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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  Protesters used burning tires, cinder blocks, boulders and trash to set up makeshift roadblocks in Abu Tor to face off against Israeli forces. Demonstrators set cars on fire and threw stones through windows of Jewish homes. For the most part, the clashes took place down in the valley, far below Abu Tor’s Jewish hilltop homes. But the demonstrations weren’t contained. Protesters used the network of connecting stairs cutting up the hillside as strategic routes through the neighborhood.

  To deal with the tumult, the Israeli police hired a controversial Abu Tor resident to organize a civil guard in the neighborhood: Shlomo Baum.

  Baum had a reputation for being an unapologetic advocate for an aggressive Israeli military. His confrontational demeanor and military gait helped him stand out in Abu Tor. Baum had zero tolerance for the street riots spilling into his neighborhood. To him, the stone throwing and car burning were symptomatic of a much larger problem that had to be forcefully confronted.

  “Burning cars is only one stage,” he told a Jerusalem Post reporter in a 1989 interview, soon after he was named to lead the Abu Tor neighborhood watch. “The next stage is torching apartments. It’s not that much more difficult, especially in the summer, when a petrol bomb can easily be tossed through an open window.”19

  At the time, Baum lived in a home down the valley in an area of Abu Tor that, like the Bazlamits’ neighborhood, had been part of No Man’s Land between 1948 and 1967. Baum took over the house as a squatter in 1955 and refused to leave, the Post reporter wrote.

  “They won’t come here,” Baum said. “If they do, they will get a bullet between the eyes.”20

  Baum took to the new job leading armed patrols with his usual flair. He started walking the streets of Abu Tor with intimidating dogs, a special insult to Muslim residents, who usually view dogs as unclean animals.

  “I don’t plan on beating the intifada myself,” Baum told the Israeli reporter. “But if I was in charge, it would have ended in three days. You wouldn’t have had Israeli soldiers being stoned.”21

  Many Israelis in the area joined Baum. More than two dozen people signed up to take part in armed patrols of Abu Tor. At the time, more than 2,000 Jewish residents were living in Abu Tor, mostly on the top of the hillside, above 9,000 Arab residents increasingly crowded into the valley below.

  The head of the Beit Nehemiah community center in Abu Tor, Maya Tavori, showed solidarity with the Jewish residents and banned Arabs from using the playground.

  “I’m very skeptical about the idea of living together,” Maya said at the time. “We can live side by side and maybe after 1,000 years the cultures will change and we can live together.”22

  Some Abu Tor residents saw Baum’s armed patrols as a dangerous move that could make things worse. They quickly drafted a petition calling for Baum’s removal.

  “We residents of Abu Tor strongly protest the creation of a special unit of the Civil Guard under the command of Shlomo Baum, well known in the neighborhood as an advocate of violence and coercion against the Arab population, and an inciter of hatred and fear among the Jews,” the petition read. “A unit under his command could only increase tension in the neighborhood, if not lead to unnecessary violence.”23

  Judith Green, an Israeli-American archeologist who lived on the street above the Bazlamits, told the Jerusalem Post reporter that Baum was “violent,” “aggressive” and “provocative.”24

  Baum, she said, painted an ominous picture of Arab residents of Abu Tor as poised to “break into our homes and rape the women.”25

  To counter Baum’s armed patrols, Judith organized meetings between Arab and Jewish residents of Abu Tor. Judith and her allies convinced the city to lift the ban on Arab kids at the Abu Tor playground. But the Arab kids could tell they really weren’t wanted, so they stayed away. It would be a feeling that lasted for years.

  “Every time we would go to the park, people would let their dogs loose to scare the children,” Nawal said 15 years later.

  The divisions in Abu Tor that at one point seemed small were starting to get wider.

  “Abu Tor is kind of a test case,” Judith said in 1990. “I don’t see how people can say Jerusalem is a united city when people pay protective services to watch their cars and houses, and the Arabs are afraid to come to our youth center.”26

  Baum left no doubt that he was among those who wanted to see the Arab families leave.

