The winter frittered on, the chill, the damp, and the sluggishness overwhelming, but it was better than panic. Now that it seemed certain there would be war in Iraq, all we had to do was wait. I tried to take the children out of Jerusalem each weekend; if it was warm enough we plumped for the beach north of Tel Aviv because it was simple to organize and the children enjoyed the sea and the sand. When Andrew came back on leave we decided on a trip to a local zoo. We had toured the big Jerusalem version—the triumph of garden and Ark and biblical animals—enough times for it to have lost its edge. We had heard that Qalqilya, whose obstetric hospital I had visited, also hosted a small zoo. It would be less impressive, but it offered a picnic, a day out of Jerusalem, and a few animals, so off we went.
There were four carloads of parents, children, and singles, and we gathered at the central Jerusalem apartment of Peter the Australian and his wife, Penny. Peter reverted, uncharacteristically, to his military background and laid out a plan.
“Right, guys, listen up. I think it would be best, all things considered, if we all make our own way to the checkpoint on the Modi’in Road, and rendezvous there. We can then follow the lead car—better be me, I reckon—and head for Qalqilya after that.”
The convoy of families headed away, around the West Jerusalem YMCA, through the rainy Jerusalem streets, up the old Nablus Road, and on to the new network of highways.
We passed through the checkpoint and parked on the other side to wait. Children swapped places and parents to neutralize the age/gender tensions and minimize the question of who listened to what music.
We waited some more. Where was Peter? Eventually someone tracked him down on his mobile phone: “Hey, where are you guys?” he asked cheerfully. “We’re nearly there.” Despite his coordinating plan, he had taken Route 1, leaving the rest of the convoy waiting at the rendezvous—on the Modi’in Road.
He may have been nearly there when we called him, but he still hadn’t found the way into the town by the time we caught up with him. A number of us had been to Qalqilya before, but it had been difficult enough to find it then and things had not improved: they were worse. We knew we were close but there were still no road signs to Qalqilya.
“Look, there’s the zoo!” one of the younger children suddenly shouted. “There’s the wall all around it. That must be to keep the lions in.”
There it was: the massive concrete wall flanking the highway. It could have caged in King Kong. The children began a debate: what animal could get over such a wall? A giant kangaroo, a blue whale? “If you had wings you could get over it,” said the smallest helpfully.
We found our way eventually. The red roofs of the Israeli settlements crowned the hills around us, and there, sheltering in their lee, was the old town and its minarets. As we followed the Barrier’s great length and turned off the settler road toward Qalqilya, the children realized that the wall was not there to keep the animals confined. We soon came to a standstill in front of the fence, looking at the fortified gap.
The bald reality of the Wall/Barrier hit home again: the one way in and one way out for 45,000 people (and they were passing into and out of Palestinian territory) was through this single, Israeli, checkpoint.
The soldiers on duty manning the gap in the fence were an odd group alongside our gaggle of families on a day trip to the zoo. They could have said the same of us. Youthful soldiers were swamped by their heavy fatigues and all-in-ones for warmth against the cold, helmets lashed down on to their heads with thick chin-straps, machine guns over their shoulders. To pass the time while the soldiers checked our passports, we looked out of the car windows at the space around us. As we waited, people on foot came up to the checkpoint and asked the soldiers at the barricade for permission to pass. One by one they were told “No”—we didn’t know why—and each of them turned round to walk slowly back again. One old man, on a donkey cart, had trouble persuading the donkey to retrace his steps.
The soldiers examining our papers were lodged behind a waist-high, concrete counter. Sometimes a more friendly soldier would foray out to meet the supplicant Qalqilyans. To reach the window of our car they had to emerge from their den for a moment. At one point a van loaded with cauliflowers drew up to the row of concrete cubes across the gap. The driver circled the van so that it was end on to the cubes. Another vehicle, a bigger truck, appeared from our side, the side of the outside world. This too reversed up to the cubes, so that the two trucks were end to end. Men emerged from inside the vehicles, leaped up on to the open back of the van, and began lobbing cauliflowers into the empty truck.
