Two walks and a cat fight


On Friday morning I took a walk through some parts of Jerusalem I didn't know. My starting point was a disused railway station near my house. The train once went all the way from there to Tel Aviv but people used to throw stones at it when it passed through parts of east Jerusalem. So a new station was built in the south of the city and now this little stretch of track is disused and wonderfully overgrown, with the rails all buckled from the heat.

The line forms part of a cut-through to the cafés and shops of Emek Refaim and, for about the first week or so, each time I crossed it I would instinctively look up and down to see if a train was coming. But I also found myself wondering where it led, so on Friday, instead of taking the minibus shuttle to Tel Aviv, I decided to see if I could walk down the track to the new station and catch the train instead.


It's not really geared for walking, especially not in flip-flops, but it turned out to be pretty magical. Like canals, railway lines take you through bits of the city you don't usually see and I like the fact you can peer into people's backyards, find yourself skirting little industrial estates and nose around in areas you would have never even known existed from the road.


I passed signal boxes, burnt-out railway carriages and bits of track-side equipment. At one point I found a small corrugated-iron shack that was obviously someone's home. And, under a road bridge, I came across an incredibly tidy pile of rubbish - some of it still in bin liners, but elsewhere little stacks of bottles, t-shirts, socks, things like that. The whole thing was obviously part of an someone's ongoing project to rescue what they could from other people's detritus. It was a small glimpse into a world of Jerusalem homelessness, far from the Jewish and Arab "villages" and their tensions, and it made me wonder how many people live here on bits of no man's land and who looks out for them.


But I also found myself thinking about connections, not only spatial ones, though this railway, the first in the Middle East, was the result of grand Anglo-French plans to link up the Levant, but also connections across time. Once I had worked out how to avoid the incredibly thorny plants that looked so sweet until they embedded themselves in your ankle, I noticed that every sleeper had the words "Colevilles 1933" embossed on it. And I started to reflect on those lanky boys from Surrey and Sussex who came out here in the 1930s as part of the British administration to bring civilisation - and new steel sleepers - to the pesky natives. They were met not by gratitude, but by Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or Arab terrorism and Jewish revolts - your call) and they must have felt a long way from evensong and tea on the lawn. It's hardly surprising they found refuge in a gin and tonic or six in the American Colony hotel.


But railway tracks and 1933 also have another, more terrible, resonance, for this was the year Hitler seized power in Germany and began a process that would eventually engulf Europe, and especially its Jews, and which would lead ultimately to the foundation of Israel. And, yes, to more Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or the other way round - again it's your call).

I got to the smart new Jerusalem station after about an hour and discovered that there's another reason most people take the shuttle: the train is a lot slower. But it runs through some beautiful countryside and is worth it just for that. We passed fields of melon and sunflowers and some sort of low-rise green thing that I think might be potatoes. And then, just around Beit Shemesh, suddenly everything was vineyards. And all of this nestled among low, sandy hills that could be straight out of the Bible.


I spent the afternoon on the beach with Tom's friend Na'ama, talking about life, drinking beer and eating shakshuka - a wonderful Israeli dish in which eggs are broken into a kind of ratatouille of tomatoes, peppers, onions, herbs and spices and the whole thing is baked in an oven. It's simple, delicious and totally open to variation (we had ours with little chorizo-like sausages mixed in too). And, as I discovered later that night, talking to someone after the Friday night synagogue service, everyone has their own secret ingredient. (His was sweet kiddush wine, which, as anyone who has ever tasted it will know, is a much better use of the stuff than drinking it.)

On shabbat itself, I went on another long walk that took me through some pine forests near my house and closer to the separation fence (wall, barrier... again your call) than I had imagined. The route took me past some very expensive-looking newly built condos, destined, I imagine, for Jewish Americans, and down into what I think is the Kidron Valley. And then I found myself in an small Arab district, indentifiable by the fact that there were cars going up and down and people in the streets. (Jewish Jerusalem on shabbat is like a ghost town.) And there, in front of me on the next ridge was the separation fence. (You can see bits of it along the far ridge in this picture. Click on the pic to make it bigger.)


Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the fence, in its concrete part, is ugly. And you get the feeling that it's meant to be that way. On the Palestinian side there is plenty of graffiti - apparently there is a Banksy somewhere but I am not sure where. But on the Israeli side all you see are tall concrete slabs.

I had just finished reading Tanya Reinhart's 'Israel/Palestine' and also this article in the LRB, both of which are highly critical of the carving up the West Bank that Israel appears to be engaged in and it was alarming to see the reality. But I am also aware of the counterargument that the parts of the wall that are concrete as against chain link (about 10 per cent) are there partially to prevent sniper attacks on nearby Jewish areas. And it reminded me of this poem that I came across a couple of years ago.

Where It's Really Dangerous
Uri Orbach (published originally in 2001)

In America, everyone knows that it is terribly dangerous in Israel now, and it is not recommended to travel to Israel.
In Israel, everyone knows that it is dangerous only in the territories and in a little bit of Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem everyone knows there is shooting going on, but only in the neighborhood of Gilo.
In Gilo everyone knows that it is dangerous, but only on Ha'anafa Street.
On Ha'anafa street everyone knows that it is dangerous, but not all along the street, just in the houses that face Beit Jalla.
In the houses facing Beit Jalla, everyone knows it is dangerous, but mostly in a few apartments on specific floors that get shot at occasionally.
In the apartments that get shot at, they know it's dangerous, but not in all the rooms. Just in the kitchen. In the bedrooms and bathrooms, on the other hand, it's totally safe.
In the kitchen that gets shot into they know it's really dangerous. But not in the entire kitchen. Just near the fridge and the toaster.
Those near the fridge know that where it's really dangerous is in the freezer, which is directly in the rifle sights of the sharp-shooters from Beit Jalla.
You can take milk and cheese out of the fridge part without getting hit - usually. Word-of-honor.
And in the freezer over the fridge part of the refrigerator on one part of Ha'anafa street at the edge of Giloh in Jerusalem in Israel? Oh boy, it's totally dangerous there. If you stand there and pull some frozen schnitzels out of the freezer, that's when you really take your life in your hands.
So for a few months, just until things calm down, we're not going to use the freezer.
Nu, so this you call dangerous?

When I got back I found No Name curled up on my bed. (Don't read this if you are eating.) I put him back outside but there are so many open doors and windows here that he was in again before I even got back to the bedroom. So I decided to leave it to Shuki.


At 6pm, Shuki walked in for his evening feed. He saw No Name and, with a burst of energy that was impressive for a 22lb cat, leapt on to him and grappled him to the floor. There was plenty of hissing and yowling as the two of them spun around in a kind of mad cat ball when one of them - my guess is it was No Name - erm, lost control of his bowels and, thanks to centrifugal force, an arc of acrid cat poo shot out over the floor, my sheets and the wardrobe. I yelled. They scarpered. And the rest was silence and, even now, a strangely lingering smell of bleach.