land – and most of it is inside the agreed jurisdiction of the West Bank.
Saleh pointed at the vast concrete partition. ‘It’s the Israeli attempt to separate our own communities. People can’t even go and visit their family inside their own land, never mind over in what they call Israel. If I want to get to Tel Aviv to see my cousins, for instance, I need to get a special permit. And because of my record, I’ll never be given it. When I was a boy, we used to sneak over there, through the valleys – but now, because of the wall, it’s impossible. I’m a prisoner in my own home.’
We entered the outskirts of the city of Hebron, famous for being one of the most visibly divided cities anywhere in the world. After parking the car in the old town, we walked through the souk, past rows of Palestinian street vendors. They looked impoverished and miserable. On the far side of the old city walls, we came across an abandoned row of shops.
‘It’s been left to rot since the nineties, when all the locals were forced out. See the dividing lines. This is the Palestinian side, and over there is where the Zionists live.’ Saleh pointed to the far side of the wall, to where modern villas lined the hillside. Some of them were only feet apart from their Palestinian neighbours’ houses, right beneath the Israeli apartments, but the difference was stark. All the Palestinian windows seemed to be covered in metal bars. We walked down an alleyway, too, where the sky was part-obscured by a wire meshing covering the entire street.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked naïvely.
Saleh shook his head. ‘Look up there.’ He pointed to a row of Israeli houses directly above the Palestinian shops.
‘They throw rocks at us,’ he said mournfully.
‘Who do?’ I asked him.
‘The Jews. The settlers. And not just rocks either. Bottles of piss and all their litter – they throw it at us like we are animals, so we built this cage to stop the rocks. Everyone thinks that we are the rock throwers, but no, not here, it’s those bastards up there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they hate us. They think this land is theirs. They want to kill us all, they want us all to die. One of my friends has a nine-year-old girl. Last year some Jews threw broken bottles from up there. That window, out of their own house, and it hit her in the face. Now she has a scar forever. She almost died. Can you imagine? They do that to their own neighbours.’
I looked to a gate between the two communities. There was a section of IDF soldiers manning a checkpoint.
‘And that goes to the Israeli side of Hebron?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but I’m not allowed to go there.’
‘What about me? Can I?’
Saleh nodded, ‘Yes, you’re British, you can travel freely. See how unfair it is. There is no communication between the two communities at all. Go over and see for yourself, if you like, because I’m not allowed.’
Saleh waited for me while I walked up to the roadblock, and an Israeli soldier waved me through when I showed him my passport. I wanted to see for myself what an Israeli Jewish settlement looked like. I’d only heard one side of the story and knew that I should see what the settlers themselves had to say on the situation, if anyone would talk to me.
The streets seemed empty, apart from soldiers in their body armour and helmets, who stood in pairs on each street corner. I’d heard there were eight hundred or so settlers here, and twice as many soldiers to guard them. Whatever poverty the Palestinians lived in, I thought that the Jews who lived here must feel imprisoned, too. But it was, of course, of their own making. I wandered around for a bit, while the soldiers eyed me with suspicion. I tried to talk to one of them, but he was barely out of his teens, spoke no English and merely shook his head. He was only a kid, and probably as ignorant of the Palestinians as they were of the Jews. Just as I was about to give up and walk back across the border to find Saleh again, a car screeched to a halt, almost sending me flying.
An angry man wound down the window and started shouting at me in English. He had a strange accent, which seemed out of place, and at the time I couldn’t put my finger on where it was from. There was a passenger sat next to him.
‘Who are you? Stop harassing the soldiers. Are you a journalist? What are you doing here?’
‘I’m just visiting. I want to meet a settler,’ I told him.
‘Why? You media bastards only show the Arab story, you never show what it’s like for the Jews. We’re surrounded here, those Arabs breed like rabbits and steal our land.’
I could place the accent now. It was South African.
‘But since you’re here, I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ said Brandon, who was from Johannesburg.
His friend Danny was also an immigrant, but lived in Tel Aviv. Brandon got out of the car and stood with his hands on his hips. He looked like he’d punch me if I didn’t listen to him.
