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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  “My father, who was killed in this area, built the house and we have been living in this house since then,” Zakaria told the UN team. “We have been living in the house for about 26 years.”15

  After looking over the detailed reports, Lt. Col. M. C. Stanaway, an officer from New Zealand then serving as chairman of the UN MAC, rejected Israel’s request for an emergency meeting. The investigators concluded that there was nothing nefarious going on in No Man’s Land. Despite her protestations, Malka’s new neighbors were there to stay.

  The following spring, Rachel Machsomi was looking after her garden when she saw Eid, the elderly Arab man, outside his house picking colorful poppies that didn’t seem to grow on the upper hillside in Israel. Using a mix of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and hand signals, Rachel asked him if he would pick some of the flowers for her.

  “Could I have some of those pretty red anemones?” she asked the man.16

  Rachel climbed through a hole in their basement and met Eid at the chain-link fence that had replaced the barbed wire.17 He came to the border and handed her a bouquet of flowers.

  Minutes later, Jordanian soldiers entered the man’s house. When they left, the old man came out back and saw Haim.

  “I mustn’t talk to you anymore,” the man whispered to Haim.18

  Rachel was grateful for the kind act and wanted to say thanks to the old man living in No Man’s Land. She kept an eye out for him, but he didn’t turn up. When Rachel saw the women across the way at the well, she signaled to ask them where the older man had gone. The women crossed their hands in an “X” and shook their heads. Rachel assumed he had been arrested by the Jordanians. It would be months before she would find out what happened to the old man. But the two families were about to become two of the closest neighbors on the hillside.

  A Farewell to No Man’s Land

  Stoked by Soviet mischief, tensions between Egypt and Israel were growing in the spring of 1967. Egyptian forces, fueled by false Soviet intelligence about Israeli military moves, massed on Israel’s southern border and blocked Israeli ships from getting to and from the country’s southern port, a provocative move that cut off Israel’s access to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

  The families in Abu Tor could tell that something was up. Israeli soldiers repeatedly told the kids where to run for safety if another war started. They told the families to stock up on food. Schools started piling extra sandbags around the buildings.

  The shooting started around 10 a.m. on Monday, June 5, a few hours after Israeli planes launched a surprise assault that decimated the Egyptian air force. Most of the kids from Abu Tor were at school, but some had stayed home as word spread that war might be on the way. Israeli soldiers watched as buses filled with Jordanian soldiers drove into the valley below and echoes from loudspeakers rippled up the hillside.

  “The war has begun,” the Arabic voices warned. “Now we’re going to finish the game.”19

  Malka, who understood the terrifying messages from the Arab soldiers, rounded up her kids and grabbed some things for the shelter, including a razor blade. Malka wasn’t prepared to have her or her daughter raped or killed if Israel lost the war.

  “If the Arabs get too close, you know what you have to do,” Malka told Maya as they ran for the bomb shelter. “You do it to me. I will do it to you.”

  The Joudans scrambled out their door, but they didn’t get far. The shooting was getting closer and they had to hide under a narrow set of stone stairs next to a small pigeon coop beside their house. Joining them as they rushed for cover was an outgoing young French woman, Gina, who’d moved into the spare room once used by the Jacobys before the Iranian family moved to a bigger place down the street. Gina had become part of the Joudan family. She took them in her tiny Citroën down to southern Israel to buy a sheep that they put in the back seat for a long, crowded, hilarious and memorable drive back to Jerusalem. Only later would the Joudans hear that Gina might have been a spy.

  Across the street, Rachel Machsomi corralled her kids and herded them up the hill to the shelter with their neighbors. When they got inside, Rachel counted her kids. Her stomach churned.

  “Pini,” she said. “Where’s Pini?”

  Her youngest son, her baby, was missing. As the fight for Abu Tor unfolded, Shimshon Jacoby, then 16 years old, rushed back to find Rachel’s infant son. A couple of guys from the neighborhood joined Shimshon on the rescue mission. They scrambled from house to house, climbing through gardens until they got back to Rachel’s home. They rushed inside to find Pini sleeping, oblivious to the fact that his frantic mom had left him behind—and that his country was at war.

