When Maya Met Abdullah
The break in the fence also created an opening for Maya Joudan to finally meet the handsome boy with his cigarettes and love-spell rings. His name was Abdullah Bazlamit. He was 19, just three years older than Maya. He called her Mazal.
They met on the edge of what had once been No Man’s Land for an awkward first hello. They didn’t know what to say to each other. Even if they did, they didn’t speak the same language. But the curiosity was still there. In fact, it had definitely grown. Maya wanted to know everything about Abdullah and his life. What was his home like? What did he do with his days?
At the time, Abdullah was working at a barbershop in the Old City’s Armenian Quarter. Maya wasn’t supposed to go to the Old City on her own. But she was so taken by Abdullah that she wanted to see Jerusalem through his eyes. Maya and one of her friends put on baggy Palestinian dresses to conceal their identities before they walked with Abdullah to his shop. The visits seemed dangerous and daring. Maya was sneaking away from her home—and doing it with a boy from across the old border. If her parents found out, she’d be in big, big trouble. But Maya wasn’t afraid. She wanted to spend time with Abdullah. Maya picked up Arabic quickly. She prided herself on having a sharp enough ear to distinguish Arabic spoken by Jerusalemites and that spoken by Hebronites. Maya got to know Arabic so well that she could get Abdullah and his friends laughing by telling classic jokes about dumb Hebronites—with a Hebronite accent. Maya and Abdullah became minor neighborhood celebrities when an Italian journalist came to write about their unlikely friendship. Their photos were splashed across pages of an Italian magazine, Maya said.
But the more time Maya and Abdullah spent together, the more it became obvious that there would always be a divide between them. Religious. Cultural. Social. There were so many obstacles. At the end of the day, both of them knew what it would mean to be more than friends. It wasn’t going to happen.
“We became very good friends, but I knew it would never become a romance,” Maya said. “I knew enough that Jews didn’t get romantic because of the religious differences. It was like we were buddies.”
Over the next year or two, Maya and Abdullah drifted apart. Maya went off to study in Canada. Abdullah got married, had kids and moved to Abu Dhabi.
“We really had a great time,” Abdullah said. “But it was superficial. That innocent relationship had no place in my new life.”
While Maya and Abdullah’s friendship dissolved, the families on both sides were getting ever closer. At the start of Passover, when the Machsomi family had to get rid of all the chametz, or bread, in the house to commemorate the rushed flight from Egypt, they sold it to the Yaghmours. On the last day of Passover, the Machsomi family would go to a nearby park for an afternoon picnic and come home to find that the Yaghmours had laid out a huge spread of freshly baked breads and homemade cheese, jam and fresh olives.
They weren’t just neighbors. They were becoming friends. Haim did what he could to help all the Arab men who came to ask him for advice. But there was only so much one person could do. Haim wanted to do more for Abu Tor. So he took his case to City Hall. In 1969, Haim drafted a petition asking Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek to fix up the neighborhood. More than two dozen Arab and Jewish residents signed the appeal for the city to deal with the sewage and poor lighting in No Man’s Land.23
The letter, believed to be the first of its kind signed by Arab and Jewish residents of a united Jerusalem, asked the mayor to help them “complete the blessed work which has begun in our quarter. . . . We are happy to be pioneers in bringing together the hearts of the two people.”24
The bonds kept getting stronger. The Machsomis all walked across the road to celebrate Ziad’s wedding. The Yaghmours piled into cars to go to Avraham’s 1977 wedding at a Jerusalem wedding hall.
“The center of our life was with them,” said Rachel’s son Pini, the baby left behind during the 1967 war. “It wasn’t like there were Jews and Arabs—it was Jews-and-Arabs.”
The Machsomis would buy shoes for their kids from their neighbor Abed Mujahed’s shoe shop in the Old City. Ziad and Avraham worked together for years at a Jerusalem printing press. Rachel brought Ziad’s wife, Randa, ointments for their son’s dry skin from the small medical clinic where she worked. Randa learned how to make ice cream and cakes with the Machsomis. And the Machsomis took their shot at learning to make spiced chicken and rice. When Randa’s father in Hebron wanted to reach his daughter, who didn’t have a telephone, he would call the Machsomi home and ask for Randa.
