A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 2

  I’ve offered silent prayers in front of the Western Wall, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and in al Aqsa mosque. I am also a vegetarian; one who wears leather boots. I like to think that I am able to set aside my imperfect vegetarian beliefs when I write about nonvegetarians. I hope I am able to set aside my preconceptions in telling this story and that people will be forgiving of inherent biases that may seep into the tale. I hope readers won’t get tripped up if a person is described in one place being Arab and in another as being Palestinian. I hope people won’t dwell on whether a particular piece of land should be characterized as “occupied” or “disputed.” Though the little things are the ones that matter on Assael Street, this story is about much more than the details.

  This book doesn’t provide a political road map with new ideas on how to solve what seems like an unsolvable problem. It’s a snapshot of a small street that was, is, and may always be the front line for one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

  * * *

  To me, Assael isn’t just any street. For many years, it was the one right outside my living room window. Like a lot of Western journalists at the time—from the start of 2006 to the end of 2009—I lived in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood.

  Choosing a home in Jerusalem is about more than finding a place with lots of light that’s close to a market. Where you live is often seen as an unspoken declaration about your political leanings. For many Americans, living in West Jerusalem is the default, and any decision to live somewhere else might very well be seen as a slight against Israel. To Israelis, Westerners living in East Jerusalem are likely to be viewed warily because of their presumed pro-Palestinian leanings. Westerners living in Ramallah, in the West Bank, are likely to be branded anti-Israel. To Palestinians, any Westerner who chooses to live in an Israeli settlement is presumed to be unsympathetic to their dreams. Living in Abu Tor, living on the old dividing line, was often meant to signal a willingness to treat both sides fairly, to look at the situation from both perspectives. Politically, culturally, psychologically, this is the street where it mattered which side you chose to make your home. Just living in Abu Tor, choosing a “mixed” neighborhood, was seen by some Israelis as a subtle sign that you harbored anti-Israeli views.

  The invisible border in Abu Tor was easy to see. It was obvious where West Jerusalem came to an end and East Jerusalem began. West Jerusalem ended at the edge of the garden below my living room window, and East Jerusalem started in the forest of satellite dishes rising from the crowded compounds on the other side of Assael Street. It looked as if development had swept over the top of the neighborhood, crept down to the western edge of Assael Street, and stopped.

  The higher side of the street was dominated by modern, multistory decorative stone apartment buildings covered with fragrant tangles of jasmine and thick canopies of purple bougainvillea. The balconies were covered with pots of flowering cacti and spiky aloe plants, snapping clothes lines and stacks of three-legged plastic chairs, Buddhist wind chimes and rainbow flag banners flying alongside Israel’s blue Star of David. The big buildings sprawled out alongside a smaller number of refurbished stone homes, places once owned by Palestinian families, with elegant arched doorways, high ceilings and mosaic-tiled floors that were often rented out—at lucrative prices—to Westerners like me. In four decades, the crown of Abu Tor had been transformed from one of the worst places to live in Jerusalem to one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.

  The eastern side of Assael, and the lower part of Abu Tor, well, that was a different story. It was the edge of what some Jewish Abu Tor residents called “the ghetto.” The well-maintained homes at the top of Abu Tor that were owned by influential Israeli politicians, former spies, retired university professors and well-known Jerusalem artists gave way to large warrens of homes that all seemed to be filled with three or four generations of Palestinian families. The stone walls and metal storefront shutters were spray-painted with Arabic and English slogans: free palestine. free gaza. hamas. Cabbies and pizza delivery guys on their scooters sometimes refused to drive through the narrow streets where groups of Palestinian men always seemed to be sitting outside their homes and shops, keeping an eye on who drove past. Few cars came down Assael. It’s a dead-end street used mostly by the people living there. Palestinian kids sped up and down the blue-gray herringbone stone street on their bikes, scooters and skateboards. They set up street-side dumpsters and piles of clothes as soccer goals in the middle of the road. And they grudgingly stepped aside whenever some driver rudely interrupted their games by driving through their “field.”

