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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  “Cakes, Not War”

  One of those attracted to life on the edge in the 1960s was Hedva Harekhavi, a 25-year-old, dark, curly haired design student who was questioning her place in the divided city. When a real estate agent asked her what she wanted in a house, Hedva told the realtor that she wanted two things: “silence and sun.”

  “I have something for you,” the agent replied: “Abu Tor.”

  The house Hedva’s realtor had in mind looked down on one of two Jordanian guard posts in the neighborhood. The back wall of the home was pockmarked with shell fragments. One blast had blown a car-wheel-sized hole in the back wall of an unfinished section of the house. A wide garden with fruit trees and grapevines bumped into the fence marking No Man’s Land, right above a dirt path that would one day mark the beginning of Assael Street. You couldn’t get any closer to the end of the country.

  Hedva was sold.

  “It was a place nobody wanted to live,” she said. “Nobody except me.”

  “I bought it,” she said, “for the cost of a blender.”

  Hedva was intrigued by life on the border. She would climb onto the roof of her new home and wave to the Jordanian soldiers no more than 50 yards away. The Israeli soldiers always told her not to get too friendly with the enemy.

  “Girl, girl, don’t say hi to them,” the soldiers told Hedva. “Not so much peace.”

  From Hedva’s vantage point near the Israeli and Jordanian guard posts, No Man’s Land and the valley below seemed to be devoid of human life.

  “We didn’t hear or see any people—just birds and chickens,” she said. “I lived here for a year and a half before the war and I didn’t hear a single voice.”

  Hedva kept to herself along the border, unaware that, just a few houses away, Jewish and Muslim teens were flirting over a part of the barbed wire where cigarettes and bread flew through the air.

  When the 1967 war began, Hedva launched a one-woman protest: She went to a nearby grocery store to buy a bunch of cakes and handed them out to drivers.

  “Cakes, not war,” Hedva told them. “Cakes! Not war!”

  Within a few days, as it became clear that the fighting in Abu Tor was over and Israeli soldiers were in control, people like Hedva set out to visit the valley for the first time.

  Hedva was stunned to see children, women, men, animals, all living a few hundred yards below her home. She wasn’t the only Israeli taking advantage of the power vacuum to explore the newly conquered parts of Jerusalem. Hedva watched as scores of Israelis—artists, thugs, soldiers—crossed through the barbed wire so they could loot Palestinian homes abandoned during the fighting. Some people simply moved in, intent on claiming the homes as their own.

  Among those who led the takeover, she said, was Shlomo Baum. Baum was a physically intimidating Israeli military commando who had helped Ariel Sharon set up a special unit in the 1950s to cross Israel’s border with Jordan and carry out reprisal attacks. Commando Unit 101 launched one of the biggest such assaults in 1953, when Sharon and members of the unit led an attack on the village of Qibya in the northern West Bank. Nearly 70 civilians were killed.

  When the 1967 war broke out, Baum and his allies were accused of beating, threatening and intimidating Arab residents in Abu Tor. Israeli police were so concerned about Baum’s actions that they forced him and his friends to sign legal orders barring them from taking over Arab homes in the neighborhood.11 Baum and his friends, including the owner of a Jerusalem nightclub called Bacchus, said they were doing nothing wrong. They said they had permission from the Israeli army to take over the empty homes. Police confiscated a small, Swedish submachine gun from an empty home they linked to Baum and kept an eye out for his return to Abu Tor.12

  “It was brutal,” Hedva said. “But it passed.”

  Baum and his fellow opportunists weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the security vacuum in Abu Tor. Hedva knew several young artists who also tried to move into abandoned homes. If everyone else was doing it, Hedva figured she would scout around to see if she could find a better place to live too.

  “I always dreamed of living in an isolated place, along with sun and nature,” she said.

  Hedva’s search led her into No Man’s Land, through unkempt trails south of Abu Tor used by wild dogs, where she found a large stone building she decided to take as her new home. It was empty. She had no idea whose it was, but now it was going to be hers. Hedva didn’t have much with her to stake her claim. It seemed unlikely that anyone was going to find her. She was deep in the secluded ravine. For Hedva, it was the fulfillment of a fantasy. The war she’d opposed had ended up leading her to her dream home.

  “I am a dreamer,” she said. “And it was like a fairy tale.”

  Although it was isolated from most other houses, Hedva slept on the floor of the building for several days. She listened to the creaks of the windows and the rustling of hungry animals outside. She could hear distant voices now and again, but they never got very close.

  “It was very dangerous, but I so wanted to live there,” she said.

  The fantasy didn’t last. It wasn’t long before Israeli soldiers came across Hedva in the home.

  “You can’t stay here,” the told Hedva. “Go home.”

  Hedva returned to her house along the border, where Israeli officials were in the process of transforming the barbed wire dirt path into a new Jerusalem street that would eventually be named Assael.

  “Made by God”

  Literally, Assael means “made by God.”

  Some residents say the Israelis chose the street name to symbolize the place where the jagged wound cutting across Jerusalem was healed.

