Samaritans and Soldiers

(Top: Aurin and Marjolein negotiating a checkpoint, bottom: Samaritan boys )

Such has been the acceleration of events in the past few days that it has become difficult to find the time in which to digest them, but of the limited absorption I have thus far achieved there are several worthy of note. The first can be found beneath the gentle inquisition of my present thoughts on the winding trail of a pass high above the city of Nablus and under the labour of an early morning taxi as the rattling pistons of its diesel engine pull grudgingly at the bright yellow carcass and its contents behind them.

 Not long afterward, the same taxi creeps shyly into a tree lined lay by a hundred yards or so short of the impending army checkpoint. Myself and three friends step unreadily from the cab, the day is Thursday and a working day for most but thanks to our respective schedules, the weekend (along with the checkpoint), is exclusively ours, no tourists have come to Mount Gerizim today, and not many will.

Once on the kerb we hurriedly slap a finish on the flakey story we will give to the Israeli guards up ahead, and hope it holds together long enough for us to see the other side. The army are not famed here for their hospitality or understanding and the road to the summit of the mountain is littered with failed attempts to make it to the village beyond. In the event, my two Dutch friends know exactly how to make hurdles such as these and have come armed with their dumbest blonde smiles and camouflage their intelligence - to great effect - beneath a formidable arsenal of lipstick and eyeshadow. Their display of bubbling joviality is never even close to being threatened and before long we are walking the narrow strip which (somewhat unnecessarily), separates the planet's last Samaritan enclave from the world outside.

Once in town we quickly acquire two Samaritan boys who seem keen - for a few sheqels - to show us to the far side of the settlement. Our local guide Sami seems more than willing to humour them and I feed myself out just a little further on the serendipitous thread upon which this uncertain journey has thus far been conducted.

before long we find ourselves at the end of an unremarkable cul-de-sak which promises little before delivering rather more than that. At its end a stone terraced path jags its way gently upward over a semi arid waist to a pile of rocks about a quarter of a mile away, as we approach them it becomes evident that they are rather more hewn than our previous distance gave them to be and further still, enrolled within a high chain link cordon. A sign in both hebrew and arabic there gives a warning that needs no translation, no entry! The Samaritan boys give it no credence though, before peeling back the loose end of the fence and clambering up onto the tumbledown fringes of the ruin beyond.

The same ruin, we are told, has stood - and now lain - in one form or another for one and a half thousand years before now and as we navigate its gracious footprint we hold only our transience against its epoch swaying longevity. It is clear from the modern addition of two observation decks and some faded signage that the site was once open to tourists but such is the trial of the checkpoint that its splendour now stands idle as its delicate murals continue their gracious decomposition beyond the protection of those who would care.

After lunch we visit the compounded rock upon which - the Samaritans hold - Abraham made for the throat of his son before the intervention of god, and then head back for the settlement and the rather more earthly site of Nablus' only off license. At this point we make our only substantial contact with the locals, The Samaritans are only 700 in number and, given their faith's rejection of outsiders (recently revised to allow women from outside to convert and marry in), victim to a number of genetic abnormalities as a result of inbreeding, the most obvious manifestation of which can be found in their disproportionally large ears and improbably slender torsos. Before long we are once again crossing the thin religious line for home as our next outing stands just the far side of an evening's rest.

If the unexpected delights of Thursday fell with the pleasure of an unplanned party then Friday's offering struck with all the invitation of an ambush, so it was with mal-rested eyes that our alarms had called us forth to the pick up point in the centre of Nablus from where we were ferried to the olive plantations of a nearby town for a solid days picking at the expense of our ill rested bodies. The journey there had been too short for my heavy head despite the roadside military presence which repeatedly served to prod my lolling mind into a state of reluctant cognition. Not wishing to present the impression that I was unwilling to give up my time for the task, I feel obliged here to suggest that I was - rather - physically incapable of any meaningful contribution toward the harvest on this particular occasion. As it transpired, within hours the skies had sent us prematurely upon our way from the proverbial coalface with the first rainfall in seven months and in so doing, presented us with the opportunity to converse with our host family back at their home. The conversation - initially at least - idled pleasantly around the family before moving on by gradations and finally - and perhaps inevitably - to the troubles, with which even the safest subject can be made unsuitable for all but the very lightest of footsteps.

The farmers two adult sons led the conversation only in their father's absence, such was the canopy of his wisdom - which unfurled in all its complexity from the simplicity of his weather beaten bones during the course of that morning in the field - that one sensed a certain freedom there in their unchecked opinions. I will not attempt to record here, every facet of their reasoning but rather focus on the feeling of profound inadequacy and shame it left me with for the actions of my forefathers during that period when they saw fit to gave away another man's home without recourse to humanity.

Those two honest men, about my age if not a little younger, sat opposite me without blame or malice and, each with an intellect far in excess of my own, and lacking only the freedom that held them from a forum to use it, spoke themselves in ever decreasing circles, shedding every conceivable reason we could offer until they were left only with themselves and no more answers to the question; why? A question that they were asking all along, perhaps to neither myself or any of the other guests in the room that day but ultimately only of their own racked minds, and all in the fullest of knowledge that they would receive no satisfying answer, now or ever. Because there is none that will justify the invasion of their land, or the sound of the concrete cracking as the Israeli army drove bulldozers though the family home when they were boys. One has the feeling that those conversations were born of well practiced lips and spoken a thousand, thousand times, if not aloud then in the minds of every single Palestinian who has breathed air in the past 60 years, all of which diminishes in no way, but rather only increases their impact. I admire these people, their humanity and strength is such that I would fear to measure myself against them lest I fail even to register. The Palestinians are still strong, they have not forgotten and never again will I, what injustices have befallen them.