  Every spring, to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem, thousands of demonstrators, some carrying rifles, others carrying Israeli flags, march down Assael Street singing nationalist songs in a provocative reminder of their political dominance over the Palestinians living on the eastern side of the road.

  Israeli tour guides and young Israeli soldiers regularly lead groups on walks past the tall, salmon-colored, decorative stone retaining walls where they point to battle scars from 1948 and to homes that served as frontline bunkers until 1967.

  My apartment rooftop looked out on Assael and the East Jerusalem valleys. To the north, through stands of tall, pointed fir trees, came the illuminated glow of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City. The Old City wall ran along the horizon until it gave way to the Mount of Olives and its thousands of white graves holding Jewish souls waiting for the Messiah to return. Sloping white carpets of graves eventually gave way to pillars of gray concrete walls snaking across the horizon where Israel’s controversial separation barrier has cut off the Palestinian neighborhood of Abu Dis from the rest of Jerusalem. The horizon curves back south where herky-jerky stacks of houses and paint-chipped apartment buildings cede the hillsides to sharply rising valleys filled with pine, fir, cypress, eucalyptus, lemon and olive trees. On a ridge at the top of the tree line sits the historic stone compound with sunken gardens and its own private pet cemetery that once served as the Jerusalem headquarters for the British High Commissioner in charge of post–World War I Palestine. Soldiers fought for this ridgeline when Israel was created in 1948. And it’s where the first shots were fired in the 1967 battle for Jerusalem.

  On Friday afternoons, the pulse of Jerusalem slows. Muslim families gather after weekly prayers for big meals, long naps and late nights of drinking cardamom-flavored coffee. The pale, tangly bearded, black-hat Orthodox Jewish men drag bike racks into the middle of all the streets leading into their neighborhoods to keep anyone from driving through the area on Shabbat. It kept a lot of wayward tourists in rental cars, delivery scooters, lost foreigners and mischievous teenagers from being stoned. Most shops in West Jerusalem, save for a few cafés, bars and markets, close their doors until sundown on Saturday.

  On a spring evening, as a warm desert breeze swept over the low, cinnamon-hued hills and through scrub-filled valleys, it was easy to sit on my rooftop and envision a unified city. At dusk on Friday nights, the air would fill with the sounds of Jewish families marking the start of their Shabbat with loud dinnertime readings from the Torah, Muslim muezzin calling the Jerusalemites to prayer on Jummah from a half-dozen mosque minaret megaphones spread out across the valley below, and Christian church bells clanging from stone towers in the Old City on the far horizon.

  On the best of nights, an oversized, orange full moon would rise over the Jordan Valley as fireworks from Palestinian wedding celebrations shot across the sky. On the worst of nights, blue flashing lights bounced off the walls as clouds of tear gas drifted through the streets.

  When the acrid jolt of burning trash mixed with pungent tear gas and the singe of gasoline-soaked burning tires, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the valley might actually lead to the Gates of Hell.

  It’s a neighborhood where skinny teenage street peddlers walk through the cobblestone streets shouting “kaak kaak kaak,” with wooden trays balanced on their heads
and stacked with freshly baked sesame seed bread, sold with small paper packets of fresh za’atar that smelled of toasted sesame seeds and warm oregano. Every morning during the holy month of Ramadan, a lone Palestinian drummer will march through the neighborhood before dawn keeping a pounding beat to wake everyone within earshot who wants to eat before a long day of fasting.

