A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  ‘Not much,’ I guessed.

  He flicked through the passport and looked back at me. ‘You say you do not travel much to Jordan but there are four stamps here.’

  ‘That was in transit,’ I said. I tried not to show it but I was nervous. This was not a good time to be taken away for questioning by Iranian authorities.

  ‘Why would any country put in a stamp for a transit stop?’ he asked: a reasonable question.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ I said, hoping it was enough.

  He and the woman had another discussion. Then he said: ‘The Arabs do all sorts of things that cannot be explained.’ They laughed furiously. The age-old Persian rivalry with the Arabs had kicked in.

  He handed back my passport. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoyed the Islamic Republic of Iran.’

  I went through, sat down and had a coffee. I felt a huge sense of relief – it could have ended badly. Once the plane took off, I watched a remarkable scene: several women around me dressed in burkas or niqabs took off their robes. Underneath, many wore designer clothes. Some took high-heeled shoes and lipstick from their hand luggage. From Basij to Prada – before the dinner was served.

  But beyond my relief at leaving Iran I also felt anger. Those of us on the plane were leaving behind millions of trapped people.

  CHAPTER 6

  The French School of Jerusalem

  July 2009

  WE’D NOW BEEN IN JERUSALEM FOR SIX MONTHS AND THE attitude we’d arrived with was beginning to be challenged. We were seeing things that we’d not read about in our preparations to come here. We needed to look no further than Jack’s school, which proved to be a mine of stories, a perfect microcosm of life in a conflict zone.

  Six years of hearing real-life stories through the French School of Jerusalem would allow me to give the conflict a human dimension. I’d be able to gain a knowledge of how the system worked from direct experience.

  Run by the French Government, the Lycée Français de Jérusalem was housed in a magnificent old stone convent rented from the St Joseph’s nuns. It had a French director and mainly Jewish Israeli teachers. Some of the parents were diplomats, aid workers and journalists. The school held fundraising lunches on Fridays that proved interesting; I would find myself having a beer with a diplomat who’d just spent a week in Gaza or Syria.

  A lot of the students lived in the West Bank. Students were mainly Palestinian, with some French and other internationals. During the Second Intifada (second Palestinian uprising) between 2000 and 2005 – in which 3057 Palestinians and 918 Israelis were killed – many foreigners fled Jerusalem, leaving vacancies at the school. France offered them to Palestinian children.

  I’ve always savoured the challenge of trying to decode scenes and conversations. Often in Israel you come across what Israelis call balagan – a Hebrew word meaning ‘chaos’. Our initial parent– teacher meeting, halfway through our first year in Jerusalem, turned into serious balagan.

  I was approaching the event with great enthusiasm. At Jack’s school in Sydney, these meetings had been a good way to make friends. Before the meeting at the new school in Jerusalem, I even bought a barbecue for our balcony so we could entertain the friends we’d hopefully meet.

  The day came. Parents began to arrive – and hostilities quickly emerged. A French parent accused the Palestinian parents of holding a secret advance meeting to plan their strategy for today’s meeting. The French parents wanted to increase the fees so the school could provide better facilities, while the Palestinians said the French Government should pay more.

  When a French parent said there should have been no preliminary meeting, a Palestinian shouted: ‘Why is it always the fault of the Palestinians?’

  A Palestinian woman began speaking in Arabic.

  ‘Speak French, this is a French school!’ a French mother yelled.

  The Palestinian woman glared at her: ‘I will speak my language when I am in Palestine!’

  ‘This is not Palestine!’ the French woman responded. ‘This is Israel!’

  The room erupted. A French diplomat involved with the school called for calm. A Palestinian father replied: ‘Under what authority are you standing there?’

  The Palestinian had wounded French pride. ‘With the full authority of the French Government, which pays for this school!’ he replied.

  The meeting went downhill from there. No barbecue tonight, I thought. As we left, a French woman, making a point, put a finger on the shoulder of a Palestinian woman.

  ‘Don’t touch me with your condescending French finger!’ the Palestinian snapped.

