The comedian and activist Mark Thomas has campaigned against the arms trade, tried to write a manifesto for a people’s revolution and once wrote a column in the New Statesman joking that a bounty should be put on George Bush’s head. His latest venture, “Extreme Rambling: Walking the Wall”, involved spending eight weeks following the route of the “separation barrier” that divides Israel and the West Bank.
He describes it as “the story of 300,000 settlers, a 750km wall, six arrests, one stoning, too much houmous and a simple question . . . Can you ever get away from it all with a good walk?”
I attended one of the early shows in the run and thought NS readers might like to catch up with what Mark is doing now, so I collared him for a chat . . .
What was the most memorable thing about walking the wall?
Walking in Hebron was a very personal thing. There were about four of us and we got to the top of this hill. There’s virtually nothing there. There is a wall, there are four houses. And two kids come out of the house.
They say “Shalom” and nip back into the house. The mum comes out and says: “Have you had breakfast?” We say: “That’s very kind of you,” so she comes out with this massive kettle of tea — with all the little glasses.
Five minutes later, we are just finishing the tea when she comes out with home-made bread, home-made sheep’s milk yoghurt, home-made sheep’s milk butter, home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers and home-cured olives.
I sat there and thought: “I am never going to experience this again in my life — this level of ingrained hospitality to strangers.” It was so beautiful — I don’t want to sound this romantic but it was amazing.
What was most eye-opening about the experience?
Bureaucracy. If you are Palestinian, you aren’t given building permits. In 2008, 128 were given to a population of a quarter of a million.
That means when your family gets bigger — your son or daughter gets married and starts having children, for example — you can’t build extensions to your home. Just 13 per cent of land in East Jerusalem is zoned for Palestinians. On top of that, you have to get permission, which you won’t get. So Palestinians have to build illegally.
The [Israeli] settlers find out about this, they get court orders to shut down the rooms that have been added and then they try to gain entrance to occupy the rooms. This happens house by house, lot by lot.
Is it a depressing place to be?
What was brilliant was the number of Palestinians who talked about, and were committed to, non-violent resistance.
There were people from the “Stop the Wall” campaign, organisers from Jordan Valley, people who do tree planting and the Christians who issued the Kairos Palestine document, which is an answer to the people who say, “God gave us the land.” When the Christians get it right, they do it really well!
And you have the Combatants for Peace: remarkable people who make these personal journeys of overcoming their fears and seeing through the prejudice.
What is interesting is that everyone is talking about non-violent resistance but there is not one of them who, at some point, will not have felt the rage that says, “Do unto them as they have done unto us.” And that’s completely natural.
What about on a broader scale?
Nationally, the politics is fucked; the national politicians are fucked. But the community leaders are astounding. Seeing those things gives you hope.
Tell me about your experiences at the refugee camp in Jenin.
There’s this place called Freedom Theatre. I went in to see people studying drama. There are three women studying drama in a refugee camp — they are the most erudite and lucid women.
One of them was called a slag because she does the drama course — and some people put around leaflets saying she was a tart. Her family walked her in to the theatre to do the drama degree, physically fighting the people who were putting out the leaflets. It sounds awful but I thought it was fucking great. Someone fighting to let their daughter do drama!
One guy told me that suicide bombing was an option for him. He thought that it was a very noble thing to defend your community, until he discovered drama and thought it was this brilliant, brilliant thing. It presses all my buttons. This isn’t flag-waving theatre, either: this is proper theatre. Its first production was Animal Farm. The Palestinian National Authority went fucking nuts and someone tried to firebomb the theatre.
Do you think that a lot of people have withdrawn from the debate about the West Bank and Gaza because it’s such a heated one?
We can’t make this a taboo issue. This is one of the global moral issues of our age. Burma is another one.
Have you mellowed as you got older?
Yes, I think I might have.
Did becoming a father make you more or less angry?
I do care what people think but I don’t care as much. I’m very happy doing what I want to do and I don’t have to care about fashion or fads.
I like the complexity of things. On the Palestinian side, for example, the gang masters are fucking evil pigs. They need to be condemned. You have to be critically engaged.
Of all the campaigns you’ve worked on, which was your favourite?
The Ilisu dam campaign. It was about the British government’s financial support of dam-building in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Seventy-eight thousand people were going to be displaced in a recovering war zone. It had an evil vibe around it.
The people we were working with were wonderful; campaigners such as Nick Hildyard from the Cornerhouse. He said the first thing we need to do is go out into the Kurdish region and find out what they want us to do. There is no point working in solidarity unless it really is in solidarity. So we went there and what they said was: “We want you to attack the finances.” We spent three years doing it and we stopped the dam being built.
I liked the fake PR company you ran, teaching arms dealers to overhaul their image.
That was funny because we used to stay in the hotel with all the old arms leaders. We’d get up and have breakfast with them and they’d be drunk. It was a credible admission of the use of UK equipment in East Timor and that was very important.
Do you vote?
Yes.
Is there a plan?
For me? For my career? Oh, fuck no. No, no, no, no, no. I’m rather proud that my career is built out of the smell of burned bridges. I have pissed off so many people. Me and Channel 4, we hold each other in mutual antipathy, if it ever crosses our minds to think about each other.
Is there anything you regret?
Masses of stuff. As a younger performer, I was very eager to get on. It meant that I was brusque in my relationships with people when I shouldn’t have been. I should have taken my time. And there are things we did for telly that I regret. We probably should have stopped a series earlier than we did.
Are you compromising less now?
The way we funded this [touring show about the West Bank] was quite nice. I used the book money. You can get the finance by doing various bits and pieces. You don’t have to go through the traditional routes. It certainly makes you feel happier. It doesn’t make me feel like I’ve used someone, which is something you do feel in television, sometimes. It’s a horrible feeling.
Are we all doomed?
No. If we look at the past century, we’ve got a fair chance of sorting something out.
“Extreme Rambling” is on tour — full gig listings are available here. The book of the tour is published on 7 April 2011 by Ebury Press. You can pre-order it here.
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