Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (28 page)

I decided that May 4 would be a good time to visit Benny and the Samaritans. First of all, though, I would have to get past the Israeli border authorities. I had reason to believe that this would be tricky. My passport had stamps in it from just about every country that would make them suspicious: Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It had caused me to be detained on arrival at airports in Chicago and London; I could only imagine what would happen in security-conscious Tel Aviv. Long before, though, during my posting to Jerusalem, I had spent some weeks learning Hebrew. I thought this might help me break the ice a little with the authorities, but then realized that all I remembered was a love song. I doubted that that would win anyone over.

The border guard at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport was puzzled. “You’re coming for Passover?” she said. “But Passover is finished.” I tried to explain that there was another Passover, celebrated in a little village in the West Bank by a group called the Samaritans—and as I said it, I realized she had never heard of them. I was ushered aside to a special waiting room in a corner of the arrivals hall, dedicated to suspect individuals who would need extensive interrogation. I sat on a bench. About a dozen Palestinian women were on a bench opposite me. Next to me was a dark-skinned boy who had the twisted
peyot
(long sideburns) and
kippa
(head covering, also called a yarmulke) of an Orthodox Jew and a huge sack of consumer goods with labels in Arabic. He was from Yemen, he told me, and had just come back from a visit to his family in a village near that nation’s capital, Sana’a. Until a few months earlier, he had been one of Yemen’s four hundred remaining Jews; he was now waiting for Israeli citizenship.

The interrogation was mercifully brief, because one of the staff in the airport had heard of the Samaritans and came to my rescue. So within a couple of hours I had boarded a bus to Jerusalem and was trying for the benefit of a fellow passenger, a tourist from Scandinavia, to describe the sights to her as the memory of them rushed back. Behind us was the seaside city of Tel Aviv, built in the twentieth century by Jewish migrants; here on the left was the Arab village of Abu Ghosh; and ahead was Jerusalem—“golden Jerusalem,” as a hit Israeli song from the 1960s had it. The most golden thing about the city was the dome of its foremost Muslim shrine. But just as the white stone of its buildings reflected the changing light of the sun, Jerusalem was a city whose personality shifted according to the angle from which one saw it. It is the site of Israel’s government, but also a major destination for tourists both religious and secular; an architectural jewel whose city walls are still a striking landmark that can be seen for miles around, but also a frontier city where religious and secular, Jew and Arab frequently find themselves in unhappy competition for space, and for freedom from fear.

After reaching my hotel that evening I called Benny Tsedaka and asked him how I could best reach the village of al-Loz, on Mount Gerizim. It was easy, he replied: all I had to do was get on a Palestinian minibus at Damascus Gate, in the Old City of Jerusalem. It would take me north, to the Palestinian-run city of Ramallah in the West Bank; there I could catch a different bus, with a Palestinian license plate, to take me to Nablus. From Nablus I could catch a taxi. This sounded feasible: I had ridden Palestinian minibuses before. But there was one more thing I wanted to check before starting the journey. Sometimes, I knew, there were travel restrictions placed on Palestinian vehicles in the West Bank. So I called the Palestinian governor of Nablus to make sure that I would be able to get through to the village. The governor sounded panicked. “They have closed all the roads for the Samaritan Passover,” he said. “You will never make it. Come next week.” I tried to say that it was exactly Passover that I was coming for, but he hung up. I was baffled. But as I thought about alternatives, I realized that there was another way to reach the Samaritans.

When Israel took East Jerusalem and land beyond it, as far as the river Jordan, in the 1967 war, there were many Jews, including in Israel’s government, who wanted to withdraw as soon as possible. Others had a more expansionist vision and wanted to keep the conquered territories. They argued that Israel’s former borders were indefensible. Religious sentiment was on their side: Jerusalem’s Old City, along with what remained of the old Temple, was in Jewish hands for the first time since
AD
70. Israel held on to it, and ever since has taken a series of measures clearly designed to make East Jerusalem an inseparable part of Israel.

