Just Another Brick In The Wall

"Okay, get off the bus. NOW!"

So this is what it feels like. The large automatic gun is not pointed at me, per se, but a young finger is most definitely poised on the trigger finger lest I try to make a run for it. While I'm not exactly scared, it's safe to say I'm starting to sweat a little.

I am at the infamous Calandia checkpoint, the only gap in the 8m high brick wall around the West Bank through which it is possible to pass into or out of the Israeli capital, Jerusalem. I knew the young IDF soldier, no more than 20 years old, was looking for trouble the moment he stepped onto the number 18 bus from Ramallah to East Jerusalem. Unfortunately for me, none of the Palestinians on board had provided a suitable pretext for his aggression. I, however, am a prime target, as I do not have an Israeli stamp in my passport.

"Ok, go." He waves the bus off. His colleagues surround me. They look even younger, and yes, even more aggressive than him.

I've seen armed men almost every day since June now: in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Syria, Lebanon; yet none have seemed quite as intimidating as this mob. The South Americans are typically Latin: laidback and friendly. The Syrian army are bored, listless, malnourished and poorly-equipped conscripts; liable to be overrun by a well-trained troop of boy scouts. The Lebanese are well-built, well-equipped, professional soldiers who mean business. The Israelis are a nightmarish combination of brash youthful arrogance and religious zeal. These are God's chosen people, defending their homeland from non-believers. They seem desperate for action, desperate to pull the trigger. While they'd probably prefer to gun down a Palestinian or two, they won't hesitate to execute foreigners, safe in the knowledge that they have legal impunity in the event of any "accidents".

Rachel Corrie, an American aid worker, was run over by a bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. Just to make sure she was dead, the driver reversed back over her already grossly wasted body. Her last words were "my back is broken". British activist Tom Hurndall was gunned down by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in the same year, while shielding children from Israeli gunfire. After nine months in an irreversible coma, his parents turned off his life support machine in January 2004. You could say I'm starting to get nervous.

"Where is your visa?"

"Check the computer system, I have a visa. I came in from Jordan at Allenby Bridge yesterday."

"If you have a visa, where is the stamp?"

"They didn't stamp my passport, they stamped a piece of paper. If they stamp the passport, I will never be able to go to any Arab or Muslim country again."

"Where is the piece of paper?"

"They take the paper off you when you leave the terminal at the border. Check the computer system."

"I don't even know how to check the fucking computer system. Why would they do that? Why would they stamp a piece of paper and not give it to you?"

"I dunno. You're the one that works for the Israeli government."

"Well, you're not coming in without a stamp, I'm sorry, but you're just not."

We have clearly reached an impasse. He is getting more and more annoyed. So am I. He won't budge. Neither will I. He has an M16 and a licence to kill. I have a bag of apples and a devastating array of sarcasm. It's not really a fair fight is it?

"Ok, I guess I'm not coming in then..."

"Yeah, that's just the way it is"

"Ok, no probs. Just one question."

"What?"

"Do you know a good real estate agent in Ramallah?"

"What?"

"Well I need to find an apartment don't I?"

"What?"

"Because if you won't let me through pal, I guess I'm just gonna have to live in Ramallah for the rest of my life aren't I?"

Game over. His colleagues collapse in hysterics. Win the crowd and you've won the argument.

Of course it was funny for me, but for the average Palestinian it's no laughing matter. The Israelis call the giant concrete wall they have constructed around the territories they have illegally occupied (in contravention of numerous UN Security Council Resolutions) since 1967, the "Security Fence". The East German government used the same terminology to describe the wall they built around West Berlin in 1961. Just like that wall, the "Security Fence" divides families and communities, and leaves thousands of people virtual prisoners, trapped in their towns and villages and unable to move around in what, nominally at least, is their own country. For Jerusalem is the transport hub of the West Bank; to travel between Bethlehem and Ramallah by public tranpsort, say, is virtually impossible without changing buses at the Nablus Road terminal in East Jerusalem. The only way for Palestinians to get into Jerusalem is to apply for a permit from the Israeli government. This can take weeks to issue, if indeed it is issued at all. The result is that most residents of the West Bank haven't visited Jerusalem since the new regulations were introduced seven years ago.

