How was your commute today?
Keith Reeves describes a day in his life as an ecumenical accompanier
Sunday and Thursday are the Taybe days. We dread them. They mean rising at 3am, dressing in the dark, stumbling up the road to the taxi office, rousing the driver from his mattress beneath the stairs and taking a silent, twenty minute drive through grey streets to the Taybe/Ephrain terminal.
Then there is an extraordinary change. You step out of the taxi into a blaze of light and colour and noise. A makeshift market has sprung up on the approach to the terminal and here, in the glare of lamps, are tea and coffee stalls, men selling the breakfast staples of fresh fried falafel, hard boiled eggs and zata, the mix of bitter herbs to go with them. You can buy bread and tins of tuna, fruit and vegetables and the owners of the stalls (what time did they get up?) call greetings to you or ask you to buy.
Our acquaintance there, Ibrahim, offers us coffee. I take it. Helena cannot even face that so early. ‘Afterwards. You will need it then,’ he says.
A job to do
We walk the short distance to the gates. Already there are as many as a dozen women and a hundred or so men squatting on the ground, silent or talking quietly, waiting for the gates to open at 4am. We count them and take our position by the side of the three turnstiles that, at the end of a zigzag of queuing space, allow the men and women through to the caged area with a magnetic gate they have to clear before going on to the permit check. From here we are just a yard from the nearest turnstile but separated by cage bars. We could touch the people there, and can speak to them, but we cannot follow them through this terminal. It is solely to process workers into Israel.
Our task is to count the numbers passing, the speed they pass and the conditions experienced. We feed that information back to our office who pass it on to the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other bodies.
As 4am approaches the crowd grows quickly. The zigzag area is packed and the lane beyond, which stretches back some hundred and fifty yards to the market area, is filling rapidly. Things start to go wrong early today. 4am comes and goes without the turnstiles opening: 4:04, 4:08, 4:10.
The crush of workers from the lane, through the zigzags and onto the turnstiles, is enormous. Those at the back are unable to understand why nothing is moving. They growl and shout – and then it is hard to know just what happens. One turnstile at least springs open and men stampede forward towards the magnetic gate and start to fight through.
Chaos
From the speakers come barked orders in Arabic. The men stop, start shouting at the speakers, at each other and back at the crowd still behind the turnstile. We work out that the men are being ordered back through the turnstiles. The operator of the gate is unhappy with their lack of discipline (provoked by his lateness). It is the impossible that is being asked. There is no way on earth the men who are through the turnstiles can make space for themselves again on the other side. They shout more. Some urge them backwards in order to show themselves calm to the operator – but they cannot bring order.
We ring the Humanitarian Hotline, a number on which complaints about the gates can be logged. The woman on the other end of the line says she will contact the gate and, perhaps because of that, perhaps because the operator realises he is making a serious, stupid mess of things, men start to be able to go through the gate.
Every minute or so thereafter the turnstiles unlock and another eighty or so men go through and take their places through the magnetic gate. Each time the turnstiles lock again with a sickening thud as men are pushing through them. Instantly, the space behind crams full of heaving, crushed bodies. I step back and look down the lane to the market. For all of its length it, too. is solid with workers, perhaps a dozen or so abreast. They are crushed against each other so tightly that a man cannot reach his pocket or his face. It is still dark and there are just a few splashes of bright light from the stalls to show the frustration and rage on groups of faces.
Suddenly, in front of us, on a corner of one of the zigzags where there is a little more room, two men explode at one another. Both men are massive. They rain punches on each other as those about them first pull them apart and then roll them round so they are no longer close. Another man shouts to us, ‘People are suffering here. Do you see this?’ It’s hard for us to tell what they think we are – Israelis connected with the gate operation? It’s easy to understand their rage, however, and easy to feel wretched about observing their misery and discomfort while standing out of the crush – clean and cool.
Behind our eyes
We stand there for two and a half hours, until 6:30am. In the first half hour over 500 (mainly) men pass through that one magnetic gate in groups of sixty or seventy. In the second half hour it’s over 700 and between 5am and 6am 1,945 people go through: face after face. Each time the turnstiles stop there is a new set of dark eyes to stare at us, the cage and the glaring lights of the terminal. Thereafter, the numbers fall off rapidly. It is probably too late to make the working day in Israel and in the latter part of the period there is a trickle of men returning who have passed through too late to catch their employer’s bus.
As 6:30am comes we stop. We go back to the market, now close to the end of its working day. Ibrahim asks what we would like. ‘Tea.’ ‘Dark like Egyptians, I think.’ He’s right. Tea, dark and sweet in the Egyptian way is just what we want and we sit on the plastic stools he pulls round for us to the back of his van, eat the chocolate biscuits he has prescribed and fail to talk adequately about what we have seen.
We go back home now. We will get back to bed, sleep until 11am maybe, while those Palestinian men and women we counted through the Taybe gate toil on their building sites, in their factories and their cleaning machines. But their images, their dark eyes, will flicker behind our eyes while we sleep and for days to come, perhaps until we manage to still them in words like this.
Keith works with Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) as an ecumenical accompanier serving on the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI).
The views expressed in this article are personal.
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