The Migration

And the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. And it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there. 1 Kings 17: 2– 4

The most common migratory bird in the Middle East is a sylviid warbler called the blackcap. Like all the passerines or songbirds that pass through the region, it travels at night, when it’s cooler and there are fewer predators around, and it flies by flapping its wings as opposed to relying on updrafts. Since it winters in northern Africa and summers in Germany, it travels a shorter distance than the white stork, and yet its journey is a remarkable feat of endurance. Normally, it weighs twelve grams, the same as a two-pound coin, but it will double in weight before it embarks on its migration. When it arrives in southern Israel, at the end of its desert crossing, it will have burnt up the extra fat, and more. According to Amir Balaban, one of the directors of the Jerusalem Bird Observatory (JBO), it will be thin and exhausted, and will rest and feed at an oasis in Elat or the Arava Valley before it resumes its journey.

Since the Jerusalem region lies within the most southerly reaches of the Mediterranean habitat, many of the birds aim for it, and the JBO, in the heart of the government district to the west of the city, is a particularly important stopping-off point. On the morning I visited, they had caught four blackcaps in the nets slung between the trees and in April, when the migration is in full flood, they will catch as many as fifty a day.

Four days had passed since my trip along the Rift Valley with Eran Banker. It was the Sabbath and when the taxi dropped me opposite the Supreme Court at seven-thirty, there was no one – other than Amir Balaban – around. He was planting a shrub beside a reed-fringed pond to the side of the path that led to the carefully cultivated wilderness of the observatory. He’s a stocky man with close-cropped hair and he was dressed in the uniform of birders and outdoor-lovers throughout the Western world – pale walking trousers, a fleece and sandals. We moved to the hide and sat looking out through the narrow slit at the birds gathering on the feeding table and the fringes of the pond. Through the trees, we could see the high-rise towers of the suburb of Nahlaot, which was founded in the nineteenth century by Jews escaping the cramped confines of the Old City.

The area had once been farmland belonging to an Arab village that was destroyed in the war of 1947–8, when the fledgling Israeli state was attempting to retain, and expand, the territory it had been allotted in the UN plan to partition Palestine. According to some estimates, as many as 400 villages were decimated in the course of the war and approximately 700,000 people were forced to leave their homes. The Palestinians call the mass exodus the nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, though not surprisingly, the Israelis have a different name for the events of the year – the graveyard abutting the JBO’s borders is largely devoted to people killed in ‘the War of Independence’.

In 1966 the Knesset, the parliament of Israel, moved to its current home from temporary lodgings in King George Street and, for the next twenty years or so, the land was used as an ‘organic rubbish dump’. Amir Balaban began birdwatching as a child among its dense, untended shrubs and trees, and in 1994, the Knesset was persuaded to lease the site to the JBO. Amir believes that its location is significant, because it asserts the primacy of nature and wildlife in Israeli life. He believes it’s the organization’s job to make sure that the half a billion birds that pass through the region each spring do so safely, and yet given the proportion of bird-lovers to bird-hunters in every country in the Mediterranean region – from France, Italy, Malta, Greece and Turkey to Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco – their task is difficult.

The JBO was the first ringing station in the Middle East; the bird-ringers who established the Jericho station where Sami worked were trained here. Amir told me that a shared passion for birds and wildlife will overcome most difficulties, ‘political or ideological’, but he was realistic about the relationship between the birdwatchers on either side of the divide: ‘We do have our…disagreements with our Palestinian friends.’ He chose the word carefully.

I still wanted to witness the migration from the Palestinian perspective and when I left the JBO, I called Imad Atrash. In the next few days, we arranged to meet several times, but without success. One morning, I stood outside the police station in Bethlehem’s Manger Square for an hour and a half, waiting for his ‘driver’, who failed to appear, despite Imad’s repeated assurances that he was on his way. I found it hard to conceal my irritation, though I had to remind myself that it’s difficult to maintain normal standards of efficiency when you’re living under occupation. I was beginning to think that we were never going to meet when he rang three days before the end of my trip and invited me to Jericho.

We met outside the municipality building and drove into the hills through a small village called Jericho’s Gate. There were children playing by the side of the road, and I saw a young boy climbing past a roll of barbed wire. On the edges of the town, the road grew steeper and narrower. Soon, we were running along the edge of a deep ravine. Imad called it Palestine’s Grand Canyon, though it’s better known as the Wadi Qelt. I’d hoped to walk through it from the west, and I hadn’t expected to find myself driving in from the other direction.

The dark red cliffs were striped with horizontal fissures and beyond them the pale, mounded hills looked as if they were made of poured concrete. Jericho was spreading out beneath us, and it looked surprisingly green, like a pool of emerald water gathered in a dip in the desert.

Imad was driving and his researcher was sitting in the front seat. The car’s wheels were no more than a couple of feet from the edge of the cliff. He caught my eye in the rear-view mirror.

‘Are you afraid?’

‘A little.’

‘You needn’t be afraid with Imad Atrash.’

