A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God

by Dion Nissenbaum

  “Don’t worry,” she told them. “Israel is a wonderful country.”

  Leyla and other Israeli women came to offer help to the mothers across the way.

  “What do you need?” they asked. “Do you need bread? Do you need milk? Whatever you want, we will get it. We’re neighbors.”

  It seemed like things might not be so bad for the Bazlamits. Then Israeli thugs descended on Abu Tor. They were looking to take over empty homes and planned to drive out any families that were trying to stay. Like the Bazlamits. Like the Yaghmours.

  Among these thugs, police and residents said, was Shlomo Baum, the burly, combative former Israeli commando with a shaved head and bushy mustache.

  The Israeli soldiers turned the marauders away. But a gang came back the next morning and surrounded the Yaghmour home next to the Bazlamits.

  “What are you doing here?” the Israeli thieves asked the Yaghmours. “This isn’t your house.”

  The Yaghmour women, trapped inside their house, screamed for help.

  Abdullah Bazlamit stood in the trees with some other neighbors and watched the armed men from afar. The men were wearing civilian clothes, but they had a curt, decisive military demeanor. It was impossible to tell who they were and who they were with.

  “Who speaks English?” one of the men in the gang asked the growing group of onlookers.

  No one spoke up. Finally, Abdullah raised his hand.

  “I do,” Abdullah told them.

  The man ordered Abdullah to serve as their translator.

  “Ask them what they are doing here,” the man said.

  “It’s their home,” Abdullah replied as more people gathered to see what was going on.

  The gunmen had a short chat in a language Abdullah didn’t understand. Then they backed off. The Yaghmours thought they had been spared. But that night the gang returned. And this time the men weren’t going to be scared off. They strong-armed their way into the homes and took men out one by one. They grabbed Abdullah, two of his brothers and one of the Yaghmours and dragged them into an abandoned house nearby where they threw the Palestinians to the ground. Then they started drinking.

  “They took us to an empty house and they tried to kill us,” Abdullah said. “From midnight until five in the morning, they beat us with everything. Our faces were swollen. They beat us with sticks, with the handle of their guns, with their hands.”

  Throughout the night, the men threatened to kill the Arabs and their families if they didn’t leave.

  “Take your stuff and go to Jordan,” they told Zakaria. “If we see you here again, we will kill you.”

  As the sun came up, the men gave them all a warning.

  “It is now five,” they told their captives. “You have until seven to leave your houses. You can’t stay.”

  Abdullah didn’t know what to do. He walked over to see if Leyla, their Jewish neighbor from Morocco, might be able to help them.

  Leyla was startled when she saw Abdullah’s cuts and bruises.

  “What happened to you?” she asked when he turned up at her door. “We have to call the police.”

  Zakaria went home and told his family they had to leave.

  “Let’s pack up and go,” he said to his wife.

  Zakaria was ready to go. He was prepared to give up the land where his father had been shot dead. Leyla came by to talk him out of it.

  “No, don’t go,” she told them. “Don’t worry, this is a gang. This is not the army.”

  The Bazlamits didn’t know how to get in touch with the Israeli police; they didn’t even have a telephone. And they didn’t speak Hebrew. Leyla made the call for them. She told the Israeli police the whole story and pleaded with them for help. Before long, police officers tracked down one of the men involved in the home attacks and told the Bazlamits that the gangs wouldn’t be coming around again.

  “I promise you, nothing will happen,” the police officer said. “We took them far away.”

  The Israeli police took the injured Bazlamit men to the hospital and vowed to keep the goons from returning.

  “We will deal with the gang,” the Israeli officer said. “Don’t worry.”

  Not long after the beatings, Israeli prosecutors accused Shlomo Baum of seizing homes in Abu Tor and threatening a Palestinian family living there. The courts barred Baum and two other men from entering the neighborhood—an order the men unsuccessfully challenged. The men, prosecutors said, sought to justify taking the homes by arguing that “Arabs should not be allowed to live in the area,” according to a Jerusalem Post article at the time.17 Israeli courts kept Baum in check—for a little while anyway.