A wave of religious Israelis also believed that the rest of the land between Israel’s former eastern border and the river Jordan—the area known as the West Bank—should also forever remain part of the state of Israel. They established settlements there, often using land that had been originally confiscated by Israel for military purposes. Because this represented a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which banned an occupying power from using confiscated land for civilian settlement, this move was instantly controversial. It also committed Israel to a constant confrontation with Palestinian villagers living near the settlements, while the settlers made easy targets for terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, the religious settlers were joined by others drawn by economic motives: the new land, many parcels of which were sited above valuable sources of water and in strategic locations, was made available at low cost to Jewish Israelis. The settlers had cars and buses with Israeli license plates, which were exempt from the road closures and movement restrictions that were imposed on Palestinians. Even if the roads were closed to Palestinians, these would get through—and so I clearly needed to be on one of them. I headed to the Jerusalem central bus station to see if I could find one that might take me anywhere near the Samaritan village.

The bus station was crowded, but the majority of people in it were going to conventional places—Tel Aviv, Netanya, Eilat. After consulting the bus guide I found that the West Bank was served from a special bay at the farthest end of the station. The bus, as I noticed when I boarded it, was armor-plated, and most of my fellow passengers were soldiers with machine guns. The ideologues of the settler movement saw their communities as a return to land that biblically belonged to the Jews, and as an aggressive defiance of terrorism. For Palestinians, they represented a racist exploitation of Israel’s military conquest of the West Bank, and a creeping dispossession that would block their ambitions for an independent state. Over the years clashes between settlers and Palestinians have been frequent and bloody.

The bus headed north and passed through the “separation barrier”: partly fence, partly high wall, it was built to reduce terrorist attacks on Israelis. It has cut off Palestinians from Jerusalem, controversially limiting their access to their holy places, whether Christian or Muslim. On the other side of the wall, I was both in and outside Israel. I was in an Israeli bus, heading to a town that felt like any Israeli town, along an Israeli-built road. Yet I was formally outside Israel: the region I had entered was run not by elected civilians but by a military governor, and non-Jewish children born there are not entitled to Israeli citizenship. A road for Palestinians, rather bumpy and potholed, ran parallel to the Israeli road at certain points and then disappeared. A message reached me on my cell phone, which was switching networks automatically: “Welcome to Palestine. Smell the jasmine, taste the olives!” The plate glass windows kept out the smell and taste, but radio signals, like memory and guilt, could not so easily be blocked. Even the Palestinian and Israeli cell phone networks, it seemed, overlapped and competed.

For years, the focus of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was on drawing a boundary between them. A boundary on a map is a mere two-dimensional thing, however, and during the Camp David negotiations in the year 2000, it was suggested that a three-dimensional one would be needed. The Haram ash-Sharif (known in English as the Temple Mount), which was sacred to Muslims, was on this proposal to have been Palestinian, and the remains of the ancient Jewish Temple beneath it would have been part of Israel. Perhaps even three dimensions are not enough. To understand the complexities of Israel and Palestine a fourth dimension is needed—invisible to the naked eye, but familiar to everyone who lives there: its history. Every place in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza has a name in Arabic and an alternative name in Hebrew; every place likewise has both Jewish and Palestinian associations and history. “Israel” and “Palestine” are still not really used by the inhabitants to describe two separate countries, but rather serve as alternative names for the land that lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The one-fifth of Israeli citizens who are Arab increasingly call themselves Palestinians, while the Israeli settlements that are spreading across the West Bank are making the “two-state solution”—the idea of an independent Palestinian state—less viable with every year that passes.

