Free Hossein Derakhshan!

Terrible news. It's been confirmed that Hossein Derakhshan, the prolific and controversial Iranian-Canadian blogger who is known as the "Blogfather" of the Persian blogosphere has been arrested in Iran.

Making this even creepier (for me) is the news that Hossein's last public act was to join the "Road to Jerusalem" group that was following this blog via Facebook.

Most disturbing are the reports that Hossein was accused of spying for Israel. In Iran, that charge can often be a death sentence.

I met Hossein once, and yes it was in Jerusalem. But he walked the streets proudly wearing an "I Love Tehran" T-shirt (probably the first one ever worn in Israel) in an over-the-top effort to challenge stereotypes and tackle the misconceptions that exist in both Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Yes, he was a critic of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Yes, he openly admired the Israel and the West. But he was also fiercely proud of his Iranian heritage, and called Iran the freest country in the Middle East after Israel. Though himself an atheist, he expressed admiration for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

This man is no spy. If Iran wants to be anything close to the marvellous place Hossein Derakhshan always claimed it was, the government must release the Blogfather immediately.

To Jerusalem, by bullet-proof bus

By bus, Tapuach, West Bank to Jerusalem - Friday, Nov. 7

I arrived in Jerusalem today, 30 days after I left it. Fittingly, the final leg of my road was through the most complicated part of the Middle East, and among the Jewish settlers who make it so by insisting on their God-given right to live on land that most of the world recognizes as belonging to the Palestinians.

I rode Egged bus 148 from the heart of the West Bank home to Jerusalem. It's a bus specifically for settlers, and is outfitted with double-paned bulletproof windows to protect it from attack as it rolls through the Palestinian Territories. It doesn't stop in any of the Arab towns along the way.

My fellow passengers, however, were far from stereotypes. While there were indeed religious fundamentalists on the bus, racing to beat the sun - and the beginning of Jewish Sabbath - to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, I spent most of the ride chatting with a young couple who themselves reflected the current divide within Israel.

Both were named Adi, and were students at the college in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. She, Adi Saidoff, is a 22-year-old believer in the idea that the West Bank is part of Greater Israel. A resident of a moshav outside Jerusalem, she said she was proud to go to school in Ariel because it meant she was contributing to the settlement project.

Her 25-year-old boyfriend, Adi Fardouq, was less sure. The son of a prominent member of Israel's left-wing Labour Party, he said he wasn't sure Jews should remain in places like Ariel.

"If we take from them, they will take from us," the deeply tanned engineering student explained before his equally tanned girlfriend, an economics major who hid her eyes behind over-sized sunglasses, interrupted.

"They're sitting on our land," she said, speaking of the Palestinians without mentioning them. "The places where the settlements are need to belong to us."

"I don't think so," he retorted as our bus rolled through the yellow gate of the sprawling Ofra settlement, with its red-roofed homes on a hilltop overlooking Ramallah. "Every time we take land from them, we open this conflict further."

While both were agnostic about the looming Israeli election - a vote that could decide which Adi sees their vision fulfilled - they were both worried by this week's victory by Barrack Obama in the U.S. presidential election.

Falsehoods such as that Obama is a Muslim are commonly repeated here, and Israelis are deeply concerned that he will reverse America's historic support for Israel and instead sympathize with the Palestinians.

Several passengers on the bus said that Israel's very existence - or at least its presence in the West Bank -would be threatened without U.S. backing.

"We can say that Israel exists because of America. They're the ones who liberated the concentration camps, and until now they give us large amounts of money," said Binyamin Lumbre, an 85-year-old who left his native France three years ago - citing rising violence in the suburbs of Paris where he lived - to take up residence in the West Bank settlement of Eli.

"If America doesn't support Israel in the future, if it doesn't give us the money, we'll be in great difficulty."

Which, of course, is exactly the outcome the vast majority of the Muslim and Arab world is hoping for.

