Where the Line is Drawn by Raja Shehadeh

Author:Raja Shehadeh
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Profile Books

8

Allenby Bridge

1992

Penny and I were returning to Ramallah from Washington with the Palestinian Delegation, tired and despondent after a year of futile negotiations with the Israeli delegation that had begun with such high expectations the year before. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 had brought together representatives from Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians, and it had been followed by bilateral negotiations between Israel and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in Washington. What we could not know, and would not learn until 1993, was that secret negotiations taking place in Oslo between Israel and the PLO would succeed in reaching an agreement between the two sides.

On the Jordanian side of the Allenby Bridge, which crosses the River Jordan, we had completed all the formalities and were waiting for the Israeli soldiers to give us the signal to drive across the border when a sprightly young Jordanian soldier leaped on to the lower step of the minibus. All we could see was his head. He had short-cropped hair and a thick moustache.

‘Are these the Israeli soldiers?’ he asked, indicating two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border. They had long, dishevelled hair and walked with heavy steps. They seemed self-absorbed, drained by the oppressive summer heat.

‘Are these their soldiers?’ he repeated. ‘These? I could squeeze a dozen of them with my bare hands.’

He turned to us and winked. He had a self-satisfied, superior smile on his face, his eyes dark and triumphant. Then, leaping down from the bus and waving to us, he said, ‘Assalam alaikum [Peace be unto you].’

The soldiers who gave us the order to proceed disappeared and we rumbled over the old, wobbly bridge, underneath us the loose planks of wood supported by the metal edifice that stretched over one of the most troubled waterways in the world. We were on our way home.

Khalid, whose puffy cheeks looked as though they had been inflated with an air pump, alighted from the bus first and the rest of us followed. We were accompanied by a Jordanian porter, who had piled our luggage on a carrier. He pulled it to where there was a yellow metal gate just beyond the bridge and stopped. We could not go any further until the Israeli soldiers came to meet us. We waited but no one came. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the Jordan.

I remember seeing a photograph taken about a hundred years ago of a man rowing his boat along this same river. It had been so much wider then and the branches of the eucalyptus trees along its bank hung over the water. Ever since I had seen this photograph I had yearned to one day row my boat here after the mines had been cleared and the barbed wire removed and the river returned to what it used to be used for – irrigation for farmers, pleasure for visitors and a means of replenishing the dwindling waters of the Dead Sea. But with the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians as they were, this seemed unlikely.

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