  The threats and beatings rattled the Bazlamits. They weren’t sure what to make of life under Israeli rule. Their neighbors seemed kind, and the police appeared to be fair. But they clearly weren’t welcomed with open arms by all.

  Perhaps the strangest thing of all was seeing their new neighbors wearing the Bazlamits’ clothes and using the things they’d looted from the family’s homes.

  One afternoon, Dawlat saw a Jewish girl wearing one of her embroidered dresses from Hebron. She had no doubt the intricately sewn dress was hers. The elaborate stitching and vibrant colors were clearly from Hebron.

  “Shalom,” Dawlat said to the young woman.

  “Shalom,” she replied.

  “Your outfit is beautiful,” Dawlat told her. “Where did you get it?”

  The woman didn’t hesitate. “I got it in Hebron,” she said.

  Dawlat didn’t say anything. She didn’t want problems with the new neighbors. She just asked a Palestinian seamstress to make her some new dresses.

  As they adjusted to life in a new country, the police officer who helped the Bazlamits asked Zakaria to go on patrol with him across the hillside. He pointed out all the empty homes and encouraged Zakaria to take advantage of the situation.

  “There’s plenty of stuff,” the officer told him. “Take what you want.”

  To help the Bazlamits, the officer gave the family a big tin of white cheese to fill the cabinets that had been stripped by the looters.

  “I got this from a house where they have two tins,” the man said. “You seem like you have a lot of kids, so . . . eat.”

  Zakaria took it with thanks. Then he told his wife not to open it.

  “We have to find out whose it is,” he said.

  Two days later, Zakaria and Leyla found the original owners when they went to visit a pregnant woman whose husband was still being held by the Israelis.

  “If your husband’s not home by the time you have your baby, all the women from the neighborhood will be there to help,” Leyla said. “We’ll take care of you.”

  “The soldiers also took a tin of cheese from us,” the pregnant woman complained.

  Zakaria smiled.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We have it.”

  For the Bazlamits, Leyla became their lifeline to Israel. She introduced the Bazlamits to all the Jewish families living along the fence and told them to stop by whenever they needed help, day or night.

  “Whatever you need—for food, for your children, for whatever—I will bring it,” she said. “We are neighbors.”

  “The Courting Period”

  When things settled down in Abu Tor, Leyla took Nawal shopping in the heart of West Jerusalem. Nawal was amazed by how much the city had changed since it had been split. As they made their way through Jerusalem, Nawal noticed the strange colored light boxes at some crossroads. Nawal didn’t understand why people were stopping in their cars and Leyla had to explain how street lights worked.

  “I had never seen anything like that in my life,” Nawal said decades later.

  Along with Leyla, the Bazlamits finally got to meet the scrawny man and his wife: Haim and Rache
l Machsomi. They were immigrants from Iran. And the families quickly became two of the closest on the hillside. Endearingly, the Bazlamits started calling Haim Abu Ibrahim—father of Avraham, his oldest son. They referred to Rachel as Imm Ibrahim—mother of Avraham. It was a sign of intimacy, a mark of honor, for the Jewish families. The Palestinian families saw the Machsomis as neighbors with a common Middle East identity, people who understood the importance of culture, tradition and history.

  “He had the qualities of Arabs,” Nawal said of Haim. “Every week he would invite his sisters over. Every week he would invite his family.”

  Nawal and Rachel met at each other’s homes to knit together. They shared fresh tomatoes, peppers, lemons and mint. The Bazlamit men started going by to ask Haim for advice and counsel on everything from getting a job in Israel to dealing with their neighbors.

