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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  Everyone’s lives on Assael now seem inextricably connected to Israel. It’s hard for many residents here to imagine anything else. Like many idealists, Khaled Rishek doesn’t want to see Jerusalem divided again. He envisions a united, open, international city for Israelis and Palestinians.

  “My plan is to keep it as an open city, where everybody lives in dignity, as a capital for both countries and, at the end of the day, no one is able to choose his neighbor.”

  His brother Amjad disagrees. He’s one of the few people on Assael Street who says plainly that he wants his home to be part of a new Palestinian state.

  “If a Palestinian state is established and where I am living is still part of Israel, I will always feel like I am living under occupation,” he said. “If a Palestinian state is formed and where I am living becomes part of a Palestinian state, I will feel that I am independent.”

  Members of the Bazlamit family firmly support a Palestinian state. But they’re suspicious of the plan to divide Assael and see it as another malicious attempt by mapmakers to sow the neighborhood with dissent, distrust and division.

  “Splitting the street is a way for them to keep control of the city,” said Abdel Halim Bazlamit, whose son Jawad was killed in 1996 at al Aqsa mosque.

  Abdel Halim’s wife thinks Israelis pushing the idea aren’t altruistic supporters of Palestine. They’re doing it to push their own agenda.

  “They think about dividing for their own security,” said Dawlat, Abdullah Bazlamit’s wife, who thought a book about the street should be titled The Rapists because “everything is against our will.”

  “Whether they divide or not, whether they separate or not, we will never feel secure,” she said. “We always feel unsafe.”

  Jewish residents across the way are just as skeptical of putting another dividing line down the middle of the street. Some Israelis on the western side worry about living on the edge of a fragile new nation, a border that could be tested by radicals looking to challenge Palestinian security forces by launching attacks on Israel.

  The concerns were amplified in 2014 by the spread of instability across the Middle East, where the euphoria of the Arab Spring revolts had given way to a sobering new landscape dominated by civil wars and extremism. The most alarming development was the disintegration of Syria, where three years of civil war had created a chaotic battlefront filled with competing militant groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s military and each other.

  That summer in Syria’s Golan Heights, Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s front line force in the civil war, had taken control of the country’s western border crossing with Israel. The militants temporarily detained dozens of UN peacekeepers and raised their black flag in the Syrian border town of Quneitra as Israeli forces and the United Nations shuttered the tiny crossing point with Israel.

  The Golan Heights crossing has been used primarily to export apples from Druze farmers in Israel to Syria. It also served for decades as the backdrop for scores of emotional farewells of Druze brides crossing from Syria into Israel, or vice versa, to marry men on the other side—a union that was almost always a one-way trip for the bride. Those crossings came to a halt in the summer of 2014 when a border that had once been one of Israel’s more stable suddenly became one of its biggest concerns. Israel started bombing Syria more frequently to stop what it said was an increasing flow of advanced rockets bound for Hezbollah militants in neighboring Lebanon. And thousands of extremists, backed by a concerning flow of true believers from England, France and America, had seized enough land in Iraq and Syria to declare themselves the Islamic State.

  In a part of the world in constant conflict, 2014 seemed to Alisa Maeir-Epstein to be an especially perilous time in the Middle East.

  In concept, Alisa wants to see a Palestinian state. But she’s not sure if she wants to see it right across the street.

  “If it would work, that would be wonderful,” she said. “But will it work?”

  Alisa watched Iraq and Syria struggling to defeat zealous Islamic State fighters and wondered if Palestinian soldiers would really be up to the task.

  “Will the Islamic State come to the West Bank?” she asked. “It’s a hard one. That’s a hard one for me to think about. Look at all these countries. As soon as there’s turmoil the Islamic radicals take over—and they’re very uncompromising. It’s not like they’ll say: ‘OK, we’ll take over the West Bank and then we’ll have a peace treaty with Israel.’ That’s not what it’s about.”

  Alisa saw the Islamic State as the resurrection of a thousand-year-old religious war—a New Crusade—only this time Muslim soldiers are leading the charge, not Christian warriors.

  “We always used to think maybe Jerusalem will be an international city, maybe it will be the capital of two states,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with that, but I know that there are people who won’t agree and would go to war over that.”

  Elon Bezalely, the guy who’d bought Carol’s home and then urged his Palestinian neighbors to use his wall as their canvas, understands the rationale for making Assael the borderline again.

  “Jerusalem is split,” he said one night in his living room in the fall of 2014. “This side of the street is Jewish and that side of the street is Arab. It’s a clear line. The question is where do you put the wall? Do you put the wall over here? Can you put the wall over here?”

  His wife, Linda, worried less about where the line is drawn and more about making sure that a new state doesn’t become a launching pad for attacks aimed at Israel.

  Linda sees Gaza as a cautionary tale. Israel pulled all of its settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 as part of a unilateral move, ending 38 years of Israeli occupation and effectively ceding responsibility for the area to the Palestinian Authority. The move gave Gaza’s 1.5 million residents a level of freedom most had never known. But Israel and Egypt, which shares a short border with Gaza’s southern edge, kept tight control of who and what went in and out. Gaza militants accused Israel of creating an open-air prison and continued to use the Mediterranean strip to launch attacks. A year after Israel pulled out of Gaza, Palestinian militants used a tunnel they’d dug under the border to kidnap a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who remained a lonely captive until he was freed in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange.