  At another meeting, in mid-2010, Palestinian parents turned on each other. One group said the school should register as an Israeli school to receive tax concessions, while others objected.

  ‘I will not take one shekel from the occupying power!’ one man shouted.

  I was sitting next to a UN official – a parent – who said: ‘Here we go – Fatah versus Hamas!’

  In Jerusalem, you could never escape the conflict.

  Later we saw how it had taken hold even at a suburban level, when we were invited to the 13th birthday of a friend of Jack’s from school. His house was just near the German Colony, a mainly Jewish area of West Jerusalem.

  The boy’s father, a New Zealander, and his mother, a Palestinian, were getting the backyard ready. His Palestinian uncle lit the barbecue, which gave off some smoke – nothing dramatic – but it unleashed a loud verbal attack from a neighbour. The boy’s family had been living in the house since 1968, coexisting peacefully with their Jewish neighbours. But a Jewish family from Morocco had recently moved next door.

  ‘Why are you living here?’ the Moroccan neighbour shouted in English. ‘You should go and live in one of the Arab neighbourhoods!’

  The following argument ensued.

  The uncle: ‘Our family has been living here since 1968!’

  The neighbour: ‘Yes, that’s enough – you’ve been here too long!’

  The uncle: ‘But you’ve only been here from Morocco for a year!’

  The neighbour then switched to Hebrew. He shouted: ‘Anachnu mishtaltim alechem’ – ‘We are taking control over you.’

  The uncle: ‘If you think you have control over me let’s meet in a stairwell and see who controls who.’

  The boy’s family called the police, fearful that if they didn’t then the neighbour would. In the battle between Palestinians and Israelis, there’s always a first-mover advantage. The family then filmed the backyard to prove it was a birthday party. I sat there thinking how horrible it was to live like this.

  The Israeli police turned up and began interrogating the family, even though they’d done nothing wrong. When the police discovered that foreigners were present – us – they became conciliatory.

  We discovered that much of the hatred towards Palestinians came from more recent immigrants. And older Israelis often had a more benign attitude than their children. They had had regular contact with Palestinians for decades, and many acknowledged that 700,000 Palestinians were exiled or fled when the State of Israel was established in 1948.

  Batsheva, who lived in the apartment below us, was in her 60s and a fifth-generation Israeli. Her gardener was an elderly Palestinian who had worked for her for 10 years. ‘But my children want me to sack him,’ she told us. ‘They say one day he’ll slit my throat.’ Her view was that the occupation guaranteed endless conflict; her children’s view was that God had given the Jewish people ‘Judea and Samaria’, the Palestinian Territories.

  One day around this time, while dropping Jack at school, a parent told us that gas masks were being handed out at the Talpiot Mall. Crowds had gathered in the mall and were pushing towards boxes of the masks. Officials shouted for them to calm down.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked one man.

  ‘We’re preparing for war,’ he replied.

  ‘Who against?’ I asked

  ‘Maybe Iran, maybe Hezbollah, maybe Hamas �
�� but somebody is going to attack.’

  Israel is that sort of place. People either talk about the war just passed or the war about to begin. Enemies are over the horizon – it’s just not certain who. I got into the queue to get masks for Sylvie, Jack and me, but was told the masks were only for Israelis.

  That night Jack, then 11, wrote in his diary: ‘There is one thing that everybody is preparing for – war. Iran was saying they have a nuclear bomb. In the malls people were giving out gas masks for free and the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] was thinking about attacking first. I knew that they [Iran] would not aim at Jerusalem, since a lot of Palestinians live there and there is the Dome of the Rock mosque. Things in Syria are getting out of control. That’s all. Apart from that, everything is peaceful.’

  We wanted Jack to experience both Israeli and Palestinian cultures, so in our first summer in Jerusalem – June 2009 – we enrolled him in our neighbourhood Hebrew-language judo and gym clubs and the Palestinian soccer club and summer camp.