West Bank traveller's index

By bus from Nablus to Jerusalem -Friday, Nov. 7

Number of our Egged bus: 148

Number of Israeli Jews on the bus: 37

Number of Arabs: 0

Number of Jewish settlements the 148 passes through: 10 (including Jewish neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem)

Number of Palestinian towns the 148 stops in: 0

Number of military checkpoints we pass through: 4

Time our bus spent waiting at said checkpoints: none (Egged buses aren't searched by Israeli soldiers)

Number of panes of bulletproof glass the bus windows are made of: 2

Height of the concrete wall we passed through separating the Israeli settlement of Pisgaat Zeev from the outskirts of the Palestinian capital of Ramallah: eight metres

Signs of the times

Tapuach Junction, West Bank - Friday, Nov. 8

I'm now out of Nablus, having crossed the massive Huwwara checkpoint on the city's southern edge. I'm waiting at a bus stop with Jewish settlers to take me the final leg to Jerusalem.

The mood here can be summed up by the black-and-white poster glued to the metal side of the bus stop, which is defended by cement blocks for passengers to duck behind in the case of attack:

"Struggle for the Land of Israel," the sign reads.

"No to a Palestinian state!"

"They are S-C-A-R-Y!!!"

Yes, with hyphenated letters and three exclamation points.

A 15 minute drive north, in the Old City of Nablus, the walls are plastered with photos of Palestinian "martyrs" - members of Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - who died in the last intifada. The ancient stones are also covered spray-painted swastikas.

The middle ground is unrepresented anywhere in these parts

The prisoners of Nablus

Nablus, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

When I first met Adly Yaish nearly three years ago, he was full of excitement. Just elected the mayor of the West Bank city of Nablus with a whopping 74 per cent of the vote (besting four other candidates), the businessman-turned-politician was a believer in the future, in democracy, even in Israeli-Palestinian co-existence.

Today, he slumps at his desk as he describes the 15 months he spent in Israeli prison without ever being charged with anything (though Yaish says he is not a member of Hamas, he ran for election on their list during 2005 municipal elections) since his election. His release was ordered nine separate times during that span by Israeli judges. Nine times, the prosecutors found ways to keep him in prison (the tactic is known as "administrative detention") while they futilely tried to build a case. Nearly half his term in office was wasted behind bars

But Yaish gets truly depressed when he describes what has happened to his beloved Nablus, a 2,000-year-old city set deep in a valley in the northern West Bank. Rather than restoring a sense of normalcy to the city through planned upgrades to its sewage system and electricity grid, the 56-year-old Liverpool University mechanical engineering graduate has seen the city's cultural and economic life crumble during his time in office.

“Nablus used to be the commercial capital of the Palestinians, now it's the capital of poverty. It used to be the biggest city in the West Bank, now it's the biggest village,” he told me as we drank zaatar-infused tea at his office this evening. “The situation has gotten so much worse in the past three years. The really bad news is that people are starting to lose hope.”

Nablus's ailment is easy to identify. The city and its 180,000 residents are surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints, 14 Jewish settlements and 26 settlement outposts, the latter of which are illegal even under Israeli law. Getting in and out of the city is a chore for anyone and impossible for many. Commercial interaction with the rest of the West Bank – never mind the rest of the world – has been almost completely choked off.

Some residents haven't left the city since the last intifada began in the fall of 2000. Thousands of children have never seen the world beyond the checkpoints.

Once a hotbed of militant activity, Nablus and the nearby Balata refugee camp are largely quiet these days. Large numbers of gunmen who once fought Israel have handed in their weapons to the Palestinian Authority, and PA policemen now control the streets. The Israeli army, however, still enters at will and makes arrests, as it did today when a group of undercover officers apprehended Hamas member Mohammed Kharraz from the convenience store his family owns in the city.

Yaish says that Israel's refusal to lift the checkpoints or stop the military incursions into his city means that the current calm cannot last.

“When I was in prison, I told the man interrogating me: ‘Look, I'm the mayor of Nablus. Seventy-four per cent of the people voted for me. I never did anything wrong, I never harmed anybody. When you put me in prison, what do you think will happen? Do you think the people of Nablus will become more peaceful?' I told him, ‘You are hurting the Israeli cause. You are not hurting mine.'”

Hitchhiking to the "Capital of Terror"

Hitchhiking from Hamra checkpoint to Nablus, West Bank – Thursday, Nov. 6

Finally, after prolonged negotiations – and several phone calls to the public relations staff of the Israeli military in Tel Aviv – I'm allowed to pass through Hamra checkpoint (pictured, with Israeli soldiers checking documents), along with my translator, Nuha Musleh.

