Running the Palestine Marathon 2023
LIKE THE WIND WERE KIND ENOUGH TO PRINT THIS ADVENTURE IN THEIR 37TH ISSUE. YOU CAN BUY A REAL COPY HERE, COMPLETE WITH MY ARTWORK.
I’m running the Lincolnshire Half this year, to raise awareness and money for the women and children of Palestine. Sponsor us if you can! – donate.giveasyoulive.com/fundraising/raising-funds-for-the-big-sing-at-small-park-big-run-2025
Before the main text, here’s an intro I penned a few days ago, 2 years after running my first marathon in the West Bank.
Israeli tanks, aircraft, armies and intelligence services have almost stopped killing people in Gaza as I write this. They’ve backed off, leaving rubble, survivors and corpses. For now, civilians are no longer being murdered in vast, unholy numbers and politicians – who somehow don’t seem to have seen the same thing as the rest of us – have gone quiet. We can all see the war machine is still in Gaza, even if it’s laying low for now, it’s inhuman killing patterns, mechanical-thinking and anti-human messaging still pouring from it where ever possible. The machine’s been paused for now – along with the screams – but for how long?
It’s been nearly two years since myself and three friends ran the Palestine Marathon in support of the Palestinian right to live free from the war machine. This time two years ago I was training for it by running the Edale Skyline on a bright, cold February morning, high on the hillsides and in and out of the clouds where there were no guns, soldiers or tanks. I wasn’t thinking of them either – this being half a year before October 7th and mass death on the scale we’ve just see wasn’t what any of us expected– and frankly, it’s tough to think about tanks, bullets and other military fantasies, when you’re running up and down thousands of feet of green Peak District valley and mountainside.
Nature and exercise and time under the sky are all antithetical to machines of war.
Half of my family are Poles who came to Britain as displaced persons and refugees at the end of WWII. My grandmother was a Nazi servant – a “slave” she would have said – who, when she died in the grip of (that other dehumanising system) dementia, relived having dogs set on her by military guards. The staff at the care home didn’t understand her shouts and screams – she returned to using her native Polish – and my mother had to translate it all for them. I won’t go into my grandfather’s story here – it’s long, complicated and very, very sad – but the damage these people lived with was obvious, even to a young boy, three generations away from the horrors of eastern Europe’s War.
War imprints itself onto people and it gets passed down from parent to child and beyond. What the Palestinian survivors will experience – something I’ve only glimpsed from a distance – is something that I wouldn’t want to get any closer to, but I think that we’ll all have to. The Palestinian survivors are going to need a lot of what everyone needs really; empathy and understanding and support and for a long time to come. And it’s not just us that need to know that either, it’s working out how to get that message through to people who think the opposite.
Dehumanisation is what war machines do. They turn people into data, animals and dust and they do it in a loop, with the same, predictable results. The operators are caught up in it too – the ones who brought it into being – their spirits, their minds, their memories and their moral capacity – all given to the machine. It consumes the victims, but it also consumes the people who pull the triggers – and we’re all watching, we can all see – who made it work, thought they were it’s master, but were and always will be it’s servants and avatars. The major result of their labours is probably more screams – to go with all of the others – and of course, to pass on to someone else further down the line.
Personally, I think we should try using some different machines.
When I wrote this piece, I hadn’t engaged with the history of the conflict very deeply. It was an approach I’d taken on purpose because I wanted to see with eyes that were naïve and free from other people’s ideas and thoughts. And also because I didn’t have time to read about the subject and delve into it properly and because the piece I was writing was about running – physical exertion, not politics – and I hadn’t written about sport before. So, forgive the lack of politics included below (and thank Like The Wind magazine for publishing it) and treat it as a peek into the world of Palestine 6 months before October 7th wrought that region’s latest change in circumstances – and there are many changes indeed.
Here’s the article.
Five of us are going to Bethlehem: Jawad, Diana, Tony, Matt and myself. Jawad’s father Hassan was from Palestine. Hassan (and Diana’s husband of many years) passed away recently and Diana and Jawad had wanted to take him to visit the Palestinian village he was born in, but the pandemic made that impossible. Tony and Jawad had planned to run the Palestine Marathon at the same time so this trip is a culmination of sorts for those three.
I’ve met Diana before, but I don’t know her as well as I know the others. Matt I know because we share friends and because he lived near me for a while. Matt has just lost his father too, a musician from Swaziland called Smiles Makama. Jawad and Tony I met through a friend who is sadly no longer with us, Rich Haslett (or Rich Pastrami to those who knew him and went to his soul nights in Sheffield). In Rich’s honour, Jawad has printed up black t-shirts that say ‘no mugs’ on them, one for each of us, that we can wear around the marathon course. Rich’s regular soul night had the phrase ‘no mugs’ at the bottom of every flyer and I wonder if it will resonate with Bethlehem’s populace in any way. None of us are religious.
