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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  When asked about his building for this book, property developer Yakov Almakayes tried to deflect questions. At first, he claimed that his building was on the western side of the street and wasn’t subject to East Jerusalem building restrictions. Then, though he lived in the building for years, he said he couldn’t remember exactly where it was. Then he got defensive. He dismissed the neighborhood whisper campaign as hollow talk and salacious rumors.

  “Maybe they have different laws and we have different laws,” he said of his Arab neighbors on the eastern side of Assael Street.

  Yakov dismissed his neighborhood critics as crazy and embittered.

  “People that don’t have any future are jealous about people that have a future and success,” he said. “That’s it.”

  Yakov laughed at any suggestion that he’d threatened to kill the Greens’ dog.

  “They can say what they want to say, I don’t care,” he said. “How can it be true? I have two dogs and a cat in my house. If you can have someone who has two dogs and a cat that wants to kill dogs, I don’t know.”

  Yakov told neighbors in Abu Tor that he hoped to sell the apartments to rich Jews from overseas who wanted, and could afford, a place in Jerusalem with romantic views of the Old City. But the arrival of the second intifada put a damper on every Jerusalem property owner’s aspirations. Hopes of making millions by selling the luxurious, modern apartment building with wraparound windows dried up. Instead, Yakov and his family started renting out the expensive apartments on Assael to Western journalists, US workers and a series of other foreigners.

  The building looms over the Arab families as an example of the inequities they face in Jerusalem. It literally casts a shadow on the illegally built homes around it. For Amjad, the building stands as a constant reminder that David’s small street improvement projects mean nothing if his home is demolished.

  “I still greet my Israeli neighbors and I feel they have the same interest in peace as us,” Amjad said. “I encourage my daughters to go play with David’s daughter. But his meeting was meaningless to me.”

  David understood the criticism. He knew dumpsters and potlucks weren’t going to be a catalyst for Middle East peace any time soon. But, on a street with physical, psychological, political, cultural and linguistic walls, you had to start somewhere.

  “It’s true that talking about coexistence fairs and graffiti things and changing garbage pails pale in comparison to the fact that somebody can’t get a building permit to build something that they can get on the other side of the street, and that when they go ahead and build it anyway ‘the law’ is enforced because they have violated the law,” David said. “It’s a catch-22 kind of a thing. Down the line, if we work well, we should get to some of those things that are more meaningful. But both sides have to build up a track record of doing some things before we reach those kinds of more difficult things.”

  David said he isn’t afraid to tackle political issues like building permits—when the time is right. The question then becomes: Will the city be as helpful on building permits as it was on dumpsters?

  “I’ve been meeting so far with a great deal of willingness to cooperate on the part of the establishment. In other words: Are they smart enough to say we should be giving Abu Tor at least what we are giving other neighborhoods, if not more? Whether that will continue when we start talking about the sensitive issue of building permits, which is part of an ideological, nationalistic and, some would say, Machiavellian policy to prevent and try to reduce the Arab presence in Jerusalem, and whether or not the city will be equally open to the influence of the grassroots, Arab and Jewish, is a big question,” he said in 2014. “Just as the city official said we can’t have a coexistence festival tomorrow, we also can’t deal with this issue. We have to find the right timing and process.”

  While David waited for the “right time” to bring up the most difficult issues on the street, Amjad kept being drained, spiritually, financially and psychologically.

  “They have exploited me, they have drained me of all my resources, just because they know I’m holding onto my rights and they know I have no alternative,” he said.

  If the Palestinian Authority really wanted to foment change in Jerusalem, Amjad said, it should stop giving people a little bread here and a little cash there.

  “Tell them the following: ‘Build without licenses,’” Amjad said. “And do not respond to house demolition orders. Let Israel come and demolish in the hundreds. How many houses can it demolish? It will be the scandal of scandals.”

  When trouble boils up in East Jerusalem, Amjad understands the pent-up frustration. But the encroaching clashes worried Wafa, whose four girls all attended school down in the valley.

  “The other day, my children were on their way to school,” she said in the fall of 2014. “They didn’t know there were problems down below. On the way to school they ran into Israeli soldiers who chased them, shot tear gas at them and fired sound bombs. They came home panic-stricken. We’ve been living a peaceful life. Up until now they’ve only seen problems and clashes on television. They haven’t seen it in real life. Now they are being confronted with it in real life.”

  The spike in violence presented a test for East Jerusalemites like Amjad and Khaled, whose lives had become rooted in Israel. One day at the nonprofit, a co-worker asked Amjad what he thought of Mu’atez Hijazi, the convict from Abu Tor who had been killed by police days earlier.

  “When the issue of Mu’atez Hijazi came up, one person at work asked me: ‘Is Mu’atez a martyr?’”

  It’s the kind of charged question Israelis often ask their Palestinian friends, co-workers and neighbors as a litmus test after terrorist attacks. It’s a way to see where they stand. And it’s a question people like Amjad have learned to deflect when needed.

  “I’m not God to decide,” Amjad told his co-worker.

  As tensions rose in Jerusalem that fall, Amjad’s boss asked about the clashes in his neighborhood.

