The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (24 page)

The month after my grandfather’s funeral, my friend Raja Shehadeh, a former human-rights lawyer and passionate path-follower, travelled to Cambridge from his home in Ramallah in Palestine to walk with me. For two days we tramped footpaths and old ways through the late-summer East Anglian countryside: along the Anglo-Saxon earthwork of Fleam Dyke, which runs like a raised and linear wildwood across the chalk valley to the south of Cambridge, through ripe fields of corn and barley, our arms raised up above the crops as though in surrender, along cliff paths out on the crumbling Suffolk coast, and at last onto the great shingle spit of Orford Ness, formerly a nuclear weapons testing site, where the buildings and debris of the Cold War decades now dilapidate in the salt air. ‘I look forward to a time,’ said Raja, ‘when the landscape of my own country has been demilitarized in this way, and we in Palestine are able to regard the artefacts of war as museum objects, rather than as live threats.’

As we went we talked about the differences between walking in Britain and walking in Palestine. I told Raja about my crossing of Lewis and Harris, about the ritual circlings of Sula Sgeir (by boat) and Steve’s ring of megaliths (on foot), about the beehive shielings in which I’d slept, about the watcher on the shore with his binoculars who had monitored my progress, the walk to my grandfather’s funeral, and looking into the Pools of Dee.

Raja told me in turn about claustrophobia, restricted movement and conflict. He said that as a Palestinian it was unadvisable to walk outside the main cities, and that if you chose to do so it was unadvisable to carry a map, a camera or a compass, in case you met an Israeli patrol, for all were items that would provoke suspicion, confiscation and even detention. A friend of Raja’s had been imprisoned for eleven days for taking photographs while walking in Northern Israel, up near the Golan Heights.

Raja had been walking
the hills and paths of the Ramallah region for more than forty years. When he began walking, before the Six-Day War of 1967, the appearance of the hills was largely unchanged from the time of the Roman occupation, and it was possible for him to move more or less unimpededly among them: to conduct what in Arabic is known as a
sarha
. In its original verbform,
sarha
meant ‘to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, allowing them to wander and graze freely’. It was subsequently humanized to suggest the action of a walker who went roaming without constraint or fixed plan. One might think the English equivalent to be a ‘stroll’, an ‘amble’ or a ‘ramble’, but these words don’t quite catch the implications of escape, delight and improvisation that are carried by
sarha
. ‘Wander’ comes close, with its word-shadow of ‘wonder’, as does the Scots word ‘
stravaig
’, meaning to ramble without set goals or destination, but best of all perhaps is ‘saunter’, from the French
sans terre
, which is a contraction of
à
la sainte terre,
meaning ‘to the sacred place’; i.e. ‘a walking pilgrimage’. Saunter and
sarha
both have surface connotations of aimlessness, and smuggled connotations of the spiritual.

Since the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel in 1967, Raja had watched the open landscape around Ramallah increase in hazard and diminish in size. It had become gradually more difficult for him to find paths near his home that weren’t cut across by a settlers’ bypass road, or that didn’t lead too close to a militia training area or an Israeli army post. The Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank has brought with it a lavish road-building project, with the use of the new roads usually restricted to Israelis and their routes secured by the army. Ramallah, too, had sprawled as a city, its planning restrictions lax, eating up more of the countryside around it.

So Raja’s
sarha
had become almost impossible. Hills that had once for him connoted freedom had come to feel endangered and endangering. Nevertheless, Raja still walked: a minimum of once a week, usually more. Sometimes only a couple of miles, sometimes ten or twelve if routes could be found that avoided difficulties. Paths that had connected village to village or village to town for many centuries had been closed by the Israelis; long diversions were often necessary. As walking had become less easy, it had become correspondingly more important to him – a way of defeating the compression of space of the Occupation; a small but repeated act of civil disobedience.