(Apparently, Nuha was part of the problem. Although she identifies herself as Palestinian – and lives on the wrong side of the wall Israel is building in the West Bank – she holds East Jerusalem residency, which comes with an Israeli ID card. Israelis aren't allowed into Nablus, which is surrounded by imposing checkpoints built during the violence of the recent Palestinian uprising, or intifada.)

Our minibus has left us long ago, so we're left to stand on the side of the road, trying to thumb a ride the rest of the way to the city the Israeli military calls the West Bank's “Capital of Terror” in its press releases. During the intifada, the city is a stronghold of both Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the Israeli army still conducts regular arrest raids here, including one earlier today.

After a few minutes of standing with our arms out, Ahmed and Khaireddin, two Palestinian farm labourers, pull over and offer to give us a lift to the next town, Toubas. Nuha and I climb into the back of their white Mercedes pick-up truck, and make room for ourselves amidst their water canisters and welding masks.
Ahmed and Khaireddin are coming back from a day working at a kibbutz inside Israel where they make 120 shekels (about $35) in a day. They don't care about the politics of that, as long as it puts food on their families' table.

“There's nothing in Palestine,” Ahmed explains, rubbing two dirty fingers together to emphasize his point.

They drop us at the entrance to Toubas, where a kindly old man offers Nuha and I some tea while we wait for a taxi to come along. It doesn't take long before a car offers to drive us to Nablus for 10 shekels. It's taken us more than three hours to reach the city, which is just 40 kilometres north of our starting point, Jericho.
“Life is difficult here,” Mustafa, our driver, says after listening to a recounting of our journey. “Nablus died when the checkpoints were built.”

As he drives we listen to the latest news on BBC Arabic radio. The new U.S. president-elect, Barrack Obama, apparently has hired Rahm Emmanuel to be his chief of staff. Everyone in the cab notes with a sigh that Emmanuel is Jewish, and therefore likely to side with Israel in the decades-old conflict that has made life in Nablus so miserable.

Mustafa turns to me, taking his eyes off the chaotic Nablus traffic that seems to be coming at us from all directions. “This Obama, do you think he can help us?” he asks.

I give him the standard Palestinian answer to a such a direct, difficult-to-answer, question: “Insha'allah.”
God willing.

Absurdistan

By minibus from Jericho to Hamra checkpoint, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

Travelling within the Israeli-occupied West Bank is always a journey through the absurd.

After the Jericho "rest stop," I board a yellow minibus heading north to the city of Nablus. Or at least, it eventually heads north. To avoid having to pass through the checkpoints that surround Jericho and protect the nearby Jewish settlements, we first head south, and then east before finally turning north up through the Jordan Valley. In all, our driver says, we're adding 35 kilometres to what should be a straight 40-km run.

There are nine of us, including a young family of four from Nablus, on the journey. As we pass through the scenic Jordan Valley, my fellow passengers emit a series of sighs.

After passing through another Israeli military checkpoint, we drive along the Dead Sea, with its unique and healing mineral-rich waters. Israelis and foreigners can lounge at the four-star resorts that line its eastern bank, but not Palestinians. "I went for the first time from the Jordanian side," laughs Aladdin Nasser, a tailor and father of two from Nablus. There's no mirth in his chuckle.

"The situation is bad, but we are used to it," his wife Filisteen told me, cradling her 1 1/2 year-old son in her lap. Round-faced and wearing a flowered tightly wrapped head scarf, she told me that Israeli soldiers often gave her trouble at checkpoints because of her name, which is Arabic for "Palestine."

"It makes some of them laugh and makes some of them angry. They say, 'Why are you named Filisteen?'"

We drive north past a string of Jewish settlements and Israeli-owned greenhouses and fruit plantations. Under the peace proposal favoured by the Israeli government, they would retain the strategic and fertile Jordan Valley

"I can't even stop for gas here," our driver," 30-year-old Muayyad Awad explains. That's an improvement, however. A year ago, no Palestinians were allowed to drive this road, Highway 90.

After just over an hour of driving, we reach Hamra, an Israeli checkpoint on the road to Nablus. The soldiers take our passports and express surprise at seeing a Canadian journalist aboard Palestinian public transportation.

"I don't think I can let you pass," a young soldier with a British accent and an American M-16 tells me.

Not wanting to hold up the other passngers, I get off the bus. For 45 minutes now, I've been standing by the side of the road in the middle of the West Bank. My passport confiscated, I can go neither forwards nor backwards until the Israeli soldiers give me permission to do so.