Somewhat surprisingly then, walking around the West Bank towns of Ramallah, Jericho, and Bethlehem, the Palestinian people are mostly cheerful, friendly, and hospitable. I drank tea and coffee with them; we chatted about football. They support Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool. (Incidentally no-one mentions Chelsea - owned by a Russian Jew and managed by an Israeli, their popularity is probably not at its highest here in occupied Palestine.) These are eminently normal people. They have homes and families, hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares. Yet they are treated like animals. And we in the West ignore their plight at our peril. Make no mistake, the ludicrous oil crusade known by the White House as the "War on Terror", most definitely has its roots here.

At the Allenby Bridge border crossing the previous day, I had waited for close to five hours while the army of young girls that bizarrely form the entirety of the Israeli immigration staff processed my application. My recent visits to Lebanon and Syria, combined with my request to avoid a passport stamp, did not ease my progress. As I waited, I chatted to some of the young Palestinians undergoing a similarly thorough background check. Khalid spoke the best English, but his friendliness was by no means unique. Well-dressed, in designer jeans and fashionable shoes, he was the archetypal modern Arab youth. Yet after exchanging the usual pleasantries, buying me a coffee, and offering me countless cigarettes, he showed me a video on his state of the art Nokia mobile. The content was soberingly familiar from countless news broadcasts. A military funeral, a baying mob carrying a coffin, a photo of a young man in fatigues and a chequered keffiyeh brandishing an AK-47. Khalid's brother was a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, shot dead by the IDF.

I looked around me at the hordes of Palestinians waiting patiently to be allowed through the border into their own country. These were a broken people, their spirits extinguished by decades of oppression. The bowed heads, the skulking demeanour, the total acquiescence in the face of overwhelming power; the Palestinians have been crushed by a mighty military and political machine. The Israeli girls, all flirtatious smiles for us Westerners, bark orders at the Palestinian untermensch. The odd unfortunate youth is dragged off for interrogation by sadistically grinning Israeli men. One of Khalid's friends, apparently a member of the Palestinian Authority's Mukhabarat, or secret police, returned silent and shaking from an hour long "interrogation" by Israeli officers. He wouldn't discuss what happened or what was said in the cell. When my turn came to be questioned, in the main hall in full view of everyone, Khalid and his friends laughed at me.

"Today you are Palestinian, like us, terrorist like us".

Khalid made sure the word terrorist was given the sarcastic sneer it deserves. I am no more a terrorist than he is: the only difference between us is that I am free to walk away from this nightmare of checkpoints, soldiers, prison walls. Khalid and the others are still there, still living in this warped world of Israeli colonisation. Perhaps one day Khalid will strap a bomb to his chest and eviscerate himself and countless Israelis on a bus in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, like his brother apparently intended to. I will see his vaguely familiar face on CNN or the BBC, condemned as "evil", "warped", "a terrorist". I will remember a friendly, charming young man, much like me, except that stripped of his freedom, livelihood, and land by the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv, he feels he has nothing to live for.

I visited many historical and religious sights in Jerusalem: The Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane. Yet I did not visit the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. Instead I took my voyeur's curiosity to the West Bank, to view a crime against humanity which is not a part of history, but is taking place now, in 2007. The historical and spiritual significance of the Holy City is undoubtedly a part of the global "clash of civilisations" between Islam and the West: the incredible physical proximity of the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock attests to that. Yet a much bigger part of this new Cold War is the unjust and inhumane subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli government financed by the UK and US.

Just don't say no-one told you.

Golan: Forgotten Occupation

"Why?" I ask rhetorically. "Why did they do this?"

"Because they are Israel", my Secret Service guide answers with a wistful smile.

My Arabic is woeful, but it's a simple answer to a simple question, and I understand easily enough.

All around us lies the devastated remains of the once-thriving town of Quneitra. I have seen some ruins in my travels, a dizzying array already on this trip, yet nothing compares to what I see before me now. The eerie silence of the deserted streets, the twisted masses of concrete and metal, the glass and rock that lie scattered across the wasted earth; all have a visceral effect that grabs hold of your emotions and twists them from shock, revulsion and incomprehension into anger and hatred. This is what war looks like.