  The fighting intensified the following morning when Israeli soldiers moved in to seize Abu Tor. Relieved Israeli residents greeted the soldiers in the streets with trays of tea and cookies. Jordanian forces pummeled the hillside with artillery and mortar fire as the Israelis hunkered down to plan their counterattack. The Joudans and Machsomis could hear Israeli and Jordanian soldiers fighting furious gun battles in the homes nearby. By the end of the second night, the shooting seemed farther off. Israeli forces had pushed the Jordanians down the hillside and into retreat across the valley. The Israeli soldiers closed in for a showdown in the Old City.

  The fight in Abu Tor was costly for both sides. Many Jordanian soldiers and 16 Israeli fighters, including the battalion commander, were killed. By the third day, the shooting in Abu Tor seemed to be over. The Machsomis, Jacobys and Joudans emerged from the shelter and made their way back down the hillside to see if their homes were still standing.

  Their stone walls were peppered with bullet holes, but none of their houses had been seriously damaged by mortars or artillery rounds. The families gathered in the streets as Israeli soldiers rounded up Arab men hiding with their families in their Abu Tor homes. Israeli soldiers were on the lookout for Jordanian Legionnaires who had taken off their uniforms and changed into civilian clothes to avoid being caught. Shimshon grabbed his camera and started taking photographs of the captives as they marched past his house. The men walked silently with their hands raised and fingers clasped over their heads. Few of them looked like soldiers. They were skinny, balding men with thin mustaches, patchy jackets, loose-fitting pants and thin-soled black leather shoes. Among the men paraded past Shimshon as he took photos was Zakaria Bazlamit.

  Praying at the Western Wall

  As the Israeli soldiers solidified their hold on the city, Shimshon and other guys from Abu Tor set off to check out the silent houses in No Man’s Land. Across the valley stood the Old City, smoke still rising from the cramped alleys where Israeli soldiers were searching for any Jordanian holdouts. The homes in Abu Tor were shuttered and silent. The Israelis peeked into houses and stopped to check out the bodies of Jordanian soldiers shot dead in the streets. They made their way through the neglected groves in Kidron Valley, which once served as King David’s escape route when he fled his rebellious son, Absalom. They walked past towering biblical limestone tombs and burial caves carved into the hillside. They looked up at the Mount of Olives and the carpet of Jewish graves filled with ancient souls who expect to be the first to be resurrected when the Messiah returns. The young men passed Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus Christ was betrayed by Judas and taken by Roman guards to be crucified. Then they started the climb toward the Old City walls. They flinched at the smell of charred rubber and flesh coming from a burning Jordanian bus with dead soldiers inside. They stopped to check out a smoldering tank and turned away when they realized it was Israeli, not Jordanian. Finally, they arrived at Lion’s Gate, the small, arched entrance to the Old City, where Israeli paratroopers and tanks first broke through en route to triumphantly raising the Israeli flag above the Western Wall on the Temple Mount, site of the first two Jewish temples. Days earlier, Moshe Dayan, the combat veteran who had drawn the lines splitting the city in 1948, and Yitzhak Rabin, who had overseen the war as
the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, had walked through the same gate as jubilant soldiers celebrated in the streets where Jewish rabbis were blowing shofar, ram’s horns, as they carried large, handwritten Torah scrolls to the Western Wall.

  Shimshon looked up toward the Temple Mount, closed his eyes and said a quiet prayer as tears fell from the cheeks of the men standing alongside him.

  The Looting of Abu Tor

  While thousands of Israelis flocked to the Western Wall, others took advantage of the power vacuum to descend on the abandoned Abu Tor homes. Israeli opportunists looted the homes and stripped some clean. They took handwoven carpets and embroidered dresses. They carried away gold wedding necklaces and silver bracelets. They hauled off tiled tables and idle sheep. Some Israelis moved into the houses abandoned by families that had fled.