  In 2007, longstanding divisions between Hamas and Fatah boiled over into a civil war between the rival political factions that ended with a humiliating defeat for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas seizing full control of Gaza. The Palestinians finally had their two-state solution. It just wasn’t the two-state solution they had been working for. While Israel and Hamas agreed to a series of truces that brought temporary halts to rocket fire from Gaza, Palestinian militants persisted in firing rockets into Israel.

  Between 2008 and 2014, Gaza militants engaged in three short, intense wars with Israel, fueling perceptions in Israel that the 2005 withdrawal had been a failure.

  “There are lines, but they’re bombing us,” Linda said. “So, it was easy to show where the lines would be, but look at what happened. Now they could say: ‘Let’s draw the lines here and here,’ but the point is what may happen afterwards. I want peace.”

  “But first you want security,” Elon said.

  “Well, it’s the same thing. Peace as in: ‘No one’s going to hurt anyone.’”

  “You’re never going to be able to get several million people to sign on a contract that says we’re not going to shoot back at you,” Elon said. “You separate into two countries. If they fire rockets at you, it gives you a right to fire rockets back and defend yourself.”

  Yaacov Davidian, the guy known as Yanki and one of the few people born on the western side of Assael who still lives there, doesn’t think dividing Assael will bring any measure of peace or quiet.

  “Even if there will be some agreement, it’s not
going to be like this,” he said. “Next door to you? What will they do? A 50-meter wall? It will not help.”

  Karen Lee and Yehuda aren’t dead-set on dividing Assael Street once again. But they both say the line has to be drawn somewhere. And Assael makes a lot of sense.

  “This is what’s on the table,” Yehuda said. “People are dreaming of a lot of nice dreams, but it’s not on the table. The real people who are talking, or not talking anymore, who used to be talking, this is the only valid scenario. Now the question is: ‘How do you create the least damage with this scenario?’ Symbolically and nationally, people want to be divided.”

  But division doesn’t have to come in the form of Berlin Wall–style concrete barriers.

  “The symbol of division today is the barrier,” Yehuda continued, “because people don’t think there is another choice, because it wasn’t planned, because architects weren’t involved, and planners, and maybe even artists. But if you understand that they want to be freed of occupation, the price within territory doesn’t have to be that harsh, it could be much more thoughtful.”

  History makes it clear that the fortunes of Jerusalem will almost certainly shift. The borders here are likely to keep changing. And who lives in which houses on Assael Street could determine where the lines are drawn. That is why the families here, on both sides of the street, hold firm to their often divergent beliefs. They know that their decisions matter. It matters if they stay or move. It matters if they fight or surrender. They all see their lives as part of the fabric that has made Jerusalem what it is today. And they all plan to leave their mark on the city’s future.

  “We did not write the Bible,” Beilin said of the plan to divide Assael Street. “One should take into account the wishes of the people at the end of the day. If they want something else, then the decision makers of the day will have to take some other decision. Our main idea was not to say that this is the only solution. Our goal was to show that a solution is possible.”

  Epilogue

  “The Siege of Abu Tor”

  In the spring of 2015, as this book was getting ready to head to the publisher, I got a phone call from Jerusalem. It was Sarah Sallon, an Israeli doctor who made a name for herself by germinating a 2,000-year-old date palm seed from the Judean Desert.

  I’d met Sarah in 2009, when she was looking for a place to buy in Abu Tor. Sarah came to check out the place I was renting and fell in love with the rooftop view. It took awhile, but she eventually convinced the owners to sell. The apartment offered an enviable view of Jerusalem that Sarah wanted to look out on every day. Sarah always hated Yakov Almakayes’s big monstrosity of a building on Assael Street. The towering eyesore was an ugly gash in her panoramic rooftop view. She looked at the place every day. She couldn’t avoid it. She knew there was a scandal there waiting to be uncovered. But now, she said, a new outrage was brewing: Developers had their greedy eyes on the Hill of Evil Counsel.

  To Sarah, this was an incomparable outrage, a disgrace that had to be exposed.

  “It’s the Siege of Abu Tor,” Sarah said. “Only now it’s a different kind of siege.”

  In this case, mysterious developers had secured a long-term lease for the most coveted, undeveloped spot in Abu Tor: the two-acre hilltop compound owned by the Greek Orthodox Church that was home to the Goelis; a small Sephardic synagogue with a dwindling attendance; the locked, rarely used monastery; and a few people who paid the church rent to live in a small block of boxy, one-story homes. After dark, cars and trucks would sometimes rumble into the compound and park under the pine trees, for some seclusion, to do one thing or another. People would throw beer cans into makeshift campfires while neighbors took their dogs out for late-night walks nearby.