Our adventure feels like it begins it 4.30am in Luton Aiport. Ice and wind sheets past us into the pre-dawn black as we bend toward the wind and traipse into the run-down, brightly lit entrance. The flight is delayed by five hours and we spend the majority of the day in a vehicle of some kind.
The sun has gone down by the time we arrive at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport. There is a glittering, organised quality to everything and everyone is quickly funnelled into orderly queues. The lights are warm, but the evening is cool. Outside in the darkness, lit by the orange of the escaping airport lights, palm trees wave silently in the breeze.
The security is thorough. Young military police carrying sub-machine guns make me want to stare. Our taxi ferries us along the lanes and highways of Tel Aviv, luminescence from vehicles dotting the dark cityscape like plankton from the ocean depths. We pass through military checkpoints lit in harsh, sodium yellows and enter the busy, worn and noisy Arab quarters of Bethlehem. It’s a cool spring evening and people and cars are everywhere. We pull in from the street and find ourselves in a dark courtyard with a pleasing echo – home to our guesthouse.
Everyone is hungry, so none of the fish, salad, breads, lamb and pickles and rice dishes lasts long. The guesthouse feels like a kind of secure cave, cleverly laid out with exposed sand-coloured stones, patterned tiling, tapestries and the heirlooms and ephemera one would expect in a much-loved family home.
In the morning, Matt discovers that we can get up on to the roof for a panoramic view of Palestine. Between the pale, rectangular block buildings that follow the land’s contours, triangular fir trees stick straight up into the air. The sky is a fierce, relentless blue and the desert seems to permeate everything from the horizon to the bricks. The streets look steep from here and the ground appears bright, sandy, ancient and golden.
We leave the guesthouse and make our way through the souks and winding sand-coloured streets, the bright pulses of morning sun shooting between the buildings like camera flashes. We travel past the rubbish tips and fresh produce sellers to Manger Square and – amazingly – to the birthplace of Christ. The Church Of The Nativity sits at the bottom of the hill, its exterior pale, blocky and clean. We enter the Church through a square, child-sized entrance, emerging into a large, cool interior, rich with golden decorations, arches and finery. Its dark compared to the outside – even the multitude of golden, sparkling furnishings in here can’t replace the Palestinian sun – and at first I don’t notice a colossal queue wending its way from a sun-filled doorway behind us, to a dark doorway below the glittering dais at the far end of the chamber. The length of the queue repels us and we decide not to get in line to visit His birthplace and instead we wander slowly through the domes and halls, the decorated alcoves and pools of shadow. At the back of the building, Matt finds a partially hidden marble staircase that slopes into the floor. Intrigued, he descends, opens the door at the bottom and emerges – completely by accident – in the subterranean chamber that houses the winding queue’s finale and the marker of Jesus Christ’s entry into this world.
Everything in the Holy Land seems to glitter and shine. Sometimes the sparkles are obvious, like stars reflecting on the surface of a lake at night. However, on other occasions you have to search for the sparkle. In the Church of the Nativity, the interior glitters, not the exterior.
As we arrive back at the guesthouse, the call to prayer descends and fills the air, the streets and the souks. The singer’s gentle voice – in the haunting Syrian scale, amplified and surreal – booms, breaks and echoes across the courtyards, its echoes bouncing up on to the rooftops, overlapping in the lanes and avenues, and escaping into the desert and the distant hills. As the sound fades and thoughts return I wonder what King Tubby or Dennis Bovell would make of that sweet voice multiplying relentlessly through the city, one prayer made into many, and reaching further than any dub soundsystem. It’s the first time I have experienced it and I doubt I will forget it.
At 4.30am on race day, Bethlehem is enveloped in another prayer, at exactly the same volume, which pulls us all from our dreams. We don’t need to be up that early and the beds are comfortable and warm. I wasn’t nervous when I went to sleep, but I am now and my low-level anxiety blooms. By 5am, everyone is up, drinking teas and coffees and eating fruit pastries. Usually before a run, I eat a banana at most, but today it seems like it should be more. We jog down to Manger Square, through the now quiet, sleepy souks, while Diana stays at the guesthouse. There are three races: the marathon, a half and a 10km, which she is doing.
In the square, huge speakers playing fast, loud dance music while an MC shouts warm-up exercise instructions and encouragement to the runners. We all stretch, set our watches to find their satellites and shuffle into the swelling, swaying crowd at the start line. Although Jawad and Tony are only doing the half, we’ve agreed to do the first half together; we’ll have each other’s company and Jawad is very knowledgeable about the history of the West Bank so can tell us about the landscape and the places we see.
And then – with no fanfare that I can detect – we begin.
Its cool, but the sun is already coming out and Palestine’s supernatural brightness begins to spread through the sky. We follow the luminous, stony road towards the edges of Bethlehem, past buildings in various states of repair, shops opening their shutters and spectators waving. Military police with sub-machine guns and heavy truncheons stand on corners and old Red Crescent ambulances trundle up and down the lined streets.