"Now you're a real Palestinian," a young man with a stubbly face - stuck in the same situation as I me - laughs. This time, there's real mirth

West Bank blues

Jericho, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

"Smell the jasmine and taste the olives," my mobile phone tells me. "Welcome to Palestine."

Not yet.

The Istiraha, or "rest station" in Jericho is anything but restful. Our bus from the border heads into an Israeli closed military zone where inside our passports are taken from us by Palestinian security guards. Meanwhile we 48 travellers sit on the idling bus, waiting while our passports are checked for the third time in a matter of a few kilometres.

The Istiraha is nominally under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but there little question who's in control here. The PA guards have nice camouflage uniforms, but no weapons. The Israeli soldiers who control the perimetre are equipped with American-made M-16 assault rifles and armoured jeeps.

It's one of the most damaging criticisms of the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas: that in seeking peace with Israel while simultaneously waging a quiet war against the Islamist Hamas movement, its security forces have become little more than part of the occupation.

Into Palestine

By taxi and bus from Amman, Jordan to Jericho, West Bank Thursday, Nov. 6

Entering the Palestinian Territories from other parts of the Arab world is always a sombre experience. You're going to a place many Arabs - particularly the millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the region since the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars - dream of seeing, but will likely never visit in their lifetimes.

This morning I was driven from downtown Amman to the King Hussein border crossing (known as the Allenby Bridge to Israelis, after the British general who built it in 1918) by Tariq Hassan, a 48-year-old Jordanian of Palestinian descent who had only seen his hometown of Ramallah once, when his father took him there as a 13-year-old boy.

"I still remember it," Tariq told me as we descended towards the Dead Sea, with the Palestinian city of Jericho coming into sight. "But I don't know if I'll ever go back. They will never give me a visa, I don't think."

The Jordanian side of the border crossing is a surreal experience where foreigners are whisked through with as little hassle as necessary (I drank coffee and watched al-Jazeera while my passport was processed) while hundreds of Palestinians queue for hours in a separate terminal.

But it's on the other side, once you've passed the last photographs of King Abdullah II and his father King Hussein and see the Star of David for the first time, that the disparity becomes plainest.

Israeli security services are notoriously intrusive and impolite (I've been left shaking with anger by airport security who often go so far as to ask to see e-mails between me and my editors in Toronto as proof that I'm being sent somewhere on assignment) but today it's relatively painless for a Canadian guy named Mark.

"What's you family name?" the unsmiling young female guard asks me when I get to the front of the long passport line inside the Israeli side of the border terminal.

"MacKinnon." Just like it says in my passport. I pronounce it in as an unthreatening a manner as those three syllables can be uttered.

"Your father's name?"

"Wayne."

"Your grandfather's name?"

"Gerard."

We both know the drill. If I answer "Mohammed" or something similar to any of the questions, it's off to the little interrogation room for me. Wayne and Gerard sounds sufficiently un-al-Qaeda, so I'm allowed through quickly. Welcome to Israel.

The Ahmeds and the Fatimas stand in line behind me, some seated off to the side awaiting their confrontation with the Shin Bet internal security service. Many of these people were born and live in the West Bank, but they could never dream of such rapid passage to their own home.

(I've had friends - with Canadian passports - delayed for four or five hours because their last name was Ibrahim or because their grandfather's name sounded suspicious to the Israeli ear.)

After passport control, I board an air conditioned 48-seat passenger bus whcih for 16 shekels (about $4) will take me and 47 Palestinians to the mandatory next stop for those who can't afford the exorbitant taxi fares onwards - the main bus station in Jericho. You can't be in a rush to get there. The bus doesn't leave until every seat is full.

The sorry state of Syria's army

Lattakia, Syria -Thursday, Oct. 29

The army of the Syrian Arab Republic often appears as the bad guy in Western media narratives.

They were the brutish soldiers who oppressed Lebanon throughout their 29-year-stay in that country. They're the jihadi-friendly outfit that looks the other way as suicide bombers to be cross Syria on their way to Iraq. Israelis still shudder at the mention of 1973, when the combined forces of Syria and Egypt staged a surprise attack one October morning.

Up close, they hardly live up to their nefarious reputation. Poorly paid and badly equipped, they're most often seen walking along the side of the road in their fading camouflage gear, trying to thumb rides.

