On the Road

We are working on a film about the roads here in Palestine (1) which takes us on many adventures as we drive around the West Bank with our camera pointed through the windshield. Sometimes the two of us just drive to see where we will get to and what we will find along the way. Other times we take along guides or passengers in exchange for their stories or comments on the drive. Most recently:

Ramallah to Jenin: We take our friend Sonia and her 13 year old son Qays to visit her elderly mother in Jenin. We go by taxi because we are not sure whether we can take our car with yellow plates into Jenin(2). We pass through approximately 4 checkpoints on the way, our driver nervously telling us to please put our camera away at the checkpoints. It is spring and the almond blossoms are blooming. Sonia is feeling nostalgic and narrates the journey for us, alternating between romantic tales of the past and resentment towards the Israeli presence felt everywhere. We decide to stay overnight with them, and walk around Jenin in the evening noticing everyone noticing us, a little surprised at the abundance of martyr banners on the lampposts.

Ramallah to Beit Ijza: Our 19-year old Arabic teacher Rand is very anxious to assist us. We tell her what we are working on and she asks whether we will take her on one of our drives, so we do. We have seen an image of a particularly brutal section of a road that is enclosed on either side by two massive walls, funneling Palestinians past settlements to outlying villages. Our neighbour Kleemans tells us this road leads to a home which is physically surrounded by a settlement. We find the road, the wall and the home embedded in the settlement. It is all a bit too much for Rand, who alternates between astonishment and crying. The man who lives in his home surrounded by the settlement is enclosed by a 20-foot high fence with barbed wire on top. I imagine the shape of his property in plan which must look like a lollipop, the driveway being the stick.

Ramallah to Nablus: We have adopted a baby lesbian here in Ramallah who has found a girlfriend from Nablus on the internet. Besides us, A and M don’t know any other lesbians in Palestine, which is probably why they got together. We have become a conduit for this budding romance, and decide to chaperone A to Nablus to see her girl, not asking her what web of lies we may be implicated in. We drive to Nablus in our car hoping to interview A along the way, but the interview is useless as she is not much of a talker, and probably more interested in her upcoming date, than indulge our questions on the road system. We ask her what she hopes for Palestine and she mumbles something about peace as she stares out the window. At the checkpoint we are not allowed in to Nablus so we leave our car and take a taxi into town. Despite being a new romance, A and M seem very familiar with each other and have an interactive style somewhere between flirtation and bickering. Unlike straight young love in Nablus, A and M can walk the streets together freely without scandal (lesbians don’t exist of course!). After lunch with Mom, we leave the two alone (that is, with her three brothers and mother) and head back home to Ramallah photographing the roads on the way.

Jerusalem to Hebron: We ask Ezra to take us on a tour of southern Palestine as this is his turf. We start in Jerusalem and head down south, weaving our way through Palestinian towns, Bedouin camps and settlements taking a combination of Palestinian roads and settler bypass roads. He wanted to show us the situation in Hebron, so we drove in the particularly nasty way, through Kiryat Arba, the settlement side of town which has been encroaching on the old part of Hebron. We soon found ourselves in the midst of checkpoint, army and settler hell. We were doing pretty well touring the insanity, until we got pulled over and ‘detained’. The army took our passports and two potty-mouthed settlers gathered round, filming us sitting in our car for some reason. They seemed to know Ezra already and had some odd insults regarding his manhood, contrasting their proliferation of children to his preference for houseplants. Ezra was so experienced in this charade he simply waited until our passports were returned and we drove back to Jerusalem to have dinner. I think we broke a record for how many checkpoints we passed that day. I don’t even remember.

Ramallah to Jericho: We had filmed the road to Jericho before, an old road recently refurbished for Palestinians as they are cutting them off from the No.1 highway which connects Jerusalem to the Jordan valley. This time however, we walked. We went with a hiking group from Ramallah which gets up at 6am most Fridays and heads to the hills exploring various trails and paths around Ramallah. We were a little worried after the taxi dropped us off near a remote village and the leader pulled out an inkjet print of a Google earth ‘map’ with our path sketched in blue marker between large mountains (3). Yet we were new to the group and put our faith in these seasoned hikers who must know where they are going. After about 3 hours of walking through valleys, across cliffs and down rocky ledges we were told that we didn’t exactly know where we were and, that we weren’t going to stop for breakfast yet. The good news was that there was really only one path, which was through the wadi (4) until it emerged on the eastern side of the range, hopefully near some form of transportation. The bad news was that elle’s knee gave out, so ‘hiking’ became more like ‘hobbling’ (accompanied with a side dish of serious kvetching). Well, in the end with the help of local shepherds, we emerged near a Bedouin village where we caught a taxi back to Jericho and then another back to Ramallah. In the cab on the way home, we chatted with a woman who pulled out her ID card at the checkpoint. Under nationality it stated: ****** (5). She had the blue ID, a Jerusalem ID as it was called, but no official identity.

Was she lost? No way, she knew exactly what side of the road she lived on.

Footnotes

1) Known as the ‘apartheid’ road system as most roads are segregated (between Jewish settlers and Palestinians) and controlled through a matrix of checkpoints and military towers.
2) Our rental car is Israeli and has yellow plates as opposed to the green Palestinian ones. Certain areas of Area ‘A’ do not allow Israeli cars (although Ramallah seems to be an exception).
3) We have a set of amazing Israeli hiking maps charting every square inch of Palestine, which would have been very helpful, but we kept that to ourselves….
4) Riverbed
5) That’s not an expletive: ****** is truly what it says next to “nationality”!