Delivering on a Friendship to Make Sure Mail Gets Through

NABLUS, West Bank -- Fadi Touqan, blue-eyed and 25 years old, scans Rafidia Street. No tanks. The coast is clear. He dashes to his office, furls the metal gates and once again is in business. Briefly.

Fadi is the DHL man in Nablus. He defies the odds of military blockade and shoot-to-kill curfews to run the international courier service in this West Bank city, delivering and receiving envelopes, packages and other special mail -- a lifeline for many Palestinians who need money, medicine, bank drafts and passports.

He couldn’t do it without the help of a good Samaritan. Literally.

The Samaritan is Yaakov Mrhiv, a member of an ancient people who claim to descend from tribes that populated the northern part of the kingdom of Israel nearly 3,000 years ago.

Half the world’s 650 remaining Samaritans live today in Mt. Gerizim, their ancestral village on a hill above Nablus, where they celebrate Passover and heed the Torah, but speak Arabic and have both Israeli and Palestinian nationality. Fadi and Yaakov are friends from childhood.

Because Yaakov is a Samaritan, he enjoys the privilege -- unique in this land these days -- of being able to move freely inside Israel, inside Palestinian territory, and in between the two.

For more than two years, Israelis and Palestinians have been locked in a death grip, a conflict that has ravaged the two societies and driven them further apart than at any time in their recent history.

Still, a rare handful of people reach over the barriers and across the divides, finding common ground or common cause, for reasons that are sometimes political and ideological, and sometimes simply pragmatic. Their lonely, largely unheralded efforts are exceptions in a world steeped ever more in hatred and mistrust.

Fadi and Yaakov have teamed in a kind of relay race against the rigors of the war that surrounds and entraps them.

Because a Palestinian state does not exist, DHL must work through Israel. Packages from the Palestinian territories that arrive at the Israeli airport are separated and given an extra security check.

Gliding through Israeli army checkpoints virtually unchallenged, Yaakov can travel to Jerusalem, where he picks up deliveries at a main DHL office. He ferries the shipment back to Mt. Gerizim and, when it’s safe, jaunts down to Nablus where Fadi awaits.

Business, of course, is not what it used to be.

From Israel and within the West Bank or Gaza Strip, same-day delivery has stretched to three days. An envelope on Fadi’s desk during a recent visit had traveled from Sri Lanka to Tel Aviv, 3,400 miles, in three days -- and then taken an additional week to get to Nablus from Tel Aviv, 30 miles.

The address said:

“Nablus, Palestine. Nablus, Israel. Nablus, Palestine, Via Israel.”

Another envelope from Guatemala took 28 days to reach Nablus.

“This is not exactly express mail,” Fadi said.

Since Israeli forces reoccupied the West Bank last spring and put most of the population under virtual house arrest, Fadi can open the office only occasionally, and then for just a few hours. Deliveries are haphazard and depend on luck, especially for mail destined to outlying villages.

His compact DHL truck, with the company’s maroon-colored logo, got stuck in Jenin. He was making a pickup there when an Israeli army invasion suddenly closed the road. And while he could return to Nablus over a circuitous route, he had to leave the vehicle behind.

“It’s very, very, very difficult,” Fadi said. Even when deliveries get through, rising costs put the service out of reach for many Palestinians. “It’s become very expensive for Palestinians. They need to eat, not send packages.”

His disheveled office is decorated with DHL posters in Hebrew and English: “For you, we always go the distance” and “The team is you” -- and one with a verse from the Koran.

For a while, some people tried to get supplies and mail in and out of Nablus using donkeys. But Fadi turned to his friend the Samaritan, whose people have been traversing and doing business in these hills for millenniums.

“I trust Yaakov,” Fadi said. “I know him from before.”

And Yaakov, whose job as a contractor securing Palestinian labor for Israeli construction crews has completely dried up, says he’s glad to help, even if he risks getting shot every time he drives from Nablus to Jerusalem.

“I feel it is my duty to help him in his work,” said Yaakov, 27. “Of course, there’s money in it for me, too. But I can’t take a large amount from him. Fadi is my friend.”

Yaakov has a few tricks for the road, which has been a venue for ambushes of Jews by Palestinians, and of Palestinians by Jewish settlers. His car’s license plates are Israeli -- yellow. But to ward off a Palestinian sniper’s bullets, he flashes his lights and honks his horn at particularly dangerous points, like a secret handshake.

And when he approaches Israeli army checkpoints, he will call out his window, “Samaritan!” It clears the way.

Few people straddle two worlds the way the Samaritans do. Not exactly Jewish, not exactly Arab, they typically speak Hebrew as readily as Arabic, and many will have a Hebrew and an Arabic name. While Yaakov’s father’s Arabic is stronger, Yaakov clearly prefers Hebrew -- and he looks like a wannabe Israeli with close-cropped hair, sunglasses on top of his head and baggy shorts.

Like Jews, the Samaritans observe the Sabbath from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, celebrate Passover and revere a Torah written in an ancient form of Hebrew.

The community has dwindled from 1.2 million 17 centuries ago to just hundreds today. Those Samaritans who don’t live on Mt. Gerizim live in the Israeli city of Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv. There are more males than females, and it is becoming harder for Samaritans to find mates.

Numbers aside, their survival depends on a chameleon-like ability to accommodate. Although the Samaritan high priest sits on the Palestinian Legislative Council, Samaritans as a whole avoid politics and pay allegiance to whoever is in charge.

