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

  Israel was not intimidated. The Israeli delegation wanted one of its still-unresolved complaints from nine months earlier to go first.

  The Jordanian officials happily agreed to stay and consider all 11 pending complaints—but wanted to start with the killing of women and children the previous week.

  “What does it matter if we consider their first complaint at one, three or five o’clock?” Sadek Bey Shar, at the time a major in the Jordanian army, asked sardonically.12

  “I can ask you the same question,” replied Lt. Col. Shaoul Ramati, who likely knew the Jordanians could easily dominate an entire meeting talking about their complaints without getting to the Israeli ones.13

  And so the two sides argued, argued and argued over this point.

  “It does not change the nature of our meeting if we discuss the most serious case first,” Shar said.

  Ramati grew increasingly frustrated as the endless bickering dragged on into afternoon.

  “During the time we have now wasted discussing the matter of priority, we could have dealt with at least two or three complaints, and still we are talking and doing nothing,” he said.

  Shar refused to budge. He suggested that they discuss the issues in order of importance, an agreement that would have immediately been followed by an argument over which complaint was the most important.

  “You can argue about the order of importance for days,” Ramati argued.

  And he was right.

  After three hours of irresolvable bickering, the two sides walked away from the meeting without discussing anything of substance.

  Nashashibi and Ramati expressed equal disgust with the stalemate, one the Jordanian officer once again warned might lead to a new Middle East war.

  “It is useless to go on this way,” Nashashibi said as it became clear they were not going to overcome the impasse. “I would hate to imagine what my government and public opinion would say when we meet here to discuss a tragic incident which the whole world is talking about, and which might endanger the peace of the whole world, if we went back to vote on a matter which took place nine months ago, and was discussed four months ago. If we cannot do any better, we had better adjourn.”14

  Ridder could do nothing. The only thing the two sides could agree upon was stalemate.

  “If you cannot come to any agreement, we had better adjourn,” he said. “But I think it is a great pity.”

  “So do I,” Nashashibi replied.

  “So do I,” echoed Ramati.15

  The dysfunctional meeting was reflective of a dysfunctional system that struggled to bring some quiet to the border.

  Raphael Israeli, the young Israeli officer working with the MAC in the 1960s, suggested that the attacks that winter, like the shot that killed Hijazi Bazlamit, could have been averted—if the United Nations had done more to bring the two sides together before things got out of hand.

  “It is difficult to dismiss the thought that, had the MAC acted immediately after the Israeli complaint of 16 December 1950 [about the killing of an Israeli civilian by a shot from the Old City walls inside Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem], the ensuing unfortunate chain of events might have been avoided,” Israeli wrote.16

  But the problems were so serious that the two countries couldn’t keep bickering over points of procedure. The killings along the border kept happening with regularity. And the No Man’s Land seemed especially problematic.

  By that summer, Israel and Jordan came up with a new plan meant to make sure people like Hijazi Bazlamit weren’t shot dead along the border.

  In July 1951, Israel and Jordan sat down with a detailed map of Jerusalem that showed which houses fell within the No Man’s Land borders.

  Israel and Jordan went house by house and marked about 70 homes in the city’s No Man’s Land in which Israeli or Jordanian families would be allowed to live. Israel marked the houses it wanted to protect in red; Jordan marked its homes in blue. For the people living there, it cleared the way for “normal civilian life” in No Man’s Land. Israel agreed to provide city services to those on the Israeli side. Jordan agreed to do the same for those to be connected to the Jordanian side. The agreement cemented the stubbornness of the families living along the borders who refused to budge.

  Now a widow, Wajeeh Bazlamit was even more determined to stay in her home. She made a vow she would ultimately keep: to die living on her land, just as her husband did. Abdullah remembers something his mom said again and again: “I will leave this land the same way my husband did.”

  The UN agreement had another significant provision: Any other families were barred from moving into No Man’s Land. People already living there could come and go for things like work and family visits. But both sides had to retain the “status quo” in No Man’s Land: Neither side could build or repair any homes there—suspicious acts both sides often viewed as aggressive attempts to gain new advantages.

  Jordan created a small entrance through the barbed wire right below the Bazlamits’ house so the family could get in and out of No Man’s Land.

  Life between the lines was supposed to be a little bit safer, even though everyone in the family knew that going out to their courtyard could be fatal. But it seemed like the trips to get water from the well or to pick lemons, olives and figs might be a little less dangerous.

  On searing summer nights, when it was quiet along the border, Abdullah, Zakaria and their other brothers would sit in the courtyard where their father had been shot dead and look out at the darkened horizon. They could hear the clank of rifles and coffee pots coming from the Jordanian soldiers in their nearby outpost. And they could hear the occasional shouts and laughter of the Israelis up above. When the moon was full, they could see the silhouettes of the Old City walls and the Dome of the Rock through the haze of campfire smoke drifting across the valley. When the winter storms pelted the city with hail, and rolling thunder spilled over Abu Tor with flashes of lightning, it did sometimes feel like they were looking down on the Gates of Hell.

