Stonings, arrests and way too much hummus: Mike White talks to the firebrand comic who hiked the entire length of the Israeli Separation Barrier. Additional research: Anna Behrmann.

There’s something intrinsically subversive about rambling. Walking along the wall separating Israel and Palestine was a very intense time; I made friendships which I will never lose, and saw things that completely turned my head. In my comedy, I want to show people the weirdness of our journey. You want people to experience the brutality of it. There’s no point going on a walk like this without people coming away having learnt something from it.

The crowd don’t laugh about children having stones thrown at them on their way to school. They laugh at the situations I find myself in. They laugh at how I’m a grumpy, sour-faced bastard in the morning, and how I’m shocked into reality by the woman who walks those children to school. With two hours spent on the subject of Israel and Palestine, I think that people not only have a right to experience my emotions, but that my stories can evoke emotions in them. I’m not preaching to the converted, and I don’t think that the left-wing have a monopoly on insight. I’ve been invited to perform the show at the UN, as well as at a synagogue in North London, before holding a discussion.

The British police helped fund the trip. I was making a speech at the 2007 rally against the arms trade, and a policeman insisted on searching me. He wrote that I was “over-confident” as the reason why I was stopped and searched. We took it to the independent police complaints and – shock, horror – they agreed with us, said it was an illegal stop and search, and gave us compensation.

We were repeatedly arrested by the Israeli soldiers. On one occasion I lost my temper. The soldiers said that they wanted to search everything in the van. All that was in the back was this guy’s laundry, and bags of clothes that had been donated to charity shops. We had to stop because I was getting so angry. Afterwards I said to our friend, “I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have behaved like that.” And he said, “No, it’s good that they see that their behaviour makes people angry.”

I believe there is hope when the Israeli and Palestinian grassroots groups reach out to one another, making the journey the two nations need to be making across an emotionally-fraught landscape. The journey challenges who they are, and their presumptions about themselves. A number of ex-soldiers on the Israeli side are doing amazing things, and Palestinian groups are also willing.

All structures are temporary. Tourists walk along Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China; barriers that centuries ago caused men suffering and pain. And they normally have kinds of signposts, and you get badges at the end for completing them. By walking across the Israeli barrier, I was treating it in the manner of something obsolete, something that it is yet to become.

I love doing things which other people would not touch with a barge pole. There is no better way to understand the land than to walk across it. And there was a time when people from England went abroad to foreign places to be critical, to enquire, but also as an act of solidarity. When we went to Israel, we didn’t tell anyone we were coming; it wasn’t a high-profile event. We worked with NGOs, with grass roots, with communities; we did a hell of a lot of work ourselves.

The Occupation has to end; the wall has to come down. I don’t know whether there should be a one-state or two-state solution. I don’t know whether Israel will actually succumb and change. I believe that international solidarity and boycotting are important. Whether it will happen now, I don’t know; whether it will happen in five years, I can’t tell either. The situation has to change; injustice has the seeds of its own destruction, and so it will change. I’m not sure how, but change will come.

MARK THOMAS SHARED HIS STORY IN ‘EXTREME RAMBLING – WALKING THE WALL’ AT THE TOBACCO FACTORY, BRISTOL, FROM MON 5-SAT 10 SEPT. SEE WWW.TOBACCOFACTORYTHEATRE.COM FOR DETAILS.

Copyright Mike White 2011