We were watching the IDF’s back-to-back process: all goods came and went this way. This was also how Qalqilya was fed. No truck was permitted to enter directly. The now-loaded truck and the emptied van drove away, to the outside world and incarceration respectively. And then a soldier lumbered up to us and waved us through, handing back our clutch of foreign passports.
The road into Qalqilya was lined with clipped, drum-shaped laurel trees, giving an aura of wealth to a place that was not wealthy. The streets were lined with shops, now sealed up and silent. One or two, processing car parts, were still operational. Skeletal cars were banked up behind the streets, giving an end-of-the-world air to the place. All the cars had been run into the ground and would be broken down into smaller and smaller constituents, recycled until they were used up.
Further in, toward the center of town, there were restaurants, again mostly closed up. Before Intifada 2000, these restaurants had been popular with Israelis. Fear and the checkpoints would have made Palestinian towns off-limits to most Israelis even if they were allowed to enter the Occupied Territories. Two Israelis were murdered at one of these restaurants after the start of the Intifada. The many suicide bombings and other acts of violence made the idea of entering the West Bank unthinkable for most Israelis. Except for the settlers, to whom the West Bank was now home.
I thought of our home in Jerusalem—only that morning we had driven past a herd of goats grazing in the wild thyme, and horses being exercised along the tracks by small boys with smiles of freedom on their faces. A few days before I had seen young men riding jumpy Arab horses along the verge of the new Mount of Olives tunnel road, a tunnel to transport Israelis swiftly under East Jerusalem. The horses leaped from verge to tarmac; ignoring the rules that everyone else had to obey, they cantered along the road as though it weren’t there.
And here we were, going to the zoo. First we took a closer look at the wall around the humans. It wasn’t hard to find, its great height like a dam at the end of every street. On top of everything else, Qalqilyans said they missed being able to see the sun go down each evening. Val, who had known Qalqilya well over many years, had described how she had recently found herself stuck inside the town like a beetle trapped in a child’s game, trying out one road after another only to come to a halt every time at the pitiless wall.
Qalqilya had been a market town, a hub of husbandry. The ring of concrete and wire had now been set tight around its perimeter, like a rigid collar hard up to the town’s chin. There had been no question of fencing their land in with them; it was cut away. The flow of produce from the town had dwindled to a few loads every now and then. Even where there had once been nurseries near people’s houses growing a range of shrubs, fruits, and vegetables, now there was only a barren emptiness, bulldozed by the IDF to protect the wall, their wall, their “security measure.” There were moments living here, frequent moments, when you succumbed, not to the silencing, but to disbelief. The truth was so incredible that, even though it was happening right in front of you, it was still almost impossible to believe. So it was with the Barrier.
Some Israelis complained that it was Israelis who were being imprisoned. “What people fences itself in?” asked one member of the Knesset, “This takes us back to the days of the ghetto.”1 To mark the scale of the wall we walked up to it and gazed.
While we were gazing, we were shot at, twice. The shots warned us to move back. At first we didn’t understand what was happening: bullets overhead don’t always register to people unused to being shot at. Even living in Kabul, when the mujahedin fired rockets on the city almost daily, I had never actually been shot at. We lurched to a slow realization that there had been a noise from beyond our normal range, and from somewhere the notion sank in that it might have been gunfire. A second shot. Now the noise made sense. A Dutchman ducked involuntarily, leaving his arms where they had begun, his body dropping so that he looked for an instant like a rag doll hanging on a line, but a living rag doll, starting to run in the same movement.
We moved back and looked to see who had fired the shots. The area looked manless. A few children from town had watched us head for the wall, hanging back at some magic but now explained line. The wall stretched away in both directions, skirted by its attendant mud desert. But then we saw bulges in the body of the wall: the watchtowers. It was from these that the shots had been fired. The towers were rounded, lowering keeps, capped with low-domed concrete roofs, with narrow slits for the soldiers to peer out.