“[Rachel] would shout across the street that my dad was on the phone and I’d run over to talk to him,” Randa said.
At times, the Machsomis’ living room became an informal neighborhood music hall. Rachel and Haim would host big holiday parties and birthday celebrations. There always seemed to be music and singing coming from their home. Their cousins would come and play the sweet sounding oud, the Middle Eastern string instrument with the bent handle. The songs reminded Rachel and Haim of Iran. They reminded Rachel of her sister, Malka. Rachel always wondered what happened to her. In the late 1970s, two Iranian men came to Rachel with a message.
“We know where your sister, Malka, is,” they told her. “We can make contact if you want.”
It seemed too good to be true. She sent word: “If you can make contact, we want to know how she is.” Rachel waited for word about her sister. But it never came. The chance to reconnect was cut short when the Shah of Iran was toppled in 1979.
“We’re Moving”
Life in Abu Tor in the early 1980s for the Machsomi kids was idyllic. There were plenty of places to get lost for the afternoon and lots of friends to play with. They could go anywhere and knew everyone.
“There was no difference between Jews and Arabs,” said Rivka, Rachel’s seventh child, a daughter who was born, perhaps not uncoincidentally, nine months after the Israeli military victory in 1967 that brought down the fence outside their house.
“We didn’t have the need for luxury like people today, but we lived really well, and we didn’t lack anything,” Rivka said one night at her home in 2014.
The kids would go get their hair cut in the Arab shops. Ziad’s mom sold them newspaper cones filled with warmed nuts they would eat while walking home.
“The place was magical,” said Liora Machsomi, who was born four years after the Six-Day War. Liora only knew about the Abu Tor dividing line from her older siblings. To her, the Arab girls across the road were just her friends on the other side of the street. Then, one day in 1983, when Rivka was 15 and Liora 11, the girls came home to find boxes in the house.
“We’re moving,” Rachel told them.
Rivka was shocked. It’s a moment that still causes her to go a bit white when she thinks about it.
“They uprooted me from there,” she said, using a blunt Hebrew word to describe leaving Assael Street.
Rivka was just starting high school when her parents decided to leave Abu Tor. She was shattered. They were moving. Not only that, they were moving out of Jerusalem to a desolate, uninviting hillside where a few thousand Israelis were setting up a new community with panoramic views of the Jordan Valley. They were calling it Ma’ale Adumim—the Red Ascent. It would become one of the country’s most controversial West Bank settlements.
Israel’s settlement movement had been gathering momentum since the 1967 war. Religious Jews in Israel argued that they had a G-d-given right to the newly seized West Bank. It was part of the Promised Land. They referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” embracing the biblical names for the area. Construction of what was to become the West Bank’s first major settlement began three months after the Six-Day War. The following year, a small group of ultrareligious activists drove to the West Bank, rented rooms at a Hebron hotel to celebrate Passover, and refused to check out. The Israeli military responded to the
protest by moving the group to a nearby military compound that eventually expanded to become Kiryat Arba, another of the most contentious West Bank settlements.
Despite international condemnation it received for building new towns on occupied land, Israel stepped up the effort. In December 1975, without official Israeli government approval, a small group of settlers drove up a hillside between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, set up a couple of simple huts, and declared it home.
The Israelis were part of Gush Emunim, the “Block of the Faithful,” a new, aggressive settlement group that challenged the government by repeatedly trying to seize land in the West Bank for Jewish families.
