Last year, Israel began building a network of “security barriers” to protect itself from Palestinian terrorists. The walls and fences cut off much of the West Bank territories from Israel, but they managed to incorporate parts of the territories on the Israeli side to accommodate Jewish settlers. Editor Ken Edelstein visited the wall last spring and talked to Arabs and Israelis on the Israeli side.
My first morning in Israel, my cousin Shai and I biked from his parents’ house in a small Jewish town called Kochav Yair through an olive orchard and across Highway 6 to the Arab city of Tira.
Shai wanted to introduce me to “Ibrahim,” a Palestinian friend who’s lived and worked in Tira for several years. Then, we’d travel a loop that would take us through the Jewish city of Kfar Saba and to the old border with the West Bank, where Israel is building its controversial “security barrier.”
Shai’s not your typical Israeli, if there is such a thing today. He grew up both in Israel and Atlanta and, after seeing action in the Israeli Army, lived for two decades on the West Coast. In 1997, after he put aside enough money to pay off his daughter’s college tuition, Shai quit his job in LA and started traveling the world by bicycle.
He ended up in Kochav Yair, an upper-middle-class enclave where his father, his mother, his brother and his brother’s family live in a four-story duplex perched on a rocky slope off a suburban-style cul-de-sac. Shai’s brother, Zvi, tends a lovely garden and keeps parrots, whose racket gives the compound a semi-tropical feel.
Sitting on an embankment behind the house, looking over to olive trees on the nearby hills and listening to the distant bleats and jangles of a Bedouin’s herd of sheep, you might mistake the place for Tuscany or Provence. A Mediterranean breeze rustles the leaves of a eucalyptus grove down in the ravine, just as it might in Italy or France — the major difference being, those lands aren’t constantly at war.
Shai lives in a small room under the garage. He spends most of his time on landscaping projects and occasionally travels to the West Bank to protest the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements on Arab land.
Much of the rest of the time, he bikes. He strikes a unique image pedaling solo across the Israeli countryside in faded shorts, a ragged T-shirt and a worn bandanna — none of the bike-geek regalia favored by most Israeli cyclists. A lone cyclist biking like a happy-go-lucky maniac through an Arab town must look pretty non-threatening to the locals.
So Ibrahim, a curious 20-something from the West Bank, had become Shai’s friend, along with a handful of other Arabs in Tira. This morning, Ibrahim was particularly happy to meet his friend’s American cousin.
“Do you have room in your house in Atlanta?” he asked, as he offered us a deliciously strong cup of coffee. We laughed, knowing it was a bitter joke. US Customs wouldn’t have to think too hard before barring the gate from a young male Palestinian without a passport.
Born and raised on the West Bank, Ibrahim wearied of the violence, corruption and, most likely, the lack of opportunity in his village. So, during the 1990s, when people still thought there might be a chance for peace, when conditions were good enough to commute from the West Bank to Israel proper, he found a job in Tira, one of Israel’s more prosperous Arab towns.
Ibrahim is smart and congenial, with a good feel for business and people. He’s done well. He worked his way up to being manager of a small business that Shai frequently visits. (To protect Ibrahim, I’ve changed his name and am leaving out details about his business.)
At first, he moved relatively freely between the West Bank and Israel. But four years ago, the Second Intifada — a Palestinian rebellion against the West Bank occupation — broke out on the heels of the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded with typical heavy-handedness: bulldozing terror suspects’ houses, assassinating terrorist leaders, and killing lots of innocent bystanders. Relations between Arabs and Jews spiraled downward, and Israel closed the West Bank’s access to jobs in Israel.
To visit his relatives and to bring them money, Ibrahim was forced to sneak into the West Bank through a field that separated Israel from the territories. Returning to Israel through the field was even more dangerous. He learned to run in a crouch low enough to keep his head and back from poking above the crop. Otherwise, the border patrol might have shot him.
Last year, Israel finally began to build the security barrier, a heavily patrolled wall and fence to prevent terrorists from sneaking in from the West Bank. Ibrahim decided his future lay on the Israeli side of the barrier.
