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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  The alternative was permanent residency—and a blue ID card—a status that prevented them from voting in Israel’s national elections. Jerusalemites with the blue IDs could vote in city elections, though few Arab residents ever do. There was another problem that made it hard for permanent residents of East Jerusalem: They couldn’t automatically pass along the benefits of residency if they married Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

  Jerusalem was united geographically, but still divided politically, economically, culturally and socially. The political stratification meant that people on Assael Street had different rights. Some Arab families, like Abu Fadi and his kids, were full Israeli citizens. Others, like Khaled, his wife and their kids, were permanent residents.

  Though there was a stark imbalance in the services provided to those living in East and West Jerusalem, the city’s permanent residents came to appreciate the benefits the blue ID provided them, things they weren’t eager to give up.

  Soon after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed in the summer of 2014, Jamal Rishek and his friends went into the heart of West Jerusalem to meet up with a Canadian friend who had come to town for a visit. The guys tried their best not to “look Arab,” but their Arabic singing at a bus stop caught the attention of plainclothes security who asked to see their IDs, grilled them about what they were doing on that side of town and told them they should go back to East Jerusalem.

  To Jamal, it was another reminder that he wasn’t welcome, that Israel really wasn’t his country. Although he was better off than Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jamal knew their fates were all intertwined.

  “I hate the government a lot,” Jamal said. “You can see what happened in Gaza.”

  Jamal, a part-time waiter at the Y’s restaurant, felt the pull of the street clashes he could hear rolling through the streets below Assael.

  “One day I will go,” he said one night in the family living room in the fall of 2014. “I have to go.”

  It sounded unconvincing, more like an idle boast than a vow. Jamal was a shy teen who liked to look at the world from behind a camera lens. He was thinking about being a journalist, but the idea didn’t seem certain to stick.

  Khaled shot Jamal a glare from across the room. His son returned the look with silence.

  “If I had a West Bank ID I would go throw rocks,” Jamal eventually said. “But because I have an Israeli ID, I can’t. They will catch me.”

  For Jamal, the benefits of being an Arab-Israeli outweighed the potential costs of joining the stone throwers. By that fall, Netanyahu and his cabinet had backed tougher penalties for stone throwers, who faced the possibility of spending 20 years in prison. Israel also started making moves to strip troublemakers of their blue IDs. Prison and exile weren’t things Jamal was willing to face.

  “I have to go to university,” he said. “I have my life.”

  It was exactly the kind of view many Israelis hoped would prevent Jerusalem from being consumed by another intifada. For Israel, the more kids who saw that they had something to lose by taking to the streets, the better.

  “Jerusalem Is a Cage”

  Khaled was well known on Assael for his work. He tried to bridge the divide whenever he could. Khaled served as a vital link for David Maeir-Epstein’s coexistence work. Khaled took part in the community meetings and backed the group’s effort to provide common ground for people living in Abu Tor.

  The group succeeded in getting new garbage bins—with lids—for the street. They backed a plan to install two benches and a chain-link fence on the edge of a neglected open lot at the beginning of Assael Street.

  To some people in the neighborhood, including Khaled’s younger brother, the benches are a joke. And the meetings were meaningless. Amjad Rishek refused to take part.

  “David can do nothing,” Amjad said. “There is something bigger than David.”

  Amjad, a beefy man with bookish, wire-rimmed glasses and a shaved, shiny head, was a relative newcomer to Assael. In 1993, he and his wife moved into the newly built, two-bedroom second-story home, right on top of Khaled’s place. The couple had four girls, bestowing Amjad with the honorific title Abu Banat—Father of the Daughters.

  Like many men in the neighborhood, Amjad married a young woman from Hebron and brought her to Jerusalem. Three years earlier, Khaled had married Rita, his stylish wife from a successful West Bank family. Khaled had been able to secure a Jerusalem ID for Rita under Israel’s “family reunification” program. But when Amjad went through the same process for his wife, Wafa, he found that the rules had changed. The process was frozen, leaving Wafa in limbo.

  Every year, Amjad had to return to Israel’s Interior Ministry to secure permission for his wife to stay with him in Jerusalem. The different IDs sometimes made it difficult for the family to travel together outside the city. Some checkpoints are only for those with West Bank IDs. Others bar West Bank residents. That meant the couple had to return to Jerusalem through different checkpoints. That sometimes made short trips outside the city more trouble than they were worth.

  “Here in Jerusalem, you live in a cage,” said Wafa, one of the many wives on Assael to wear a hijab and conservative Palestinian dress. “In Hebron, you’re able to live.”

  As a young man, Amjad was an ambitious contractor who snatched work away from big Israeli firms. He worked as a subcontractor building apartments, offices and stores in high-rises. But contracting feuds consumed Amjad, so he moved on to work for an Israeli nonprofit that helps hundreds of elderly Jerusalemites each day with food, medical care and workshops to make a little money in their golden years.