This reaction is by no means unusual, and by no means accidental. When Syria first reclaimed what remained of Quneitra in 1974, their outraged President Hafez al-Assad vowed to rebuild the town as a symbol of his country's stubborn refusal to yield to Israeli oppression. He changed his mind soon enough, reasoning that the pathetic ruins of a town of 40,000 people reduced to rubble would be much more effective as a monument to Zionist belligerence than as a sign of Syrian steadfastness. It was an astute decision.

Quneitra's pathetic ruins sit just a few hundred metres from the Israeli-Syrian border in the hotly-disputed Golan Heights an hour's travel southwest of Damascus. Actually the word "disputed" is somewhat inaccurate: only Israelis dispute the illegality of their occupation of Golan - even the UN Security Council, usually unduly lenient on Zionist misdemeanours as a result of the oft-used US veto, condemns Jerusalem's continued refusal to give back the territory seized in the June War of 1967. UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338 stipulate that Golan, the West Bank and Gaza, were illegally occupied by Israel, and must immediately be returned to their rightful owners, respectively Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Unlike UNSC Resolution 1441, however, which provided the justification for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the international community has proved unwilling to enforce these resolutions: Israel retains ownership of all three areas to this day, claiming they are necessary to maintain her security.

Golan is at the heart of Syria's continued immense hostility towards Israel; the two countries remain technically at war and are likely to do so until Jerusalem returns all occupied Syrian territory. Yet beyond the relatively straightforward issue of territory, Quneitra is evidence of something more sinister. After an agreement to station UN peacekeepers in Golan, it was decided to give the town back to Syria in May 1974. Between that decision and the physical handover in June of the same year, the IDF totally destroyed the town in an act of singular barbarity. This gross breach of international law, human rights, and basic morality was roundly condemned by the international community; as usual, however, the widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth were not matched by actions.

As I stroll the devastated streets, pausing to photograph innumerable demolished houses, dynamited hospitals, and forcibly collapsed schools, mosques, churches, banks, restaurants and shops, it's the small details that hit me hardest. The Hebrew graffiti scrawled on walls by gleeful Israeli soldiers, apparently bearing such delightful sentiments as "you want Quneitra, rebuild it first", "there'll be another round, we'll finish you then". The pockmarked walls evidencing the use of the former hospital for target practise. The systematically-gutted Catholic Church, formerly dedicated to Saint Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus supposedly took place just outside Quneitra. A deflated football lying sadly in the rubble of a school.

On one of the few walls still standing, a crudely-daubed swastika bears evidence of the maelstrom of hatred the Israelis brought upon themselves with their senseless destruction here. As always, that symbol evokes thoughts of another era, another continent, and other appalling, incomprehensible, reprehensible atrocities. For once, however, the usual revulsion is dimmed by what I've seen this morning. Just as in Gaza and the West Bank, just as in Lebanon, Israel's actions here have more in common with the Nazis than they might care to admit.

As we pause to gaze over the barbed wire fence at the neatly manicured green fields of Israel, I feel real anger for what was done here, real sorrow for the innocent Syrians whose lives were destroyed.

Symbolically, I throw a stone over no man's land. My rather sinister Mukhabarat escort emits the kind of hysterical guffaw I suspect he usually reserves for torturing Zionist sympathisers. "Be careful. Israel fires missiles at people who throw stones."

Ancient Cities of Anatolia

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

With these words Percy Shelley famously damned the legendary Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II and his vainglorious dreams of immortality through architectural achievement. As I wander the ruins of Troy, Pergamum, Ephesus, Hierapolis, and Aphrodisias, and survey what little remains of some of the greatest civilisations in human history, I am constantly reminded of Shelley's biting irony. As I stroll between the piles of rubble, decapitated statues, and precarious-looking columns that represent the only physical legacy of the great empires of antiquity, it's difficult not to wonder what will remain of modern Western civilisation 2,000 years from now. In future millennia will people stroll down Picadilly or Fifth Avenue and gaze upon a few tangled metal girders, some piles of broken glass, and fragments of a green and white coffee mug and ponder about their by now semi-mythical forebears and their worship of the great god Starbuck?

