Brian Martin is an Irishman hitchhiking from Westmeath to the West Bank.

I've been involved in activism related to Palestine and Gaza for nearly two years now. The kind of activism I was doing was fairly low level, fairly bog standard, from joining local demonstrations, national demonstrations, leafleting, trying to get people to sign petitions, joining an encampment in London. I was always thinking what more could I do? What skillset do I have to make more of an impact? I’m not a really talented musician. I haven’t got thousands or millions of followers on social media, but I've traveled quite a bit. I’ve hitchhiked and backpacked, that’s the skillset that I have and I think other people might find it interesting if I share that journey.

Going back to the situation of the Palestinian people and what has been done to them, there’s a natural affinity for most Irish people. Ireland was a colony of the most extensive empire in history, subjected to settler colonialism, a genocidal famine that saw a million starve to death and a million forced to emigrate. During Ireland’s war of independence, the British sent in a brutal force, nicknamed the "Black and Tans," notorious for reprisals against civilians. When the war of independence came to an end, those same forces were sent to Palestine to put down the Palestinians. I’m from Westmeath, right in the center of Ireland. It’s rural, my family are farmers, and I think it can feel a bit distant to people. But when you actually know someone who’s going, taking a bit of a risky journey and doing some risky activism, then you have a dog in the fight. I wanted to bring the issue home.

The first day, my mam gave me a lift into town. We were going to do a walk down through the town, but it was the worst day that I can remember all summer, cold and wet. It marked the end of summer in Ireland. So we decided we’d give the march a miss, and I decided I would make my way in the direction of the on-ramp to the motorway and hitch from there. I waited 15 minutes, and three Syrian guys drove past me. They circled back around and picked me up. They were brutally honest. They were like, “He didn’t want to pick you up and he did want to pick you up.” They were debating, but they came back. They were asking, “Where are you going?” I was like, “Well, I’m going through Syria.”

It only took me one ride to get to Dublin. Then I took a ferry at 7:30 in the morning. When I got to the UK, there had been a far right rally in London the weekend before with 150,000 people turning out. Driving down through the country, there were St. George’s Crosses hanging from flagpoles and bridges, everywhere, in this ultranationalist show of what they call patriotism. So getting into the cars I was looking at a person and not really taking any risks. I see a skinhead in a car, I’m like, “Okay, let’s see where this conversation goes before I mention what I’m actually doing.”

It took me seven rides to get to London, which was unbelievable. The first was pretty chill. That was just outside Holyhead in Wales. It was a guy who had moved to that area. He was quite into outdoors activities, hiking, climbing, so he was in the right part of the world for his interests. He took me up the road as far as he was going to Bangor. 

The next guy that picked me up was Romanian. He was former police and military. He said he’d worked special ops, but wouldn’t specify any details. It was heavily redacted. He kept saying he was a bad man. He said he could kill a man in 30 seconds. Maybe he was just trying to say, “Don’t try anything funny.” The guy was in his 60s with a walking stick. He didn’t look very scary. I didn’t feel like he was trying to scare me. I didn’t feel like it was a power trip or anything like that. I think he was probably telling the truth. He asked me was I doing Race Across the World, a thing on Netflix. I told him what I was doing, but we didn’t get into it too much, just a vague comment about how terrible it is.

He brought me a nice distance. I was dropped outside of a small service station. This guy came along who was a skinhead. His name was Dagger. He said he never thought to ask where the name came from. I said my family are farmers. And he said, “Oh, the wife wants to farm.” I was like, “Did she grow up on a farm?” And he said, “I never really thought about it. I don’t really like to dig into the past.” After that, I thought to myself he was either private or not much of a thinker, so I stopped with the questions. I don’t think he was very political in any sense. He was more sympathetic to vulnerable people. He had that goodness: He saw me on the side of the road, he didn't feel scared, and he wanted to help me to get to the next leg of the journey, because he may have found himself in that position in the past, where someone was able to help.

After that, I got to Chester, a big service station. I had loads of people coming up to me and asking, “Where are you going?” A lot of them happened to be going the other direction, but I was really buoyed by that friendliness. There were trucks going to an area and cars in another section. I was trying the cars, since the lorries were coming out a different slipstream, but this lorry pulls up. I can see him beckoning. I wasn’t expecting that, because my experience with lorries is you will get an occasional lorry, but, usually for insurance reasons, they don’t want to stop. This guy asked where was I going. He was heading south. That was huge. 