  The Rishek family pooled its money to buy the rectangular stone home in 1990 from the Yaghmours—with the clear understanding that they would be able to get a license to build another story. They even had a paper from the city telling them they would be able to build, Amjad said. But when the time came to apply for permits, they got a different story.

  “They started giving us excuses by saying the percentage of the building versus the size of the land blah blah blah, which did not make sense to me at all,” Amjad said.

  The city came up with reason after reason to say no to the Risheks. Then, one morning, Amjad began to see construction crews coming down the street, passing his house and going to work on the western side of Assael. Developers were transforming the old Machsomi property into a new, modern apartment building. As it rose, Amjad couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Amjad took photos of the construction site. He took pictures of his own property. And he brought them all to the city for comparison.

  “Why are you giving them a permit, but not us?” he asked.

  They came up with more reasons why it was OK for those property owners to build a big apartment building on one side of the street while denying modest building permits to those living on the other.

  “We were surprised to see that a Jewish neighbor managed to build a high-rise,” Amjad said dryly. “Bottom line: They do not want to grant any licenses to us.”

  So the Risheks decided to do what most Palestinian families on Assael had done: Build without permits. City inspectors came out to check the work, but they couldn’t stop it. Amjad and his family moved in, knowing that the wrecking ball was going to shadow their lives until they got an OK from Israel for their house.

  The families on Assael grumbled about the building inequities, but they only got worse.

  “I’m not concerned on a personal level,” Amjad said. “I am only concerned so that I can get a license.”

  Living With a Looming Wrecking Ball

  The disparities drove Amjad toward a meticulous obsession with life on Assael. He tracked down rare satellite maps of the street taken right after the 1967 war. He collected city maps and legal documents that he stuffed in white plastic bags that became his makeshift filing cabinets. He filled his shel
ves and drawers with demolition orders for their home, paperwork from attorneys, and fines from the city.

  The Risheks got their first home demolition order in 1993, soon after they built the second-story addition. The threats to demolish their house come every year, sparking an annual battle to prevent wrecking crews from turning up on their front door. They hire attorneys and seek court intervention to block the demolition orders. Every year they pay thousands of dollars in fines.

  Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, Amjad rummaged through bags and bags of paperwork while his wife looked on with a mix of admiration and disbelief. One of his teenaged daughters came home from school and changed into a zip-up sweatshirt, black tights and a T-shirt with a simple statement on the front, in Arabic: “We are all Gazans.” She slumped on the living room couch while her dad dug through his paperwork, searching for one thing or another. When it became clear that her dad was going to keep talking about boring stuff, she retreated to the small room she shared with her sisters.

  Amjad’s wife laughed at the stacks of maps, architectural drawings, reports, letters and legal papers and wondered what good would come of it all.

  “All you have gotten for us is no space to live in a house threatened with demolition,” Wafa told her husband.

  It was a joke. But the problems constantly weighed on Amjad.

  “We are living in the context of a racist Israeli policy against the residents of East Jerusalem in every sense of the word,” Amjad said as he held up the latest demolition order imposed on his home.

  The Risheks know that the orders aren’t hollow. The Bazlamits had to destroy part of their compound after losing a battle with the city. To prevent the city from sending bulldozers into his yard, Moussa Salhab personally dismantled a veranda the city said he’d illegally built. The families lived under a constant psychological siege while defending their homes. They were never sure where the next attempt might be made to drive them off. Amjad didn’t know where the next threat might come from. In 2009, he found out.

  That year, Amjad got an official letter from the Israeli Interior Ministry. Israel had concluded that Amjad was living outside the country—a precursor to stripping an East Jerusalemite of their residency permit. Amjad gathered up his water bills, his electricity bills and his tax bills and brought them all down to the ministry to prove that he was living in Jerusalem.

  “Is Assael Street in Israel or Romania?” he sarcastically asked the city worker.

  The official didn’t like Amjad’s tone and had him thrown out. Amjad had to beg for another meeting to clear things up. Amjad saw it as part of a calculated effort by Israel to force Palestinians out of Jerusalem.

  “They send letters hoping people will panic,” Amjad said. “It’s one way of decreasing the Palestinian population. They exploit our ignorance of the law and our fear of confronting them.”

  The following year, Amjad went to the city to get a copy of their land registry document—the coveted Tabu. He paid for the copy, but when the clerk returned to the desk he told Amjad he couldn’t find anything with his name on it.

  “Check again,” Amjad said. “Look, here’s my ID.”

  “No,” the clerk told him. “Your name’s not here.”

  “Forget my name,” Amjad told the clerk. “Check the previous owner: Ziad Yaghmour.”

  The clerk checked the records again.

  “There is no Yaghmour,” he said.

  “Who owns the land then?” Amjad asked.

  “This land,” the clerk told him, “is owned by the Moriah Company of Jerusalem.”

  The clerk gave Amjad paperwork showing that their property was owned by Moriah, the city’s development arm.

  “This is my land,” he told the clerk before leaving, “not Moriah’s.”

