Biking in the West Bank

Words and Photos by Davey Davis

“I have another bike you could buy, real cheap. You should really get a new bike, that one’s crap.”

Thus began my friendship with Seif, a trilingual Palestinian hoodlum whose candor and lack of deference make him extremely unusual in the conservative West Bank city of Nablus. Another stand-out feature about him is that he is obsessed with riding bikes. Nobody here over the age of 14 rides one, yet Seif, who claims he’s 27, and looks 19, is a regular bike punk. He works illegally in Tel Aviv, hopping a fence and catching a bus there from inside occupied Palestine several times a month, staying in a cheap room shared with other laborers and hawking various products on the streets. He makes seven to ten times as much money as guys his age in the West Bank do, who usually take in a flat rate of about $14 a day. Like almost all Palestinians, he is barred from going to Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv, or anywhere else outside of the small patch of land relegated to them in the war of 1967. Nevertheless he bought his bike there, a tricked out Iron Horse with mechanical disc brakes and a decent set of shocks. It might as well be a spacecraft next to the other two-wheeled specimens around here: a scree of department-store mountain bikes, rebar BMXs, and inventively-preserved cargo bikes from the early 20th century.

Nablus is an ancient, stony city tucked between two mountains, there are steep hills, lax rules toward maximum road grade, and endless stairways everywhere. To get around people take shared taxis or walk places, hands full of groceries split between plastic bags. When the streets aren’t tiny, interconnected footpaths they are crowded with honking taxies, salmoning vegetable carts, the occasional donkey, and jaywalking women in long dresses and hijabs.