The tour, Walk the Green Line, was run by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, or IPCRI, a joint Israeli-Palestinian think tank. I jumped at the rare chance to go to places like Bethlehem and East Jerusalem. I was also eager to meet Gershon Baskin, one of IPCRI’s two co-directors.
Baskin grew up in the States, came to Israel for ten months after high school, and then lived for two years in the Palestinian-Israeli village of Kfar Qara, in Israel’s North. His life at IPCRI began in 1987, when the first Intifada erupted. He placed ads in the three major Arabic dailies that he was looking for someone to talk to about peace, leaving his home phone number. The calls turned into meetings, and eventually he found enough people to create IPCRI, which drafts policy recommendations for resolving the conflict.
Baskin speaks fluent Hebrew and Arabic and since he moved to Israel in the late 1970s, has positioned himself as an expert and a lynchpin of contacts between Israeli and Palestinian civil society. He mingles with Palestinian philosophers in Al-Quds University as easily as he chews the fat with American tourists on their first trip to Israel, or with IDF soldiers. He’s also often quoted in news stories.
We were a group of about 15 tourists, mostly American Jews with a few exceptions – a Swedish guy, an American pastor, and two American students in Israel for studies or an internship. Although the tour was called Walk the Green Line, it could just have easily been titled Meet Local Peace Activists or The Palestinians Don’t All Bite. I got there for the second of three days; in the first, the tour visited an Israeli kibbutz, spoke with the mayor of the regional council in Israel’s North, and saw Nazareth.
Watching Baskin narrate an itinerary that wove back and forth across the Green Line was a treat. He knows every village and settlement, as well as how much land was lost and how many families moved in. As we drove from point to point, Baskin and his guide, Uri, were quick to point out where the Green Line lies, where the separation wall/fence runs, and which roads are for Jews only.
The trip was a metaphor for Baskin himself, who is trying to re-establish Israel’s border even as it gets more blurry by the year. When he went house shopping in Jerusalem, he was careful to only consider living in Jewish neighborhoods that fell in the 1967 city borders, and to avoid the ones that cropped up in and around Palestinian East Jerusalem. He boycotts anything coming out of the settlements, including ultra-cheap olive oil and Mei Eden water from the Golan Heights. Yet Baskin, who served in the Israeli army and did reserves, considers himself an ardent Zionist. For him, creating a peaceful Palestinian state is the only sensible option for Jews who want to feel safe in Israel.
Some of the highlights of the trip:
The West Bank village of Umm Rehann has begun processing its sewage with the help of an Israeli hydrologist and foreign aid. Small-scale sewage treatment in the West Bank is a win-win. Without treatment, Palestinian towns have raw sewage running in the streets and streams, and the polluted water percolates into the groundwater that Israelis drink and runs into streams that cross the border.
We visited the town(s) of Barta'a, which the Green Line bisected in 1948. When Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, the two halves were loosely reunited, but with wide discrepancies between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. For now, residents on either side can mix and go to school out, but no one knows what will happen in a peace agreement. Here’s the mayor of the Israeli side, Riyad Kabaa.
We went to Bil’in, which each Friday becomes the site of non-violent protests against the path of the security barrier, which has sliced off part of the village's farmland. (more about the protest here). When we got there, the fence to the farmland was closed, and we wound up standing on one side having a surreal chat with the soldiers who were keeping us out on the other.
On our way out, our bus ran into a roadblock that was the cause of many jokes about having the "real" West Bank experience.
Another stop was Wadi Fuqin, a Palestinian village sandwiched between the settlement of Beitar Illit and the Israeli town of Tzur Hadassah. We spoke to a village teacher there, who said that Wadi Fuqin residents are torn between wanting to put up hothouses to increase their crop yields, or to stick with traditional agriculture for its touristic value. He said the unstable political situation makes the hothouses look like the better bet. Baskin pointed out the stench of Beitar Illit’s sewage, which overflows the settlement’s treatment system on Fridays and runs into Wadi Fuqin.Here’s a section of the farming area, with the high-rises of Beitar Illit on the hilltop.
We also visited Al-Quds University, a campus of 10,000 students in East Jerusalem. This included a stop at the school’s Israeli studies department, where students write theses on topics like the Holocaust in Jewish collective memory. Outside the American Studies department was a wall of relics, like this Jane Fonda advertisement.
Another stop at the university was the Abu Jihad Center for Political Prisoners' Affairs, a space covered in letters from Palestinian prisoners, memorabilia from their time in prison, and a wall of those who died behind bars. At the end of our tour of the museum, Baskin confronted the museum director. “I visited museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and half the museums were devoted to peace. There’s not one word of hope in this museum. Why?” The director didn’t really have an answer, and it was an interesting argument to watch. Here are “capsules” – they’re notes prisoners transported by coating them in some sort of plastic and swallowing them.
Along the trip, we often encountered the security barrier in its concrete wall format – grey slabs that stretch high around Palestinian urban centers and have become canvases for graffiti artists.
Gershon Baskin.
The food on the trip was excellent, including a massive tray of kenafe – a cheese pastry topped with sweet thin filo noodles.
We also saw a lot of traditional village scenes – boys on horseback, women carrying trays of olives on their heads, fresh chickpeas sold by the branch, and a flock of goats the same shade as the hillside rocks.
There is a certain purity in the West Bank village lifestyle – the buildings are low, the streets are about the width of a bus, and the undeveloped hills roll out into the distance.
