The Devil's Drivers

In most parts of the world where there is heavy political investment in policing borders, crossing them illegally is high risk. Those who do it risk getting shot or jailed (or arbitrarily detained, often for much longer periods of time). Most people who take that risk do so because their lives are on the line in their countries of origin and they need to find sanctuary. When it comes to the border between Israel and Palestine, however, people do it because it’s their only realistic way of making a living, and they come and go every few weeks. This documentary meets the men who drive them.

It’s a gripping tale. Do you like watching car chases? These men do them for a living. It’s the only alternative, they explain, to earning the equivalent of $12 a day (salaries in Palestine do run higher than this on average, but not that much higher). The desert roads are rough and mechanics have to fix up the cars after every trip to keep them in suitable condition. They are pursued by army jeeps and by soldiers trying to pass themselves off as fellow smugglers. Lookouts on the hills keep watch and alert the drivers when they see signs of trouble. Masters of the fast turn, they reach terrific speeds, whipping up clouds of dust. It’s a thrilling existence – except, of course, that most of them would rather not have to be daredevils, and have their families worried sick every time they go out on a job, wondering if they’ll come home.

Their families are at risk too. We see soldiers surround the hilltop Bedouin village where the drivers live. We are told that they do it often, forcing everybody to line up, taking their blankets away in cold weather, poisoning the sheep. We don’t witness all of this, but in due course, the film captures much worse. Collective punishments are illegal under International Law and Jerusalem’s own court edicts, but the soldiers ignore this and nobody with power seems inclined to do anything about it.

Why do these practices exist? It is, the drivers say, virtually impossible to get the necessary papers for working in Israel now. Israeli employers are clearly still happy to take advantage of this source of cheap labour, all the better because illegal workers can’t insist on proper conditions, but the government sees every unmarried, childless man as a potential terrorist. Participants in the film argue that because it’s really expensive to have a wedding in Palestine, it’s not easy to work around this. When two men smuggled across the border do commit a terrorist act, it makes everybody’s lives harder, and their driver is treated as if he must have known their plans all along.

It’s difficult to tell how much of what we see is being performed for the camera. At one point, after a car has been stopped at a checkpoint, the driver remarks that the soldiers were being nicer than they would have been had there not been a foreigner on board. For the most part, though, the Palestinians’ focus seems to be on taking the opportunity to express their frustrations, which seem too lean to be exaggerated. Around the edges of this, we get a flavour of Bedouin culture as it is today.

The villagers are not permitted to build new stone houses, but they tell the stories of old rooms whose outlines remain. They speak of fields passed down, of faded yet cherished futures, and from their ruins they look out across the world as if they stood at the very heart of it. There is something very old about the cars racing through the desert below. The drivers are called smugglers, gangsters even, but the resilience and resistance which they represent are essential to life in the Negev, and hard to stop.

The Devil's Drivers screened as part of Docs Ireland 2023.