  The Machsomis taught the Bazlamits how to speak Hebrew. The Bazlamit kids started going to the Machsomi home on Fridays to turn off their Jewish neighbor’s lights, becoming Shabbos Goyim—non-Jews helping observant Jews during the day of rest when they are not permitted to do anything considered to be work, be it turning off a lamp, driving a car or heating up soup.

  At the beginning of Passover, the Bazlamits and other Palestinian families on the opposite side of the road would buy all the bread from the Jewish families foregoing leavened food to commemorate the flight of Israelites to freedom from the pharaohs. At the end of Passover, they would bring the Machsomis big platters of breads and cheeses, fruits and jams. When Nawal gave birth to a new son, Rachel brought over some baby clothes and a blanket for the newborn.

  Zakaria and Nawal Bazlamit’s oldest son, Hijazi, named after his slain grandfather, looks back on those years as “the brainwashing period.”

  “It was the courting period,” said Hijazi. “That’s when we were deceived.” Hijazi was seven years old when Abu Tor was taken by Israel and the Jewish neighbors rushed down to say hello.

  “That’s the period when they showed you brotherly love,” Hijazi said.

  No one in the family seemed to be more seduced by the new country than Hijazi. He learned Hebrew and quickly became friends with the Jewish neighbors. He didn’t really understand what the Israeli victory meant. He didn’t understand that he was now living in Occupied Jerusalem.

  “To us, it was simply that the Jordanian army left, and a new government came,” Hijazi said. “We thought at the time that whomever was in the Jordanian army could just go into the Israeli army. We were not aware of the consequences of our ignorance.”

  When he was old enough to get a job, Hijazi knew what he wanted to be: an Israeli police officer. He’d seen the police in Abu Tor and knew what they could be, what they could do. When he was old enough, Hijazi took a government intelligence test, walked away with a score higher than many Israelis, and soon had an open door to join the police department.

  At 21 years old, Hijazi proudly wore his police uniform when he worked in East Jerusalem. He wore it when he worked at the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque. Hijazi thought he had found his calling.

  The allure didn’t last long.

  “We thought the pasha was a pasha,” Hijazi said. “He turned out to be a rascal.”

  In time Hijazi came to see his fate as a modern-day morality tale, one with echoes of a story—a legend—he told about a Palestinian shoeshine boy who worked in the Old City when England ruled the region after World War I:

  One day, a British army officer went to check on things in the Old City. As he walked through the crowded streets, he came across a young man shining shoes. So he stopped to have his shoes cleaned. As the young man buffed the British officer’s shoes he kept quietly saying under his breath, in Arabic: “Tomorrow you will leave. Tomorrow you will go.”

  The British officer was cunning. He understood what the shoe shiner was saying. And he knew the trouble it could mean for the British. So he told his aide to invite the shoe shiner to his office.

  The shoe shiner was afraid.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the aide told him. “Come, and something good will come out of the meeting.”

  When the shoe shiner went to the British man’s office, the officer had a proposal for him.

  “I see your potential to become more than a shoe shiner,” the officer told him. “I want you to do better. We want you to become a policeman.”

  The shoe shiner was wary.

  “I don’t have any education,” he told the officer.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he replied. “We will educate you.”

  So the shoe shiner took the job. And the first thing the British police asked him to do was to go into the market and get rid of all the illegal stalls.

  He went off and did as he was told. He kicked people out of the streets. He pushed them out. His harsh ways earned him promotion after promotion until he became an officer. They eventually put him in charge of all of Jerusalem. But people hated him left and right. Because of his new wealth and prestige, he forgot where he came from.

  He kept up his tough ways—until the British came to talk.

  “People are complaining about you,” they told him. “People are protesting. You have defamed Britain’s reputation. We have no need for you and you should go.”

  The man knew what that meant for him.

  “Where should I go, my lord?” the man asked.

  “If you are no good to your own people, what good are you to us?” the British officer replied.

  And so the people killed him.