  The Greek Orthodox Church was more than a major Christian fixture in Jerusalem. It was one of the city’s largest landowners. Second only, perhaps, to Israel itself. The Israeli prime minister’s house and the country’s parliament were built on church land. That put the Greek patriarch in Jerusalem at the center of feud after feud. In 2005, the church was accused of secretly selling prized East Jerusalem land to Israeli settlers as part of a campaign to drive Palestinians out of the city. The patriarch accused of orchestrating the deal was ousted, but he locked himself in the church’s Old City compound, not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and refused to leave.

  When Sarah called me that night in early 2015, the ousted patriarch was still hunkered down in a modest apartment inside the tranquil stone Christian Quarter compound, where he used a shopping bag and rope lowered from his room to get food and supplies from his supporters. Now, Sarah said, the church had ignited a new furor by selling part of the Abu Tor compound to greedy developers. The Hill of Evil Counsel might become Jerusalem’s next big apartment complex or, even worse, some new high-tech business hub. This would not stand.

  Some Abu Tor residents were quite happy to see development coming to Abu Tor, especially in the church property.

  “It’s neglected, it’s abandoned, good things at night do not happen there,” said one neighborhood resident who lives near the compound. “It’s not good to have open space with no one in charge. It’s kind of abandoned property. If a developer comes in and at least takes care of it, it’s at least good for the neighborhood.”

  But Sarah and a group of neighbors were preparing to fight. Abu Tor residents had lost their battle to block a big shopping and entertainment complex from being built on the edge of Abu Tor, right next to the Peace Forest. But they weren’t going to let that defeat deter them.

  “It’s a tragedy,” said Sarah, a London-born founder of the Natural Medicine Research Center at Israel’s Hadassah University Hospital. “It’s a scandal. This compound has enormous significance in early Christianity. This is absolutely unheard of.”

  If there was to be a coda to this story of Assael Street, David Maeir-Epstein didn’t think it should be about the so-called Siege of Abu Tor and the fight over developing the church property. That had little to do with the trajectory of relations on the dividing line. No, he said, the thing people should be left with was the story of the newly refurbished soccer field at the Abu Tor community center, which was one of the last places where Arab and Jewish kids could still find some common ground in the neighborhood. The field, spruced up at city expense, was poised to become the site of a new soccer program for middle school kids—Jewish and Arab—where they would be able to kick the ball around and get help with their homework. Then there were the plans to offer Hebrew lessons to as many as 30 Palestinian women and Arabic classes to the same number of Jewish women, or however many signed up. It was something. Especially since the community center had been thinking about banning Palestinian kids altogether when things got tense in Abu Tor the previous year. It was progress. It was a victory, however small.

  While David worked away on his bridge-building projects, city officials turned up across the street to carry out a surprise inspection of the Bazlamit compound. They came to see if Mohammed had done as he’d promised and torn down the rooms he’d built without city permission. Mohammed, son of Nawal and Zakaria, grandson of Hijazi, did destroy the rooms in 2012. But, before too long, he quietly started rebuilding. His family needed somewhere to live. So he decided to take the risk. Now the city inspectors were back.

  The Bazlamits didn’t know who, but they figured somebody had snitched on them. Maybe it was the son of the collaborator, the one living a few doors down who’d clashed with Ahmad over and over again until the young Bazlamit was thrown in an Israeli prison for who knew how long. Maybe it was Yaacov, the owner of the yappy dog and son of their old friend Imm Ismael, the Iranian immigrant who’d scolded Israeli soldiers for beating Palestinians after the 1967 war.

  It didn’t really matter who made the call. It ended the same way. The city hit the family with another costly fine for illegally building on their property. The Bazlamits watched the
inspectors leave and added the order to an ever-growing stack of crippling penalties they had to pay to avoid being kicked off the family land where Hijazi Bazlamit had been brought down by an Israeli bullet in 1951.

  Notes

  Please note that links referenced in this work may no longer be active.

  Note: Italicized quotes in the book are based on memories of one or more people who were part of the conversation.

  Introduction

  1.Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1961), 33.

  Chapter One: No Man’s Land

  1.Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 63.

  2.Ibid., 57.

  3.“Report of the Special Mixed Armistice Commission Meeting Called by the Chief of Staff on 23 April, 1953,” May 13, 1953, Jerusalem, Reports, United Nations Archives and Records Center, New York City, New York (hereafter UN Archives).

  4.Ibid.

  5.Ibid.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Ibid.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Ibid.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Ibid.

  12.Maj. Gen. Vagn Bennike, Letter to UN Security Council, UN Truce Supervision Organization, December 12, 1953, Jerusalem, UN Archives.

  13.New York Times News Service, “Nuns Recover Dentures from No Man’s Land,” Milwaukee Journal, May 23, 1956.

  14.Ibid.

  15.E. H. Hutchison, Violent Truce: A Military Observer Looks at the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1951–1955 (New York: The Devin-Adir Company, 1956), 11.

  16.“Jordan Yields Wrong Sheep,” Jerusalem Post, February 11, 1958.

  17.Ibid.

  18.“Betrothal in No-Man’s-Land,” Jerusalem Post, November 15, 1956.

  19.“Couple Married in No-Man’s-Land,” Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1956.