In the Danger Zone (40 page)

Abu Nasim pulls out an ancient TV but can only manage to find one very fuzzy channel. It's running repeats of WWF wrestling, complete with maniacal voice-overs and ridiculous costumes. We sit in this ancient house drinking Arabic coffee and sprawling on cushions as the sun sets on the most fought-over, holiest land on the planet, whilst on the telly a man who looks like a pig on steroids appears to be smashing seven shades of shit out of what I can only describe as a spandex bat.

We bed down for the night in the room we ate in – Marc, Mehjdi Nadir (our WFP driver) and myself – all sprawled out on cushions. Throughout the night the sons cough and splutter, and none of us gets much sleep.

By dawn the room smells pretty rank – the only thing for it is to go for an early walk, so I'm sitting writing this under an olive tree on a Palestinian hillside, shaded from the brutally clear morning sunshine. Whatever religion you are, I defy you to sit here on these crumbling olive grove terraces and not feel some sense of awe and history. Although there's a brief but palpable serenity, looking down towards the Great Rift Valley and across to Jordan you do get a sense, though it troubles me to admit it, that this land has been fertilized with blood, and that perhaps peace doesn't really belong here

The valley is beautiful, bathed in a sharp sunlight and hissing gently with insect life. The ancient terraces ring the hills and there's no movement or sound except for rustling leaves in the trees – until I hear the pop of a distant gunshot ringing out from one from somewhere above. Then, on the hill opposite me, a settler's JCB starts work pounding rocks on the scrubland and digging next to a watchtower. It looks from here as though they are laying out a new cul-de-sac of houses.

A man shouts at me. It's Rashid, the village mayor who's just back from taking his sheep grazing. He's waving at me and shouting
'Salaam,
but he doesn't have time to stop. He warns me (using the international language of finger drawn across throat) not to go any further up the hill or I'll be shot.

I return to the house to help Om Nasim cook bread in her
taboohn,
a goat-dung fired oven. A deep hole has been filled with broken stones and floor tiles, then covered with a steel lid, on top of which is what looks like a pile of ash, but is actually a deep fire of goats' dung smouldering away. She tells me that it never goes out. She wipes away the surface ash, and underneath it's a furnace of bright red embers. Within this has been set a large iron pot half-filled with stones, and this is the oven. She lifts the lid and lays a piece of dough about 60 cm in diameter straight onto the stones, then replaces the lid. After four or five minutes, the bread is baked a deep, mottled brown, marked in places with a little charring, and smelling damn fine. She grabs it out with her bare hands despite the heat, and lays it down to cool, a few stones still sticking to the bread. It has a slight taste of goat's dung which I rather like.

It's time to leave. I have listened to two sets of people who have wildly differing views on the conflict over these hills, and it's difficult to know who's right and who's wrong, and even harder to see how a resolution to this conflict can ever be found.

Nablus

I'm heading for one of the unhappiest places on the planet: Nablus, the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank, next to both Itamar and Yanun. It's a renowned centre for Palestinian militants, entirely surrounded by the Israeli army, and inside it's awash with weaponry, frustration and anger. Six Israeli checkpoints control all access for people and goods in and out of the city and many people haven't been able to leave since the second intifada in 2001 because of the number of suicide bombers who came from there.

The drive is tense. I get through the checkpoint with just a few cursory frowns from the soldiers, and a few hundred metres inside I pick up my guide, Alaa (who has great difficulty getting through checkpoints) and he takes over the driving. He tells me that there's a rally going on in the old city for a militant who died recently and suggests that we go along. I'm a little wary, but he assures me that it'll be safe.

In a small central square, three or four hundred men and boys have gathered to listen to men reading out speeches. The atmosphere is bitter, angry and violent. On the back of a truck about 30 men stand in military clothing, each holds an Ml6, and they fire into the air after every few sentences to show their appreciation, deafening everyone around them. I worry for the hundred or so young boys sitting on top of the adjacent buildings and Alaa says that every now and then people get shot by mistake at these rallies. There are other gunmen scattered around the square who occasionally get so worked up by the speeches that they, too, start firing into the air, at which point everyone starts panicking in case it's the Israelis trying to snatch the militants. 'The men on the truck are all wanted men,' says Alaa, 'but they don't care if anyone sees them – they are dead already and it's just a matter of time.'