  “You’re living in Abu Tor?” she asked. “How are things?”

  “These things are not born overnight,” Amjad told his boss. “Whether the escalation is from the Israeli side or the Palestinian side, it has a reason, it has a feeling that has been building on both sides.”

  At the end of the day, Amjad told her, the root of the problem was Israel’s control over the fate of the Palestinian people.

  “Do you feel that you are living under occupation?” she asked Amjad.

  “Yes, I do,” he told her. “And this is what I tell my daughters.”

  Amjad’s boss was startled by his candor.

  “I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear,” he told her. “I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  No matter which country controls Assael Street, Amjad said, he isn’t moving.

  “We are Jerusalemites and Muslims,” he said. “My family is from Jerusalem. My father was born in Jerusalem. My grandfather was born in Jerusalem. Our family house is in the Muslim Quarter. They say that this is the land of steadfastness and protection of the holy sites. I consider my project one of steadfastness. I could easily buy somewhere else, but I am staying.”

  Eight

  The Architects of Division

  Presidents, generals, dictators and kings have all taken their shot at solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now the architects want their chance. They have a vision: Divide Jerusalem, once again—right down the center of Assael Street.

  For better and for worse, Assael Street is still Jerusalem’s dividing line. Like the grease pencils that created the thick, poorly defined lines through Abu Tor in 1948, the borders here are blurry. Things bleed over. But, if there is to be an Israeli state living alongside a Palestinian one, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

  For Karen Lee Bar-Sinai and Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat, that somewhere may be down
the middle of Assael Street, where the barbed wire once split the neighborhood. It’s not a fanciful idea. There are plenty of good reasons for Assael to become the eastern edge of Israel and the western edge of Palestine. And these architects have influential backing for their evolving designs. The pair developed the meticulously mapped plan for the Geneva Initiative, an independent coalition of well-known Israeli and Palestinian politicians who have spent more than a decade fine-tuning their peace plan. The group was created by Yasser Abed Rabbo, a veteran Palestinian peace negotiator, and Yossi Beilin, one of Israel’s most dedicated diplomats.

  In the late 1990s, Beilin served as a minister for Prime Ministers Yitzak Rabin and Ehud Barak. He was part of Barak’s 2001 negotiating team during peace talks in Taba, Egypt, where the Israeli leaders had opened the doors to dividing Jerusalem and accepting East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. Though those talks fell apart and Barak was soon defeated, Beilin embarked on two years of secret talks with a small group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators who set out to come up with their own plan. In 2003, the group unveiled the Geneva Accords, a 50-page framework that called for making East Jerusalem the capital of a new Palestinian state, officially absorbing Ma’ale Adumim and most other major West Bank settlements into Israel, and sending international forces into the West Bank to keep a check on security.

  They then spent another six years doing the detailed work that Dayan and Tell had been expecting someone to do soon after they divided Jerusalem in 1948. The group wrestled with every curve in the road. They examined the demographics of mixed neighborhoods like Abu Tor as they hunted for border lines to separate Israel and Palestine. They knew there would be no perfect compromise.

  “How can you really divide a street?” said Beilin, a soft-spoken politician with wire-rimmed glasses that sealed his image as a bookish intellectual. It was a conundrum they had to face. There were plenty of places where borders seamlessly blended from one place into the next. But Jerusalem wasn’t likely to be one of them. The group eventually released an exhaustive 400-page plan that detailed what the dividing line between Israel and Palestine in Jerusalem would look like (wall, fence and border crossings), how Palestinians could get between the West Bank and Jerusalem (a four-lane sunken highway), and where the border would run. The plan to divvy up Jerusalem was largely the work of Karen Lee and Yehuda, idealistic young architecture students who thought the world’s architects didn’t have enough of a voice in deciding where and how to draw borders in the Middle East.

  “Architecture is a problem-solving profession,” said Yehuda, a quiet thinker with shaggy brown hair and glasses that make him look a bit like an adult version of Waldo from the popular children’s books Where’s Waldo? “It’s not philosophers.”

  The two teamed up while studying at the Technion, Israel’s premier technology institute on the country’s northern coast in Haifa. They shared a common belief that their work could change the way people saw the stagnant peace process.

  “There’s nobody who is an expert on space in the negotiation rooms,” said Karen Lee, a fast talker with thick, curly black hair, who always seemed like the more optimistic of the pair. “It’s amazing. Not even a single one. We think this, inherently, should change. We design in order to show and expand the possibilities in somebody’s mind.”

  The Geneva Initiative unveiled its plan while Karen Lee and Yehuda were studying at the Technion. The two were inspired by the ideas and disturbed by the impact of Israel’s separation barrier as the country continued to carve an unrecognized new border through the Middle East. To the pair, it was a major political and moral question that needed to be confronted.

  “It was one of the biggest spatial facts in the Middle East—and nobody was talking about it,” Yehuda said.