They were forced off the West Bank hillside several times but kept returning to rebuild until the Israeli government relented. In 1977, Israel’s new prime minister, Menachem Begin, anointed Ma’ale Adumim as one of Israel’s official settlements. By 1983, 3,500 Israelis were living in Ma’ale Adumim. Another 20,000 were living in dozens of other settlements built on confiscated and disputed West Bank land.25
Like Israeli general Uzi Narkiss in the 1950s, Israeli politicians in the 1980s knew that what mattered most was not the border itself “but the number of Israeli civilians living permanently on the line,”26 so they kept moving families into Ma’ale Adumim. Toothless denunciations from friends and foes around the world didn’t matter much as long as the building continued.
In 1983, the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing released a special promotional video to entice families interested in Ma’ale Adumim. Architect Thomas Leitersdorf stood on the rocky, treeless hillside overlooking the Judean Desert and sketched out his vision for transforming the barren land into a “garden city.”27 The Machsomis were sold. They had gotten an offer they didn’t think they could refuse.
A developer offered to buy their home on Assael Street and build them a better one in Ma’ale Adumim. At the time, Israel was offering various incentives for people to move to settlements: tax breaks and benefits that made it much more affordable to build and live in places like Ma’ale Adumim. The Machsomis decided to move to the red hilltop four miles outside Jerusalem.
The Yaghmours cried as they said good-bye to the Machsomis. No two families on opposite sides of Assael Street had been closer.
“She was the best one for us as neighbors,” Randa said of Rachel, Imm Ibrahim.
The Machsomi girls and boys hugged their friends and set out to start a new life a few miles away as part of the burgeoning settlement movement.
For the Machsomis, the move was more practical that political, more economic than ideological. They could get more for their money in this new Jerusalem suburb. Moving to the hilltop right outside Jerusalem, with rows of uniform red-tiled homes, didn’t feel like being a settler.
As a teenager, Rivka was more concerned about making new friends than figuring out the geopolitical implications of her new home. Although she was born and raised on the old borderline in Jerusalem, Rivka hadn’t spent much time learning about the changing geographic realities of the region.
“When I first came here, I didn’t understand [what] the idea of a Green Line was,” she said over coffee one night in 2014 at the family home in Ma’ale Adumim. “I didn’t even know what the Territories were. I didn’t know there were Territories.”
To Rivka, Ma’ale Adumim was a boring Israeli frontier town, far from her friends in Abu Tor. The family spent six months in a temporary home in the settlement while construction crews finished building their new modest, one-story, four-bedroom home.
Rachel and Haim got to know their new neighbors and embraced their religion more strongly. Rachel wrapped her head in a scarf to cover her hair and started spending more time at the synagogue.
“I like it better here,” Rachel said of living in Ma’ale Adumim. “I loved it when I lived there, but when I came here I like it more.”
Rachel decorated the home with tall vases of plastic flowers and photographs of revered Sephardic rabbis, including Baba Sali of Morocco, a leading figure in Kabbalism, a mystical branch of Judaism that won Hollywood notoriety when pop star Madonna started studying it. Between her big goldfish tank and a living room couch, Rachel placed a large framed photograph of the son she’d lost to leukemia when he was barely 40. Right above her living room couch, Rachel hung an elongated photograph poster of the Western Wall with G-d’s commandment written below: “Return to me, and I will return to you.”
A New War for Abu Tor
The Yaghmours tried to keep in touch with the Machsomis. The first Passover the Machsomis spent in Ma’ale Adumim, the Yaghmours drove out to the settlement with big trays of breads, fruits, cheeses, olives and sweets for their old neighbors. Randa Yaghmour drank coffee with Rachel at her Ma’ale Adumim home. But it wasn’t the same—for any of them. Though Ma’ale Adumim was a 25-minute drive from Abu Tor, the divide between the two was already growing.
“The kids became soldiers,” Randa said of the Machsomi children.
By Israeli law, one after the other, the Machsomi kids signed up to join the army. Pini, the son Rachel had left behind in the house during the Six-Day War, started his military service soon after the family moved to Ma’ale Adumim. He eventually joined Israeli military intelligence—Unit 8200, a secretive group known for picking up everything from embarrassing phone calls from Jordanian queens to orders from Arab leaders to attack Israel. To do his job well, Pini learned Arabic. Avi never seemed to miss an opportunity to tease his younger brother about it.