The kids on the rooftops are clearly in awe of the militants, and it's not hard to see why. In a city where children have bleak futures and little cause for optimism, a life as a famous fugitive followed by a blaze-of-glory ending is as much as they can hope for. And quite apart from the sense of retribution, anger and religious zeal, to these boys, being a militant is
cool.
The guys with guns command respect that they're unlikely to find any other way.

I stick out a mile, but Alaa has warned people that I'd be here, so they tolerate my presence. I am invited up onto the truck to get a better view, and they fire their guns very close to my ears, so that I'm soon rendered entirely deaf. When a man starts singing a song to the dead militant, Alaa suggests we leave.

You can sense the pressure in this city, and although the Palestinian Authority has nominal control here, Nablus's main police station has been hit repeatedly in Israeli air strikes. That night, there's sporadic gunfire, including a startling burst as I'm on the phone to my daughter. I speak up and talk nonsensically to try to cover up the noise. Later, I'm woken by more gunfire, but I'm getting used to it now, and I go back to sleep.

Nablus Bakery

I get up at dawn and head for the old city. This place is classically beautiful in the mould of Damascus or Istanbul, all white stone and paved streets swarming with old gents smoking and drinking tiny glasses of sweet tea. But when you take a closer look, the walls are covered in flyposters of militants wielding guns, and the occasional outline of Israel, depicted dripping with blood. Alaa says that they are pictures of dead 'martyrs' Some of them look as young as 16.

It's a while before I notice that sitting in the alleys I stroll past are men holding Ml6 rifles and eyeing me with suspicion. 'There are a lot of wanted men here,' says Alaa, 'militants who would be shot on sight by the Israelis.'

I ask why they are sitting openly on the streets. 'It's OK; the Israelis can't operate in the middle of the old town, it's too dangerous for them.'

I wander down tiny alleys, along cobbled walkways and up precipitous staircases until we find Abu Sharif, a gently spoken one-armed baker in his 60s who works with two of his brothers. He lives with seven of his family in a small second-floor set of rooms with a view-out towards the hills ringing Nablus. He agrees to let me help him for the day and we head off to the bakery.

His two brothers and one of his sons have got there before us and the wood-fired oven is nearly up to temperature. They make four different types of bread – mainly wholemeal pittas and flatbreads made from flour (only Palestinian flour), water and salt – no yeast. I offer to help. 'You can try, but you'll only slow us down,' they say. I manage to bake the simpler breads easily enough, sliding them into the inferno with a flat paddle, and yanking out the cooked ones so they are just about marketable. But when it comes to spreading the dough to make wider ones, I am clearly a shambles, turning perfectly good balls of dough into Munch grotesques. I try to lay out the dough balls for proving instead, but I'm just as cack-handed at that, and the brothers are soon cackling with laughter.

Despite my ineptitude, the bread tastes wonderful. I pull loaves out and drop them onto a stone ledge where they sit sighing steam. They cool for a minute, then I rip them apart and the wonderful smell wafts into my nose. They are browned and slightly charred in places, and the taste of the charred bits is sublime. We start by making a few brown pittas and then we churn out hundreds of flatbreads of all shapes and sizes. Abu Sharif's brother Keza makes a batch of white flour breads for his family who won't eat anything else, much to his dismay, but the breads that sell on the ramshackle stall outside are the wholemeal ones.

As they teach me, we talk about the situation in Nablus. They tell me that food has doubled in price since the second intifada. 'There's food in the streets, but no one can afford it, so about half of the city goes hungry.' Abu Sharif says that women go to the market, pick up food to look, then simply hand it back again because they don't have any money.

The IDF often blocks access to the city and sometimes doesn't allow food supplies in or out, so their bakery doesn't always have flour to bake with. 'Often we can only work two days a week because there's no flour, or there are incursions by the army. The IDF come, demolish houses and arrest people, usually relatives of wanted militants, and then leave again.' In the past, it was rumoured that Saddam Hussein's regime would pay huge sums of cash – in the region of $20,000 – to the families of the suicide bombers. It was taken as read that the Israelis would swiftly arrive to demolish their houses, so Iraq would pay to have them rebuilt again. This is no longer the case.