  There were also plenty of neighborhood feuds. I saw my share of late-night arguments that spilled out into the streets. I got caught up in a few Abu Tor disputes myself. Israeli police officers knocked on my front door more than once to complain about the late-night bass beats coming from my rooftop and waking annoyed neighbors. I was even the unsuspecting target of an ill-considered, and ill-conceived, attack on my home. One night, a pair of mischievous, hazily inebriated Western journalists for well-known American media companies decided it would be a hilarious joke if they fired massive bottle rockets and heavy-duty fireworks at my rooftop, 100 yards away. They fired—and missed. Badly. Instead of hitting my long, rectangular rooftop deck, the fireworks slammed into the modern stone apartment building right below me, on the western side of Assael Street. At the time, the place happened to be home of the US consulate’s top security officer—the kind of guy who was trained to jump when things go bang. It wasn’t long before black Suburbans with flashing blue lights came screeching to a halt on Assael Street, and muscular men with sidearms stepped into the street to take control of the situation.

  Abu Tor is a gritty neighborhood in more ways than one. The physical grit settles on cups and dishes. It dusts rugs, tables and chairs. Storms coming from the Dead Sea gather force in the narrow valleys and tear through wood-framed canvas Bedouin tent encampments in the Judean Mountains before slamming into Jerusalem’s Abu Tor hillside homes with a fury that can knock heavy iron window shutters from their hinges. When the rolling thunder stops echoing through the valleys and the skies clear, you can turn east to see the shimmering waters of the Dead Sea and the dull glow of Amman’s city lights 50 miles away in Jordan’s rolling desert hills.

  * * *

  It was easy to settle into the city’s rhythms. I moved into my new home in 2006 and sat for hours drinking coffee on the rooftop, soaking in the sounds and scents of Jerusalem. There was a small dog yapping in the garden right below my living room window, but what neighborhood doesn’t have barking dogs? I didn’t think too much of it at first. But because I often worked from home, the yappy Chihuahua soon became the bane of my existence. The dog barked day and night. There never seemed to be an hour when he wasn’t yapping at something.

  I didn’t want to be the new foreigner who started complaining about things the minute I arrived. But as the days of relentless barking dragged into weeks, I walked down the concrete stairs next to my building and knocked on a rusting metal gate leading to the garden home right below mine. A small, elderly woman with tangles of dark hair and a thin, flowered dress came out and stood on the porch, giving me the eye. She spoke in a loud, gravelly voice, as if she could hardly hear herself. She didn’t know much English. I didn’t understand much Hebrew. Her suspicious daughter-in-law finally came out to translate. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to end well.

  “Can you please keep your dog inside when you’re gone?” I asked the two women in my best friendly-new-neighbor voice. “He barks all the time.”

  “Yes, yes,” the daughter-in-law said in a way that made it clear they weren’t going to think much about it after they closed the door.

  The yappy dog, Timmy the Sixth, became my Telltale Heart, the incessant soundtrack to my life, driving me a little battier every day. I left my neighbors printouts of brochures for gizmos they could buy to train Timmy the Sixth not to bark. One afternoon, when the yapping seemed unbearable, I stormed back down to the house and asked the old woman to do something about her dog—this time with a bit more Jerusalem anger in my voice.

  “It’s the Arabs,” her irritated Filipina daughter-in-law told me as she translated for a mother-in-law she seemed to dislike. “She says it’s the Arab kids that make her dog bark. She says the Arab kids run up and down the street all day and bang on our fence to make the dog bark and upset her.”

  It felt like an argument I wasn’t going to win, so I turned to the long arm of the law. The long, legal process of having the woman fined for violating city noise ordinances became a torturous, time-consuming affair that led nowhere. When all hope appeared lost, one longtime Abu Tor resident offered a grim solution: She offered to kill Timmy the Sixth for me.

  “I’ll just put poison in some meat and throw it over the fence,” she told me matter-of-factly one night after listening, again, to my complaints about the barking. “It’s no problem. We’ve had problems with them for years.”

  I didn’t think she was serious until she mentioned it again. Like it was a done deal.

  “It’s OK,” I told her. “It’s not so bad that you have to do that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I wasn’t giving her a wink-and-a-nod to go ahead with it. I really didn’t want her to poison the dog. But she seemed to think I was giving her an implicit green light.