  Hijazi told the story one afternoon in the fall of 2014, between long drags on cigarettes that filled his low-ceilinged living room with smoke. He kept the wall-mounted television on mute and glanced up every now and again to read the scrolling news headlines running across the bottom of the screen. Unlike his father, Hijazi had kept his silver mane as he got older. His bushy mustache shadowed darkened, nicotine-stained teeth as he thought about the story he’d just told.

  “People thought about me like they thought about the shoeshine boy,” Hijazi finally said.

  For years, Hijazi saw his job in noble terms. He would sit with his friends, his family or anyone else who questioned him, and explain why he was working for Israel.

  “As an Arab policeman, I can help you,” he told people. “We have the same language, the same culture.”

  Most people weren’t convinced. “People felt like I was helping the Israeli occupation, not helping them,” he said.

  When Hijazi started to rise in the ranks of the Israeli police, he began to see more of what was going on and started questioning his decision. When he looked around, he noticed that Arab police officers all seemed to hit a glass ceiling.

  “Why do I just reach one stage when the Israelis can go further?” Hijazi wondered.

  Hijazi started questioning his superiors more and more. Then the Palestinian intifada—the popular uprising—upended things for Hijazi and the region.

  It was December 1987, and Hijazi had been working for the Israeli police for seven years. Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip seemed to be facing stone throwers more often. The hostility was growing. On December 8, Israeli soldiers driving a truck through the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip smashed into a car, killing four Palestinian civilians.

  Rumors that the crash was intentional fueled demonstrations that spread across Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel’s immediate efforts to contain Palestinian protests only seemed to make things worse.

  The following month, Yitzhak Rabin, then serving as Israel’s defense minister, vowed to quell the uprising with “force, might, and beatings.”18 Rabin encouraged soldiers to use clubs instead of live ammunition, a policy that earned Rabin the nickname “Bone Breaker.”

  A few weeks afte
r Rabin outlined the new Israeli response to the Palestinian intifada, Hijazi saw the end result of Rabin’s orders. Hijazi was in London when he was startled to see stomach-churning footage on TV. A CBS cameraman had captured footage of four Israeli soldiers using stones to beat two Palestinian teenagers in a West Bank field.

  The video sparked international outrage over Israel’s heavy-handed response to the Palestinian uprising. The footage haunted Hijazi when he returned to Jerusalem. And things at the police station seemed to be going from bad to worse. Hijazi and his Palestinian colleagues were left out of meetings held to come up with new plans for confronting problems in East Jerusalem, a place Hijazi knew better than most.

  Hijazi noticed that Israelis arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails seemed to be set free quickly while Palestinians arrested for similar things faced harsh interrogations and long jail terms. He heard about Israeli interrogators putting sacks filled with dirt and shit over the heads of Palestinian prisoners. As the Palestinian uprising rolled into its third year, Hijazi quit.

  “I never felt the democracy that they claimed,” he said. “I studied the police laws and I felt that the discrimination was embedded in them. The general law is punishment for all, but implementation of it was only directed towards Palestinians.”

  Like the Jerusalem shoeshine boy from his story, Hijazi realized that he’d been manipulated.

  “They were using me,” he said. “Even though the nine years were hard and long, I learned a lot. I learned about their internal sense of discrimination against the Palestinians. To them, Palestinians are slaves.”

  Hijazi could see little difference between the British and Israeli rulers of Jerusalem, both of whom used divide-and-rule tactics with the Palestinians.

  “This is the colonial thinking that we are living with,” he said. “Those nine years were the hardest of my life.”

  “A Bullet between the Eyes”

  Hijazi’s disenchantment grew as the sense of community on Assael started to erode.

  Leyla and her family moved away soon after the fence came down. In the early 1980s, Rachel and Haim Machsomi packed up their family and moved out of Jerusalem. The Bazlamits’ connections to the other side of Assael were shrinking. And Abu Tor became one of the flashpoints for Palestinian defiance in Jerusalem.