We hang out with Abu Sharif and chat some more as he sells his bread on the street corner. 'The Israelis are trying to strangle us,' he says, shrugging his shoulders as though there's nothing that anyone can do about it. Suddenly he lunges at a thin man who passes by muttering to himself and wallops him across the head, sending him wailing up a side alley. 'He keeps trying to steal my bread,' says Abu Sharif. Alaa tells me that there's a high level of psychological problems amongst Palestinians, exacerbated by the pressures they face. But there's little sympathy around here, and I spot the mutterer being abused by various different people throughout the afternoon.

I wander the streets of Nablus again, stopping to drink hot minty tea every so often. Drinking tea and coffee is an art-form here. The tea is called
shai
and they drink it black and sweet, sometimes minty and sometimes not, but invariably served in small glasses that are too hot to hold, and a glass of water served alongside. The coffee is a different matter: it's mixed with a touch of cardamom and unfiltered. Each potent little cup is topped with a scum of bitter coffee dust I like the cardamom and the hefty whack of coffee in the first few sips, but if you suck the grounds up by mistake they're pretty unpleasant.

That night I have supper with Abu the baker and his family. His apartment is in the centre of the old town and from his window the hilly skyline is covered in Israeli army observation posts. Behind the tree line is an Israeli settlement. He says, 'There isn't as much food around because of the economic situation. The way people eat has changed. They are eating less meat and cutting down on costly foods.'

'How does it feel to have the Israelis always looking down on your' I ask.

'Neighbours never like their neighbours. So if neighbours don't like each other what am I to think about those settlements over there? They arc monitoring me in my own home.'

'What do you think of the settlers?'

'I consider them enemies, enemies to my people, to my homeland. They are like a cancer. It starts small then spreads everywhere, exactly like the settlers.'

That evening I hear that there's an Israeli army raid into the city. In the firefight that followed a stray Israeli bullet hit a pregnant woman, killing her unborn child.

Hedera

I visit Aron, an Israeli stallholder in Hedera where, on 26 October 2005, a Palestinian militant detonated a bomb outside his falafel stall. Aron had just taken over the shift from his brother and was busy serving customers when the bomb went off killing five people and injuring 28, including Aron. 'There weren't that many people killed, but they were people I knew. Especially an old lady, a regular customer, came here every day to eat while her husband did the shopping and she was killed.'

I ask him how he feels about the bomber and he's remarkably calm about it, reminding me of the Palestinians I met in Yanun: 'Look, I'm 60 years old. I know about Arab living conditions, why the bombers are being sent and who is sending them. They have been taught to have a certain mentality, and I can't change that. But I hope the next generation won't study it, and will move towards peace.'

Tel Aviv

I'm back in Tel Aviv and the difference is astonishing. This place is as laid back, secular, friendly and architecturally ugly as Jerusalem is uptight, religiously strict, rude and beautiful. It's all concrete blocks and apartments, but there are cool restaurants and a clear vibrancy to the place. Streets are full of cafes and gorgeous people, and although the beaches are dominated by gargantuan 1970s' era hotels and acres of concrete, there's a palpable relaxed atmosphere. As if to prove the point about Tel Aviv's coolness, Gay Pride day is drawing to a close as we arrive. On the beach below my hotel room, lots of people in shorts and bikinis are dancing in the sunset.

The next day I go to the Old Port, an area full of restaurants and overpriced surfing shops, and visit a restaurant called Beny the Fisherman. The owner, Beny (a fisherman, as it happens), looks like a very naughty ex-rock star. He's dressed all in white, with a lion's mane of curly Brylcreemed locks tumbling down his back, and a smile that makes him look like Jack Nicholson on heat. He's also a major player on the Tel Aviv scene, and as if to prove the point, his mobile phone rings constantly and customers in the restaurant drop by to pay their respects, Godfather-style.