  Amjad was in a panic. He called his wife at home to confirm he had the right number for his land. He went back to the clerk, who told Amjad that if he had a problem he should make an appointment with the head of the land registry office.

  “I want to see her now,” Amjad said. “You can call the police and kick me out, but I’m not leaving until I find out what’s going on.”

  After some arguing, Amjad talked his way into a meeting. The director dispatched someone to research the history of the land and bring it back to her.

  “Sorry,” she told him after reading the paperwork, “your name was never put on it. There’s no such thing as an Amjad Rishek.”

  “I called my brother,” Amjad said. “I told him: ‘We’re in big, big trouble.’”

  Khaled was in his manager’s office at the Y when Amjad called.

  “I have the original land documents,” Khaled told him, “but I don’t know where they are.”

  Amjad drove back home, found the Tabu, returned to the office and marched back to the manager where they tried and failed to keep him from going in to see her. Amjad laid the documents down on her desk.

  “One says I don’t belong and one says I do,” he told her. “Which is the correct one?”

  The director looked over the paperwork, checked her computer and turned back to Amjad.

  “Have you ever used this paper for anything?” she asked, referring to the city documents claiming the land as city property.

  “No,” Amjad told her.

  “There has been a mistake,” she said before tearing up the paperwork showing Moriah as the owner of his land. “Don’t pay anything,” she told him. “We will give you all the documents that you want.”

  The endless uncertainty hangs over Amjad and his family. And it reinforces his feeling that coexistence programs in Abu Tor that promote yoga and street fairs are pointless.

  “Why would I go to David’s meeting?” Amjad asked. “Look at my life. David doesn’t know anything. These are systemic policies from the highest levels of government. It is bigger than me and bigger than David. It’s not that I rejected David’s invitation for personal reasons. I rejected it because it doesn’t make sense.”

  The “Monstrosity” on Assael Street

  Nothing stands as a larger testament to the inequities on Assael Street than the massive apartment building that Jewish and Arab neighbors both call a “monstrosity.” It is distinctly out of place on the eastern side of the street. None of the neighbors can figure out how the Jewish-Israeli developers got permission to build it.

  The apartment building was built on land once owned by a distant relative of the Salhabs. From what Amjad knew, the Salhabs had sold the land to Canadians who then sold it to Israeli developers. It was the kind of land sale that could get an Arab property owner killed. The new owners came as a shock to longtime residents on Assael Street. For the first time, the Risheks and Bazlamits had Jewish homeowners on their part of the street. It didn’t go unnoticed that the property sat next to the home of the collaborator, Abu Fadi.

  When the developers started work at the site, Amjad and everyone else on the street could see that something wasn’t right. The footprint was huge. It ran from the edge of Assael Street down to the edge of Ein Rogel one block below. There was no open space left. It seemed to be taking up more land than builders were allowed. Amjad took photos of the construction site and brought them to the city.

  “How are they able to build this, but I can’t get a permit for my home?” he asked.

  The planning office cited various rules and regulations about green space percentages and construction square footage that didn’t seem to make much sense. But there was nothing Amjad could do. From the street above Assael, Judith and Jeffrey Green were aghast to see the building going up.

  “It was such an eyesore,” she said. “It was just so obviously out of place.”

  By law, a building in this part of East Jerusalem was typically not supposed to be more than two stories high. This building looked like it was going to be three, four, ma
ybe five or more. Judith sent a letter to the planning commission that was slightly tongue-in-cheek: “If you’re looking for illegal construction in East Jerusalem to demolish,” she wrote, “I know just the place.” When it became clear that the building was going to tower over its neighbors and block the Old City views of many homes, the Greens and other Jewish residents asked the city to shut the construction site down.

  “It was so obvious that what they were doing there was illegal,” Judith said. “We took them to the planning committee and they gave them a command to stop building. They had 200 building violations.”

  The developers were furious.

  “They were so mad that they threatened to kill our dog,” Judith said.

  Construction came to a halt for a few years and the unfinished building sat like countless others across Jerusalem. One day, the workers returned. They had new orders, new money, new permits. How the property owners got them, no one seemed to know. Everyone suspected that they had used some political connections with the city.

  “It’s definitely a scandal,” Judith said.

  The building was like no other in the neighborhood. The red-tile roof was reminiscent of the ones in Israeli settlements spread across the West Bank. From the street below, the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of the penthouse looked like they could be the bridge for a Star Trek starship. On either side, the building was surrounded by Arab neighbors—the Bazlamits, the Risheks, the Salhabs, the Mujaheds—all of whom were entangled in costly legal battles over their homes. The message to them seemed clear: If you were Arab, you couldn’t do anything. If you were Jewish, the sky seemed to be the limit. Perhaps worst of all for the Bazlamits, the new building entirely blocked their view of the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque—a view they had cherished for generations.

  “It always seems like they want to kick us out,” said Nawal Bazlamit.

  Rumors began to spread that the developers planned to rent the place to nationalistic Israeli settlers who would likely raise a massive Israeli flag from the roof and use the property as a wedge to splinter the neighborhood.