At Yaakov’s family home, his father, Yitzhak, greets visitors by donning his traditional loose-fitting robe and red-and-white fez. He proudly shows off the handwritten Torahs in elaborate ancient-style script that women may not touch.

“The community’s existence depends on good relations with the people who rule them,” Yitzhak, 63, said as his 80-year-old mother served sweet juice. Whether it’s the Ottoman sultans or the Hashemite kings of Jordan or Israel or the Palestinian Authority, it’s all the same, more or less. Lately, they are caught in the middle.

Samaritans had to leave the center of Nablus during the first intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he said, because militant Palestinian youths thought that they were Jews and harassed them. And Israeli soldiers often view them with suspicion because they help Palestinians with rides and supplies, Yitzhak said.

The Samaritans are so reluctant to get into politics that when the head of the community discovered that a reporter was in town without checking in with him first, he proffered a friendly greeting -- then threatened to sue if anything political was written.

But this is the Middle East, and politics are everywhere. Even the Samaritans do not escape the ravages of conflict and occupation.

Residents of Mt. Gerizim have about had it with the Israeli tanks that charge through, leaving their streets a pulverized mess.

“You go abroad and everything looks nice with clean streets, and you come here and see all this damage and you think this is a backward people,” Yaakov said.

As he spoke, as if on cue, two tanks and an armored personnel carrier roared by. Because the community sits on a hill, with deep valleys on either side, the roar echoes and is amplified, giving residents a kind of stereophonic tank crescendo.

In what for the Samaritans was an unprecedented display, residents several weeks ago placed themselves in the road and blocked seven Israeli tanks. Eventually, the army agreed to repair the roads.

“We don’t have a problem with the trucks and jeeps, but we simply ask that they build a separate road for the tanks,” Yaakov said. “There is dust and dirt 2 meters deep.”

The tanks, of course, are on their way down the hill to Nablus.

Nablus, the Palestinians’ largest West Bank city, in many ways suffered more than any of its counterparts. The curfew has been in place for months on end, longer than anywhere else. Destruction during an Israeli offensive last spring was greatest in Nablus and included ancient, irreplaceable cultural sites in its central casbah, like a public bath and Byzantine church bombarded by Israeli tank fire or rammed by Israeli bulldozers. And the death toll in Nablus was higher during that offensive than in any other Palestinian city.

The Israeli army regards Nablus as a hotbed for Palestinian terrorism and points to numerous explosives labs and weapons caches, some hidden in the casbah, as evidence. Many of the dead were killed, and the destruction wrought, during pitched battles.

Nablus claims a long tradition of resistance to authority. Founded during the Roman Empire, it germinated uprisings throughout the centuries and was the cradle of both recent Palestinian intifadas. The 1987 revolt started here, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia that has wholly reshaped the current conflict, was born in Nablus’ Balata refugee camp.

Fadi, blond with an impish grin, shuns armed activism and comes from a prominent Nablus family. A cousin was one of the Arab world’s most famous poets.

When he’s not delivering or collecting mail, he is studying law at Nablus’ An Najah University. In recent months, however, classes have been called off more often than not, and Fadi is attempting to finish his studies through a correspondence course with a university in Beirut.

Fadi has worked for DHL for six years. Before the current conflict, he frequented the main headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he was on friendly terms with many of the Israeli employees.

He says he misses the Israeli friends he had made .

“They know I’m not a terrorist, and I know they’re good people,” he said. “We don’t like to speak politics. If we talk politics, we will disagree.... We were friends, not enemies. The intifada has destroyed everything between us.”

Bothered that his old friends only called once to ask how he was faring under Israeli military assault, Fadi nonetheless understands the dynamics of two peoples who are each convinced that their own suffering is unmatched.

“We feel we are in a very bad situation, and they feel they are in a very bad situation,” he said. “The Jews blame the Palestinians, the Palestinians blame the Israeli people. I just hope they will finish this war and then the relations will come back.”

In the meantime, Fadi has had more than his share of close calls. Once he was attempting to deliver mail in the nearby town of Tubas, six miles from Nablus. With his delivery truck disabled in Jenin, he went in a taxi and arrived without trouble. But on his way back, he suddenly saw tanks closing in on the road, shooting as they advanced.

“I prayed to God,” he said.

The taxi driver was a bit more practical, and hid in an alleyway. The tanks passed, in hot pursuit of other Palestinians. Fadi escaped.

The partnership between Fadi and Yaakov worked, off and on, for most of the last year. Even though the Israeli military siege tightened and civilians were frequently shot for violating curfew, Fadi attempted to do business. For him, like for most Palestinians, everything is tentative -- whether he can finish a delivery, whether he’ll get shot on the road, even where he can live and make a living.

On a warm sunny day this autumn, hours after Israeli tanks rumbled through the city once again, Fadi opened two of the four metal panels from his office’s front gate and waited for customers. Eventually, 20-year-old Mohammed Turaby ventured in, clutching the papers he needed to send to Kansas to be able to attend university there next year.

“When will it go out?” Mohammed asked Fadi after paying the equivalent of about $30.

“Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow,” Fadi said. “Inshallah [God willing].”

Fadi laughed at himself, then pointed to another DHL motto: “We keep your promises.”

“Now there are no promises,” Fadi said. “Only inshallahs.”