He plans to marry an Arab girl from the village as a way to stay in Israel. Israel banned most marriages between Arab Israelis and West Bank Arabs because the government feared they’d be ploys to plant terrorists in Israel. This marriage would be a ploy in a different way. Ibrahim figures his future wife’s family can vouch that he’s from the town but that he lost his papers. Then, he could live as an Israeli Arab, perhaps get papers allowing him to attend school and to get a job legally — maybe even get an Israeli passport so that he’d be able to visit, say, Atlanta.
In Hebrew and broken Arabic, Shai wished his friend good luck. In fluent Hebrew, Ibrahim bid us bye as we hopped on our bikes and continued on through Tira.
We pedaled through the sprawling Arab town and curved south toward Kfar Saba, a city of about 80,000 people where Shai’s family had lived when my family first visited in 1969.
Kfar Saba was a different place back then. We visited only two years after Israel had defeated eight Arab countries in the Six-Day War.
In retrospect, that victory set up Israel for its most difficult and potentially corrupting challenge: the occupation. At the time, however, the Six-Day War seemed a miracle. All of us were incredibly proud of the way Israel had fended off its hostile neighbors and was going on with the task of building a just and equitable Jewish homeland.
Shai’s older brother, Eli, had been in the tank corps during the “67 war. In 1969, Shai was a tank commander. He’d hitchhiked back from his army post, like all the Israeli soldiers did in those days. That was super cool to an American kid like me: Soldiers in this spunky country were hip enough to hitchhike!
Kfar Saba was impressive, too. Behind my aunt and uncle’s house were acres of orange groves. The beach was only about a half-hour away. And the town itself was bustling with new shops and — best of all — excellent falafel stands.
Today’s Kfar Saba is like a different city. First, it’s gone blond with thousands of Russian immigrants. Second, while it’s still bustling with new shops, they’re on a more gargantuan scale. Finally, and maybe I’m imagining this, it feels more tense — as if the half-dozen terrorist attacks to hit the city, which is just three miles from the West Bank, have given Kfar Saba a stressful air, even for Israel.
We biked into downtown, and Shai pointed out the mall, one of the largest in the country. Its claim to fame isn’t its size; it’s best known for a couple of terror attacks. The most recent came in November 2002, when the militant group Islamic Jihad sent 20-year-old Nabil Sawalha in from the West Bank to blow himself up in Kfar Saba. He killed two other people and injured 30.
Guards now scan everyone who enters the grounds. The shoppers are utterly nonchalant about being checked. If you’re walking in with someone else, you simply keep speaking with your friend as you absent-mindedly raise your hands or open your satchel.
Another Kfar Saba attack occurred in April 2003, when an 18-year-old West Bank resident named Ahmed Khatib arrived in town on a bus. Khatib got off at Kfar Saba’s new commuter rail station. A security guard — an immigrant from the old Soviet Union named Alexander Kostyuk — stopped him. Khatib detonated the bomb he was carrying. Kostyuk died; 13 other Israelis were injured.
The Israelis quickly rebuilt the damaged facade of the station — the last stop on a new line that carries riders to Tel Aviv. Within a few months, a plaque memorializing the victim was near the entrance.
“Until then,” Shai quipped, “they didn’t know what to name it.”
Our loop back to Kochav Yair took us east on the old road toward Qalqilya, a West Bank town known as a major crossing point for terrorists. It’s only three miles from Kfar Saba to the border, but we weren’t going quite that far. Shai wanted to take me up what he called the Mystery Hill.
The hill really isn’t so mysterious. It’s the old Kfar Saba landfill. Shai had biked up to the top a week earlier, so he led the way through a desolate field surrounding the landfill. We trudged up the road that spiraled to the top and, maybe 150 feet below, we saw a remarkable contrast.
At the foot of the landfill, cars and trucks were whizzing north toward Haifa and south toward Jerusalem on the most modern expressway in Israel, a new toll road called Highway 6. On the other side of the highway was the security barrier, a drab, gray concrete wall about 30 feet high. And behind the wall was the West Bank city of Qalqilya.