Occasionally, Raja told me, walking allowed him briefly to forget the situation on the ground. He spoke of the pleasure he felt at being out beyond checkpoints, walls and barriers, of feeling ‘giddy with joy’ under a wide-open sky. Sometimes the evidence of the spans of geological history, the knowledge that he was walking on limestone which had formed as the bed of an ancestral sea, crushed his frustrations at the Palestinian predicament to a wafer. He had written a book about life in the West Bank called
Palestinian Walks
(2007), in which path-following figured as an explicitly political act and walking as a means of resistance. But walking was also, for Raja, the means for inner voyages, and the passage through landscape was a hugely private as well as intensely political experience. The landscape – the depressions of the Dead Sea and the Rift Valley, the elevations of the Ramallah hills – were both cause and correlate of profound shifts in his own spirit.

Not long after Raja walked in East Anglia with me, I travelled out to the West Bank to join him on a
sarha
.

I reached Ramallah as dark fell. Winding terraced hills of limestone, ceding to marly chalk. Piles of rubble and rubbish in the city outskirts. Jasmine, lemon and bougainvillea lining the streets, scenting the air. Hooded crows scavenging in trash-heaps, making two-footed hops. Posters on telephone poles advertised ‘The 29th Basketball Match of the Martyrs’. The walls were tagged with green, red and black spray-can graffiti. The bougainvillea were on the turn, and had shed hundreds of thousands of white petals, like vellum pages, which gathered on the pavements in flocks.

I sat in a chair by a lemon tree in the courtyard of Raja’s house, recovering from the journey. The square of sky above, framed by the courtyard walls, was pricked with stars. I had not had an easy border crossing at Tel Aviv airport. My passport had been confiscated and my luggage searched. I had been questioned for an hour and a half by a series of officials in a series of rooms of diminishing size: airport entrance hall, side room, back room, booth. My questioners had been especially suspicious of the flints I had brought as gifts for Raja and others in the West Bank (I would later discover why). At last I’d been allowed to go, and my final questioner had escorted me back to the entrance hall, murmuring apologies for the mild inconvenience. He hoped that I understood the situation, the necessity. He hoped that I would have a good stay in Israel.

I left him, trying to walk confidently, truthfully, on my jelly legs across the hall: like a drunk driver attempting to pace off the road-dashes to prove his sobriety. I imagined that there was a path ahead of me on the glossy tiled floor, to which I had to keep, and this steadied my gait a little.

Raj and his wife Penny had heard many versions of this story, many times before. They calmed me, set my minor difficulties in context.

Later that evening, Raja drove me up to an unlit road that ran along the high ground on the south-west of Ramallah. From the road edge, the land fell steeply away in terraces. We got out, and stood looking across the landscape.

‘This is where we will walk from tomorrow,’ Raja said.

The valley at our feet was in darkness. Beyond it was a strange pattern of lights. Nearest to us, at our altitude, were squashed ellipses with ribbons of paired lights swooping up to them. Between the ellipses, but lower, were untidy neon scatters. Further away, in the distance, a curve of sodium orange, then pure blackness. I recalled an account I’d read of certain Aboriginal Australian dream-runners who were exceptionally fluent in the Songlines, and whose knowledge allowed them to move across the land at great speed in the dark, for they saw the glow of the song as vividly as if they were running along great lighted pathways.

‘Twelve in that direction alone,’ said Raja.

‘Twelve?’

‘Settlements. The rings of light are the Jewish settlements on the hilltops, with the well-lit roads leading up to them. The smaller lights, lower down, are the Palestinian villages. The curve beyond them is the coast of what is now Israel. The darkness is the Mediterranean. Over there is Jaffa, where my family lived before the
Nakba
.’

It was all so small in scale, absurdly small. You can see from the middle of the West Bank right across Israel to the Mediterranean. It felt as if I could have thrown a stone from where I was standing into the nearest settlement.

‘It will be necessary to be vigilant tomorrow,’ Raja said, as we looked out over the darkness and the light. ‘Down there’ – he gestured into the valley – ‘is where Penny and I were pinned down by gunfire, behind a boulder.’ They had been walking during the wild early years of the second
intifada
when bullets suddenly struck the rock above their heads. They sheltered while ricochets and limestone splinters hissed around them. Not Israeli settlers, but Palestinian militia – practising their aim, choosing live targets.