  Cross-Border Bread Smuggling

  As things settled into more of a routine, the Bazlamits went up into their gardens more and more. The more time they spent out back, the more often they caught sight of the Israelis on the other side, living in the homes of the Bazlamits’ former Palestinian neighbors. Every now and again a kid’s ball would come sailing over the fence and roll down the hillside. The balls were rarely returned. Dawlat, Abdullah’s wife, was one of the women who thought of the Israeli families on the other side of the street as neighbors, even if they lived in different countries. Whenever one of the Israeli chickens wandered into No Man’s Land, Dawlat would shoo it back across the border.

  “That would please our neighbors a lot, because it showed that we were honest,” she said one night, decades later, as her husband, kids and grandchildren squeezed together on their living room couches to hear old family stories. “Especially because people were afraid to talk to each other on both sides of the barbed wire.”

  In 1959, Zakaria married a young girl from the Old City, a 14-year-old named Nawal. She had a broad smile and dark, fiery eyes that let you know that she wasn’t one to be too deferential to her husband when she thought he was wrong. Nawal grew up in a home not far from al Aqsa. She spent her childhood learning the twists and turns of the Old City’s cobblestone alleys. She liked living off Chain Street, so close to al buraq—the wall where the Prophet Muhammad tied his buraq before riding the winged horse to Heaven. (It was the same 60-foot-tall wall that Jewish worshippers called the Wailing Wall.) And living so close to al Aqsa mosque was a blessing.

  Moving to No Man’s Land took time to get used to. The Bazlamit family was big. Her new mother-in-law was strong-willed. And Nawal had to come to terms with living between coils of barbed wire separating warring nations.

  The most dangerous part of any day was the tri
p out back to the neighborhood well, which rested up on a vulnerable part of the hill, close to the fence, well within rifle range of the Israeli guard posts obscured by the tree line above.

  The women would go to the well in the early morning or at dusk. Never when the sun was highest and tempers along the border seemed to be hottest. When they brought their buckets and pots for water, the women would catch glimpses of Israeli life on the other side of the barbed wire: children playing hide-and-seek in their gardens; women hanging laundry from clothes lines between the twisting tree branches outside their homes. It was a mirror image of life on their side of the border.

  One afternoon, while Nawal was at the well, she saw a lean Jewish man on the other side of the barbed wire trying to get her attention. She’d seen him before. He had big glasses and wore one of the little caps the Jewish men all seemed to wear. His shirt and jacket hung off his thin frame as he stood on the balcony of his home on the hillside above the well. He made a bulge over his belly and kept repeating a word in a language she didn’t understand. He kept putting his hand to his mouth.

  She didn’t know what to make of it all. Nawal didn’t know if this guy was crazy or hungry. He tried to reassure her and the other women at the well that he meant no harm.

  “Get some bread,” one of the women said to Nawal, who went back down to her house, wrapped up some freshly baked pita bread in a towel and brought it back up to the well. They unwrapped it and looked around to see if any soldiers might be watching. Nawal tossed it over the fence. The man rushed toward his side of the border, grabbed the bread with a wave of thanks and retreated to his stone home on the other side.

  Nawal laughed at her surreal life as she walked back down to her home with the other women.

  New Neighbors in No Man’s Land

  Zakaria, one of the shorter, rounder, quieter Bazlamit brothers, spent a little time in the Jordanian army before his mother convinced the military that her son had more important work at home. Zakaria trained soldiers and cooked for them in Abu Tor. He led neighborhood patrols and invited soldiers to dinner at his home in No Man’s Land—an action that could set off alarms for Israeli soldiers up the hill keeping watch on any suspicious military moves by the Jordanians.

  One of the Jordanian officers in charge of the area, a man they called Abu Hani, took a special liking to the Bazlamits. Occasionally, he would risk sparking an international furor by slipping under the fence and into Israel to pick some fruit or vegetables.

  Abu Hani patrolled the area, so he knew what was growing in the fields along the border. He watched the Israeli chickens, oblivious of the international border, crossing into No Man’s Land to lay their eggs. He rescued the Palestinian sheep that sometimes got trapped in the barbed wire and had to be untangled.

  One quiet morning, Abu Hani stepped over the low stone terrace walls on the hillside, crept through the fence and chased down a wild turkey wandering through the Israeli brush. Nearby, he saw some ripe tomatoes growing in someone’s garden. He picked some, stuffed them in his pockets and rushed back into No Man’s Land before anyone could see him.

  Abu Hani slit the turkey’s throat, gutted it and brought it, along with the tomatoes, over to the Bazlamits.

  “Courtesy of Israel,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  Life in No Man’s Land settled into some semblance of normalcy. But it was always a point of contention. Israelis kept close watch on who was coming and going. They had given their OK for some Palestinians to live in No Man’s Land, but they wanted to make sure that the Jordanian soldiers didn’t use that as a cover to set up new military positions. In the mid-1960s, one of the Bazlamits’ old neighbors came to visit. Eid Yaghmour and his family were thinking about coming home.

  “Is it safe here?” he asked the Bazlamits.

  “Will we be OK if we move back to our house?” he asked the Jordanian soldiers.