The city of Nablus, toward which I was heading, is known to Israelis as Shechem—its old biblical name. It is a city with historic Muslim mosques but also houses Jewish holy sites such as Joseph’s Tomb. Similarly, Tel Aviv’s suburbs include the historic Palestinian town of Jaffa; many of the refugees who live on Nablus’s outskirts have their origins there. Nor is it only the geography of the two peoples that is intertwined. The languages are, too: when Ben Yehuda invented the modern Hebrew language and could not find the words he needed in the Bible, he borrowed them from Arabic instead. The process has continued since, with Israelis adopting Arabic slang like
yalla,
which means “let’s go,” and Palestinians using the Hebrew word
mahsoom
for a checkpoint. The two people’s DNA is also related. A study published in 2010 concluded that—setting aside south European influences on Jewish DNA, which might have come from conversions to Judaism—“the closest genetic neighbours to most Jewish populations are the Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze.”

Even if Jews and Palestinians are descended from common ancestors, their religious differences have trumped ties of kinship. The feeling of trust gained by praying together and sharing beliefs ended up mattering more than the trust gained by sharing a family or tribe. Something similar once happened between Jews and Samaritans. A genetics study in 2004 showed that Jewish
kohanim
and Samaritans are closely related—something that backs up the Samaritan claim that they are indeed descendants of Israelite tribes who were spared by the Assyrians.

Reaching the Samaritan village was not a simple business. The settlement that was closest to the Samaritans, I was told by my fellow passengers, was Har Brakha. It was small and fervently religious. Reaching it would mean taking three different buses. The first dropped me at Ariel, a large and bland university town created by ideologues in the 1970s in order to block the creation of a Palestinian state by sitting right in the middle of the West Bank; it had since managed to attract a sizable population, many of whom just wanted cheap housing. I wandered along its quiet tree-lined streets, hungry and looking for a town center that I never found. I gave up on the idea of buying food and waited for my next bus. It was emptier than the first, and now as we traveled I could see vineyards and gardens the local Jewish settlers had cultivated in an attempt to live more authentically biblical lives. If their relations with Palestinians were more peaceful, they might have perceived biblical scenes in a Palestinian village during the olive harvest, or in a Bedouin encampment with a sheikh sitting at the entrance to his tent at midday. Instead, theirs is in every sense a frontier existence.

The second bus dropped me just outside Nablus, at a roadside shelter protected by concrete blast walls with a gas station nearby; it was at the foot of Mount Gerizim, at the top of which was Har Brakha. Great imagination would have been necessary to find any history or holiness there, if not for the group of children standing and waiting for the next bus alongside me. They had the
peyot
of strictly religious Jews, like my Yemeni acquaintance at the airport, and gave me curious glances. Clearly, strangers did not often come this way. The next bus arrived, and took us—boisterous boys at the front, demure girls at the back—up the mountain to the collection of houses that made up Har Brakha. From the edge of the settlement, I could see the Samaritan village three or four hundred yards away; a road led toward it, with trees on one side and an open field on the other. I alighted from the bus and began to walk.

The Israelis call the Samaritan village Kiryat Luza, while its Palestinian name is al-Tor. The Samaritans had a name for it as well: al-Loz. In this as in much else, they studiously tried to be neutral between the two sides. The residents of al-Loz have identity papers from both the Palestinian and Israeli governments—and can also hold passports from neighboring Jordan. They are obviously not Muslims, but neither are they Jews. They manage, most of the time, to remain open to both groups. I had first come to the village in 1998 with a group of Palestinian refugees. This time around I entered the village in the company of a Jewish man, who drew level with me in his van as I was walking and offered me a lift. His front seat was littered with papers, which he swept aside. “There isn’t often anyone in here but me and God,” he joked, and explained that he was a traveling salesman who visited the settlements and Palestinian towns. It was not so dangerous, he said; things were calm just now.

The village itself looked as if it had been designed to be a showcase of diversity. It had only one street, where the village’s teenagers socialized. A bunch of boys were talking in Arabic: some students from Nablus’s university, meeting a Samaritan friend. Girls in miniskirts were sitting at a table in the main shop and speaking Hebrew. They were Samaritans from the suburbs of Tel Aviv and were more integrated into Israeli society (their clothes made that clear: the village’s regular inhabitants were more conservatively dressed). I guessed that these visits might be a good chance for them to find husbands, since Samaritans—and especially Samaritan women—are not allowed to marry outside the religion.