Mr Felix gets the boot from Israel! The Prelude

I was finally off to Jerusalem.

Today's plan was to leave Jordan at the Abdullah Bridge, cross into Israel at Allenby in the West Bank, and then cycle the 30 kilometres west to Jerusalem. With luck I’d be there by dinnertime.

I turned left off the Dead Sea highway and rode 15 km down past small huddles of orchard groves and the numerous Bedouin encampments stretched out along the Jordan River plateau. Their encampments, each a collection of perhaps 4 or 5 large, square tents, with accompanying goats, camels and motorised vehicles in various states of disorder, looked for all the world like Barnum and Bailey had come to town, in a big way.

Oh, to be a boy again!

At the bottom of a long, straight hill, the Jordanian Immigration building loomed into view.

Once inside, I handed my passport in through a little opening at one end of a wall, called out ‘No stamp! No stamp!’, and picked it up 20 metres along, at another little opening. All I could see through the small openings were hands, but they seemed to be working well.

So far, so good.

The ‘no stamp’ issue is politics in motion.

If you have a Jordanian exit stamp at King Abdullah Bridge, and a corresponding Israeli entry stamp at Allenby in your passport, this means you have been to Israel, and subsequently you will not, under any circumstances, get into Syria, Lebanon or Iran, the politics of the region being what it is.

The way around the impasse is to ask for ‘no stamp in the passport’, in which case you are issued a piece of paper, and there is no permanent record of visiting Israel in the passport itself. Once out of Israel, you can ‘lose’ the paper.

I was eventually heading up through both Syria and Iran, so I was definitely in the 'no stamp' program.

Nothing to worry about…

It was approaching midday when I climbed on the bus that was taking us out of Jordan Immigration, across the river, and further on through a few kilometres of No Man's Land to Israel at Allenby Border Control. Rooster, my bike, was safely tucked into the luggage bay of the bus.

It was all moving like clockwork.

The bus, a large, white, modern 40 seater, was half full, and populated by the usual energetic backpackers, mostly Westerners of various nationalities, on school holidays of some sort. Across the aisle from me was an attractive, thirty-something German girl, and up at the back of the bus was a middle-aged man in a dark grey suit, presumably an Arab of some description, sitting quietly by himself.

The bus came to life, and very soon the rough desert landscape of No Man's Land, with it's maze of steel guard rails and barbed wire fences positioned higgledy-piggledy on each side of the dirt road, began to slip by.

I smiled at the German girl, we made our introductions, and once she started talking, she just wouldn't shut up. On and on she went about working for some NGO or other in Amman and getting 'absorbed' into a Bedouin tribe (whatever that entailed, I didn't want to know), until I eventually lost track of her somewhere in a sandstorm in the Sinai, or was it on a bus in a tunnel in Egypt with a tank blocking the exit? Beruit was somewhere inside the long narrative, as was Libya, and I wondered if I shouldn’t have sat in the back with the Arab chap. He looked like the kind of guy I could get on with.

Next thing she was in Dubai, and I wished I was on my bike.

I gazed past her head, made 'aha' noises, and slowly, mercifully, drifted away. I recalled a conversation I'd had with a Palestinian friend in Malaysia some months before. I planned to visit his cousin in East Jerusalem.

"Can I cycle across the border into Israel, Mohammed?" I asked.
"No, Felix, they will shoot you!" he said, somewhat startled. "You must get the bus." We were sitting together in an Indian cafe near the university where I taught, and Mohammed, tall, thin and in his early twenties, was a student.
"But, Mohammed, this is a cycling trip I'm doing and it's important that I cycle all the way," I said. "Catching a bus is, you know, not on, not kosher, haram." (Harum is Arabic for 'forbidden'.)

Mohammed gave me a look which clearly said, 'You are nuts!' His hair was beginning to stand on end.

"No, Felix," he repeated, forcefully, "they will SHOOT YOU!"
"Oh, come on! They’re not going to actually shoot me, surely!" I said, leaning back in my chair, and waving a hand dismissively in the air. “All the world loves a cyclist, man!”

I’d crossed enough international borders in my time, on a bicycle, and I wasn’t about to be phased by the emotive outburst of a testosterone charged student.

In my job students flip out on a weekly basis, and I'm used to dealing with young, reactive minds.

Creative Media, by its nature, is an emotive process, viz.; The student presents his or her work. You tell them it's a piece of shit. They jump up and down. They get in your face. They tell you that you are a no-talent-idiot-loser-megalomaniac-fascist who is destroying their great artistic opus, and 'A pox on you, Sir!' etc etc, and so be it.

However, being the lecturer, I hold the gun. I am the keeper of the gate, and my word dictates whether the student 'gets through', or is sent packing, maybe for another try later, or maybe never to be seen again.

Power, I tell you, is a long, cool woman in a black dress...

So you brush aside the barbed rhetoric, and settle down to work with the facts.

You point out that their precious film, for example, has no characters, no plot, no set up and hence no possible resolution, but still, not all is lost, it does have nice title graphics. However, you explain, 'Special thanks to God!' in the end credits may skew the audience's perception of what the student film maker is trying to say, and is possibly best 'removed'.

