fear, either, to feel better about wasps, because what I felt was also a kind of hatred: when I saw a wasp, what I wanted unequivocally was for it to die. Even when I had killed them en masse with ant-powder in a ground nest near my house, and had come the next day to find the dead heaped in the entryway – piles of bodies, multiples, a horror of waspness – it had made little difference that they were dead. In stasis they still carried with them the reminder of that insistent weaving attack movement, and I wanted them not so much dead, as never to have existed.
Despite the doubts my uncle had voiced, I went with my daughter to Ramallah anyway, on the way south to Eilat, smug in my own liberalism, repudiating what I dismissed as his ignorant mistrust, my aunt’s prejudice and fear, and it started to go wrong before we even left Holon. My phone ran out of credit and I could not find any way to top it up: it was Shabbat and everything was shut. I had told Ghaith approximately what time we’d get to the Qalandia checkpoint, where he’d meet us at the other side, but we got there earlier than I’d estimated, and I could not contact him to say we’d arrived.
This was 2007, the first occasion in years that I had spent any extended time in Israel, apart from a week’s visit to family the previous year, and this was the first time I was visiting the West Bank since before the start of the Intifada in 1987. Though I had seen the high, heavy separation fence from the top of Mount Gilboa, the approach to Qalandia gave me my first sight of the notorious wall section of the barrier. It had settled into the land, concrete and cement weathering quickly in the heat. The checkpoint was in a barren landscape of waste ground, with rubbish caught in the low scrub. I felt it ought to have been somehow momentous, the first time passing through, as though we’d entered a war zone, but the brutality of the wall and its watchtowers had, through over-exposure to its image, become normalised and unremarkable. It was only remarkable in its ordinariness.
There was no other traffic going through, and we were waved straight on without being stopped. The Qalandia checkpoint was frequently violent, and it was the one place I did not want to wait. Ours was the only car in the wide empty lot on the far side of the barrier. Though there was little traffic coming from the Israeli side, there were plenty of people trying to cross the other way. Heavy traffic crawled on the road towards and past the checkpoint in a blare of horns. A military jeep sped by, blue lights flashing.
Sitting alone and conspicuous in the empty car park, waiting for Ghaith to arrive, we were soon enough targeted by a ragged streetseller, who leaned towards the window, gesturing to me to open it. He held up bags of spices – green za’tar , and powdered red sumac – and knocked on the window. British politeness, fear of causing offence, made me open it, and he thrust a bag of sumac at me. ‘Only ten shekels,’ he said.
When I refused, and began closing the window, he asked, ‘How much you pay?’ and when I shook my head he began to get angry. ‘Take it, take it, I give it to you,’ he said, and he reached through the window and put the bag of sumac in my lap. I handed it back, closed the window and looked away, kicking myself, frightened. Not three minutes across the border and I had been a foolish tourist, and now an angry streetseller was shambling off to – to what , exactly? I told myself the fears were absurd, but they had proliferated and grown ugly by the time Ghaith stepped out of a taxi in front of us.
The centre of Ramallah was the way I remembered much of Israel as a child – full of diesel fumes and ruinous buses, crowded and noisy. But in the stillness of the middle-class residential neighbourhoods, with their rose gardens and pale stone houses, Israel seemed a long way away – until we walked to the Quaker school, and looked out over the valley at the
Despite the doubts my uncle had voiced, I went with my daughter to Ramallah anyway, on the way south to Eilat, smug in my own liberalism, repudiating what I dismissed as his ignorant mistrust, my aunt’s prejudice and fear, and it started to go wrong before we even left Holon. My phone ran out of credit and I could not find any way to top it up: it was Shabbat and everything was shut. I had told Ghaith approximately what time we’d get to the Qalandia checkpoint, where he’d meet us at the other side, but we got there earlier than I’d estimated, and I could not contact him to say we’d arrived.
This was 2007, the first occasion in years that I had spent any extended time in Israel, apart from a week’s visit to family the previous year, and this was the first time I was visiting the West Bank since before the start of the Intifada in 1987. Though I had seen the high, heavy separation fence from the top of Mount Gilboa, the approach to Qalandia gave me my first sight of the notorious wall section of the barrier. It had settled into the land, concrete and cement weathering quickly in the heat. The checkpoint was in a barren landscape of waste ground, with rubbish caught in the low scrub. I felt it ought to have been somehow momentous, the first time passing through, as though we’d entered a war zone, but the brutality of the wall and its watchtowers had, through over-exposure to its image, become normalised and unremarkable. It was only remarkable in its ordinariness.
There was no other traffic going through, and we were waved straight on without being stopped. The Qalandia checkpoint was frequently violent, and it was the one place I did not want to wait. Ours was the only car in the wide empty lot on the far side of the barrier. Though there was little traffic coming from the Israeli side, there were plenty of people trying to cross the other way. Heavy traffic crawled on the road towards and past the checkpoint in a blare of horns. A military jeep sped by, blue lights flashing.
Sitting alone and conspicuous in the empty car park, waiting for Ghaith to arrive, we were soon enough targeted by a ragged streetseller, who leaned towards the window, gesturing to me to open it. He held up bags of spices – green za’tar , and powdered red sumac – and knocked on the window. British politeness, fear of causing offence, made me open it, and he thrust a bag of sumac at me. ‘Only ten shekels,’ he said.
When I refused, and began closing the window, he asked, ‘How much you pay?’ and when I shook my head he began to get angry. ‘Take it, take it, I give it to you,’ he said, and he reached through the window and put the bag of sumac in my lap. I handed it back, closed the window and looked away, kicking myself, frightened. Not three minutes across the border and I had been a foolish tourist, and now an angry streetseller was shambling off to – to what , exactly? I told myself the fears were absurd, but they had proliferated and grown ugly by the time Ghaith stepped out of a taxi in front of us.
The centre of Ramallah was the way I remembered much of Israel as a child – full of diesel fumes and ruinous buses, crowded and noisy. But in the stillness of the middle-class residential neighbourhoods, with their rose gardens and pale stone houses, Israel seemed a long way away – until we walked to the Quaker school, and looked out over the valley at the
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