There had been other alarming encounters: Palestinian villagers who thought Raja was an Israeli settler; Israeli settlers who thought Raja was a Palestinian villager. Three years ago, while out walking with an English friend, Louisa Waugh, he had been confronted by two young Palestinian men, unrecognizable beneath their
kaffiyehs
. They were carrying cudgels. ‘Except for you,’ they had said, ‘we would slaughter her immediately,’ pointing to Louisa. ‘It is
halal
for us to kill the guilty English.’

The next morning, not long after dawn, we left from Raja’s house to begin the first of our walks, down a long curling valley, Wadi ’qda, which trends westwards towards the coast and through which runs an ancient right of way that follows the wadi line. The sides of the valley were formed of hundreds of receding terraces of limestone, scrubbed with olive and oak and streaked beige, cream and ivory by the heavy marl that mixed with the limestone. I felt very nervous.

We dropped off the edge of the high road and down a poorly tarmacked hairpin track. Almost immediately we met with a bad omen. A thin breeze-block wall, plastered with cement, which had been turned into a firing range. Targets were scratched onto the plaster: concentric circles plugged by bullet-holes. Green glass bottles were lined up along the top of the wall. Most had had their tops shot off. I started humming ‘Ten Green Bottles’ to myself; the song would buzz like a fat fly, like a greenbottle, in my brain for the rest of the day.

‘Militia or police?’ I asked Raja.

‘It could be either. Most probably police.’ It was only over the past three years or so that an effective Palestinian police force had been established, reclaiming most of the West Bank towns from armed gangs. They needed somewhere to train.

A hundred yards further on, the road ran out, dribbling to a stop next to a part-completed villa. We moved onto rough ground and picked up a path that descended the terracing, towards the wadi bed. The heat of the day was building but a big westerly wind was also blowing. At the base of an olive tree was a scatter of big bullet-casings. They looked like the spoor of a creature: AK-47 droppings.

The sunlight fell hard as timber. Big holm oaks grew here and there among the olives. Bryony with its baroque-heart leaves snaked up stands of teasel: unexpected botanical rhymes with the chalk-lands of Thomas’s English South Country. Marjoram, sage, thyme and hyssop. Everywhere was
natsch
, a scrubby spiny thistle that grows to ankle height throughout the West Bank. The existence of
natsch
has been used by Israeli land-lawyers as a floral shorthand for waste ground – evidence that an area of land is not being farmed or maintained. Once designated as unused, the area of land can be reclassified as ‘public’ land and then more easily requisitioned when necessary for Israeli purposes. Everything here, including botany, is political.

Land in the West Bank is zoned by the Israelis into three areas: A, B and C. A is for the major Palestinian towns and cities. B is for the villages. The rest of the West Bank, the open country, is C, and is out of bounds to Palestinians. Raja told me this with some pleasure when we crossed into Zone C and became trespassers according to Israeli law.

A big dog fox broke cover on the other side of the valley, vaulted downhill, disappeared into rocks, bringing the barren slope to life. After a mile or so of moving along the terraces, we came to a tower made out of limestone that had been tanned by the marl to a yellowish brown. It was a
qasr
, a traditional building used as a base by farmers and shepherds.
Qasrs
dot the hills of the West Bank; most are ruined. This one was intact and corbelled, and reminded me instantly of the beehive shielings. I went in through the narrow doorway on hands and knees. Raja followed.

‘Actually, it is a good idea to offer warning of coming,’ he said, his voice echoey in the cool space. ‘Throw a stone in first, so that any snakes or scorpions will retreat. You can think of it as a gesture of politeness, like knocking on a door.’

Raja is precise in his movements and his speech. Physically, he is small, bird-like. When he’s looking for the right word, he rubs his forefinger and thumb together as if crumbling something friable, reducing it to finer units. When he’s thinking about something, he tilts his head a little to one side. A comment which requires no response from him is met with none. It took me some time to interpret his silence not as a reprimand but merely as an efficiency. His humility is uncontrived. He has none of the English modesty which knowingly depresses evidence of achievement in order that it might spring out more forcefully at some future point. His modesty is a function of the sense that his own life will always remain subservient to the larger questions of his region.