You could tell that Qalqilya was a desolate place. Windows were broken. Buildings looked empty. There was no sign of commercial life. Two boys played on the nearest street. A woman in a black robe plodded along, hunched under a heavy load.
The highway looked like Marietta. Qalqilya looked like Afghanistan.
The sad truth is, the wall — or at least that stretch of it — is justifiable. It sits on a recognized border, not just between Israel and the territories but between Israel and the suicide bombers who wish her harm.
Terrorists crept over that part of the border countless times throughout the past few years. After the wall went up, no terrorist attacks have been traced to anyone crossing at Qalqilya.
The problem with the barrier starts just north and just south of Qalqilya, where it turns for a while into a high-tech fence, with razor wire and electronic sensors, and curves east onto the West Bank itself. The fence wraps around both sides of Qalqilya, so that Jewish settlements on the West Bank get to be on the Israeli side of the barrier. Then, the fence tightens on the backside of the town like a noose. And as if that wasn’t enough to choke the life out of a regional agricultural market like Qalqilya, the Israeli army set up a checkpoint on the one side of town where there isn’t a barrier, ensuring traffic jams at its only egress.
Journalists who have traveled recently to Qalqilya confirm that the town of about 40,000 is suffocating. The New York Times reported that the barrier cut farmers off from their fields and greenhouses (we could see those greenhouses from the Mystery Hill). The Christian Science Monitor reported in August that the city had lost 3,000 residents and 600 businesses since the wall had risen.
Tangents like those around Qalqilya, which diverge from the internationally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank, caused the International Court of Justice in The Hague to rule earlier this month that the barrier is a violation of international law.
In effect, Israel is enclosing the entire Palestinian nation. Qalqilya is only one of the more visible examples. Gaza already is fenced off from the rest of the world. And the new network of 200 miles of walls, fences and checkpoints around and within the West Bank amounts to a massive system of corrals for three million people.
In the Middle Ages, Italians came up with the word “ghetto” to describe the quarters where Jews were required to live. It is an eerie thing today for a Jew to look down from the Mystery Hill and see that his people have built the world’s largest ghetto.
Kochav Yair is gated, but it’s more like a cocoon than a ghetto. The town has the feel of a well-to-do Southern California subdivision. Large stucco homes with red-tile roofs. Beautifully tended gardens and courtyards. Pocket parks with playgrounds. Lots of golden retrievers.
It’s a testament to Israeli perseverance that these residents have overcome challenges like war and terrorism while continually improving their standard of living. Nothing stops them. If terrorists bomb the mall, hire more security guards and keep shopping. If terrorists bomb the train station, fix it up and keep rolling. If terrorists sneak across the border, build a wall and keep on trucking down that brand new highway.
Maybe it’s because of the conflict that everything moves so quickly. If you stopped and thought about it, you’d get kind of depressed.
In her kitchen, after the usual family kibitzing over this or that had died down, my Aunt Chedva turned to me to say something suddenly serious: “We are so, so afraid now.” Her voice was trembling.
Chedva and her husband, Joe, arrived in Haifa in 1948 on one of the last ships before the first war broke out between the Arabs and the Jews. They rode into Jerusalem on a bus that was ambushed; it rolled into town with three dead and an injured driver. She gave birth to Eli during the siege of Jerusalem, while Joe was off defending a Jewish position from the Egyptian legion. Later on, in the 60s and 70s, all three of their sons saw combat.
Then, in the late 90s, came the dashed hopes of the Oslo peace process. And now this.
It’s not the violence that my Aunt Chedva fears. It’s the possibility that the dream she’s lived — to build a peaceful homeland — is slipping away for another generation. It’s the possibility that her grandchildren will be living the same struggle.
Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and the terror groups surely helped to make peace difficult. Every time there’s been a chance at a solution over the past few years, the Palestinians have been sure to ruin the opportunity.
But the problem isn’t just the Palestinians; there’s also the unwillingness of Israelis to abandon the West Bank. After 37 years of occupation, the settlers are so entrenched that the rest of the nation doesn’t have the fortitude to yank them out off what essentially is and should be Arab land.