We gathered the children quickly and headed for the zoo, an ordinary, well-kept little zoo with limited space for the animals. It enclosed bears, leopards, a giraffe (there had been two, explained the keeper, but one had died in a cloud of tear gas during an IDF attack on the town), a lion, crocodiles, birds, and monkeys; the lion roared, the hippo came to the fence and yawned open her mouth to show us her vast, fleshy palate, and the giraffe stretched his head over the fence to be fed by the children.
Qalqilya too had become a zoo whose inmates also had to be fed from across a fence. Now that the Barrier divided the town from the outside world, farmers from their land, and the populace from their vegetable allotments and water supplies, thereby leaving citizens dependent on humanitarian aid, many had quit, often relocating to other Palestinian towns, all of them under closure and frequent curfew. “Voluntary transfer” was working: the mayor of Qalqilya reported that up to 20 percent of its citizens had already left. Those who stayed behind, often turning from belief in coexistence with Israel to Islamic extremism, survived thanks mainly to aid provided by the UN and the EU. These organizations were, in effect, subsidizing the Israeli occupation. The alternative was to let the Palestinians hunger behind what an Israeli commentator called “the Starvation Fence.”
We retreated for lunch: a Palestinian national dish—falafel—from a café on the main square. It is also an Israeli national dish. So much closeness and yet, at the same time, such infinite separation. Each culture vying with the other for claims as earthy as the origin of foods; we once heard an Israeli exclaim that he had no idea that they had falafel in Cairo.
A van drove past selling gas canisters, ringing out its tinny call tune. At the falafel café I met a lab technician who could no longer go to his job in a nearby town because he couldn’t get a permit to leave Qalqilya. “Now they are building this wall, they are slowly continuing all the time, flattening everything near it, all the gardens, all the homes. The Israelis have killed everything in Qalqilya: the businesses, the agriculture, travel, study, universities, and schools. And at our holy feast of Eid al-Adha they raided the town and killed three people. One was a boy, only eight years old.”
As we left the town our nine-year-old asked if the ambulance we saw being searched at the checkpoint would be allowed through or not. I asked the soldiers. They spoke no English, but the two Palestinian ambulance workers looked at us and said that yes, they were being allowed through—today. “No problem,” they smiled, and went on showing the soldiers the contents of their ambulance. My son turned to me and said, “You know, today was okay, I like animals. But zoos—I don’t like zoos at all.”
I looked out of the window at the checkpoint. “I know the Qalqilya case,” one diplomat had said to me after my first visit. The Qalqilya “case”: he was using code to distance himself. The “case” of more than 40,000 people locked inside a human zoo. And we were all hiding from the truth of it, the cruelty of it, by blocking it from view at best or numbing it when we had to confront it, with excuses and professional language.
Andrew left again, back to his new, African, world. The children learned to capitalize on my increasingly late nights—my distancing from the days. Knowing that I felt guilty at being up late in the morning, they would launch themselves at my bed, me slow and sleepy, with cries of, “Let’s go to the beach!” which I could rarely face. Jerusalem’s altitude kept it colder than both the coast and the Jordan valley: we lived on a spine of chill between two welts of warmth. One Sunday, instead of the beach we went to Nabi Musa, where Muslims hold that Moses was buried. It sits in the Judean desert, white-walled and square, with rows of low domes set off against the yellow dunes and stark blue sky. At Nabi Musa we met the bearded mullah who worked part-time there and part-time at the al-Aqsa Mosque. He showed us around, not minding that the children swarmed irreverently. We walked through the compound, inspecting his chickens and sheep as well as the tomb of Moses. He described to me the drug programs he was running, taking in addicts and rehabilitating many of them, slowly, carefully. Drugs were increasingly an issue for Jerusalem authorities.
Halfway through our tour the boys decided to be Catriona’s horse, and disappeared into the desert. Archie carried his sister up and down the dunes around Nabi Musa, Xan in pursuit, two lanks of boyhood charging down the stony dunes clutching rocks that they were sure were rock salt. Xan clashed the rocks together, trying to create slates to write on.