  Eid Yaghmour’s claim to land in Abu Tor went back even further than the Bazlamits’. He and his brother had bought their property, which ran alongside the Bazlamits’, in the 1930s. The family wanted to see about coming back to the place they’d fled in 1948, thinking at the time that they’d be able to return soon. Sixteen years later, when Eid Yaghmour was 80 years old, he returned to the family’s two-story gray stone home, just up the hillside from the Bazlamits, close to the well. The house was little more than a chilly shell. The windows were open holes. The floors were covered in a thin layer of red sand, created by years of dust storms.

  “The only things living there were birds and snakes,” said Eid’s grandson, Ziad, who was 12 when his family moved to No Man’s Land in 1966.

  1967: “We Have to Go”

  It wasn’t long after the Yaghmours moved back to the border that tensions started rising again.

  The recently formed Palestine Liberation Organization was sending more and more militants over the borders from Syria and Jordan into Israel for sneak attacks. Israeli forces were carrying out more reprisal raids. Shooting incidents along Jerusalem’s border began to intensify. More Jordanian soldiers turned up in Abu Tor.

  “Do you have enough food and water?” Abu Hani asked the Bazlamits one day when another battle with the Jewish soldiers seemed inevitable. “You should make sure that you do.”

  When the fighting started in June 1967, the Bazlamits pulled their shutters closed and hid inside a home that was about to be caught in the cross fire of another war.

  Busloads of Jordanian soldiers rumbled into the valley below. They set up new sandbagged positions in homes as families packed up clothes, food and water before fleeing from the border. Though they couldn’t have been in a worse position—framed by border posts—some of the Bazlamits decided to stay.

  At first, it seemed like the Jordanian soldiers might have the upper hand in the battle for Abu Tor.

  The Jordanians hit the Israeli soldiers on the upper hillside with mortars and machine-gun fire. Soon the fire coming from above grew heavier. The Bazlamits could hear the mortars whizzing overhead and the crack of bullets slamming into stone. Even if they wanted to get away, it was too dangerous now to go anywhere.

  By the second day, the shooting outside the house had come to an end. It sounded like the battle had been won. But the Bazlamits didn’t know who had come out on top.

  Abu Tor was choked with hazy, sweet, pungent smoke rising from charred wood, rubber, uniforms, hair and muscle. Zakaria could still hear fighting across the valley, but it seemed too far away to be dangerous. The big conical roof of the Christian church inside the Old City walls had been burned away, creating an apocalyptic, smoldering, pencil-top frame silhouette on the horizon.

  Zakaria quietly stepped out of the house and made his way toward the Jordanian army post down the way. He checked house after house. They all were empty. Abu Tor seemed to be a ghost town. He saw the bodies of bloodied, broken Jordanian soldiers behind garden walls. The hillside was peppered with bullet casings and shrapnel.

  As Zakaria got closer to the Jordanian position, he could see soldiers and thought all was OK. Zakaria waved to them. When they waved for him to come over, Zakaria realized something was wrong. They weren’t Jordanian soldiers. He ducked away and cut through the homes until he finally found some friends hiding in their home.

  “What’s happened?” he asked them.

  “Don’t you know?” they replied. “The Jews have been here for two days.”

  Zakaria rushed home and told everyone the news.

  “We have to go,” he told them.

  Zakaria hustled the family down to the neighbors and then went back to get some food and supplies. As he approached the house, he saw a soldier shooting at the shuttered homes trying to get inside. Zakaria quietly crept away.

  From the streets below, the Bazlamits and other families watched as Israelis looted their homes. There was nothing they could do.

 
Armed with guns and tire irons, the looters walked away with jewelry and embroidered wedding dresses. They took sheep and chickens. Homes were torn apart and picked clean.

  Then the Israeli soldiers came for the Bazlamits. The soldiers told the men to put their hands up and walk in a single-file line to the Israeli command post up on the crest of Abu Tor.

  One of the Israeli soldiers, probably from the country’s minority Druze community, turned to Abdullah, a good-looking teenager with thick, wavy hair.

  “How old are you?” the soldier asked him.

  “Nineteen,” Abdullah replied.

  “You don’t look 19,” the Druze soldier told Abdullah. “If anyone asks how old you are, tell them you’re 14.”

  Then they took Zakaria and several other men to the top of Abu Tor. They questioned Zakaria for a few hours and set him free when they figured he wasn’t a threat. Abdullah was waiting nearby. On the way home, the brothers ran into another group of Israeli soldiers with more questions.

  “Hey, where are you going?” they asked the brothers.

  Home, they told the soldiers.

  “How old are you?” they asked Abdullah.

  “Fourteen,” he told them.

  “You’re not a soldier?” they asked Abdullah.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know how to do anything.”

  The Israeli soldiers didn’t believe him. So they took him off to the Russian Compound, where he was questioned for days at Jerusalem’s central police station before being released.

  “Israel Is a Wonderful Country”

  While the men from Abu Tor were being interrogated, the women were crossing the old border to meet the people they’d seen for years over the fence.

  One of the first to come over was Leyla,* a young Israeli mother, originally from Morocco, who still spoke Arabic and tried to allay their fears.