The road began to descend again, and we drew up in front of a roadblock made of concrete blocks driven into mounds of rubble. Sami’s fears had been justified: there had been a fight between Palestinians and settlers from Vered Jericho on the day that we had planned our walk, and the army had sealed, or resealed, the road between the settlement and the town.

We followed a path that wound through the lunar strip and emerged on an area of smooth, dark tarmac, opposite a large stone arch, surmounted by a cross. We had a choice of two paths: the first led through the arch and fell sharply downwards, but we took the other one leading upwards and came to a vantage point on the cliff top. Beneath us, tucked into a platform against the cliff face on the far side of the valley, was the monastery of St George.

The road we hadn’t taken emerged at the base of the cliff and ran through the bottom of the valley. It crossed a bridge and led to a gatehouse adorned with a red cross on a white background. Beyond it, steps led up to another wall and a steep tower, crowned with a sky-blue dome. A culvert filled with water ran beside the road at the bottom of the valley, and the lower slopes of the hills were lush and green. Some people believe that ‘the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan’ is the Wadi Qelt, and the monastery is supposed to have been founded in AD 420 by five hermits, next to the cave where Elijah was fed by ravens when he fled Israel to avoid a drought. When the Persians conquered Palestine in the seventh century, they massacred fourteen monks, whose bones are preserved in a cave near the monastery. The monastery was subsequently abandoned, but it was restored by the Crusaders in 1179, and rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Greek Orthodox Church.

Over the years, many cave-dwelling hermits have lived in the Wadi Qelt in imitation of Elijah, and the cliff face above the monastery is pocked with caves still used by the monks as places of retreat. There were crosses on every hilltop as far as I could see and in the distance we could make out the antenna of the radar station on the summit of the Mount of Temptation.

Imad had set up his telescope on the edge of the cliff. I assumed that he was watching for birds but in fact he had spotted someone in the courtyard of the monastery. He looked up from the telescope: ‘Abu Majid!’ His booming voice echoed around the walls of the canyon. Imad’s cousin was restoring mosaics in the monastery, but the figure he had seen wasn’t Abu Majid. For the next two minutes, Imad and the man in the courtyard shouted at one another across the chasm of the Wadi Qelt. The conversation established that Abu Majid had taken the day off, and Imad packed up his telescope.

It had been a pleasant expedition, but it seemed rather pointless, and as we walked back to the jeep, I asked Imad why he had brought me to the Wadi Qelt, rather than the bird-ringing station. He told me that it was one of his favourite places – that he had often walked through it as a child. He was born in Beit Sahour in 1958, to a poor family, and as a boy he had helped his mother grow vegetables to sell to their neighbours. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Boy Scouts, and when he spent a year studying at Bristol Polytechnic in 1982, he went on a pilgrimage to Brownsea Island, the site of the first Boy Scout Jamboree. For many years he worked as a lab technician at Bethlehem University, but he wanted to translate his love of nature into action. In 1992 he set up a non-governmental organization called the Environmental Educational Centre (EEC) in the grounds of a school called Talitha Kumi, in the village of Beit Jala, on the other side of Bethlehem from Beit Sahour. In 1998, he left to establish the PWLS. As well as running the ringing station, the PWLS promotes ecotourism and animal welfare, and soon Imad hopes to establish the first environmental institute in Palestine. Praiseworthy aims, no doubt, though again I found myself wondering what to make of his puzzling arrangements – were they indicative of the way that Palestinian society functions, or merely a product of his own relaxed and haphazard style?

The next day, I visited the ringing station at Talitha Kumi. They had netted a blackcap and two common chiffchaffs before I arrived and at eight a.m. I went round the nets slung between almond trees and fig trees in the school’s terraced grounds with Riad Abu Sa’ada, the director of the station. We found a chaffinch and a robin – a bird the Palestinians regard with as much affection as the British do. They call it abu henna – ‘the father of henna’ – because its breast is the colour of the dye used in wedding ceremonies.

Riad freed the birds from the nets, placed them in cloth bags and took them to an open-air platform in the woods, where he weighed and measured them. He held their heads between his fingers as he wrote up the notes, and their beaks moved across the page as though they were taking an intense interest in the recording of their specifications. It was a pleasant morning’s work, and yet Beit Jala lies in one of the most contested areas of the West Bank. The settlement of Har Gilo occupies a hilltop three kilometres to the west, and the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo stands on the other side of the valley. During the second intifada, Palestinian militants used to shoot at Gilo from Beit Jala, and the Israeli Army responded with characteristic severity: many houses in the village were destroyed and dozens of people were killed. One morning, Riad and Simon Awad, the executive director of the EEC, were nearly shot by Israeli soldiers when they were taking down the nets by the wall that overlooked the road to Har Gilo.

Riad had finished his assessment of the robin and was holding it with its claws pinned between his fingers and its head upright.

Hunting birds is part of the culture in Palestine and Riad said that people are often surprised when they ring them and release them. ‘We just open the hand,’ he told me, ‘and let it fly away.’ It was like a magic trick in reverse – one minute the bird was there, quivering faintly, and then it was gone. Abu henna took off in a blur of flickering wings and disappeared into the trees, free to resume its northward migration.