We quickly find ourselves running along the Partition Wall. It is huge, grey, disordered and burned, covered with graffiti tags and scrawls but also the work of talented visual artists. I can see a stylised peace symbol, a surprised face, a 15ft Larry David, a small rendition of what could be a cross between a deer and a soldier painted in brown by someone called Sadiq, a painting of a hole in the Wall through which can be seen a lush green city (and next to which someone has set up a table and chairs as if it were a cafe), strange silver machinery, animals balancing on top of each other to make a tower, soot-black splashes from petrol bomb backwash under unmanned watch-towers, a soldier in a hood looking at a child, a Christmas tree encircled by fencing, deserted watch towers, Shireen Abu Akleh and Donald Duck. Looking at the Wall, the armed military, the checkpoints and the burned-out ruins I can’t decide if I’m looking at an outline of something that has died and decayed or at an outline of something that is growing and only in its infancy.
We pass Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel and then the Al Aida refugee camp, next to old overturned cars and more scorched towers, and then head through cooler, shaded streets and out into the sunshine and the light. By the time our muscles have warmed up, we’ve begun the long, steady trawl up the Jerusalem-Hebron road.
Everyone is in good spirits. The sound systems are getting more lively, the colours are becoming brighter and the general mood is good. It’s not quite a carnival atmosphere but there’s a light, pleasant chaos to proceedings that makes me want to grin.
We turn right off the Hebron road and start to climb. The pace slows, talk becomes sparse and everyone settles into the psychological and physical mechanics of getting up a hill without stopping. The brilliance of the sun washing over the roads, the people and the landscape is taxing in its own steady, hallucinatory way. A blur of palm trees, motorbikes, soldiers and lagoons of shade populate my awareness and then suddenly we’re back at the start. Jawad and Tony peel off while Matt and I turn around and start the circuit again.
As we approach the 20- mile point, it’s around 16°C but feels hotter. I accept water from the lines of children and run in shade whenever I can. Two children run out to hand us a plastic red rose each. Matt entwines his into his dreadlocks and I clutch mine in a hand too sweaty and tense to use properly. By mile 22, I can feel my mind gently dissociating. When my thoughts consider what my body is doing, my mind conjures the word “unfittening”. I briefly wonder whether long-distance running is indescribable and can only be represented by feeling, but then my feet go numb and all I can think about is stopping and drinking a beer. For a while, there is only light, dusty concrete and a pleasant sense of detachment. I give in to it. My vision swims slightly and I get the feeling that I could keep going forever.
From the dusty street ahead of us a crowd of fresh-faced, smiling people tumbles around the corner and cascades toward us. They careen along the road, completely ignoring the demarcated running lane and everything feels thick and delayed. We sort-of stagger through them, gulping in hot air. It takes a few minutes, but we realise these people must be the 10km runners. I head for a splash of shade and think that perhaps our environment takes up a kind of residency within us and we dip into it to navigate other, newer spaces. I come out of the shade and notice that my aches and pains have gone.
I don’t really remember the final section, but suddenly we’re back in the square, blowing air out of our cheeks, limping and clicking our watches with half-useless fingers. I can’t see very clearly and my whole body feels odd but I’m high and happy to have made it to the end. We hobble and wander through the crowds and into the Peace Centre, ordering beers, making our legs bend and easing our bodies into chairs like we’re in our nineties.
On the guesthouse roof, we drink beer with Diana, Jawad and Tony. A few days later, we rehabilitate our bodies by practising yoga in the same space.
Kamal, a local guide, takes us up to Herodium and Solomon’s Pools. He’s a clever, educated man with a better grasp of his own history than I could ever hope to have and a great example of the premium that the Palestinian people place on education. We go to Ramallah to visit Jawad and Diana’s open, welcoming family, squinting through the dust into the bright roads of the Valley of Fire, along the steep sides of the wadis and through tiny Bedouin villages of metal and wood.
The day before we leave, we visit Jerusalem on the bus, through the arid landscape and a checkpoint that emanates paranoia rather than safety to the suburban order and greenery of Jerusalem. I am told that Israeli settlements and cities are green because they have a water supply whereas Palestinians catch theirs in water butts mounted on their roofs.
We visit the Wailing Wall and the Jewish Quarter. Everything looks new and tall and modern after our time in Bethlehem and the Palestinian Territories. The sun doesn’t seem to be as fierce and there are many more palm trees.
On our way back to the UK, we are detained for several hours at Tel Aviv airport. Staff check our passports, ask us where we’ve been, and interrogate Tony, Matt and Jawad (even going through their phones). They make us take off our shoes, empty our luggage and wait.
I spend my time thinking about the effects of living with and implementing a paranoid, armoured state, but decide that I don’t want that to be what I remember most clearly so I return to a picture of the brightest sun I’ve ever seen and deep blue Palestinian skies. I think that landscapes get into your bones and they make you what you are: but then security are done and they want us to leave – and quickly. We re-pack our bags, put on our shoes and head for home.
