Israel: beyond the fence
On stepping into the hotel foyer on the morning of my first day in Israel, I noticed a man sitting patiently next to a coffee table, with a rifle slung casually over his shoulder. Jeremy Leigh, our guide, told us that it is normal for groups to have armed guards, and that it's nothing to worry about.
Coming from Northern Ireland, I am well used to seeing armed soldiers and police on the streets, but the sight of a rifle in an otherwise mundane scene disturbed me greatly, largely because of the nonchalance with which everyone else accepted his presence.
Later on we went to Café Hillel - a sort of Israeli version of Café Nero - for lunch. The guard's name was Chayim and we had an enthusiastic, if often confused, conversation. He did not speak much English but we quickly established that he didn't do very well at school ("I was... how you say... a hooligan"), that he likes football (he used to be a goalkeeper before he was injured) and that he likes Eyal Berkovic, the Portsmouth midfielder. Once I had recovered from my shock that he was actually a month younger than I am, I started to feel that I was on familiar ground, and the focus of my attention shifted from the gun on his back. I started to think that perhaps Israel was a normal place after all.
Then Jeremy mentioned that this was the site of a suicide bomb in September and the surrealness of it all sank in. We were sitting feet away from the spot where a terrorist killed himself and 15 others only a few months previously, and there was not so much as a plaque commemorating the incident. The trendy staff continues to serve lattés and mochas and the customers chat and sip their cappuccinos as in any other cafe. Except it becomes noticeable that they huddle towards the back of the room, to distant themselves from explosions.
Additionally, there is an armed guard at the door with a metal detector, which is also common. These people are continually faced with the fact that they may come into contact with someone who will be so hell-bent on ending their lives that they become indifferent to their own. And it is with unsettling ease that this fact is internalised into their everyday life.
This explains a lot about Israel. It explains how they have consistently repelled their hostile neighbours, despite its tiny population. It explains why the Israeli military are one of the most advanced in the world, while relying to a great extent on national service. It also explains the severity with which they treat the Palestinian population and their consequent willingness to resort to measures as extreme as building a colossal security fence along the West Bank.
We visited the contentious 'security fence' under the supervision of men from an Israeli security thinktank. Both had military experience - one used to be in the Special Forces, the other in 'the Israeli equivalent of MI5'. The fence is a physical monstrosity, the reification of the metaphorical scars the country already carries. The structure is about 70 metres wide and consists of a couple of dense layers of razor wire, a deep trench to prevent vehicles charging it, an alarmed and particularly high central fence, and a road in the middle for the Israeli Army to patrol. When the division traverses urban areas it becomes a concrete wall due to the amount of space the fence requires. Either way, it is impossible to transgress unless via a checkpoint.
Our guides were advocates of the fence being built, although they had strong reservations about the route that it is taking and the consequent political ramifications. They did not attempt to hide the suffering and humiliation that it imposed on the Palestinian population. First we visited the most northerly point of the West Bank, about ten kilometres from Jenin, site of the infamous Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Our next stop was part of the fence near a village called Anin. The security divides the village from the olive groves to its west, hence divorcing it from its main source of income. Farmers have to wait for Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to open the gate in order to harvest their crop, and a large portion of their land was used to make the fence. The compensation offered, by our guides' admission, was insufficient and typically refused.
A few miles down the road we were taken to a checkpoint, where a pair of soldiers warily observed the continuous stream of Palestinians on their way to work. It was a strange situation. Under an imposing watchtower soldiers talked next to an armoured jeep. The soldiers approached us, obviously concerned about us taking photos. I was becoming somewhat nervous until it became apparent that they looked like a comedy duo - one was short and tubby, the other tall and gawky, and neither looked much older than 19. They skulked off after an abrupt conversation with Yitzhak, a genial man from a local kibbutz. The IDF soldiers had effectively been told to piss off by an ageing, bearded lefty. The Palestinians enjoy no such power of persuasion.
This checkpoint was to the West of a village called Baka Al-Gharbia, a village which, due to a gaffe by the Israeli authorities, has found itself enclosed by the security fence on either side. The village has a section which is Israeli-Arab - Arabs who are entitled to Israeli citizenship. The route which the fence initially took put these Israeli-Arabs on the wrong side of the fence, which undermines Israel's strong sense of citizenship. So they built another section of fence and the village finds itself in an enclave. It is a fairly unfathomable mistake to make - the fence costs around $2 million per kilometre so, aside from it alienating and humiliating the Palestinian population, there is good reason for the Israeli Government to be careful where they put it. On the other side of the village the partition is a wall. It provides an apocalyptic environment, as the building of the wall necessitated the destruction of a market. The remaining debris provided a hint of what was there before: twisted metal, broken tiles, and even some bones where, presumably, a meat stall had been bulldozed. It was difficult to comprehend that this scene was not the remnant of long-forgotten carnage, but rather an extremely recent occurrence. Already the little bits and pieces of everyday trade looked like archaeological artefacts.
It is natural to wonder what prompts the construction of a partition that causes so much hardship and is so costly, both financially and in terms of global opinion. A brief visit to the Kibbutz Metzer provided a clear answer. In November 2002 a gunman entered the collective community and shot five people, including two young children, whose mother was killed attempting to protect them. Yitzhak described the good relations the Kibbutz had with the local Palestinians, how they had, over the course of their 50-year existence, shared resources and even campaigned for the security fence to better accommodate the olive groves belonging to the Palestinian village Kafin. With depraved irony the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade (the military body linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation) attacked a model of Israeli moderation and Cupertino. Yitzhak maintained that the attack had served to strengthen relations between Metzer and the local Palestinian and Arab-Israeli villages.
I hope he's right.
22nd Jan 2004