  The Hand in Hand summer camp was one of the few in Jerusalem that accepted both Jewish and Palestinian students. At the end of the first day I asked the director, an Israeli, how Jack had been.

  ‘No complaints, but I can tell you he’s unlikely to be worse than the Israeli kids,’ she said. ‘A lot of Israeli children are on Ritalin and their parents think it’s good to give them a break over the holidays. So the kids come off Ritalin and become my problem.’ She told me Israeli kids often became aggressive towards their teachers, so Ritalin was used ‘like a blanket thrown over the children’. Local media reported a lot of violence in Israeli schools.

  Through Jack’s school I discovered that some Palestinian children also had behavioural problems. It seemed the conflict fed on itself in terms of violence.

  We saw first-hand how Palestinians in Israel lived in fear. One of the Palestinian boys in Jack’s class was playing with friends in Bethlehem when Israeli soldiers arrived. Jack’s friend escaped but others did not: they returned to school days later with cuts and bruises.

  One day in 2010 a car driving past Jack’s school lost control. Because there were no railings, the car careered onto a footpath, killing a student, six-year-old Farid Abu Katish. Jerusalem’s streets are narrow; it’s a 17th-century city with 21st-century demands. In an effort to get railings and speed humps installed, the parents – including Sylvie and me – held a protest outside the school, complete with banners in Hebrew. We walked to the office of the Mayor, Nir Barkat. One of the parents, Nicolas Pelham, the correspondent for The Economist, led the way. We wanted to give Barkat a petition. Looking up at Barkat’s office, Pelham chanted through a megaphone: ‘Barkat! Barkat! Come down now!’

  Finally, Pelham needed a rest. He turned to some Palestinian parents and tried to hand them the megaphone. They backed away. Even though we’d obtained a permit for the demonstration, the Palestinians were too fearful to take a prominent role. And although the protest was legal, Israeli police told us to close it down. ‘You have a permit for the demonstration but not for the megaphone,’ one said. In the end, the municipality agreed to put up a barrier outside the gate and paint a crossing.

  Palestinian parents later told me that one of the reasons for their fear was Israel’s right to revoke work permits or residency for ‘Jerusalemites’ – Palestinians living in Jerusalem. These Palestinians don’t have the same rights as Israelis – for example, they are not allowed to vote in Israel’s national elections. For those parents living in the West Bank the permit situation made them even more vulnerable. In the West Bank, the Israeli Army will not allow Palestinians to gather for a protest in a group of more than 10.1 Permits are rarely granted, meaning demonstrations are effectively prohibited. The maximum sentence for protesting is 10 years – which means the army can go into a crowd of 10 or more Palestinians that they claim is a demonstration and send someone to prison for 10 years. The only evidence they need to show for a conviction is a photograph of what appears to be a protest.

  This was just one of many kinds of discrimination we noticed. One day, not long after we arrived in Jerusalem, Sylvie was picking up Jack from school and mentioned to the Palestinian woman in charge of the playground that she looked good. ‘I washed my hair!’ she replied. She explained that in her West Bank village of Taybeh they got water on Saturdays, and the moment they heard water hit their tanks they began washing their houses, their clothes, their children and their hair and then filling up bottles. For many, Saturday was their only day off work.

  From this moment, we started to inquire about the water situation in every Palestinian village we visited. We learnt that an Israeli uses between 240 and 300 litres per day, compared with the Palestinian average of 73 litres. Many Palestinian families spend up to 40 per cent of their salary on water, according to Haaretz newspaper. In Area C of the West Bank – which is under total Israeli control – average water consumption for Palestinians is 20 litres per person each day.2 This compares with an average of 270 litres per person each day for neighbouring Israeli settlers.

  Many Palestinian parents at the school were also not allowed to live in Jerusalem. Israel does not allow the immigration of Palestinians from the West Bank to Israel, which would change the demographic balance. In 2003, Israel passed a law3 that prevents Palestinians from the West Bank who marry Palestinians who are Israeli citizens from living in Israel. One Palestinian man that we knew – an Israeli citizen – was married to a Palestinian from the West Bank. His wife was not legally allowed to work or drive in Israel, so she held a job in secret and lived in fear of having the smallest car accident that would bring her to the attention of Israeli police.

