FROM JERUSALEM TO NABLUS

At seven the next morning a middle-aged Palestinian man called Yassir picked me up in a van. He offered me half of his breakfast, a sandwich of plump, moist falafel in pitta bread.
'Thank you. How long will it take to get to Nablus?' I asked
'One hour and ten minutes.'
This seemed amazingly precise considering the stories about road blocks and delays. I asked Yassir what I should say if the soldiers asked where I was going.
'Say you're going to the Samaritan mountains. Say you've heard there are some interesting ruins there. You have the right to go. Don't worry.'
I did worry. 'You have a typical East European paranoia complex,' a Hungarian friend had once told me, remarking on my tendency to feel automatically in the wrong if I'm suspected of being so. It was kicking in now.
I'd never heard of the Samaritan mountains. I started flicking through my guide book for information but found nothing. My fears were fuelled by a news item broadcast a couple of weeks after the ISM session. Samia, along with two other Pakistani women, had already travelled to Israel and, despite their strict Islamic dress, had made it through the airport. A day or two later a twenty-strong squad of armed soldiers burst into their bedroom in a Jerusalem hotel in the middle of the night and arrested them. They had subsequently been deported, even though the judge at their hastily arranged hearing could find no reason to complain about them.
At the first checkpoint Yassir drove round a line of waiting cars. He explained that he was an Arab-Israeli, one of some one million Palestinians living in Israel. As such, he had an Israeli number plate and didn't have to queue up or be questioned. We made the same detour at the second checkpoint and then took a road up into the mountains. We stopped in a village where Yassir said he could take me no further because Nablus lay in Zone A. Seeing my mystified look, he told me that the Occupied Palestinian Territories were divided into three zones: A where the Palestinian National Authority had full civilian and security jurisdiction, B where the PNA controlled only civilian matters, and C (about 73 percent of the total) which was under full Israeli control. Israeli citizens (including Arab-Israelis) were only allowed to enter Zones B and C.
'Don't worry,' Yassir said. 'Another car is waiting for you further ahead, down the mountain.' He showed me where I should go and told me to leave my bag with him. It would be delivered to me in Nablus in about an hour, he said. How, I knew not, but nevertheless I handed it over. Right then, being separated from my toothbrush and a change of clothing was the least of my anxieties. I clambered over a wall, jumped over some clumps of barbed wire, ran down through some fields, all the time tensed for the sound of soldiers' shouts or, even worse, the whizzing of bullets past my ears, and found the waiting car.
We zigzagged down the slopes of Mount Gerizim and into the outskirts of Nablus. I was entering one of the oldest cities in the world, and one with an intimate historical link to the present conflict. Genesis chapter 12 reports that it was in Shechem - the former name of the city - that God made the first of his promises to Abraham that the land would be gifted to his descendants. The Jewish Talmud speaks of it more darkly as 'a place where bad things happen'.

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