Ancient cities always fascinate me, not just for their aesthetic beauty and historical resonnance, but also because I can't help but be amused by the often ludicrous assumptions presented as fact by archaeologists. Just as their colleagues in paleontology blithely assure us that from the four fragments of leg bone they have found they are certain Tyrannosaurus rex was olive green, could run at 28.72mph, and generally liked to eat rare roast pheasant accompanied by a starter of quail's eggs, so too do archaeologists offer ridiculously unprovable claims about the everyday lives of our ancient ancestors. For this reason, I tend to prefer visiting archaeological sites alone rather than with a guide, thus allowing me to silently admire the spectacle, be awestruck by the unanswerable questions, and generally take in the very special ambience of ancient places, without some well-intentioned halfwit blathering on about the imagined culinary preferences of Roman/Greek/Inca peasants. At a couple of sites here ın Turkey I have been able to indulge my no doubt idiosyncratic tendencies and wander unmolested through ruins of staggering scale and resonance. The spectacular location of Pergamum in particular, sitting high on an exposed peak with staggering views over the windswept plains below, will live with me forever.

Quite why this particular gem is not overrun with busloads of tourists I'm not sure; I'm certainly not complaining, however. One site which is rather 'blessed' with a bounty of visitors is Ephesus, arguably the most famous of Turkey's archaeological treasures, and generally regarded by most authorities on the matter (though not by me I might add) as the most spectacular. By happy coincidence, Ephesus is located just a short hop from the major port and tourist resort of Kusadasi, thus allowing all manner of cruise ship passengers to disembark and venture inland. While the ruins are admittedly quite spectacular, for me the real spectacle was the other visitors. (Particularly once I learned that by far the most notable part of the complex, the Library of Celsus, was actually rebuilt from bare rubble by a team of German archaeologists in the 1970s. This revelation, while disappointing, did at least clear up the nagging doubt ın my mind as to where the Romans had sourced their concrete in 200AD.)

Confusing my ancient history just for a second, Ephesus today is a veritable Tower of Babel, with every language under the sun audible on a casual saunter around the mammoth site. Each linguistic grouping, each nationality, seems to bring its own idiosyncracies to the party. It gives me no great shame to admit the Brits are among the most heinous of the visitors, dressed uniformly in badly fitting beach attire, with a skin colour that closely resembles either freshly driven snow or a recent victim of napalm and a physique that recalls nothing so much as a hippo wallowing on the banks of the Limpopo. Yet the Brits are far from alone. The Americans wander around gaily in their knee length white socks and khaki shorts, pointing at things and loudly saying "aww gee" and "shucks"' while quietly wheezing as their aged respiratory systems prepare to give out. Indeed, most of the American tourists I've seen in Turkey appear so ancient that one might reasonably assume they're returning to visit old haunts, rather than touring the remnants of long-gone ancient civilisations. One particular specimen I witnessed staggering down a once-colonnaded Roman street, portable dialysis machine/colon/heart trailing in his wake might perhaps better have stayed at home. Then there are the parasol-toting Asians, some of whom wear something highly akin to a Nuclear Biological and Chemical warfare suit in a desperate attempt to prevent their skin colour lightening even a shade darker than ice. I could go on: the fat middle aged Russians and their whores, the totally obnoxious French, superior and condescending despite their inherent ugliness and lack of style, or the Italians chattering excitedly on their mobiles while their guide drones manfully on in the background; but I won't.

Why is it that tourists always revert to being tired cliches of their nationality? Actually, I don't care. All that matters is that Turkey, or at least the Aegean coast and Cappadocia, is full of tourists. While the language barrier clearly doesn't help, I feel the overwhelming presence of fellow tourists and the near impossibility of seeing any of the sites without using a tour guide leaves me totally incapable of making any kind of connection with the Turkish people or of understanding the country at all. Every interaction I have is purely on the basis of tourist-native. Of course this is always the case to some degree, though less so when language is less of an issue, and especially when there aren't so many fellow tourists. In this respect it's probably a good thing that I finish this post to board an overnight bus bound for Aleppo, Syria's second city, and supposedly the most conservative place in the country, complete with what is reputedly the greatest medieval souk in the whole region.

Turkey has been great, but the Middle East starts now. Er, that is unless the Israeli Defence Force crosses the border before I do:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6981674.stm