So Israel plods further and further into becoming an international pariah. So “the situation” goes from bad to dire. The people are so used to it they pretend their lives are normal.
One afternoon, Shai and I showed up at Kochav Yair’s shopping center just as a “suspicious object” had been discovered in the parking lot. We leaned over a railing on the second-floor walkway just as a small truck careened into the lot. Two men hopped out.
“Why are we walking over here, Mommy?” a toddler said to his mother as they passed behind us.
“Because we didn’t want to be near the bomb in the parking lot,” the mother said.
“What happens if the bomb blows up, Mommy?”
“That’s why we’re walking over here,” she said matter-of-factly.
The suspicious object was flat, blue and metallic. It was sitting in a shopping cart in the middle of the lot. One member of the bomb squad placed a portable winch on the asphalt. Then, draping himself in protective gear, he grabbed one end of the cable attached to the winch and walked quickly past the cart. He wrapped the cable around a railing near the sidewalk, returned to the cart, and calmly attached the cable.
He headed back to the winch and turned it on. It reeled in the cable, which yanked the cart toward a curb. The cart fell over, and the blue object tumbled onto the ground and opened harmlessly. The bomb squad guy unhooked his cable. As he turned and headed back toward his truck, he waved his hands in a nonchalant, coast-is-clear gesture. Immediately, the lot filled with people who’d been waiting with their groceries and watching the drama from inside the supermarket. Without so much as glancing at the object, they scurried toward their cars.
Another day, another bomb threat. Time to get on with business.
The object turned out to be one of those portable picnic tables that folds out to create four seats. But it was broken.
“You need a picnic table,” Shai said. “There’s your souvenir.”
“No way,” I told him. “You need it for your back yard.”
He picked up the “suspicious object,” walked to the car, and threw it in the trunk. Nobody gave us a second glance.
I hadn’t planned to travel to Jerusalem on this trip. But back in the States, I was asked to visit a distant cousin from the ultra-orthodox branch of the family.
His name is Ariel. He’s from Miami, and he’s spending his first two years after high school in a small religious school, or yeshiva, on the outskirts of the city.
I hadn’t seen Ariel since he was 2, so I was surprised when a tall young man in a yarmulke came to the door. We went for a stroll in a park at the end of his street. I asked Ariel to tell me the most interesting thing he’d learned in Israel so far.
He cast his eyes into the sky for a moment. Then, he said, “Oh yes, this is a good one.”
For half an hour, I listened to my young cousin offer a discourse on the first sentence of a book in the Bible called Samuel. “Now there was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim,” the book begins.
Suddenly, this 19-year-old, who was spending hours upon hours studying the Bible in the basement of his yeshiva, sounded like on old rabbi — dissecting every word in a brief, holy passage for hidden meaning.
The gist of the message he got from this mind-bending was that the Hebrew name for the hometown of Samuel’s father means “a high place,” which therefore signifies a connection between prophets and “high places.”
Other parts of the Bible hint that “high” is a metaphor for something else, and God — obviously, only God — knows what multiple meanings Ariel and his teachers could extract by juxtaposing those uses of “high” with this one.
His point was that the Bible values a “high place” as a vantage point. “Sometimes,” he explained, “we call a prophet a seer.”
“Let me explain it to you this way,” Ariel finally said. “Imagine a man walking down a street with buildings on both sides. How can he know that another man is walking down the next street over? And how can the man on the other street know that the first man is walking down the first street?
“But if another man was at the top of a hill,” Ariel continued, “then he could see both men. So this is why we value a high place.”
A high place, I thought. Just the other day, I’d been contemplating that very thing.
I told Ariel about the high place I’d been to, about the Mystery Hill and the struggle to climb it, about the highway and the ugly concrete wall, about the city behind it and the children playing in the street, about the stocky woman carrying a heavy load.
Ariel paused for a moment and nodded knowingly.
“It’s not,” he said, “that I don’t feel badly for them.”
Ken Edelstein is Editor of Creative Loafing in Atlanta.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2004.