“Your Arabic is better than your Hebrew,” Avi told Pini more than once in their lives. Avi was the classic oldest brother who had embraced his role as the man of the family when Haim passed away at the young age of 59. Avi’s sisters and brothers turned to him for perspective, direction and laughs. Avi was the only one of the Machsomi kids to stay in touch with people on Assael Street after the family moved to Ma’ale Adumim. Perhaps because he was oldest, he had the deepest connections to Abu Tor. Even after he married in 1977 and moved to Gilo, a West Bank settlement on the southern edge of Jerusalem, Avi came back to Abu Tor every Friday to play soccer at the field behind the hilltop community center.
When the Palestinian uprising gathered strength in the late 1980s, Avi stopped going down into the Arab streets in Abu Tor where he’d once played pool, gotten his hair cut and bought milk for the house.
“You couldn’t get anywhere close to there,” he said. “They started throwing stones. Then it was war.”
Like the Machsomis, the Jacobys cut a deal with an aspiring developer and some of the family moved to a different part of Jerusalem. The Joudans stayed on in their home. And it wouldn’t be long before they found themselves in the middle of a new fight for Jerusalem.
Young Palestinians in Abu Tor used the narrow stairways running between the houses during their cat-and-mouse confrontations with young Israeli soldiers, who chased them through the neighborhood. The Joudans were right on the front lines once again. Everyone knew where the Jewish part of Abu Tor really began: right outside the Joudans’ door, where the barbed wire once ran. Their home was repeatedly hit by stones during the first Palestinian uprising.
“Every day we were attacked,” said Yaacov, the neighbor known as Yanki who used walks with his Chihuahua, Timmy the Sixth, to keep an eye on things. “They were coming up and down and it was scary. They would break the windows and run. They’d kick the door. Every night.”
Though the Palestinian stone throwing didn’t touch Ma’ale Adumim, it hardened the views of the settlers living there. Palestinians from nearby villages and towns were stoning Israeli settlers and soldiers as they drove along West Bank roads. If Rachel had ever really thought there could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the intifada solidified her belief that it was impossible.
“I don’t have faith in them,” Rachel said in 2007. “They were throwing stones for no reason. They were killing p
eople for no reason. They were killing innocent people—for no reason.”
The disillusionment grew in the years that followed the first intifada. Sporadic bursts of peace talks and diplomatic progress always seemed to be the small respites between the fighting.
The lynching of two Israeli army reservists at the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000—the brutal mob attack whose ferocity was captured in images of one Palestinian attacker showing his bloody palms to a cheering crowd—came to encapsulate many Israelis’ perception of relations with the Palestinians.
“When you get close to an Arab village, you don’t want to go in because you don’t know if you’re going to come out,” Rivka said in 2014. “It’s just a few people, not one, two, three, but it’s a few that are causing all this trouble. I know people who are Arabs and they’re really good and you see that they want peace, too. Nobody wants this, but those people are ruining it for people on both sides. It’s a pity.”
By the start of the second intifada, Ma’ale Adumim’s continued expansion made it seem inevitable that it would never be handed over to Palestinians in any peace deal. Israel declared Ma’ale Adumim its first official city in the West Bank after its population hit 15,000 in 1991. A decade later, its size had nearly doubled.
There always seemed to be new construction in the settlement. Red-tiled single-family homes rose in clumps alongside multistory apartment buildings. Israel built a highway link with a special tunnel to connect Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem. Ma’ale Adumim created everything its residents could want: malls, cafés, health clubs, pools, libraries, even its own art museum.
Developers transformed the “Founder’s Circle,” where the original families set up camp in 1975, into a major industrial zone that eventually housed hundreds of businesses, including SodaStream, the Israeli company that would create an international celebrity controversy by hiring American actress Scarlett Johansson as its public face.
A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 15