Today, I met Abdo, a 29-year-old tour guide in Lattakia who recently finished his three-year stint as a conscript. He said he earned 300 Syrian pounds per month (about $6) while stationed near the Lebanese border. "I live with my mother, but I still need 5,000 or 6,000 pounds a month," he said. Which is why Syrian soldiers are notoriously corrupt. They live on bribes.

My first encounter with the feared Syrian army on this trip was a trio of soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Turkish border. Ostensibly, they were there to examine travellers' documents, but taking shelter from the rain in a roadside shack, they were much more interested in bumming cigarettes.

"Are those good to smoke?" a somewhat portly middle-aged soldier said, spotting a pack of Dunhill cigarettes lying in the front seat of my longtime friend Raed's car.

Raed, a Jordanian and a skilled negotiator of Middle Eastern checkpoints, flipped him the whole pack. We didn't want to be held up and scutinized. (More on that later.)

Seeing our apparent generosity, two other soldiers surged forward, leaving their Kalashnikov rifles leaning against their chairs. "Hey, there are three of us," one says. Raed handed over a second pack.

The first soldier asked Raed where "the foreigner," me, was from. "Canada," Raed said.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. "He looks like one of us," he offered with a shrug before waving us on. His curiosity had been bought off by the Dunhills.

It was easy to imagine the notorious foreign fighters of Iraq sliding through the same checkpoint with even more ease.

The U.S. brazenly bombed eastern Syria this week, claiming Damacus wasn't doing enough to clamp down on the flow of jihadis into Iraq. The truth is that even if Bashar Assad's regime were to make helping the U.S. priority No. 1 (something that's unlikely given the angry, if orchestrated, demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus today) this underfunded, unmotivated force simply doesn't look nearly up to the task.

Next year in Tehran?

Kish Island, Iran - Thursday, Oct. 16

Over the years, I have been turned down on three separate occasions when I applied for a visa to visit Iran. The first two attempts were via the Iranian Embassy in my old home of Moscow, and once I was even approved for a journalist visa by the Foreign Ministry in Tehran only to have it revoked when I went to pick it up at the Tsarist-era building that housed the embassy on Moscow’s tree-lined Pokrovsky Boulevard.

With over-the-top ceremony and politeness, the ambassador treated me to half-a-dozen cups of tea and a plate of cookies as he rolled out a lengthy explanation of why I wouldn’t be allowed to board my flight to Tehran the next morning. “Iran loves Canada,” he told me earnestly. “But Canada does not love Iran.” I had no retort. After that much tea, all I could think of was my bladder and what level of diplomatic faux-pas it would be to relieve myself in the snowbank outside the embassy.
The ambassador didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t need to. The visa had been revoked because of the diplomatic brouhaha over Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who was raped, tortured and beaten to death in 2003 inside Evin Prison, in northern Tehran. No Canadian journalist, the Iranian authorities correctly surmised, could travel to the country without making an effort to investigate what had happened to Ms. Kazemi.

During the nearly four years I lived in Jerusalem, an Iranian visa was an effective impossibility. In fact, you're forbidden from travelling to the Islamic Republic if you've even set foot inside Israel/the Zionist Entity. Though there were a few intrepid correspondents who did the occasional Jerusalem-Tehran commute, they were generally old Iran hands who had contacts inside the regime in Tehran who could be trusted to look the other way when their visa applications arrived. So when I finally convinced my editor to let me drive across the Middle East to mark the end of the Bush era, I knew that the biggest hurdle would actually be in reaching the starting point of my journey.

There were two routes I could try. First I sent in an application for a tourist visa via an online service that promised Iranian visas “in 7 easy steps.” I was so enticed that I didn’t notice the chart on the same webpage which suggested Canadians are more likely to be turned down for Iranian visas than any other nationality, including Americans. I gamely sent in the 72-euro application fee, only to get the predictably negative reply a few weeks later.

So Kish Island represented a last, desperate chance to see Iran before I ended my tour of duty in the Middle East. And today, I was told – again – that I was not welcome in the Islamic Republic. “There is a problem with your visa,” the shy desk clerk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office told me. The office is one of the few places on the island where photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khameini are displayed.

After a week of battling with the bureaucrats and being repeatedly promised a visa, I was as grumpy as the two ayatollahs looked in their official portraits. I demanded to know what the "problem" with my visa was. I got a one word answer: "Politics."