  “Most people hate them,” Baum told a visiting American journalist.27

  Among the Palestinians, the animosity was also building.28

  “My hatred for them grows every day,” Samia, a 19-year-old from the neighborhood who didn’t want her last name used, told the reporter. “They treat us as if we were not human beings and we were animals.”29

  Judith Green saw Baum as a provocateur whose main contributions to Abu Tor were to fuel divisions and intimidate those who disagreed with him.

  “He considered himself Lord of Abu Tor,” she said years later. “He was a bully.”

  Jewish families living on the western side of Assael Street started shoring up their homes with higher walls and stronger doors. Even as the walls went up, the Bazlamits tried to keep their eyes on their Jewish neighbors. One of the Abu Tor stairways ran right along the edge of the Bazlamit compound. Up above, the next flight of steps ran between the Machsomis’ old home and the Joudans’ place. It became a regular route for the stone throwers, whose whistles and shouts could be heard echoing off the tin and tile roofs.

  One day while hanging laundry on the Bazlamits’ roof, Nawal saw some kids throwing stones at Malka Joudan, an Iranian immigrant she called Imm Ismael, across the way.

  “I rushed down, pushed the kids and screamed at them,” Nawal said.

  The kids scattered and, when the police turned up, Nawal told them that the stone throwers had come from somewhere down in the valley.

  “They are not our children,” Nawal told the police.

  “Our prophet calls on us to take care of our neighbors,” Nawal said. “It is my duty to protect Imm Ismael.”

  Malka’s religion didn’t matter to Nawal.

  “Our prophet said even if your neighbor is Jewish, you must protect them,” she said.

  By the time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed an historic 1993 deal with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat as US president Bill Clinton looked on, the walls on the western side of Assael Street were a little higher. Judith and her group eventually managed to put the brakes on Baum’s patrols. But the fabric of the street was seriously frayed. The Oslo Accords helped bring quiet back to Assael, but not a renewed sense of community.

  Judith tried to capitalize on the new era of optimism by organizing neighborhood dialogue groups and community concerts. Four or five Jewish families from Abu Tor agreed to get together with four or five Arab families in the area. The summer after the Oslo Accords were signed, Judith teamed up with some Palestinian musicians from Abu Tor. With a little support from the city, Judith and the group organized a short series of concerts featuring Arab and Jewish performers. Three were held in the Abu Tor community center where, years earlier, the director had backed segregating Arabs and Jews. The last concert was held on a Friday afternoon on the stone promenade running through the nearby Peace Forest.

  Dozens of people came to the park: couples, women with strollers, families from both parts of Abu Tor. Israeli musicians performed South American tunes. The Palestinians played the pear-shaped, stringed oud instrument and drums for more than 100 people. A couple of Palestinian men were so inspired that they got up for an impromptu traditional dabke folk dance performance. Judith was thrilled by the turnout.

  “It was really a high point of all the things I had done,” she said. “But it’s the kind of thing that you can’t do forever.”

  A Martyr at al Aqsa

  It didn’t
take very long for tensions to return to Jerusalem.

  The year after the Abu Tor concerts, a religious Jewish extremist killed Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Six months later, Israeli voters turned to the right by backing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, a skeptic of the peace process who played to the country’s anxieties about a rise in Palestinian suicide bombings.

  The 46-year-old “peace through security” politician became Israel’s youngest prime minister, narrowly beating incumbent Shimon Peres, an ally of Rabin and an architect of the Oslo peace deal.

  Netanyahu took a tough stance with Arafat and resisted concessions pushed by Clinton. Three months into Netanyahu’s term, he gave the go-ahead to open a new exit for archeological digs running along the base of the Western Wall, below the Dome of the Rock complex. Israel’s archeological excavations in the Old City were seen by Palestinians as a covert effort by the government to gradually take control of the religious site where the first two Jewish temples once stood. While Rabin and Peres had decided that it would be too provocative to open the tunnel exit, Netanyahu decided the time was right.