‘I am a Zionist. Do you know what that means? It means I want my own country. I came here because Hebron is a Jewish city and it always has been. We need to stand strong and look after one another – where else can we go? We’ve been thrown out of every country we’ve ever lived in, but not this one. This is our ancestral home. There was never anything called Palestine until the sixties. When the Jews came here in the forties, there were just a few shepherds here. There is no such thing as Palestine, do you hear me?’
I told him that I was listening.
‘Good. People think there is a solution to this mess. A two-state solution! What a joke. Golda Meir said that when Palestinians lay down their arms, there will be peace. If Israel lays down her arms, there will be genocide. And she was right. We will never forgive the Palestinian leadership for what they made us do to them. I have nothing against Arabs. I don’t want a wall. I want my children to go to school with Muslims. I have Arab friends, I employ dozens of them. I fought against apartheid in South Africa, and I will fight against it here, but two states is not the solution. We need to become one people, the Arabs are welcome in Israel, and the sooner that wall comes down the better. But THERE IS NO PALESTINE,’ he shouted. ‘Go tell that to your people.’ And with that he got back in his car and sped off.
It was hard not to think that he had a point. Walls help no one; the problem here was a lack of communication and dialogue. There are no good guys and bad guys, only people.
After the horrors of Hebron, it was time to head back via the city of Jericho. I hadn’t had any time to explore it properly before Christmas, as I was in a rush to get to Bethlehem, so I decided to return and see the biblical city. It was here where the famous walls were brought down by the prophet-soldier Joshua in about 1400 BC.
It’s said that Jericho is the oldest city in the world. Mind you, I recalled that the inhabitants of Erbil said exactly the same, and having been to Eridu in Iraq too, I was reminded that wherever you go in Arabia, you’re faced with mind-boggling antiquity and stiff competition among claimants. I hadn’t even reached Damascus or Byblos yet, and if I saw both of them, then I would have been to all five contenders.
At any rate, it is said that the original Jericho dates back over ten thousand years – twice as old as the Pyramids of Egypt – and it is rightly considered to be one of the starting points of human civilisation. Who knows, perhaps it will be known to future generations as the place where civilisation ended, too. It certainly felt that way when I arrived.
I’d just finished walking around the ruined remains of the ancient walls, admiring the stacks of pottery and beautifully carved stone works, against the faint sound of the call to prayer as it drifted over the morning birdsong, when Saleh came running over.
‘Lev, come quick. Follow me.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Just follow me and you’ll see.’
I ran down the path and jumped in the back of Saleh’s car and he sped off down a deserted road running to the west out of town. There seemed to be a crowd gathering underneath a highway checkpoint. I looked around and noticed that it was only men and teenagers. The old men were sitting around outside the closed shops, watching as the youths massed.
Suddenly a car overtook ours and screeched to a halt underneath a large billboard. A kid, no older than fourteen, got out and opened the boot. It was full of old car tyres and he began unloading them. Other boys came over to help and before long a gang of them were rolling the tyres across the road to form a barrier, while others nearby were pulling down fence posts and dragging bits of barbed wire across the highway.
‘Is this what I think it is?’ I said.
Saleh smiled. ‘There’s gonna be a protest against Trump and the Americans and how they’re supporting Israel. Let’s stick around and see what happens.’
Saleh left the car parked at a safe distance behind, and led the way through the crowd right to the front. Some men in their twenties were busily donning masks and hoods. One of them poured a can of petrol over the tyres and set them alight, causing an immediate plume of thick black smoke to swirl into the air. Suddenly the atmosphere was changed from a peaceful Friday morning into one of ominous violence.
The young men began to chant. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they shouted and started forward, ahead of their defensive line, through the smoke and down the road, which was still filled with the debris of previous battles. A few hundred metres away, I saw their objective. At the side of the road, hidden by a fence, was a small Israeli bunker, and I noticed two soldiers in green uniforms standing alert with their rifles trained directly towards us. One of them was on his radio.
The mob ran forward, taunting the Israelis, but never getting too close. Out came the slingshots – home-made rope and leather concoctions that hadn’t changed in their design, or lethality, since the time of David.