  “Really though,” I said before we hung up. “Please don’t poison the dog.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she reassured me in a way that wasn’t reassuring at all. “I understand.”

  Sure enough, she tried to kill Timmy the Sixth by throwing poisoned meat into the dog’s yard. But it didn’t work. Timmy the Sixth lived to bark another day. I gave up. The yapping dog appeared unbeatable. The day I moved out of the apartment at the end of 2009, the irritable little Chihuahua was still barking at shrieks and shadows.

  When I returned to Abu Tor in 2014 to talk with the family, the woman’s son, Yaacov, a guy known in the neighborhood as Yanki, recognized me almost immediately. Like his mom, Yanki had put down his roots in Abu Tor. He’d brought his wife there, proudly took their twins on afternoon walks, and watched the three of them move away when the feuding couple decided some distance was best. Like the kid he must have been, Yanki still roamed around his mom’s house in flip-flops, baggy shorts and sleeveless T-shirts that showed off his dark, hairy arms. The house smelled of wet dog and chicken soup. Timmy the Sixth was still alive—and still barking at anyone who knocked on the gate.

  Yanki’s mother, Malka Joudan, the one who’d blamed the Arab kids for making her dog bark, still lived on Assael in the abandoned Palestinian home she’d moved into in 1951. Malka’s mind had been hobbled by a stroke that made it difficult to talk to her. It was hard to follow all the tangents in her meandering stories and harder to know which tales were true. Yanki’s wife and their twins were long gone. Yanki and his mother had stopped talking to each other. They moved around the cold, damp house in their own orbits. Malka’s brown curls popped out of the edges of the scarf tied around her head as she asked her guests, again and again, why they were there, whether they had seen her daughter, what her son was doing in the kitchen . . .

  Malka sat near a small electric space heater under several puffy comforters while she shouted at the television news. Yanki paced around the darkened rooms as he talked on the phone. His flip-flops slapped against the cold tile floors while he rummaged about in the shadows for something. When he was nearly done with the call, he came into the living room where his mom was watching TV with the volume blasting.

  “I remember you,” he said to me as he sat down near his mother and hung up the phone. “You wanted to be in control.”

  I waved my hand and laughed it off. The sound of Timmy the Sixth’s barking felt like nails on the chalkboard in my brain. I wanted to chase the memories from my mind as soon as I could.

  “It’s in the past,” I told him.

  Yanki chuckled and looked me over.

  “It’s OK,” he said before getting up again to get tea and water for his guests. “Forget it.”


  Yanki, who was born and raised on the street, took a long view of the fight. He’d seen plenty of foreigners pass through the neighborhood. He could tell who was going to be around for the long haul.

  “I knew you were a visitor here,” he told me as he slipped away into the darkness once again. “I knew you were going to go.”

  * * *

  Living in Jerusalem sometimes felt like being in Dr. Seuss’s illustrated children’s story “The Zax,” about a North-Going Zax who runs straight into a South-Going Zax in the middle of the wide-open Prairie of Prax. Whether North-Going or South-Going, the Zaxes are loud, hairy, stubborn, argumentative creatures. Although the open prairie stretches out on either side of them, neither the North-Going Zax nor the South-Going Zax is willing to step aside so the other can pass.

  The North-Going Zax threatens to stand firm for 59 days. The South-Going Zax vows to stay put for 59 years. If there is to be a showdown, the South-Going Zax says, he will come out on top. As a boy, the South-Going Zax tells his North-Going rival, all young Zaxes learned a simple rule: “Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east!” The patronizing lecture only seems to make the North-Going Zax dig in, so his South-Going adversary makes it clear that he’s not going to back down.

  “I’ll stand here, not budging!” the South-Going Zax warns, “I can and I will, if it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”

  The North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax do stand still. For years and years and years and years and years. But the world doesn’t. It moves on. People eventually build a freeway right over the un-budgeable Zaxes, still defiantly glaring at each other in the middle of the desert.1