a Tour of the WestBank

Thursday, October 20, 2005

My time up in Zababdeh was really cool. Fine, I was sick for a couple of days but by Tuesday was feeling like myself, again. I really enjoyed going for walks in an olive grove with Mark and Andrea and seeing old trees leading my eyes towards beautiful views of the mountains surrounding Zababdeh. Tuesday night brought a full-moon and it looked so beautiful hovering over those mountains. Wednesday it rained. It poured, in fact, over the entire country. I was so glad to see great globs of water fall. I loved hearing the constant drumming of pitter-patter on the ground. It rained in Israel, too, even in Tel Aviv. People are talking about winter and there are less people in the streets at night. Not that it's actually cold. Last night, after my return to Tel Aviv, Matan and I went for a walk to the grocery store and I was in shorts and a t-shirt and enjoying the coolness. He was in long-pants and was complaining that it was too cold; he had forgotten to put on a sweater so we didn't go for much of a walk: only to the store and back.

To leave Zababdeh, I was going to catch a bus at 5:15 am to take me to Ramallah, then it wouldn't be much trouble to get to Tel Aviv via Jerusalem from that point. Mark walked with me to the bus. There were no people, so we waited, hoping the driver would come soon. After five, or so, minutes he did show up. He took one look at me and said to us some sentences. He said something about my foreign passport and he either said the roads were closed and he's doing a new route or he said that he didn't want a foreign passport on his bus because it would cause problems. I only heard the word "passport" but Mark understood a little of what he said. I don't know any Arabic because I'm surrounded by Hebrew. I didn't get on the bus; it was clear that he didn't want me to.

There was some tension in the Westbank this week because the IDF were stepping up their road closures and their supposed security checks. It's a tough situation on both sides, I think; Israel is paranoid that Palestine is going to stick it to them every opportunity they get and Palestine gets so tired of being squashed by the Israelis. Why Israel doesn't just pull out of the WestBank and stick to the 1948 borders is beyond me. I think it is rooted in imagery, symbolism and desires for hegemony and held firm by propaganda and fear. Anyway, times get tough and tension spills over. Three settlers were killed and several others wounded at a hitchhiking stand near Bethlehem on Sunday when a Palestinian man shot them. The next move is that Israel flexes its muscles and tightens its chokehold on Palestine. Airforce jets circled Jenin for several hours on Wednesday, their constant circling and roaring engines was pretty annoying to me but they weren't letting off sonic booms or dropping any bombs. Intimidation is the name of the game for the IDF. Bethlehem and Jenin are not even near each other; but Israel impedes life all over the West Bank, just the same. They protect their illegal settlements by shutting down the highways that run near them, which means Palestinians have to either drive huge distances to circumvent the closures or they have to go off-road and drive through fields to link back up with the road on the other side of the closure. There are many unknowns because the IDF is unpredictable and moody. There is tension and fear, on both sides. Palestine is poor, very poor.
Israel blocks any economic growth and blocks any outside trading with other countries. Israel gets stronger and Palestine continues to hold on to their hard way of life, still living with grace and dignity in a way that amazes me.

Andrea was surprised to hear both our voices as we came back to their place. They contacted their landlord a couple of hours later - at a respectable hour! - and asked if he could try to arrange a seat in a taxi for me run by one of his relatives who lives in Ramallah who takes people up to Jenin every morning then does a run back to Ramallah at the end of the day. But with the road closures and the stepped up harrassment at checkpoints, not many people were wanting to travel. The driver sat around in Jenin for several hours with no travelers until the Stoner-Leaman's landlord called him up to tell him that I'd pay just over double fare to get a ride. Finally, by 4:30 I climbed into a taxi, paid the driver 100 shekels ($30 CDN), and got a ride to Ramallah. We had to take a very round-about way to avoid some checkpoints and road closures. I got my own private tour of the WestBank and it is beautiful. Its also very poor and underdeveloped, which is really sad because it is only that way because Israel chokes the Palestinian economy.

At one point my driver Saliba (means "the cross" - he's part of the 2% Christian population of Palestine) took us around a sharp corner on a mountain road and a huge expanse opened up before us. The mountains gradually fell away into lower ground and the sun was just setting giving off a soft light that made the view breathtaking. From left to right I could see until the horizon swallowed up everything. As we descended down the mountain we were stopped by a taxi driver coming towards us who told us that up ahead there was a tank blocking the road so we needed to go another way. Saliba manouvered our big old six-door mercedes down a steep and incredibly bumpy dirt path and we set out across fields on a worn track that is often used by Palestinians to avoid checkpoints or closed roads. We had been near a Jewish settlement, which is why the tank was closing the road (to "protect" it). Saliba told me that by going through these fields, which was like a maze of different tracks and more stones on the ground than soil, it seemed, we were saving driving 150 extra kilometers on roads to get back to the highway.

We spotted the tank and the tank spotted us. For about two or three minutes ours was the only car in the field and the tank's upper body rotated, following us with its eyes. I could sense the discomfort and tension of Saliba and see the sweat on his forehead and wondered if we might be in real trouble. We just kept on driving. Other cars and minvans and trucks started to appear on various tracks after some minutes of our solo off-roading. Most of the drivers tried to wave Saliba down, presumably to ask about open roads ahead, but he wasn't stopping. He wanted out of the fields as fast as possible. He just waved people on instead of stopping to talk and muttered to me about how dangerous it would be to stop and confer with other drivers with a tank watching us. We eventually got back to a paved road and continued on. We went through two checkpoints where the soldiers treated us cooly but let us pass before coming into Ramallah.

My driver, Saliba, talked with me the entire way. He had a very interesting perspective on all things political and had some good knowledge, too, having been a schoolteacher in Jerusalem for 25 years before the school closed. The only two parts where I asserted counterpoints to what he was saying were when he denied the Jewish Holocaust and sang the praises of Saddam Hussein. That last one led to a very interesting conversation where he told me that Arab people cannot live with democracy; they need to have a dictator-type ruler, he said. I reminded him that he was of the Christian religion and asked if he wanted to live under an Islamic legal system. He replied that there was nothing he could do about it and that it was in Palestinian law that the leader must be Muslim. He said he didn't mind. That he didn't want democracy; he said that when Palestine becomes a nation, Abbas will have to go because he is too weak and too democratic. He explained his point of view to me about Hussein by listing a dozen other examples of Arab countries whose leaders are autocratic and dictatorial. He told me that Jordanians only settled down when their King built a military that kept them in line. I don't think he speaks for all Arabs or all Palestinians. He is just one man with his own opinions, just as I am, but it sure was interesting to hear him rail on against democracy. Saliba also named villages we past and told me a thing or two about a thing or two. He explained to me how certain villages got their names. He told me stories about the British occupation. I was thoroughly exhausted by the time we arrived in Ramallah but also very grateful for my own private tour of the West Bank.

From Ramallah, I took a servees (shared taxi mini-van deal) to Kalundia then walked across the "border" and through another checkpoint before getting into another taxi to get me to the central bus station in Jerusalem. When we passed through yet another checkpoint the soldiers wanted me to open my backpack for them. It was dark and he didn't have a flashlight so as soon as I opened it and said "rack begadeem" (only clothes) he just waved me away from him moved on to the next car.

After getting to Central Bus Station, going through yet more security checks from visual profiling to metal detectors to x-ray machines, I finally boarded my bus to take me to Tel Aviv. Just over four hours after leaving Zababdeh I was back in my apartment in Tel Aviv, exhausted but happy. I find it amazing that if there wasn't so much conflict and tension and if buses and vehicles could move freely between Israel and the Westbank, I could have made the journey in just over an hour. Maybe someday.