How times had changed, I thought to myself. Here were the Palestinians (the name itself is only another pronunciation of Philistine), descendants of Goliath, now forever reduced to taking the slingshot as their own mantle. And three hundred metres away were David’s children, forming up behind armoured cars. I saw the little green figures, which from this distance looked like toy soldiers – except they were armed to the teeth with vehicle-mounted machine-guns, grenade launchers and tear-gas cannons. The roles were very much reversed. But this didn’t stop the Palestinians trying their luck.
‘They come out every Friday,’ said Saleh, wrapping his red and white headscarf tightly around his face. ‘It’s so they can’t identify me.’
One of the youngsters came over and gave me a scarf, too. ‘Wear this,’ he said, before running forward to pick up stones to throw.
‘Wouldn’t that make me a target?’
Saleh laughed. ‘We’re all targets here. They don’t know who you are. They’ll still shoot you.’
The mob edged forward and the boys began to lob their stones towards the soldiers. The Israelis held their line. They simply stood and waited.
The Palestinians seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some of the boys were laughing and joking and whooping with joy when a stone landed on target. Were it not for the impending threat of being shot by an Israeli sniper, it would have all been rather fun and festive, and that’s certainly the impression I got from the youths.
‘We love it,’ one boy in a black mask said.
‘Do you know why you are here? What have the Americans done?’ I asked, wanting to see if they had a particular agenda.
He simply shrugged. ‘I don’t care. I’m just here to fight the Israelis,’ he said, before winging off another rock. I wondered if for them it was a rite of passage, or even simply a habit, formed in solidarity with generations of Palestinians over the last seventy years.
After an hour, the riot grew more intense.
‘It’s not a riot,’ implored Saleh.
‘Well, these guys are throwing stones,’ I told him, ‘it’s not just a protest is it? And let’s be honest, they did start it.’
‘Stones! That’s all we have,’ Saleh responded. ‘Stones, not guns. Look over there at the Israelis. You’ll see what they have soon.’
He had barely finished the sentence when the shooting began. I instinctively ducked and the mob all cowered. I heard something ping against a signpost nearby.
Thank God, I thought. It was only rubber bullets. More shots came, sending the Palestinians into disarray; they darted around, zigzagging to avoid the incoming rounds, but always they regrouped and pushed closer and closer to the Israelis, trying their best to keep up the rock throwing. Saleh bent down and picked up a bullet. It was indeed rubber, but Saleh took out a knife and spliced it in half.
‘Look,’ he said, thrusting the thing into my hand. ‘It’s metal inside.’
As I felt the weighty little object in the palm of my hand, I saw that there was a steel core.
‘If this hits you in the face, it will kill you,’ he said, with a fire in his eyes that I’d not noticed before. He was clearly keen to show the Israelis’ indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians. ‘When you go home, tell your people what you see.’
There was another bang, this time louder, and I noticed a trail of smoke hurtling towards us. There was a whoosh and a thud, the object missing my head by a couple of feet.
‘Tear gas, run!’ shouted Saleh, amid the clamour.
Stupidly I ran straight through the thick white smoke, as one of the Palestinian boys kicked the round across the road, and someone else tried to cover it with a cardboard box.
Boom … there was another one. The Israelis were soon firing dozens of gas grenades directly at us. My eyes began to stream – the poison kicked into effect straight away. The sensation of burning was indescribable. I’d felt it before, in the army, when we had to experience pepper spray and CS gas first-hand, but I’d forgotten how awful it is.
‘Come on,’ said Saleh. ‘We’ve had enough fun here, time to go.’
I couldn’t help but agree.
As we went back to the car, with tears still streaming down our cheeks, I took a backward glance at the mob clashing. The Israelis had begun marching down the road, backed up by their Humvees and tanks, and the Palestinians were retreating to the burning tyres.
‘It will go on all night, or until they all get bored, then it’ll start all over again next Friday.’
It seemed bizarre to go from one extreme to the other, but that is the norm in Israel and the Palestinian territories. I said goodbye to Saleh back in Bethlehem, and walked alone over the hills and through the checkpoints into the suburbs of Jerusalem, which is only a few miles away. Soon, the barren limestone hills gave way to high-rise skyscrapers, apartment blocks and congested highways. Only the ancient city walls and the glistening dome of Al-Aqsa Mosque marked this out as an extraordinary city from a distance.
