A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 5

  “What does it mean?” asked Lt. Col. Yair Biberman, the Israeli military representative called upon to fight for the outhouse. “Does it mean that this building will remain without a toilet?”23

  No, the Israeli colonel could not accept this.

  “Once it was agreed that normal life will proceed there, that means that such an elementary thing as a toilet is entirely within the authority of the people living in that building to repair and to change.”24

  The Jordanians disagreed. Abbasi said no deal between the two countries allowed people in No Man’s Land to build extra rooms on their houses, no matter the size. If Jordan allowed Israel to repair the toilet, it would set a precedent for Israelis to build dozens of buildings that would be perfect new sniper positions for their soldiers.

  “If this kind of work is allowed to continue for a few months more, we will have 25,000 annexes to one house,” he said at a March emergency meeting at the UN office. “This is the intention of those who built up this agreement, and I am sure that you know it.”25

  On March 14, the diplomats met to decide the outhouse’s fate. By a vote of two to one, the MAC condemned Israel for building the outhouse and called for its removal from No Man’s Land.

  “Let my concluding words be an earnest appeal to the parties to find a satisfactory solution which will prevent future similar situations with a view to preventing tension in this sensitive area,” said Lt. Col. M. C. Stanaway, an army officer from New Zealand who was then serving as chairman of the UN commission, at the close of the fourth hearing and 18 hours of arguing.26

  For the Israelis this was a victory. The United Nations condemned the construction, but the outhouse remained standing.

  “We used to draw up a balance-sheet of condemnations, and even evolved a kind of tactical strategy during these protest wars,” Israeli Gen. Uzi Narkiss wrote in his memoir. “I, of course, was fully aware that the real decision would be made not at the debating table of the MAC, but on the line itself, where the number of hands raised for or against would not decide the issue, but the number of Israeli civilians living permanently on the line, earning their living and raising their children.”27

  Narkiss understood that having civilians like the Goelis, who were willing to put down roots on disputed land—what modern politicians would call “facts on the ground”—mattered more than placing soldiers on the border.

  “I will always remember a talk I had with a young officer early in my command,” he wrote. “I pointed out to him that his patrol passed a part of the line in one of the mixed quarters. ‘But we don’t need to demonstrate our presence there,’ he said innocently. ‘The Jewish children playing near the fence demonstrate the presence.’”28

  It was a constant battle over inches. The inability to agree on what to do with the No Man’s Land meant that there was always new ground to fight over. It wasn’t just about toilets or sheep. One of the biggest fights of the time was over trees.

  “Bulldozers Aren’t Machine Guns”

  Few people probably paid much attention to the small story on page three of the Jerusalem Post on August 15, 1957: “100,000 Trees for Jerusalem Border.”

  The story seemed to be a yawner, a little newspaper filler, about Israel’s latest tree-planting project.

  It was actually an early public salvo in another Arab-Israeli fight that would have to be settled by the UN Security Council.

  “Over 100,000 trees are to be planted this coming season near the ceasefire lines in Jerusalem,” the three-paragraph story began. “The trees will be planted by the Jewish National Fund [JNF], right up to the border from Talpiot to Abu Tor. Preparatory work for the planting is already being carried out at the site. The Forest Division of the Ministry of Agriculture has announced that over 20,000 dunhams [5,000 acres] of marginal lands unfit for cultivation are to be planted with Eucalyptus trees, starting this winter.”29

  As Israel put it, this was environmental activism at its best. Israeli officials described the tree planting as a citywide beautification effort meant to eventually encircle then-divided Jerusalem in a green belt. To Jordan, it was a blatant act of aggression. These weren’t just trees; Jordan viewed the saplings as another way for Israelis to steal contested property from Arab owners who were powerless to stop the land grab.

  The fight had quietly begun earlier that summer when Israeli workers, protected by soldiers, entered No Man’s Land to begin planting. Tractors and bulldozers uprooted dozens of olive trees to make way for the Israeli reforestation effort.30 Jordanian soldiers watched from afar as the project grew. Day after day more workers came. So did the soldiers. They began plowing fields, carving out new roads, building barbed wire fences and installing what appeared to be new mortar positions.31 On July 24, Lt. Col. M. M. Izhaq, the senior member of the Jordanian team at the MAC, fired off a detailed demand to the United Nations for an emergency meeting.

  “Statement of Facts,” his complaint began. “On 21 July 1957 Israeli labourers escorted by Israeli security forces entered the No Man’s Land between the lines at approximately MR 1724 1288 and MR 17240 12893 and started digging.” This, Col. Izhaq wrote, was a “flagrant violation of the status quo.” An emergency meeting had to be called to force Israel to stop the work. Immediately.32

  The head of the MAC unsuccessfully sought to defuse the situation by asking the Israelis to halt the tree-planting project. Israeli officials said no. They refused to take part in an emergency meeting to discuss it. They were going to keep digging.

