Yalla - Pedalling Through Palestine
Published in The Bikepacking Journal. Not Published Online.
The weather is perfect. My bike is running great, and there’s no dangerous wildlife to worry about, no swollen, glacial rivers to ford. There hasn’t even been a single downed tree to carry my bike over or around.
And yet, something is wrong. I have the kind of ominous feeling I get when I’m at home riding
through grizzly country. The feeling that, at any moment, I could turn a corner and a perfect day of bikepacking could turn into anything but.
I can’t exactly place why. The fact that Alaa, my local riding partner, seems on edge isn’t helping. And, when I stopped to snap a photo of a golden-domed mosque, I noticed that the old, moustachioed man on the roadside gave me less of a “what are you and your weird bike doing here?” stare, and more of “you and that weird bike really shouldn’t be here” glare.
At the next crossroads, Alaa stops and pulls out his phone. The red line of our route, a trail he’s been piecing together for a couple years but never ridden in full, points straight ahead, but Alaa suggests we hang a left and try to avoid riding directly through the next town. He doesn’t explain why, but we’re riding his route, so I follow him onto a gravel path that winds into some olive orchards.
We rejoin the route’s red line again midway up a steep climb and stop at a small shop to pick up water and snacks for the rest of the day. As with every town we’ve stopped in so far, some children gather and start asking us questions. They look at me and say, “Shalom.”
Alaa answers them quickly in Arabic. He’s run through these answers dozens of times, explaining that, yes, the bikes are pretty expensive, that he’s from the nearby city of Nablus, that I’m from Canada, and that we’re riding south that day to Birzeit.
“Yes, all the way to Birzeit,” he explains.
Midway through our interrogation, a dark purple sedan pulls up and three serious looking men step out. Their stares are ice cold, and they cut a beeline directly towards us. My shoulders instinctively tense.
Alaa waves and shouts, “Al-salaamu alaykum.”
A moment that feels like an hour passes before they reply, “Alaykum a salaam.”
With the opening, Alaa starts into the same refrain he delivered to the kids: bikes, Nablus, Canada, Birzeit. The man who seems to be the group’s leader nods and responds with what sounds like a lecture. Alaa shrugs and smiles, seemingly admitting to whatever the man is accusing him of. The man nods, turns to me, and breaks into a wide, toothy grin.
“Welcome to Palestine. Most welcome!” he exclaims, grabbing my hand and shoulder to give me a sort of full-body handshake.
GRAFFITI
Whether you call it Palestine, the West Bank, or the Occupied Territories, the stretch of land between Jordan and Israel is one of the most complicated places on the planet. Layer upon layer of culture, religion, and politics have accumulated for generations, and you can feel all of it as you ride through the land.
It’s not just history, though. There’s an energy in Palestinian day-to-day life that, to an outsider, is electrifying, terrifying, and confusing all at once. I spent most of the long November nights mentally unpacking each day, trying to understand how politics, culture, and the daily realities of life were shaping my ride through the West Bank.
The night after our experience with the men in the purple sedan, Alaa tried to explain what happened over plates of molokhia, a dark green, herb-packed Palestinian soup served with iridescent yellow saffron rice. The town was close to an Israeli settlement, and there had been deep conflict between the communities over the years. The day before we rode through, Israeli soldiers had fired tear gas and rubber bullets at a protest close to the town.
As he explained the situation between bites of food, I remembered seeing “price tagging” graffiti on the walls of Sebastiya, another nearby Palestinian town, the night before. Painted in the bright blue of the Israeli flag, the graffiti was a mix of six-pointed stars, fighter jets, Hebrew letters, and, crudely, the hatched circles of a rifle’s targeting scope. Palestinians I spoke to called it clear intimidation. Israeli settlers brushed it off as the work of kids and teenagers letting off steam.
In Nablus, an ancient Samaritan city that’s become one of the largest Palestinian cities in the West Bank—and Alaa’s hometown—posters of martyrs adorned the walls of the bazaar. They mostly showed fallen young men holding assault rifles, standing proud and defiant. The posters carried more images of swords and guns. All of it was surrounded by graffiti in the red, black, white, and green of the Palestinian flag.
The posters and graffiti were even thicker across the walls of Bourin, where we had met the men in the dark purple sedan. The walls were also adorned by streams of yellow flags emblazoned with the image of a crossed rifle and sword. The flags showed the town’s support for Fatah, a Palestinian political party once listed by most of the Western world as a terrorist organization.
I was used to staring at my surroundings on a bikepacking trip and trying to glean some understanding, but nowhere else was there so much weight, history, and allegory in the small town graffiti.
ROCKS
“There’s a checkpoint ahead. We’re going to turn right just before it,” Alaa explained to me at the top of a long, paved climb. I mentally prepared myself to ride at high speed towards a roadblock manned by heavily armed teenagers doing their compulsory national service in the Israeli Defence Forces.
The guards’ stares followed us from behind dark sunglasses as we drew closer. I waved nervously, unsure exactly what to do, as their stares tracked us through an arcing right turn about 50 meters before the checkpoint.