  At one point, Israeli soldiers turned up and tried to stop the looting. One soldier, a young man who still had bloodstains on his uniform, stood outside the hole in the barbed wire as Israeli civilians returned with armloads of stolen goods. He stopped Israelis as they came through No Man’s Land and berated them for stealing. He pointed at the blood on his uniform as the looters tried to get away.

  “This is the blood of my friend,” the soldier told them. “He didn’t die so that you could go and steal dishes.”

  One of them, Shimshon said, was Avraham Joudan, the dad who’d scared him to death when he was young. Shimshon said he watched the soldier point his gun at Avraham as he tried to bring armloads of looted stuff into his home.

  “You put those things back, or you burn them, but you will not take them,” the soldier warned Avraham.

  As one man rushed past with a bedsheet filled with looted things, a pretty piece of embroidered cloth fell to the ground in front of the Joudan family’s door. Maya said she was immediately attracted by the beautiful, vibrant, hand-sewn red-and-green flower.

  “Don’t take that,” Malka, Maya’s mom, said to Maya as she went to pick it up. “That’s not yours.”

  Maya took it anyway. If she didn’t, the beautiful piece of artwork would end up in the trash.

  As the Palestinian families returned to see what had happened to their homes, Malka kept watch. She saw an Israeli soldier beating an Arab man on the roof of one of the homes.

  “Stop it!” she shouted at the soldiers. “Don’t be a show-off. That’s not how you treat Arabs.”

  When she saw another Israeli soldier firing on Arabs making their way home, Malka rushed up and gave him a shove. The soldier’s rifle shot slammed into a nearby stone wall as he stumbled.

  “You almost killed me,” the soldier angrily shouted at Malka.

  “I know,” she shot back at the soldier. “Watch out.”

  Haim Machsomi also tried to stop the looters. He called the police, who confiscated some of the stolen property and asked Haim to look after it until they could return it to their owners. Haim was afraid he’d be accused of being a looter if he kept it, so he agreed only to look after the sheep his neighbor had taken.20

  As the looting subsided and families began fixing up their war-damaged homes, Rachel and Haim walked down to meet the people who had been so kind to them over the years.

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

  “We never had a bad day with them,” Abdel Halim Bazlamit said of the Machsomis. “Never.”

  While the women gathered in one garden, Haim took one of the Bazlamit men aside for a private talk.

  “Our neighbor took your sheep,” Haim confided to Abdel Halim. “He stole it.”

  Haim returned the sheep he’d been looking after to a grateful Abdel Halim. In a gesture of thanks, the Bazlamits slaughtered it and they had a big post-war party together.

  Itzik Joudan did not see a thief when he looked at his dad. His father wasn’t a looter who would steal anyone’s sheep. His father was the guy who helped the Arab neighbors fill out confusing new Israeli government paperwork filled with questions about their homes and families.

  “None of our friends or the people we knew were part of that,” Itzik said of the looting. “No, we were the opposite.”

  When they were sure that the shooting had stopped, Haim and Rachel took out their prayer shawls and kippah, looked out on the city walls they had prayed toward for years, and made their way to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall.

  Haim and Rachel walked into the Old City to see the place they had fantasized about as kids in Iran. They made their way past the stalls and shattered windows, through the streets filled with soldiers and shopkeepers, until they finally saw it.

  Rachel was flooded with unexpected joy. Haim joined the men while Rachel joined the women. She prayed for her husband and her family. She prayed for her brothers and herself. She prayed for her sister, Malka, their queen, the one they had to leave behind.

  Is This Arab Meat Kosher?

  After soldiers came to haul away the border fence on the ridge, the Machsomis and Yaghmours became some of the closest neighbors on the newly united hillside.

  “We were like family,” said Ziad Yaghmour, Eid’s grandson, who was 13 when the dividing line was erased in 1967.

  At long last, the Machsomis were able to talk to Eid Yaghmour—Abu Ali—the family patriarch who had handed the poppies over the fence. Haim saw Abu Ali carrying a stick with a white flag. He walked down to meet the elderly man, who drew back in fear.21

  Haim reassured the man and extended his hand.