I’d made it to the holiest of the holies – the place where it all began. For the next week, I explored the beauty, intricacy and wonders of Jerusalem. I visited the place of the crucifixion, and the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I was allowed inside Al-Aqsa Mosque and stood inside the Well of Souls. I touched the foundation stones in the Roman crypts and walked through the Damascus Gate. I felt the engravings of Maltese crosses – Crusader graffiti a thousand years old. I tiptoed along the haunted corridors of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, and laid a hand on the Western Wall.
Every inch of this city has a story to tell and I trod in the footsteps of time itself. The names of those warriors, demi-gods and saints, all of whom had prayed, fought and died here, came to mind in the very fabric of the stones I touched. Abraham, King David, Solomon, Alexander, Nero, Jesus, Muhammad, Richard the Lionheart, Einstein, Montgomery, Churchill: they’d all been here at some point, and it’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by the scale of this town’s importance throughout human history. With the company of friends and family, the expedition took on a more leisurely pace, and for a short while transformed into a real holiday.
We rented an Airbnb in Tel Aviv for a few days and lounged on the beach, partying until the early hours and generally having a good time. New Year’s Eve passed in a suitably hedonistic fashion, and we all welcomed in 2018 with a thick head and new-found resolutions. I was happy to be surrounded by good friends and new memories. The glistening prospect of the Mediterranean Sea, in its winter golden hue, was glorious and reminded me that the end was in sight.
I said goodbye to my friends and family as the waves crashed on the sun-kissed beach. I hoped to see them in a few weeks, but I knew that the journey wasn’t over yet. There were two hundred miles still to go to reach Byblos in Lebanon, and a whole host of challenges lay in my path. But I felt revitalised, reborn almost. It was a New Year that promised a new future and I was ready to take on whatever lay ahead.
And so off I went, walking along the promenade of the corniche, past the new city and the financial district, through the suburbs and up towards the old Roman ruins of Haifa and the Crusader fortress of Acre. It was a journey into the past, and yet also into the future.
I stared in wonder at the impregnable walls of the Akko castle, looking as grand and imposing as when the Knights Hospitaller had built it. Sometimes I’d walk and other times hitchhike, getting lifts with random strangers of all religions. I met Bahai students, who showed me their temple in Haifa, standing on top of a mountain like a little garden of paradise, with beautiful trees and manicured landscapes. I followed the coast and went inland over rolling hills and beautiful forests. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze and a host of all sorts of immigrants seemed to live in harmony, side by side. It was a world apart from the segregation of the West Bank.
With every step north, the landscape grew more and more familiar. Ahead lay the misty highlands surrounding the Sea of Galilee, where I stayed for a short while on a kibbutz as the guest of Jewish farmers. Here in Kadarim, the residents were mostly old hippies, remnants of a bygone age: the kibbutzim – Jews from around the world, who’d given up everything to live the Zionist dream. They worked in collective farms, giving up their salary for a community. Each day they worked together, growing crops or raising chickens, and each night they ate, danced and sang together.
Shani, a lifelong kibbutznik, and Mark, an east Londoner who’d moved here in 1992, welcomed me in with impeccable politeness. Despite being adamantly Zionist, they were both sympathetic to the Palestinian people and I couldn’t have hoped for nicer hosts. Their life was tough, living in simple, small houses that reminded me of an army barracks, and eating in a communal kitchen. And yet they seemed content. They smoked weed and played the guitar and neither of them yearned for city life.
Shani drove me north to Metula, on the Lebanese border. The little town was nestled in these windswept highlands, which were now on the very front line against Israel’s closest foes, Syria and Lebanon, and had been a closed frontier for decades. I knew there was little chance of crossing into either, but I wanted to get to the border to see with my own eyes what lay ahead.
The last few weeks had been enlightening, and in spite of the political complications, they had been enjoyable. But now I was about to enter no-man’s-land and perhaps the most dangerous part of my journey so far.