  On Monday, September 23, 1996, just before midnight in the Old City, scores of Israeli police kept watch as archeologists and construction workers opened the new tunnel exit, which emerged in the Muslim Quarter on Via Dolorosa, the main pilgrimage route known as the Way of Sorrows to Christians, who retraced Christ’s steps as he carried his cross through hostile crowds on the way to his crucifixion. The tunnel route also ran underneath an elementary school in the Muslim Quarter, stoking Palestinian suspicions that Netanyahu was trying to steal the contested Jerusalem ground from underneath them. Netanyahu’s actions led to a predictable response: Palestinian activists poured into the streets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Arafat had started to build the foundations for what he hoped would eventually become an independent Palestinian state.

  The protests started in the streets of the Palestinian refugee camps, but they quickly devolved into deadly gunfights between Israeli soldiers and members of the young Palestinian Authority security forces. Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned negotiator viewed by many as one of the more pragmatic voices in the new Arafat-led government, called the tunnel the “tip of the iceberg” of Israel’s efforts to covertly extend its authority over the most cherished holy site, one that had been the cause of centuries of conflict.

  “What’s happening now is not a fight over the tunnel,” she said to CNN at the time. “It is a fight over the soul of Jerusalem and the legitimacy of the peace process.”30

  By the time Friday prayers came around that week, at least 40 Palestinians and 11 Israelis had been killed in deadly clashes that quickly became known as the Tunnel Riots.

  Thousands of Palestinians flocked to al Aqsa mosque that Friday morning as thousands of Israeli riot police and soldiers fanned out through the Old City to prepare for an inevitable post-prayer confrontation.

  Among the 10,000 Palestinians heading to al Aqsa that day was Jawad Bazlamit, one of Hijazi and Wajeeh Bazlamit’s many grandchildren. It was a special Friday for the 21-year-old from Assael Street. He was days away from marrying a pretty young Palestinian girl. The Bazlamit house on Assael was filling with relatives coming from as far away as Jordan for the celebration. The women were making stuffed grape leaves and the men were preparing to slaughter fresh lambs to feed the hundreds of people expected to join in the celebration. His father, Abdel Halim, and Jawad’s brothers set up a wedding tent in the courtyard to welcome visitors and hung big colorful balloons from the ceiling.

  Jawad’s 11 brothers and sisters teased him about his marriage and how many kids he was going to have. Because he was one of the younger boys, Jawad was usually quieter than his brothers. He had frizzy brown hair, a thin mustache and a closely cropped beard that wasn’t quite full enough to mask his adolescent face.

  While his mom cooked Friday lunch, Jawad went off to al Aqsa early to help with a tiling project at the mosque before noon prayers, the biggest of the week, began.

  Thousands of Palestinians crowded into al Aqsa for the prayers while thousands more lay out their prayer rugs on the cold stone outside. More than 3,500 Israeli riot police and soldiers had set up an exceptionally large security cordon. Shortly after noon, as prayers were winding up at al Aqsa, scores of demonstrators started throwing stones at hundreds of police positioned along the edge of the mosque compound. Wearing helmets and body armor, the police threw tear gas at the crowds and opened fire with rubber-coated metal bullets and live fire.31

  “A martyr has fallen!” someone shouted.32

  Thousands rushed back into al Aqsa and shut the heavy wood doors as bullets zipped through the narrowing entrance. Thousands more scampered up the stone stairs outside and rushed toward the Dome of the Rock as police closed in from all sides.

  Sharif ‘Abd a-Rahman ran straight into a group of policemen who smacked him to the ground with batons.

  “Jerusalem is ours,” the Israeli soldiers told Sharif in Hebrew.33

  Sharif, a 22-year-old from the Arab-Israeli town of Abu Ghosh in the hillsides between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, asked them for mercy—in Hebrew.

  “I am an Israeli citizen with an Israeli passport,” he told them. “Help me.”34

  His pleas did no good. The police officers kept beating him until he was limp. The clash lasted about 20 minutes. When it was over, three Palestinians were dead, including Jawad Bazlamit.