  Karen Lee and Yehuda planned to work on a project to protest the new dividing line. But when Beilin and the Geneva Initiative came out with their plan for splitting Jerusalem, the pair decided to present the Israeli diplomat with their ideas for dividing the city. Beilin was so impressed that he hired them to create the entire blueprint for Jerusalem. Yehuda and Karen Lee joined the team intent on finding a compassionate way to separate Israelis and Palestinians.

  This, Karen Lee said, is “a family that desperately needs a divorce.”

  Yehuda agreed. “There’s no ‘Kumbaya’ here,” he said.

  For starters, they threw out the pre-1948 plan, pushed by many countries, that would make Jerusalem an international island with special status short of being its own country (like Vatican City). The idea, known as corpus separatum, was a nonstarter for many reasons. One of the biggest was Israel’s 1980 Jerusalem Law, which declared the city the country’s “complete and united” capital.

  “There is no way on earth that Israelis will give up their sovereignty of their capital,” Yehuda said. “It’s not gonna happen.”

  Even if it was possible politically, the pair found the idea of creating a secure border around Jerusalem to be much more problematic than drawing one straight line through the city.

  “While this idea is a beautiful one—let’s share Jerusalem—de facto what it will mean in terms of securing that Jerusalem and separating it from Israel and Palestine, it would mean that you encircle the whole of Jerusalem with some kind of wall or fence or border of some sort—and you capture people in that entity,” Yehuda said.

  It didn’t make sense. Instead, the pair looked for obvious breaking points.

  “It makes a lot more sense to separate the city where it’s so naturally separated, even today, where the scars of earlier separations still are, and do that in a sensitive manner, in a manner that allows connections together, with separation,” said Yehuda.

  Karen Lee and Yehuda looked at the border as a living being, a creature with muscle that stretches.

  “We talked about division, but division in a sense of a living tissue that still needs to work together on many, many levels,” Yehuda said one afternoon in 2014 at a downtown Jerusalem café where he and Karen Lee detailed their ideas.

  “Normally cities are divided by war and united in peace,” Karen Lee said. “Here we are talking about the opposite need. We need to separate for peace.”

  The models for things like this—the partition of India among them—weren’t great success stories. The architects were well aware of the thick, broken lines drawn by Dayan and Tell in 1948 when they started trying to craft their own.

  “There’s a huge gap between policy making and the broad sketches on the map, like Moshe Dayan [made],” Karen Lee said. “There’s a huge gap between that and the reality on the ground. How do we come and say: ‘What does the city need? Can we create new connections that don’t exist today?’”

  For years, the team argued over the route they were creating. Their first idea was to divide the city along the eastern edge of the old No Man’s Land, a route that would have naturally cut along the ridgeline above the Valley of Slaughter. When the group unveiled the plan in 2009, the team proposed a route that would have put the top part of Abu Tor—and all of Assael—inside Israel. The natural drop-off below Abu Tor’s Ein Rogel Street, they argued, created a natural barrier that would reduce, if not eliminate, the need for concrete walls or barbed-wire fences.

  “The spine of Abu Tor is really there,” Karen Lee said.

  A New No Man’s Land for Abu Tor

  They also proposed creating a new buffer zone in Abu Tor by transforming part of the valley into a park that would be open to citizens of Israel and Palestine. The team dreamed up a shared space that belonged to everyone and no one, a kind of international community park connecting the two nations.

  “The idea here was to create a border garden that can be used as almost a No Man’s Land that everybody can use together,” said Chen Farkas, one of the Israeli architects who worked on the plan. “It’s not owned by either side, but it could be, depending on
different circumstances. It could be Israeli, Palestinian, divided half-and-half, or shared completely.”

  While the idea of resurrecting the neighborhood No Man’s Land—the setting for decades of disputes—might make some neighbors shudder, Yehuda said creating a new one might be cathartic.

  “It’s kind of a healing process, in a sense,” he said, “saying that there really are going to be shared areas.”

  Abu Tor, Yehuda said, “is the most intense part of the division, because it’s really in the urban fabric.”

  “The real division in Jerusalem is in Abu Tor, and it’s only about 500 meters,” he said. “It’s a unique challenge.”

  The team tried to “avoid the city line and its scars, both physical and mental, that it left on the population,” Yehuda said.

  Avoiding the city’s physical and mental scars proved to be impossible. There was simply no way to carve up Jerusalem without offending a lot of people. As criticism for the proposed split piled up, Karen Lee and Yehuda fine-tuned their plan. The group commissioned a detailed survey of Abu Tor that pinpointed which homes in Abu Tor were Arab-owned and which ones were Jewish-owned. When they looked at the results, they could see that their plan would place all of Abu Tor’s old No Man’s Land inside Israel. That would place all the Palestinian families on Assael Street, along with dozens of other Arab homes, inside Israel. Palestinian architects working on the maps weren’t willing to accept that kind of division.

  “While our stance was: ‘Let’s create what’s best for the border infrastructure, let’s use the best possible landscape,’ they said: ‘Look at how many Palestinians live on that side. Are you mad?’” Karen Lee said. “That was a discussion.”

  “Each house you annex to Israel is a huge loss for Palestinians, so they couldn’t accept any change of ownership,” Chen said.