  The fight over the trees brought No Man’s Land back to center stage. In this case, the battle took on special importance because the two sides were fighting over land near the UN headquarters in Jerusalem. Built in the early 1930s, the UN Government House served as home and headquarters for the British High Commissioner while England ruled Palestine. The locals called it the Government Palace. It was where the British elite hosted parties in elegant halls with high ceilings and chandeliers.

  When Dayan and Tell sat down to draw their map in November 1948, they drew wide lines around the Government House, creating a fat No Man’s Bulge over the sparsely populated valley. As in Abu Tor, Israel and Jordan agreed that a fixed number of civilians already living in the area “between the lines” would be allowed to stay. Around the UN compound, Israel and Jordan both agreed to limit that number to 200 apiece. The area became a wide demilitarized zone.

  Dayan repeatedly tried to convince Jordan to divide No Man’s Land. In Jerusalem, Dayan persuaded one of his Jordanian counterparts to accept division of the area by creating an informal “civilian line” through the middle, but the idea was rejected in Amman, where Arab leaders weren’t prepared to willingly cede any part of Jerusalem to Israel. Although the two sides never officially agreed to divide the No Man’s Land, they sometimes acted as if they had, creating a de facto split that was tacitly accepted—as long as neither side complained.

  While Israel portrayed the program run by the Jewish National Fund as a beautification project, Jordanian officials knew that tree planting was a political act in Jerusalem, one that could be used to establish the digger’s rights to the land. Israel knew it too, and the government approved the move into No Man’s Land to demonstrate its claims to the area.

  With Israel refusing to stop, Jordan took its case to New York. UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish diplomat who’d just helped avert a 1956 war in the Middle East by creating a new UN peacekeeping force, privately urged Israel to stop planting the trees. So did London and Washington. Everyone was leaning on Israel to bring the digging to a halt.33

  On August 28, 1957, as pressure built on Israel, its top leaders gathered to discuss their predicament. Golda Meir, then Israel’s foreign minister, painted the whole debate as an absurd overreaction by jittery Jordanians.

  “In Jordan during the first days there was great panic, when near the border, very near
the border, we went in with heavy equipment, tractors and bulldozers,” Meir told Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders. “Possibly, they were really panicked and turned to all their friends: ‘For God’s sake, Israel is preparing to attack!’”34

  Israel wasn’t preparing to attack Jordan. But the tree planting had triggered a war of its own. In New York, Meir said, Hammarskjold kept warning Israel to cool things down before they got out of control.

  “When someone approached Hammarskjold he said: ‘You don’t really want a discussion in the Security Council. There is a feeling that America also does not want this discussion any too much,’” Meir told the group. Just that morning, a UN official gave Israel another warning: Stop the tree-planting work or we will bring this before the UN Security Council. Meir urged Ben-Gurion not to bow to the pressure.35

  “There is no reason to make a commotion,” Meir said during the meeting. “There is no logical reason that we be forbidden to prepare the area and plant trees.”36

  “They do not want our rights to be established,” Ben-Gurion told her.37

  “I want to suggest that we continue the work,” Meir replied. They had to stand up to the pressure. “We will go to the Security Council. We will go there. Common sense does not tolerate that we have to stop the work.”38

  Meir warned that Israel would lose the upper hand if it agreed to stop digging up the hillsides.

  “We know that if we stop this one time, it is harder to start again later,” she said. “I think that the best thing we can do is to finish quickly, at the very least, the work with heavy equipment, indeed, bulldozers are not machine guns.”39

  The Israeli leaders emerged from the meeting ready to fight. The United Nations, America, England and other world powers kept privately prodding Israel to stop the work before they were forced to bring it before the Security Council. No one wanted to see the world superpowers fighting over trees in the Middle East.

  “The Americans are afraid that Syria and Russia will be given the opportunity to appear as though protecting Arab interests,” Meir said in another meeting on September 1. Meir urged the Americans to get Jordan’s King Hussein to back off. She saw no reason to back down.40

  “I do not care if Hussein says this is a victory because we took our heavy equipment out of the area,” Meir said. “But to stop crucial work—that we cannot do. Hussein has to supply sensations to public opinion, we also have public opinion to whom we will not be able to explain why we must stop work that doesn’t cause damage to anyone and that there is no objection to our doing this work.”41

  Neither side would bend. Five days later, Israel was hauled before the UN Security Council to defend its decision.

  The 11-member Security Council included Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the American diplomat who would go on to become Richard Nixon’s vice presidential running mate when he lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Ambassadors from the Soviet Union, England, the Philippines and Iraq all gathered in the Security Council chambers to hear Jordan’s ambassador to the United Nations lay out the ominous implications for peace in the Middle East. This wasn’t about trees, he told them. This was about the ground they were planted in. This land wasn’t “no man’s land.” It belonged to Palestinian farmers forced from their homes by war. Now, the Jordanian ambassador told the Security Council, Israel was using tree planting as an excuse to seize more ground in Jerusalem.42

  “We are now faced with a particular form of Israeli violation of the Armistice Agreement, the aim of which is the same as that of other aggressions on the part of Israel, namely, to get access to, to exploit and occupy privately owned Arab lands,” Ambassador Yusuf Haikal told the Security Council.43

  Haikal left no doubt that Jordan was prepared to go to war over the trees if the United Nations didn’t do something.

