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79 Chapter Two A Fence behind a Fence behind a Fence Riding after the Unknown Soldiers and Looking for a Breach in the Fence June 25, 2010: Meeting a Former Enemy I am standing with (retired) Colonel Munir Ibn Hassan (pseudonym) of the Jordanian Armed Forces in front of the memorial plaque at the foot of Mevasseret ’s water tower, just a short distance from the gate in the separation fence. It is noon, but not a very typical late June day. Usually, by this time of the year, it is already around 30 degrees Celsius at this hour and the sky is painfully bright. Today it is just 23 degrees, the sky is gray, and the wind is howling around us. We look at the memorial plaque, which describes the battle that raged here on June 5, 1967, between the IDF and the Jordanian military (it was called the “Arab Legion” up until 1969, and then the name was changed to the Jordanian Armed Forces). Back then, Ibn Hassan was a twenty-­ one-­ year-­ old lieutenant, an officer in the Jordanian outpost of Sheikh Abdul Aziz, on the ruins of which the water tower and the memorial plaque and plaza were built. While researching the Sheikh Abdul Aziz site, I read a newspaper article about a meeting between Israeli and Jordanian officers who fought in the battles in Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Ibn Hassan participated in that meeting and related his memories of the battle here. He is now heading a Jordanian peace organization, and a friend 80 / The Politics of the Trail from the Hebrew University who’s studying the Jordanian military connected us. I phoned him, presented myself to him, told him about my autoethnographic research of local history and landscape along my bike trails, and asked him if he would agree to visit the Sheikh Abdul Aziz site with me (I brought him here in my car . . .), as he is staying these days in Israel for a conference on agricultural cooperation among Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian farmers. The aluminum plaque we examine now shows the“battle plan.”“Is this how you remember the battle?” I ask the colonel. To my surprise, Ibn Hassan, who was, he told me, a senior officer in Jordanian military intelligence, replies that he does not read Hebrew. I am puzzled, but do not reveal my thoughts. I read to him from the plaque, and watch him while he listens.“The blue rectangles are Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers,”I explain,“and the red dashed lines are‘enemy forces.’ That is,” I add with an ironic smile,“you.” Ibn Hassan smiles back, and says, while looking at the battle plan, which shows the Israeli tanks storming in from the southeast, that the Jordanian force was caught by absolute surprise. He looks at me, thoughtfully, and adds that he could not imagine that tanks would be able to climb these rocky slopes. But the Jordanian soldiers, he says, fought well, nonetheless. We fall silent for a few moments. Then I point out that the memorial plaque says that fifteen Israeli soldiers were killed there, and that the battle was fierce and included face-­ to-­ face combat in the bunkers and trenches of the outpost. Ibn Hassan nods, solemnly. It is an odd situation. I think about the battle that raged here, so close to where I live now. I don’t ask if he himself killed one of these people. Instead, I ask,“How many men were killed on your side?” More than the Israelis, he responds, many more. He then notes that the place looks very different from what it used to be in 1967, even compared to his previous visit here in 1994, after the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.1 He wouldn’t have recognized the place, he tells me, due to the new Israeli neighborhood built here. Hardly anything, indeed, remains of the old Jordanian outpost , except a few trenches and a sign reading“a double rifle position.” Nothing remains of the small huts the Legion built here to house some of its veterans, in the form of a colony/settlement as in Roman times. Only a photograph in the Israeli Har’el Brigade’s memorial book, the brigade that conquered this outpost and other places in this“sector” during the 1967 war, shows these houses. We turn from the memorial plaque to survey the area from the observatory deck that was built...

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