He was so full of energy. I talked about what I was doing, but this was one of the people with anti-Jewish, big time anti-Jewish. Which is not my stance, in the slightest, if that needs clarification. Anti-zionist, yes, but no bigotry. It came up when I talked about what I was doing, and it came up as, “They own the world. They own the banks,” all of the typical tropes. Usually when someone brings that up, I tend to contest it and say it’s not that there’s an issue with Jewish people, just because you’re Jewish doesn't mean you support what the Israeli state is doing to Palestinian people, the genocide that they’re perpetrating. I feel it’s important. I tried to move the conversation along. You could tell he was a lad’s lad and the lads were more important than the family in the pecking order.

He dropped me off at a service station just before Birmingham in the Midlands. It was a long day. I hadn’t really eaten since before I took the ferry, so I was just standing there and munching on a bit of bread and some olives. I actually wasn't there that long, about a half an hour. These two guys picked me up, really nice guys, really friendly, really curious, sympathetic as well to what I was doing, although one of them said a pet peeve of mine, which is, “It’s complicated, and I don’t really pick a side.” I did call it out and say, “Not really,” but I didn't lecture him. They were really nice guys and they went out of their way to make sure I got to a good place to hitchhike from. They went past their end destination a good bit and brought me to probably the best service station I was in all day.

I stuck out the thumb straight away when I got there and was surprised at how quickly someone was stopping for me. He was an older gentleman, around retirement age, and he was happy to take me. He’d run a sawmill, but had moved away from that. I was really curious. I’d never met someone who worked in or owned a sawmill, so I was quizzing him on that. We talked politics, and I told him what I was doing. He struck me as a conservative type, anti-immigrant, so I tried to tease out his ideas a little bit and get him to think about some of the things that he was saying. I wanted to plant a seed in his mind. But when I felt like, okay, it might get a little bit more heated now, I reeled things back in a little bit. I'm not a master of that, but on this occasion, we struck the balance, and had a good chat and shook hands at the end of it.

He dropped me off at a service station 40 kilometers north of London. It was dusk and even then, it was really busy, but I decided I’d pitch the tent for tonight. I found this wooded area just on the perimeter. It was hard to find space to pitch the tent. It was newly planted woodland, quite dense. I cleared a bit of a space. Then I started feeling these burning sensations. Just one at first. I thought, “Oh, it’s a stick that’s poked me.” Then I felt a couple more on my chest, on my back. I was like, “Okay, some insect is biting me.” I found one on my chest that I had smudged. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but it was quite uncomfortable. I said, “I’ll move out of here and I’ll try pitching in the fields next door.” But there were two farm houses not that far away, clearly visible. I could have chanced it, but I said, “I’ll try and keep a lower profile than that.” So I walked down along that woodland and found a great camp spot. 

The next morning, I took a video to update people on what I was doing and headed on to London. Straight away, again, people were stopping. I even had a taxi driver stop and chat to me. He said, “I’m going the other direction, but if I was going into London, I’d give you a lift.” Soon after chatting with him, I got a ride right into into London. It was a project manager. He was on his way to work in the construction sector. His brother had been in the car the night before with him, so the massage chair was still switched on, and I was like, “The chair is alive.” I’d never experienced that before.

I got into London and straight away decided I’d join any any actions that I knew were going on. It's one of those cities that never sleep, so there’s always activism. I joined the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network that Friday evening outside the Israeli embassy. Then on Saturday, there was a demonstration in support of the civilian flotilla carrying baby formula to Gaza, which was bombed last night in international waters. We threw paper boats off the bridge outside Westminster, the parliament.

I decided to stay in London to help a friend with post-op recovery before hitting the road again.

Enjoying Drifter? Subscribe to receive a new story every other week. Want to hang out with other drifters and see how the newsletter is made? Join our Slack. Have a story to tell? Drop us an email.

Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu

Open Road Editor — Nico Lethbridge

Deputy Rails Editor — Connor Noble