Through the turn, we settled into another long climb. Razor wire and blue on white Star of David flags marked the edge of an Israeli settlement on the ridge above us. A bright red sign beside the road reads:
This Road leads to Area “A”. Under the Palestinian Authority the entrance for Israeli citizens is forbidden, dangerous to your lives and is against the Israeli law.
Under the Oslo Accords, a set of agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed in 1993 and updated in 1995, Area A is the part of the West Bank solely under Palestinian control. Comprising about 18 percent of the West Bank’s lands, it’s joined by Area B, under joint Palestinian-Israeli control, and Area C, lands under full Israeli control.
“Even when I’m on my own, other Palestinians think I’m an Israeli settler,” Alaa explained. “Palestinians don’t ride bikes like this, so whenever I’m riding, I have to stop a lot and explain who I am, that I’m from Nablus, and all that.”
He shrugged with a sort of “it is what it is” smile, and we turned onto a dirt road. Alaa is remarkably calm given that I’ve seen children in some small towns instinctively pick up rocks at the sight of us on our bikes. Assuming we’re settlers, they prepare for conflict, only dropping their rocks when they finally accept Alaa’s story and ask me questions about Canada in broken English.
I’m never sure how to feel in these moments. Part of me is terrified, the natural reaction when the locals pick up rocks to potentially throw at you. Another part of me is heartened to see such resilience and readiness to fight among these youth. A third part reminds me that this is one of the most politically charged places on earth, and if anything, this is just another sign of the intractable conflict among the people who live within these hills.
UNICYCLE
Before he started bikepacking, Alaa was a unicyclist. He wanted to join a circus troupe because travelling with the group to study and perform was one of the few opportunities he had to travel outside of the West Bank.
A unicycle was key to his plan. But, there wasn’t anyone in Palestine selling one, so he traveled over 50 miles from his home in Nablus to meet an Israeli unicycle dealer at a checkpoint to buy the single-wheeled machine. The taxi ride there was uneventful, and the purchase went off exactly as planned. He tried out the unicycle, handed the Israeli shekels to the seller, and prepared to head back home. Unfortunately, there weren’t any taxis to take him back to Nablus, so he started doing the logical thing: riding his unicycle.
Keep in mind that at this point, Alaa hadn’t really learned how to ride a unicycle. In fits and starts, he figured it out, eventually hitting a decent pace as he became, perhaps, the first Palestinian to try long-distance unicycling.
The sun had just started to set the first time an Israeli military patrol pulled him over. It was well and truly dark by the time the second patrol stopped him. Finding nothing amiss about Alaa or his ride—short of the fact he was riding 50 miles on a unicycle—the patrols eventually let him pass, and well after sunset, his first long ride was done.
Now with two wheels under him, Alaa is a master route maker. As the checkpoint and the settlement dropped out of view behind us, Alaa guided us onto a stretch of rocky singletrack. The trail cut a route around the Israeli checkpoints on the main road, creating a sort of backdoor that Palestinians, especially the semi-nomadic Bedouin shepherds, use. It was a stark reminder that though I can pass through checkpoints as a tourist, for Alaa, this is a land where the freedom of a bike extends only to the next border. The checkpoint I passed through to enter the West Bank isn’t open to him. Rather, it’s just another piece of what will be a 708-kilometer-long wall surrounding most of the West Bank. Currently, around 500 kilometers of barriers have been built along the border, with another 200 kilometers either planned or under construction.
JORDAN
A steep, rough sheep track forced us off our bikes and onto a short hike-a-bike through a thick cypress forest. Pushing our bikes along a bouldery trail, we popped out into a clearing with a small beige building tucked into the foliage on one side.
“It’s from Jordan,” Alaa explained. “Military, from the war.” He meant the period between the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the West Bank was annexed by its neighbour Jordan, now one of only two countries (the other being Egypt) in the region with which Israel has a peace treaty.
We stopped for a moment and took in the view. Below us were churches, synagogues, and mosques. In the distance, the peaks of Jordan’s Abarim Mountains were barely visible in the midday haze. In the other direction, we could just make out the silhouette of Jerusalem on the horizon. Beyond that, Israel stretched to the Mediterranean Sea.
Staring out at the view, biting into a piece of halva—the tahini candy popular across the region—my brain searched for a simple way to sum up my ride through the West Bank. But, like an easy solution or explanation to the political situation in the region, anything I came up with felt cheap.
Our route took us past a pair of breweries run by Palestinian Christians. We biked through towns where flags, posters, and graffiti professed support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other militants. We passed tour buses full of day trippers from Jerusalem visiting Wadi Qelt, a long canyon where sublime desert singletrack passes ancient arched Roman aqueducts, oasis retreats dating back to the Ottoman empire, and a Greek Orthodox monastery residing on a cliff’s edge.
I saw Israeli soldiers at the gates of a national park smiling and joking with Palestinian children. Then, I listened to a group of Israeli mountain bikers react with suspicion and disdain when I stopped on a popular trail to chat and explain that I was riding through the West Bank with a Palestinian.
As I looked out across the Judean hills, I had no grand epiphany. Instead, I just asked Alaa where we were headed next, dropped in behind him, and started pedalling.