It is the most popular attraction for residents
of the West Bank and somewhere people can
escape the realities of blockade, barriers
and bombardment. Amelia Thomas visits
Qalqilya Zoo. Photos by Astrid Schulz
‘Watch out,’ says Dr Sami Khader, sole vet at Qalqilya Municipal Zoo, as a baby hamadryas baboon called Robin skitters, screeching, across the floor of his office. ‘I don’t know why, but he’s scared of shoes.’
I deposit my shoes at the door of the tiny, ramshackle room, crowded with the detritus of a zoological job and, sure enough, the tiny, pink-faced creature emerges gingerly from beneath the office debris. He slinks across the floor to take up his customary position, clinging to one of Sami’s shoeless feet. Behind Sami, a complete emu skeleton glares disapprovingly down; on the opposite wall are mounted two homemade anaesthetic rifles, in case of emergency.
This is the rudimentary nerve centre of one of the West Bank’s most popular local attractions. Though busloads of foreign tourists might brave governments’ travel warnings to visit Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and Manger Square, with the more adventurous venturing as far as the chic restaurants of Ramallah, native Palestinians will risk hours of delays, military checkpoints and roadblocks simply to come for a day out at the zoo. Entry costs five shekels ($1.5); a children’s electric train ride, an extra two. For most of its visitors, young and old, this is a rare opportunity for a fun day out, and their only chance ever to see anything more exotic than a farmyard goat.
A chorus of anxious cheeping has been issuing from a cardboard box at the far end of the office. I get up to take a look. Inside the box, eight tiny peacock chicks scuttle for cover. I have been coming to the zoo for several years to record its story. In this time, the eccentric Dr Sami and his cast of animal characters have become old friends. I am no longer surprised at what might be lurking somewhere in a corner.
Sami puts the kettle on, and relaxes back in his chair. It has been a strenuous morning. There are lions to be fed, a daily report to be written, Syrian bears’ cage cleaning to supervise and food inventories to take for a herd of oryx. A Shetland pony is lame and its hoof must be examined; a leopard needs antibiotics.
The zoo is situated on the edge of the West Bank in Qalqilya, a market town and the closest Palestinian conurbation to Israel. Under a mile away from the Israeli town of Kfar Saba, it might as well be on another planet. While Kfar Saba office workers sip white wine in slick bistros, donkey carts ply Qalqilya’s streets, bringing produce to its central souq, where burka-clad women, hand-in-hand with tiny children in ribbons and frilly dresses, inspect their wares.
Fenced in almost entirely by Israel’s contentious West Bank barrier, the town was the first to elect a Hamas municipal council. Most of its residents are unable to leave; unemployment is rife and confiscation of farmland to build the wall has been widespread, though financial compensation has not. From here, several suicide attacks on Israel have allegedly been masterminded. For the majority of its citizens, Israeli military incursions – to root out potentially dangerous militants – are an unpleasant and unnerving fact of life.
Robin clambers a few inches further up Khader’s sock as the vet pours hot, sweet tea and tickles the monkey on the top of the head. Brought up in a refugee Palestinian family in Saudi Arabia, the doctor has been tending his charges at the zoo since 1999, and has seen the town’s fortunes rise and wane. Originally a prosperous place, the arrival of the second al-Aqsa Intifada (Palestinian armed uprising) in 2000, saw the town thrust into chaos. ‘There were curfews for weeks at a time,’ says Khader, ‘with just a couple of hours, here and there, to rush to the zoo and feed the animals.’
Most of the animals survived. Not all. Several zebras were killed during tear gas attacks, while Brownie, a prize giraffe, died after being startled by machine gun fire and bolting headlong into a metal lintel.
The indomitable doctor collected up the bodies of the fallen and put his self-taught powers of taxidermy into action. Today, the zoo’s Natural History Museum – a Palestinian first – displays the animal victims. But despite its losses, Qalqilya Zoo was the lucky one: the Palestinian Territories’ other zoo, in Rafah on the Gaza Strip, was destroyed, along with its animals, in a large-scale military operation in 2004.
We drain our mugs of tea and Khader takes an old, battered sports bag, punctured with air holes, down from the shelf. ‘Come on, Robin,’ he calls. The tiny monkey reluctantly leaves the safety of the sock, and hops into the bag. Khader zips it closed and slings it over his shoulder.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘He’s used to this.’ We leave the office and clatter down the metal stairs to the far edge of the zoo. Across the main boulevard, a group of boys in neat school uniforms clamber across a brightly coloured playground. A young couple with a pushchair saunters past. In one of a long line of small wire cages, a badger takes a dust bath. We stroll by the enclosures, passing a pool full of languid crocodiles, on past Fufu, the tame ibex, and an ancient, toothless hyena. Each creature has its own story to tell, from the three lions lounging beneath a wooden canopy – saved from solitary confinement at a safari park in Israel – to Dubi, the forever-hungry hippo, who lasted out the longest of Qalqilya’s curfews on an unusual diet of overripe fruit and scavenged hay. t the monkey cages, we stop to look in on Robin’s parents. He is the second baby they have rejected in the past two years; the first, Rambo, now a strapping young adolescent, was also hand-reared by Khader.
The monkey enclosure comprises the oldest and saddest part of the zoo, built in 1988 and unchanged since. This, explains the vet, is why the monkeys reject their young: they are simply unhappy, cooped up in a damp, miserable environment of concrete and rust. Plans are afoot for a new monkey enclosure, complete with rope swings and plenty of room to explore. Though this will cost money and the zoo has little to spare, Khader hopes Robin will one day be free to lead a happier adult life than his parents.
We turn a corner and head down to look at the enterprising vet’s three new museums – the only museums in the Palestinian Territories – designed and executed largely by Khader himself, and a testament to his rather unique sense of interior design.
The first is the Museum of Natural History, where stuffed animals peer out from dramatic dioramas. The second is a Museum of Agriculture, where a massive model bee presides over a display of bee-keeping. The third museum, meanwhile, is the vet’s pièce de résistance, the Museum of Everything. Here, Palestinian children can learn about volcanoes, dinosaurs, fossils and space travel, through a series of huge plaster representations of Krakatoa, a Tyrannosaurus rex, and the space shuttle Discovery. Khader says a pair of American visitors turned up at the zoo recently and were very impressed.
Aside from these unexpected guests, few foreign visitors make it as far as Qalqilya. The zoo cannot compete with the famous sights of the West Bank – Herodium, Bethlehem and Jericho – or with even the most basic of European zoos. Many people, too, are critical of its animals’ living conditions. But those who do attempt the journey to the town and its zoo are met with a warm welcome. Taxi drivers will waive fares just to be able to talk for a few minutes about their cousin in London or Toronto. Stallholders at the market will thrust olives and fruit into paper bags and insist they are free. And a stroll through Qalqilya’s zoo, listening to the tales of its keepers, its animals and its visitors, opens a small window into life in one of the world’s most turbulent regions.
A group of schoolchildren being led through the Natural History Museum by their teacher dash up to practise their English on me. ‘Hello,’ they giggle. ‘Nice to meet you. What is your name? Have a nice day!’ Inside the sports bag, Robin stirs. ‘Anyone want to meet a baby monkey?’ Khader asks. To the children’s delight, he unzips the bag. ‘But please, all of you,’ he continues, serious for a moment, ‘take your shoes off first.’
Amelia Thomas’ book The Zoo on the Road to Nablus, telling the true story of the last Palestinian zoo, was released in April, published by PublicAffairs.