  “In the event of the persistence by Israel in the work described earlier,” he warned the council, “my government would have no alternative but to take the necessary steps and measures to ensure the safety of the area and the preservation of the status quo.”44

  When his turn came to speak, Israel’s deputy UN ambassador, Mordecai Kidron, immediately mocked Jordan for bringing the issue to the Security Council. He characterized the Jordanians as petty rivals who were willing to pick a fight over the most absurd things. Like trees.

  “It might appear that the appropriate place for a discussion of this nature is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations rather than the Security Council,” Kidron said, “because, despite the assertions of the Jordan foreign minister, there are no aggressive or other military aspects to the planting of trees in this area.”45

  Kidron cast Jordan as hopelessly trapped in a pitiful paradigm that made the country’s leaders reflexively anti–anything Israel did, even planting trees. He deftly framed Jordanians as reactionary rejectionists who saw dark deeds and hidden agendas on Jerusalem’s innocent hillsides.

  “We have in Israel a particular feeling about trees,” Kidron told the ambassadors from the world’s leading powers. “Among the things of which we are most proud in the history of modern Jewish settlement in the Holy Land is the conversion of large stretches of barren hills and rock strewn mountains into verdant forest.”46

  Kidron went on at some length about the importance of trees to Israelis. They planted them when people were born. They planted them when people died.

  “Trees are for us symbols of life and of growth,” he told the Security Council. “It was thus with a particular feeling of amazement and lack of comprehension that we heard that Jordan wished to put a stop to the planting of trees in the former Government House area.”47

  There was nothing nefarious about the tree planting, Kidron said. It was little more than Israel doing on its side of No Man’s Land what Jordanians were doing on their side. When Kidron was done, Arkady Sobolev, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United Nations, leaned in on Jordan’s side. Like the Jordanians, Sobolev saw Machiavellian hands pulling hidden strings. He blasted Kidron for trying “to belittle the significance of these works” that the Israeli leader “seemed to regard . . . as a joke.”48 This was no laughing matter to the Soviet ambassador. Sobolev agreed with Jordan: This wasn’t about trees. It was about Israel doing America’s bidding by stirring up conflict to keep the Middle East in a constant state of chaos.

  “Aggressive circles in certain governments are interested in the maintenance of such tension and are using Israel as a tool for the implementation of their own plans,” Sobolev said.

  When he decided to speak, America’s ambassador ignored the Soviet implications entirely and backed calls for continued UN examination of the situation.

  “We do hope,” Lodge said in time-tested, mealymouthed diplomatic speak, “that . . . both parties would refrain from taking any action between the armistice lines that would tend to increase tensions.”49

  With the United Nations punting, Israel was able to keep planting. For the rest of the year, UN officials kept tabs on every tractor, bulldozer, young tree and soldier that entered the area between the lines. UN observers drew detailed maps documenting the tree-planting efforts that showed the Israeli work stretching across hundreds of acres in No Man’s Land, from the edge of Abu Tor to the south. When the issue came back to New York in January 1958, the UN Security Council unanimously backed a US-crafted resolution that called on Israel to suspend the tree-planting project until the United Nations could carry out a new survey of No Man’s Land that would examine whether Israel was planting trees on land owned by Palestinian Jerusalemites.

  “Israel should not be allowed to use Arab-owned properties and Arabs should not be allowed to use Israeli-owned properties,” the resolution read.

  The UN action was meant to defuse tensions. In reality, it did almost nothing to curtail Israel’s work in No Man’s Land. By the time the UN Security Council voted on
the dispute, Israel had been working on the tree-planting project for six months. New “facts on the ground” were taking root. When Israel seized control of East Jerusalem in 1967, the JNF declared part of No Man’s Land next to Abu Tor, where the 1957 tree-planting project had taken place, to be a new “Peace Forest.”

  “The Peace Forest was intended to connect the eastern and western parts of Jerusalem, representing the reunification of Israel’s capital city in 1967,” one Israeli tour guide wrote on a tourism website. “Its name reflects a wish that all of Jerusalem’s residents will be able to live together in harmony, and its location serves as an ideal gathering place for people of all walks of life.”50

  The Peace Forest’s origins have long been forgotten. When I asked the JNF in 2014 about the history of the forest, the group hired an Israeli geology professor, Yossi Katz, to investigate. Katz looked over JNF records and checked Israeli government archives before reporting back to the JNF. Katz said he could find no evidence that the JNF planted trees in the disputed No Man’s Lands that later became the Peace Forest. The geologist couldn’t explain why detailed UN maps in 1957 showed the Israeli tree-planting project expanding across the area now known as the Peace Forest. He couldn’t say who did the work, but it wasn’t the JNF.

  In the end, it didn’t really matter who planted the forest along the Jerusalem ridgeline. The dispute became one more reminder that feuds over small things along the unsettled border, from toilets to trees, could become the spark for a major confrontation, if not a new Middle East war.