  The coroner determined that he had been shot in the eye—at close range—by a rubber-coated bullet. The bullet was found lodged deep in his brain.35

  Like his grandfather 45 years earlier, Jawad became a Palestinian martyr.

  Friends of Jawad told his family that he hadn’t been one of the stone throwers, that he had been shot while praying inside al Aqsa. An investigation by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem was unable to find anyone who saw Jawad get shot. B’Tselem said he had been killed on a plateau near the Dome of the Rock looking out on the Mount of Olives.36

  It didn’t matter where or how Jawad had been killed. His shooting threatened to ignite new tensions in Abu Tor and across Jerusalem. Scores of Israeli forces converged on Assael Street to quickly quash any problems. Abdel Halim went to talk to the soldiers. He was worried they would make things worse. He assured them there would be no trouble and asked them to leave him to bury his son. They did.

  “We don’t care for problems like this,” he told them. “God gives and God takes away. This is a lifetime relationship. We’re not going to make problems with our Jewish neighbors.”

  The Bazlamits served sweet tea with sage and small cups of thick, unsweetened coffee to stunned relatives and friends under the rented wedding tent they’d transformed to shelter mourners. Jawad’s mother, aunts and sisters wept in the street. Jewish and Muslim neighbors came to pay their respects.

  “He was a nice boy,” said Rafi Goeli, whose father had stretched the borders of No Man’s Land for their home in the 1950s. “I’d known him since he was a baby.”

  Although they didn’t know Jawad, Herman Shapiro and his son, Alex, also came to say sorry and sit with the family in the tent. The father and son took a seat on red plastic stools the Bazlamits had borrowed for the wedding and sat near Abdel Halim as he came to terms with the loss of his boy.

  “Even though I didn’t know the deceased, it’s a shock,” Alex told a CNN reporter.37

  An ultra-Orthodox Jewish father living on the street above the Bazlamits didn’t know the family, but still felt badly for their loss.

  “I have strong right wing political views, but this death is so sad, I feel it personally,” he told CNN.38

  Jawad’s mother was inconsolable. Her surviving sons supported her, kept her from collapsing to the ground, and washed the tears from her face with handfuls of water.

  “How, I ask you, would Netanyahu f
eel if he had lost a son?” Abdel Halim told the CNN journalist who came to his house. “In that, we are all the same.”39

  Abdel Halim told journalists that he had decided not to play verses of the Quran over loudspeakers at his home to avoid upsetting the Jewish families on the other side of Assael Street who were observing Sukkot, a weeklong holiday commemorating the 40 years of Jewish wandering in the desert.

  “They did not harm us,” Abdel Halim told an Associated Press reporter. “Why should we provoke them?”40

  Not everyone in Abu Tor felt badly about Jawad’s death.

  Shlomo Baum, the former Israeli commando and onetime leader of the Abu Tor neighborhood community watch, told the AP reporter that he shed no tears for Abdel Halim or his son.

  “If his son had not rioted, he wouldn’t have been shot,” Baum said.41

  To Baum, Jawad was an agitator who got what he deserved. To the kids growing up on Assael Street, he became a hero: a Palestinian who had died while protecting Haram al Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Palestinian children in the neighborhood started calling Assael “Martyr Jawad’s Street.”

  A New Wall Divides Families

  Shortly before Jawad was killed, the Bazlamits had bought a small piece of land just outside Jerusalem in al Azariya, the town on the eastern stretches of the Mount of Olives where Christian tradition says Jesus Christ performed his most transformative miracle: raising one of his followers—Lazarus—from the dead. The town, known to Christians as Bethany, was a short drive from Abu Tor.

  The family was getting too big for the compound on Assael. They were running out of land in Abu Tor and Israeli officials never seemed to approve their requests to build anything, no matter how small. So the Bazlamits found three-quarters of an acre of land in Azariya, not far from the Tomb of Lazarus. The property sat just below a Catholic convent and its groves of olive trees.