I followed them away from the shrine, walking on into the Judean desert toward the scarp that looked down over the Jordan valley. The folds of rock rolled away, and the stillness settled around, broken only by the occasional war noise from the children. Some say the desert is the easiest place to find God, should you happen to be looking, and that it is no accident that the desert plays such a frequent role in religion: temptation, contemplation, mountaintops, and messages. Hiding away from the new and frightening, like the Essenes, just down there in Qumran, 2,000 years ago.* Was that what the Gush were doing now? Here in the dunes, scuffing soilless rock underfoot, separation looked appealing; running away from modern life, being protected by a different system of rules, rules you don’t have to question. Here you can convince yourself that the land is empty, at least in tiny patches, and, if you want, you can exist in the biblical dream for a moment: the goatherds, the oases, the domes, the past. Then you turn your face, back to reality, and head into the new settler-only road system that bypasses the goatherds and the towns and villages where they live.
Israeli democracy was brewing elections again, two years after Sharon had been brought to power for the first time. The Labor party was fielding Amnon Mitzna, a former general who had served under Sharon—and had publicly questioned his military decisions—and was now the mayor of Haifa. Haifa was a success story, the beachside city that had proved coexistence between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis was possible.
I went to hear Mitzna speak in a conference room near Yad Vashem, the site of Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial. In the dark and the rain I parked the car and wound my way through the security system. There were guards everywhere but nothing odd in that. The huge room was full of activists and journalists, recent immigrants and old hands, the occasional observer like me. It was an Anglophone meeting, but Mitzna’s English was not spruce. There was no demagoguery, and he seemed misplaced on the political stage. He was a mild man up against the titan of Sharon: time, place, and politics against him.
“We must let go of Eretz Israel,” he said carefully. “We have to take responsibility for what goes on around us. We have to separate ourselves from our enemies by building a fence... to prefer our own problems to occupying three and a half million Palestinians against their will... we must live in the real world. It is time to say ‘enough.’ If we don’t separate, we will lose either our majority or our democracy.”
There were no illusions in the hall: too many Israelis were too angry at Palestinian methods of resistance for Mitzna’s message to penetrate the majority. We stood up at the end, and “Hatykva,” Israel’s haunting and beautiful national anthem, rang out, overpowering. Nahum Barnea, chief commentator for Yediot Ahronoth, greeted me on the way out; “No,” he said, “I don’t hold out much hope for anything these days. Things are really very bad.”
A few mornings later Roni, the manager of the café near school, was making sandwiches and ‘afurch as he did every day. Some parents would come in—harried—before dropping the children, others would come in afterward, more relaxed, and would sit for a while. Some of us did both. We would take five minutes, or twenty, exchange news, take stock. The television always sat up high, playing either soccer or the news: the World Cup and the suicide bombings. The station was in Hebrew, and Roni would often translate for those with no Hebrew. This morning he saw a group of us sitting at a table with a pile of Hebrew papers left behind by another customer, trying to work out who was who in a newspaper tableau of Israeli politicians. It was just before the election and he decided to give us a course: Israeli politics 101.
We asked him, “Roni, come on, who’re you going to vote for?”
He ignored the question. Instead he picked out a photo of Sharon and said, pointing: “This guy is shit because he’ll make me go in the army.”
We laughed.
“And this guy,” his finger on Mitzna, “is also shit because he’ll make me go in the army. So I don’t vote tomorrow. This country is shit.”
“Come on, Roni, be serious.” He shook his head, leaned over us and opened a newspaper. One by one he went through all the stories in the paper, explaining why he thought his country was shit. There was constant war and violence with the Palestinians; at this he simply threw up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness and exasperation.
Then, “Look at this,” he said at the stories of domestic violence, “and this—and this,” at the rapes and wife beatings. “You finish beating up the Palestinians when you go off duty and then you feel bad about it so you beat up your wife and maybe your kids as well.”