  “Finally,” he said. “We’ve been neighbors for so long and at last we can shake each other’s hand.”22

  The two men talked about the flowers and the Jordanian soldiers who had harassed Eid. The old man was defiant. He’d had his fill of people coming to ask him about flowers and home repairs.

  “Why are you harassing me?” he’d told the Jordanian soldiers. “I only threw her flowers.”

  With the barbed wire gone, there seemed to be little separating the families on the upper side of the hill from those down below. Ziad’s mother, who Rachel called Imm Ziad—the mother of Ziad—brought fresh baked bread. Imm Ziad and the other women across the way took to affectionately calling Rachel Imm Ibrahim—the mother of Avraham, her firstborn son. Imm Ibrahim would go across the street to knit with Imm Ziad and Nawal Bazlamit, Imm Hijazi, the woman who had thrown bread over the barbed wire to Haim.

  The Jewish mothers cherished their new nicknames. It was a sign of the intimacy the families shared in Abu Tor. Rachel’s kids taught Ziad some Hebrew and Ziad taught them some Arabic. Imm Ziad taught Rachel and Malka how to make spicy stuffed squash. The girls from the neighborhood played hopscotch on the open patch of dirt on top of the hill where they’d hid during the Six-Day War. They climbed trees together and tossed rotten fruit at each other. The older boys—the “bad” boys—walked down the hillside to a small clubhouse where they shot pool with Arab kids in their part of the neighborhood. Sometimes one or two of them took a drag from a cigarette.

  On Friday nights, when Haim headed to the neighborhood synagogue for Sabbath prayers, his kids would rush across the old barbed-wire line to the Yaghmour house where they would gather around the TV to watch the weekly Arabic language movie on Israel’s Channel One. Sometimes Rachel would come watch too.

  The Bazlamits and Yaghmours would make hot, thick, sweet, cardamom-infused coffee for Haim on Fridays after the sun went down and religious dictates prevented him from making it for himself. Some Saturdays, during the Jewish Sabbath, Ziad would turn on the TV for Malka—the mother they called Imm Ismael—when she wanted to watch an Arabic language show that reminded her of home.

  “My mother always said: ‘They are not Muslim,’” said Malka’s son, Yanki, of the Yaghmours. “‘They have Jewish blood.’”

  The trust b
etween the families grew quickly. Then the Yaghmours and some of the other Arab neighbors extended special invitations to the Machsomis and the Joudans: Please come join us for lunch with our families in Hebron.

  The Machsomis were elated. There was no greater sign of respect. It was an invitation they were happy to accept. They piled into a couple of cars and drove south to Halhoul, a small village near Hebron, near the Cave of the Patriarchs holding the tomb of Abraham, the prophet revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews as the father of their faiths.

  They arrived to a massive feast. The Palestinian families laid out freshly made labneh yogurt and olives. They brought out steaming lamb, slaughtered just to welcome their special guests from Jerusalem. The Machsomi kids looked at each other, all thinking the same thing: Is this meat Kosher? Haim and Rachel had never said anything to their neighbors. It hadn’t crossed their minds to say something.

  “What do we do?” Haim asked Rachel.

  “We have to tell them,” she replied.

  Haim walked up to the men and explained the problem. Their embarrassed hosts huddled to talk about the culinary crisis. Then they quickly took the meat away and brought more fruit and vegetables for their honored guests. There were still lots of things the families had to learn about each other.

  The visit solidified the bonds the new neighbors were building in Abu Tor. Eid started gardening for the Joudans. Unbeknownst to Eid, he was working for the woman who had complained to the United Nations about his return to No Man’s Land a few years earlier.

  One day, Israeli police turned up at the Joudan home with some concerning questions. They were looking for Gina, the friendly French tenant who had become a big part of the Joudans’ daily lives before the war. But Gina was gone. She was missing. And Israeli officials wanted to speak to her. The Israelis told the Joudans she was wanted for questioning. They wouldn’t say why. But the Joudans figured that she had to be a spy for Russia or some other enemy of Israel. It would become one of the war’s unsolved mysteries.