ISRAEL

16^th – 30^th March

 

ACROSS THE ALLENBY BRIDGE

 

It was 5 degrees and raining heavily as the JETT bus for the King Hussein-Allenby Bridge rolled out of Abdali at 9am. With political tensions already high over the Al Baqura incident and escalating daily as the East Jerusalem housing development impasse reached critical mass – the first sod was due to be turned tomorrow – we expected the West Bank crossing to be on full alert and bristling with even more intense security than usual. Even Ted could count on an internal search.

Formalities, which included not having our passports endorsed to show we’d exited Jordan for Israel, were completed smoothly at Jordanian customs control and we boarded the shuttle bus for the short drive along a fenced military road to the bridge itself. The driver stopped at the Jordanian checkpoint and awaited orders to proceed. Two soldiers conducted final passport checks. The rain eased. We waited.

With a larger-than-life reputation as one of the most fraught frontiers on the globe the Allenby crossing is a remarkably unremarkable place. The Jordan River, little more than a creek at its most torrential, is a muddy stream here and lined with eucalypts which give Australians a sense of home. The actual bridge is a basic iron affair with a wooden deck about thirty metres long; if I were Lord Allenby, whose victory over the Turks at Megiddo in 1918 won Syria and Palestine for the British, I’d be less than impressed with such a modest memorial.

Relations between the Jordanians and the Israeli personnel at the opposite end of the bridge were boringly cordial and relaxed, all just another day at the office, and at 10:34 by the digital clock above the driver’s head we were waved over to the West Bank. At the Israeli post our documents were re-checked with brisk efficiency and the bus proceeded down a narrow road, fenced on both sides like a prison access corridor, towards the immigration terminal. There was a further wait within sight of the low border buildings and then the radio crackled with instructions for the driver to advance the last few hundred metres.

After twenty years I’d forgotten how exceedingly fetching Israeli women are in uniform and the all-female security detail at Allenby reminded me just how many Israeli uniforms of all kinds are filled with exceedingly fetching women. As I waited in line I reflected that the most serious personal risk I was likely to run in this country was not the Palestinian rock, the rubber bullet or the café bomb, but the compound neck injuries from whiplash perving. Of course, this may just have been a reaction to the fact we’d gone almost a month without seeing a woman’s face on the street, let alone a woman in a position of authority, but I doubt it.

When my turn came I threw myself against the wall and yelled “Frisk me!” but the smiling girl in the sky blue uniform wanded me very professionally with the metal detector instead. Technology sure has sucked the fun out of some contact sports. I was quietly envious when Tess, in an ironic twist given the TWA experience in Athens I’ve described elsewhere, was subjected to a more rigorous search.

Another international incident was narrowly averted when here, of all places, Tess passed her camera around the barrier because she was concerned about the fogging effects of continual x-rays and metal detectors. A guard gladly accepted the camera and promptly spirited it away behind a security screen. This agitated Tess to the point where her body language alerted the suspicions of the x-ray machine monitor who cast a meaningful glance at another guard and Tess’s daypack was removed from the conveyor. It too disappeared behind the security screen where physical checks were obviously being carried out. It was several anxious minutes before the camera and pack reappeared and we were allowed to cross the floor to passport control.

Ted had his mojo workin’ with the girls in the immigration booths. As soon as Tess produced him they came from all directions to coo over this unusual visitor. You have to realise Israelis don’t have a lot of experience with soft toys, their kids cuddle Uzis at bedtime. They whisked him away into an office and in the time it might have taken to photograph and fingerprint him they were back with his passport stamped, which is more than can be said for our own passports. Our transit stamps were on separate loose pages inserted into our passports so they could be easily removed for sensitive checkpoints.

We swapped our last JDs for shekels and then, business at last concluded, we stepped out into the West Bank. The rain had returned with a vengeance.

 

*

 

There are two ways to get to Jerusalem from the Allenby post; in a sherut, which is not a cigar but a shared taxi, or on a Palestinian bus which goes via Jericho. We went for the authentic experience on the bus.

The vehicle was a replica of the East Delta bus to St Catherine only more decrepit, more crowded and with the rear exit blocked by a microwave someone had picked up in Amman. It took 30 minutes to depart and all of 15 minutes to reach Jericho, one of the oldest human settlements in the Holy Land.

We debussed into a bitter wind and sluicing rain and were herded by Palestinian police into a large, open concrete shelter. There were perhaps two hundred other damp souls crammed in with us and, as is the way when you get more than a dozen Arabs together, there was a lot of yelling and gesticulating. It felt faintly daring to be the only travellers here – everyone else had the good sense to take a sherut – but the novelty wore off when we realised that in all the mayhem we were invisible, no-one appeared to speak English and we couldn’t find the East Jerusalem bus.

Like skin expelling a splinter, the crowd squeezed us out onto a forecourt where there were several buses lined up, all signed in Arabic.

“Jerusalem?” The sudden English startled me. A Palestinian man stepped down from a bus in front of us. “You go to Jerusalem? Here.” We climbed aboard and struggled up to the back seats, the only dry ones on the bus. The floor was awash so we hauled our packs up onto the seats beside us.

As we toiled the 40 minutes through the steep Judean Hills to Jerusalem it was difficult to tell whether it was raining more heavily inside the bus than out, mainly because the windows were so comprehensively steamed up you couldn’t see anything out there. In here the long-dead air con nozzles drizzled rainwater all over the twenty-odd passengers, who silently shifted seats for a while like the choreographed cast in an Absurdist play then gave up with a collective Inshallah and just let it all happen. We stayed high and dry.

But not for long. On the drab outskirts of East Jerusalem the driver pulled over and beckoned us up the front. Behind us there was a scramble for our seats like mice scurrying into the kitchen when you leave. “You will wait here. There will be a bus for the Old City soon,” he said. We alighted into a small brown lake stippled with pelting drops and waded to the shelter of a motor mechanic’s awning holding our packs over our heads. The wind blew the rain straight under the awning into our faces. We must have cut forlorn figures, like a pair of cats newly dragged out of a washing machine.

The mechanic’s workshop had been painted with sump oil, even the unsealed floor was more pitch than mud. A cheeky little lad played peek-a-boo among the bent 44 gallon drums, now and then bobbing up and giggling at us. A bus raced past in the wrong direction and one of the mechanics stuck his head out, “There,” he nodded at the vanishing bus and pointed to the roadside, making a circling motion with the other hand. Obediently, we hoisted our packs again and sloshed across the road to await the bus’s return. Ten miserable minutes later we were on another battered bus to the Arab East Jerusalem terminal opposite the walls of the Old City.

Next time: Jerusalem, Jerusalem...