There were stories of the economic crisis that had made so many people desperate: “You finish in the army and you get a job or maybe you don’t and you land in shit and you can’t even afford the shit you need.” And a piece on the increase in suicides, especially among soldiers: “When the shit gets so much—too much to take any more shit—so you want to put an end to the shit.”
And there were pages of sport: photographs, results, and reports. The obsession with soccer and basketball: “Because it’s easier if we forget that everything else is shit except that.”
Finally, on the back page for us, the front page for him, there was a photomontage of all the big names in the election. He pointed from one face to another, saying, “This guy is shit. This one is very shit. And that one—what a shit he is. This one is shit shit shit.”
He was winding up the tutorial. “And this one,” pointing to Effi Eitam,* “is the shit of the shit. He put me in jail in Gaza two times because he told me to break the arms and legs of the Palestinians and I refused. So he put me in jail one time for sixty days, and then another time as well.” He finished with this, looking at us.
That night an Egyptian diplomat gave a party, typical of the parties that went on most nights, all for the same reason that the Israelis were so fond of soccer and basketball. Unlike other parties this one had a serious side to it: screening a documentary about the Palestinians. All the guests had to roll up their hedonism and sit somber to watch the video, which had been brought by an expat who managed to combine bacchanalian abandon with vivid, clear analysis of the political situation, and within minutes of each other. There were many who did both but most needed a few hours between the two to disengage the hats.
I found the video hard to watch. The facts were there: the occupation, the repression, the broader impact of the conflict. “What are you going to do, keep quiet about it forever?” asked a friend visiting from Rome, with all the new anger of a visitor seeing the situation, and the wall, afresh. I asked him not to be combative when he met my Israeli friends. A group of them were having a party later that night and I was taking him along.
“Living here has immunized you,” he whispered. He accused me of seeing the reality up close, and railing against it, but “the process of immunization makes you tell yourself ‘don’t say it too loud,’ speak gently, tell people what they want to hear, don’t use words like ‘ghetto,’ keep on the right side, don’t ostracize yourself by saying what they don’t want to hear.
“And then one day you’ll have had enough of being party to the injustice, of sitting opposite Palestinians, listening to their daily gruel and being unable to say anything except that you’re so sorry they’ve got problems. Hiding what’s happening does no one—Israeli or Palestinian—any favors.”
The documentary was about the obvious, not the hidden. There was no code, and no hiding the context. There was also footage of tied-up Palestinians kneeling on the ground during the first Intifada. Behind them stood IDF troops and these troops were breaking their prisoners’ arms. One soldier held an arm horizontal, another hit the arm with an implement, a gun butt or a large stone. But arms are difficult to break, they don’t crack under the first blow or the second or the third sometimes. You could see the resistance, the elasticity in the living tissue. The soldiers had to hit harder, and harder, and then the bones would snap. And the Palestinians knelt in the dust without hope, pain screwed into their faces. What Roni had said was no longer just a story. There were the deformed arms and the faces deformed by pain. And I saw Roni’s face, distorted with distaste, disgust, at what he had been told to do by his commander, Eitam.
Then, slam, came another suicide bombing, sent by Hamas, killing 17 people and wounding 53 in Haifa, en route to Haifa University. Now what about distaste and disgust? Broken bones and broken lives—hundreds of them. Two months earlier, on January 5, 22 people had been killed and more than 120 wounded in a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. That attack was carried out by two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, helped by Islamic Jihad.
Sometimes I talked to people to put out the reality, sometimes I kept things to myself, choosing not to join in the clusters discussing the looming war in Iraq and Bush and gas masks at the talking points in the rhythm of the day. The situation and its concentric rings remained wrapped around our family, always. I sent another email to Andrew, telling him the details of our life, commenting on the details of his life in his emails, touching on but not wholly understanding his liberation and how badly he wanted to share it with us, and ending feebly: “We miss you. When are you coming—Catriona wants to know.”
* An ascetic sect originating in Babylon, who lived apart as a reaction to religious laxity and dedicated themselves to perfect observance of the law, the Essenes were the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
* Ex-general and now a far-right Likud minister.