were from Georgetown. He rode motorcycles and liked Western music. He was a crack shot and a good horseman. He said that Western politicians who met people like himself thought of them as ‘good Arabs’. I paraphrase what he said, because I did not write it down. It went something like this: ‘I dress like them. So they think I am not really an Arab. It’s like being an honorary white. But I am as much an Arab as any Bedouin who has never left the desert. And, if I have to choose, I choose to be an Arab.’
He had just told me that Jordan had arrested some of the Islamic fundamentalists of Osama bin Laden, who had tried to blow up a Jordanian phosphate plant. The Jordanians were passing information about threats to Americans in the US and the Middle East to Washington. They wanted to help, especially when the fanatics were as opposed to the Hashemite throne as to the American government. But they could not go all the way, as President George Bush demanded with his ‘You’re either with us or against us’ speech. Nor could Jordan support General Sharon’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ that was a war on Palestinians under military occupation. Jordan could not, however much it disapproved of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, favour the sanctions that deprived Iraq’s people of medicine and of equipment for the restoration of sewage treatment and other basic services. To Talal, there were no good and no bad Arabs, measured on a scale of Americanization. There were good and bad people based on their humanity.
The sky in the king’s fresco was a clearer blue than the one towards which our bus rumbled across the deserted plain. We came to sets of metal gates and a long runway, as if we would fly into the darkening horizon over the River Jordan and into Canaan in our sweet chariot. This was no-man’s-land, the nether-world that separated each state of Greater Syria from the other. No one lived here. No one governed the tribal buffer. No farmers farmed, no livestock grazed and no trees cast shadows to obstruct the view from either side of the other. Concrete pillars – dragon’s teeth, in American military parlance – stood sentry at intervals of ten yards on both sides of the highway. I don’t know if the land was mined against infiltrators, but nothing grew out of that cement-powder soil. Two miles of protected desolation brought the bus at last to the ‘Police Security Directorship – Bridge Security’. Metal screamed on metal, as the ancient brakes of our border shuttle stopped us crashing into the gates. A Jordanian policeman boarded and collected vouchers that confirmed we had paid the departure tax. The driver slammed the doors, fired up the engine again and released the brake. We rolled past a sign, the last I would see in Jordan. It wished us all ‘Bon Voyage’.
The first Israeli fence was a little further. We stopped. We waited. We waited a long time. The old man sitting in front of me, who had been patient for a quarter of an hour, was the first to speak. ‘Why are we waiting?’ ‘Who knows?’ the driver answered. His daily route between the two border stations had accustomed him to waiting. This was his last trip of the day, and he would return empty. The old Haj repeated his question: ‘Why do they make us wait so long?’ The other passenger, the man in the suit, told him, ‘Be patient, Haj.’ The Haj looked at his wife, who smiled at him, and shrugged. The driver got out and opened all the luggage compartments for inspection by two Israeli soldiers. He drove on to a second gate, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to the Allenby Bridge Crossing Point’. We were still on the East Bank, waiting to cross a tiny suspension bridge that the Israelis, following the British, named for General Allenby and the Jordanians called the King Hussein Bridge.
Impatient, the driver took the bus up to the gate and said to a woman soldier inside the guard post, ‘This is the last bus.’ She told him to reverse to where he had been. He backed up to our original position twenty yards away, with the perilous grinding of old gears and brakes. The moment he stopped, the woman soldier waved to him to come forward again. At last, we were going through.
‘Palestine, formed and surrounded as it is, is a land of
tribes. That it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary to Nature and Scripture.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
On the West Bank
INSIDE THE ISRAELI BORDER SHED the old Haj asked me to fill in his forms. At this crossing between an Arab country and occupied Arab land, there were no Arabic entry cards. All were in Hebrew and English. The old man gave me his and his wife’s Jordanian passports and I wrote their names and addresses on the questionnaire. He was born in 1932. City of birth: Bethlehem. I hesitated at country, wanting not to complicate his entry, before writing what it said in the passport: Palestine. The purpose of their visit was to see their daughter. They thanked me and went ahead to the passport booth, where a young policewoman was polite to them both. The man laughed at something she said and then, taking his wife’s hand and wheeling his smart new suitcase, walked outside to a taxi.
Next at the passport counter came the man in the suit. After presenting his American passport, he answered the policewoman’s questions in an amiable but apprehensive way. Born in the West Bank in 1960, he now worked as a businessman in Jordan. The purpose of his visit was to see business associates in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, his passport had stamps from many trips to Europe. The Israelis took him apart, first the suitcases, then his dignity. Israeli police did not treat American citizens of Arab origin as they did other Americans. They looked on them as security risks. This man would have a hard time. I had done a story the year before about another Arab American, a young man named Anwar Mohammed, from Florida. The police had arrested him as he was leaving via this same border. They took him to the Moscobieh, the security headquarters in Jerusalem known in English as the Russian Compound. He was chained to a chair, interrogated, abused, held for two months and released without charge. He was lucky, saved perhaps by the cockiness that came from his youth, his karate black belt, his belief in his American passport and, just as important, the fact that there was no evidence against him. If he had been a Palestinian with no passport, only a refugee identity card, he might have stayed for years. The American Embassy lodged no protests on his behalf. An American diplomat pointed to a warning on the State Department website that Israel did not necessarily respect the American citizenship of Arabs born in Arab countries, Israel or the occupied territories. The State Department permitted the Israeli police to determine who was and who was not an American citizen.
Outside, in the dark car park, I found an Israeli taxi driver and asked him to take me to Jerusalem. The road from the Allenby – Hussein Bridge cut through the occupied – disputed Jordan Valley, knocking aside all obstacles in its straight path. Jericho, whose walls came tumbling down, sparkled on the dark horizon. ‘That her walls fell at the sound of Joshua’s trumpet,’ the Reverend George Adam Smith wrote in 1894, ‘is a summary of her history.’ No one had ever defended Jericho. Her low-lying position on the frontier between eastern desert and western mountain was indefensible and prey to raiders from both directions. Under the Oslo accords of 1993, Jericho was the first town that Israel allowed the new Palestinian administration to govern for itself, within limits.
As the road had created its way through the plain, it resculpted the hills beyond. On the Jordanian side, it had rambled with the land like the rolling English road’s drunken path of no resistance. Israel’s was an American highway for which mountains and villages and forests made way, a proud, broad road that would have me in Jerusalem for dinner. ‘There is no water,’ Reverend Smith wrote, ‘from Jericho till you reach the roots of the Mount of Olives.’ There was no traffic either. Israeli settlers were afraid to drive at night, and the Israeli army kept