  One woman we knew needed a visa for a work trip to the US. As a Palestinian, she was not allowed to travel to Jerusalem without a permit. Because the US Consulate is in Jerusalem, the only way she could get a visa was to illegally visit the city. At checkpoints into Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers stop anyone who looks Palestinian, so to get through, the woman took off her scarf, let her hair down, put on lipstick and wore sunglasses. The soldiers, presumably thinking she was either a foreigner or a settler, waved her and her female friend through. The women called it their ‘Thelma and Louise moment’.

  Each morning the school provided a bus for students – both French and Palestinian – who needed to travel from Bethlehem, in the West Bank, to Jerusalem. They needed to cross an Israeli Army checkpoint. Most soldiers waved the bus through. But we were told that once in 2008 a soldier had decided to make all the children get off. It had been a hot day, and about 15 children, some as young as four, had been forced to stand for hours in the sun. Many had cried and several had wet themselves. French diplomats had been outraged.

  To make sure it did not happen again, each day a French diplomat in Jerusalem would rise at 6am and drive to Bethlehem to accompany the bus into Jerusalem. If a soldier tried to board the bus, the diplomat would hold up his or her credentials and tell the soldier the bus was French territory and could not be entered.

  Most days this worked, but one day a soldier decided that while the French official had diplomatic protection, the driver did not; the soldier insisted that he could board the bus. A stand-off went on for hours until Israeli and French officials worked out a solution.

  Many of the parents in the West Bank were not able to attend school concerts. Many never met their children’s teachers, as they could not travel to Jerusalem.

  One Palestinian boy was preparing for his final exams, the Baccalauréat. Because he had turned 18, he needed an ‘adult permit’ to travel from his home in Bethlehem to the school in Jerusalem. The Israelis would not give him one. This meant he could not sit the exams in Jerusalem even though he’d been preparing for six years.

  A French mother, angry about this, smuggled the boy in her car to a hotel in East Jerusalem. The boy was terrified there would be a knock at the door and it would be Shin Bet (the Israel Security Agency). There was no knock, and he passed with distinction.

&
nbsp; In 2016, after our return to Australia, a new hotel would open opposite the school. A group of fathers who had dropped off their children tried to order coffees. ‘We don’t serve Arabs here,’ they were told. Such discrimination, in my view, creates a long-term disaster: these men are moderate, well-educated professional Palestinians who should be bridges to a peaceful future. Instead, they felt humiliated, and it reinforced to them that such discrimination goes on openly, and unpunished, every day.

  About six o’clock one morning, the mother of one of the Palestinian boys from Jack’s school phoned. ‘We need your help,’ she told me. ‘As a foreigner you will have more influence than us.’

  She said the police had come to their house in Jerusalem and taken away their 16-year-old son. He was now being interrogated, without a parent or lawyer, by Shin Bet.

  Someone had gone into the family’s garden and cut down their olive trees, and written ‘Price Tag’ in Hebrew. ‘Price Tag’ was a policy of violence used by some Israeli settlers in the West Bank to protest against government decisions they didn’t like. They would write these words after they burnt down mosques or cut down olive groves.

  Sometimes Jewish extremists in Israel vandalised Christian churches and spray-painted graffiti such as ‘Price Tag’ or ‘Mary Was a Whore’. But while Christians were sometimes targeted in Jerusalem, if Palestinians were now facing ‘Price Tag’ inside Israel it was a big story. The French media in particular were interested.

  ‘They say my son cut down the trees,’ the mother told me. To me this was completely implausible – the notion that he would cut down his own family’s olive trees then write ‘Price Tag’. But that was what Shin Bet was arguing.

  This fitted with a pattern I had started to see of how Israel muddied the waters. It was much harder for the media to report that ‘Price Tag’ was spreading among Israeli extremists when a Palestinian youth was being interrogated for the crime.