After a small theological discussion, viz.; 'You are an athiest dog, Mr Felix!', you move on, and finally get through to an agreed and sober working reality.

I love working with students, but you do have to keep your humour up.

Mohammed wasn't about to be brushed off...

"Felix, listen, I'm a Palestinian, and I live in Jerusalem," he said, leaning across the table and fixing me with steely eyes. "IF YOU CYCLE ACROSS THE BORDER THE ISRAELIS WILL SHOOT YOU!"

What's with these Palestinians?

I went back to gazing past the German girl’s head. She was in Yemen, I think, eating something bad.

We crossed the Abdullah Bridge into Israeli territory, and on the right of the cyclone fence that ran alongside the road, small white porta-rooms began appearing, one after the other, like workers' huts in a construction site. Each hut had an array of aerials sticking upright out of its roof, and you did wonder whether inside each little hut there was an Israeli soldier with earphones on, listening into the conversations on the bus. I pity the poor chap who was tracking the German girl.

I felt like I was entering another reality, and it made me oddly, and unexpectedly, ill at ease. Maybe they were monitoring our thoughts?

I had strict instructions from Mohammed not to mention him or his cousin at the border. "It will create problems for us, Felix," he said, darkly. Exactly what problems he didn't specify, but I figured the Israelis kept tabs on the flow of Palestinians in and out of the country, and international visitors on bicycles may illicit suspicion - who knows?

Ok, don't think about Mohammed, don't think about Mohammed...

Maybe the Israelis were just overloading the electro-wavosphere with all the radio activity and it was disturbing the neural balance in my brain?

Maybe that was the idea?

I was on a sailing ship some years ago crossing the Andaman Sea from Thailand. A couple of nights out, around midnight, we ran into a vicious storm blowing in from the Indian Ocean. The boat lurched too and fro, the deck swayed up and down, waves crashed over the railings, and finally, as much as I tried to hold it in, I just hurled my guts. Everybody hurled their guts that night, and it was a ghastly scene.

I am standing at the Israeli checkpoint. The man with the curly hair looks deeply into my eyes. "You have been thinking of Mohammed, haven't you, Mr Felix!" he says. It's not really a question, but more a statement of fact. The man leans down and turns up the electro-wavosphere machine. My brain sways up and down...

"Yes, I have!" I shout, voiding myself of all knowledge, honour and hope for redemption in one great hurl. "His name is Mohammed Blah Blah and he lives in a safe house in Blah Blah Street... his cousin's name is Blah Blah... his known associates are Blah Blah... whatever you want to know, I will tell you... groan!" The sound of a man betraying his friends is a pitiful thing.

Maybe I'd just eaten too many falafels in Jordan?

In any case, all the world loves a cyclist, so what was I worried about?

The bus pulled up in front of a white, low-slung concrete building, and began disgorging its load, just as the German girl was riding a camel in Syria and fighting off an overly amorous tourist guide. Man, she could talk!

My feet hit the ground and I conveniently lost her in the shuffle.

The first thing I spotted were three young men in sloppy tee-shirts and jeans, each not a day over 22, standing with legs apart by the railings of the baggage check-in area. They chatted and laughed, turned to say something to the two Israeli girls walking by, also in jeans and tee-shirts, who chuckled and quipped back. The boys smirked. The whole scene was reminiscent of a Sunday afternoon at the marina at St. Kilda beach, a popular hangout spot in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

The only problem was that each of the young men was sporting a very large, and very lethal looking machine gun, slung from the shoulder and hanging loosely, Rambo style, down across their respective genital areas.

What the fuck is wrong with this picture? My brain reeled. They looked like kids who'd just gotten back from a successful raid on Toys-R-Us.

Having cycled around Asia off and on for last 20 years, I'm actually cool with chaps with machine guns. The difference in Asia being that the deadly ones are normally wearing a uniform and exude 'high discipline'. When it comes to lethal killing machines, I'm totally into high discipline.

You may not like the shiny buttons, you may not agree with the politics, and you may even turn your nose up at the 'Yes, sir, no, sir, let me polish your boots, sir!' mindset, but when it comes to 'is he going to shoot me, or no', you instinctively know with hard drill chaps in shiny buttoned down uniforms that if you stay to the right of the line, you live, and the line is very clear and very well defined.

Even if you do cross to the left, there are strict protocols in place before you get atomised, viz.; 'Hey, you with the bike, go back to the right of the line!', followed by, 'Let go of the bicycle and lie down on the ground, now!', and finally, if you haven't got the message yet, 'If you as much as ring your bell, Mr Cyclist, you're a dead man!'

All of the above instructions are easy to understand, easy to comply with, and if you follow instructions, you live. Living is good.

Imagine if my students carried machine guns...

Still, appearances can be deceptive, especially first appearances, and who knows what I was looking at? This was Israel, and all young people are required to do a couple of years in the army, but still, I didn't expect the beach party atmosphere. It was strangely menacing.

We're all going on a summer holiday,
Doin' things we always wanted to.
Fun and laughter in East Jerusalem,
For a week or two-oo-oo,
Me and Mohammed too-oo-oo... (Fade out)

The only way to find out what was going on was to actually visit the place, and I was almost there.