  But the street name isn’t meant to be translated literally. Jerusalem officials actually named it after one of King David’s nephews, Asa’el, who grew up to become one of his uncle’s battlefield commanders, a fighter “fleet-footed as a wild gazelle” whose death in battle was one in a series of tit-for-tat biblical killings. People here will argue over how the name should even be spelled in English: Assaell. Assael. Asa’el. They all refer to the same place, but different people will tell you that one way is the right way to refer to this narrow Alley of God.

  Some Palestinian kids from Abu Tor simply refer to it as the “Street of the Martyr Jawad,” a young man from Assael Street who was killed by Israeli forces at al Aqsa mosque one Friday afternoon in 1996, becoming the second man in his family to be shot dead by an Israeli gunman. His grandfather, Hijazi Bazlamit, was the first.

  Three

  The Martyrs

  The shot came from a hidden rifle on the hillside above, and Hijazi Bazlamit fell by his son’s side.

  Another bullet crack echoed across the valley—and down went Hijazi’s brother.

  Abdullah Bazlamit, then a toddler still unsteady on his feet, froze.

  While his wounded uncle crawled to safety, Abdullah watched his father slowly bleed to death as the sun cast afternoon shadows across the Abu Tor No Man’s Land.

  Along Jerusalem’s border, the death of Hijazi Bazlamit in February 1951 was one of many. Sniper shots killed women, children and farmers on both sides. Jerusalem’s border was far from settled. Especially here in Abu Tor. Most of the Palestinian families living in Abu Tor fled in 1948 when the Jordanian Legionnaires fought to a stalemate on the hillside.

  When Dayan and Tell sat down with their pens to carve up Jerusalem in November 1948, the Israeli general drew a red line on the map that passed to the west of Hijazi Bazlamit’s house and the Jordanian officer drew a green line that passed to the east.

  The Bazlamits’ home, like countless others along the newest Middle East borders, was now trapped, as UN officials would dub it, “between the lines.”1

  In this section of Jerusalem, the No Man’s Land was a narrow belt about 50 yards wide and 300 yards long.
A short strip of homes in Abu Tor was caught in No Man’s Land—maybe a dozen compounds in all.

  Many of the Bazlamits’ neighbors, along with those who lost houses on the other side of the barbed wire to the new state of Israel, sought safety with relatives somewhere else. Others wound up in refugee camps between Jerusalem and Jordan. Not the Bazlamits. Wajeeh Bazlamit, Hijazi’s wife and the matriarch of the family, refused to let war drive her from the family’s Abu Tor home.

  The family had shuttered their house when the war swept through Jerusalem and quickly returned once the shooting stopped. They found they weren’t welcome in their own home. They were in limbo. Their house sat on land that belonged to neither Israel nor Jordan. It posed a problem for everyone. There was good reason to kick the families out of No Man’s Land. By definition, it was unsettled territory. Something for Israel and Jordan to keep fighting over. Although the Bazlamits’ simple stone block house lacked the grandeur of the nicer homes in Abu Tor, the family wasn’t going to leave.

  Israel and Jordan were never able to agree on a plan to officially divide No Man’s Land. So there remained, as Dayan put it, “two front lines” across Jerusalem.2

  In some places, the No Man’s Land cut a wedge several hundred yards wide, creating vast, open, neglected fields that became a home for howling dog packs, wayward sheep herds, and—at least once—a foreigner suffering from messianic delusions.

  In 1951, after two years of continual disputes over the border, relations with Israel and Jordan were fraying. Both countries were flooding the UN Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) with demands for emergency meetings and immediate investigations. Some were trivial matters meant to gum up the system. Others involved serious allegations of rape, cross-border attacks and retaliatory massacres. Israel accused Jordanian soldiers of breaking the peace by firing on Israel’s West Jerusalemites as they raced for safety across open ground. Jordan accused Israeli forces of sneaking across the border and attacking innocent villagers.

  On that fatal day in February 1951, there had been some shooting along the border, but it had not reached Abu Tor. Hijazi Bazlamit left his Old City shoe shop in the hands of Zakaria, his 13-year-old son, and caught an early afternoon bus back to Abu Tor. The Bazlamits’ house sat on the lower slope of No Man’s Land, below the barbed wire marking the border of Israel. The family’s backyard bumped right into the new country up above. The only things separating their little courtyard from the border were a couple of tilting stone retaining walls and some thin, young fruit trees.

  The family’s house was effectively surrounded by soldiers. Four border posts kept watch along this small stretch of Abu Tor. One Jordanian unit kept watch from an abandoned Palestinian home on the border about 100 yards to the south of the Bazlamits’ home, and another looked over things from a house about 100 yards to the north. On the hillside above, Israeli positions essentially mirrored the Jordanian ones.

  Hijazi, a slender man with a thin Charlie Chaplin mustache, knew going in the backyard could always be risky, especially when there had been shooting along the border. That didn’t stop him that afternoon. He headed up the rocky hillside with his youngest son, Abdullah, wobbling after him.

  Though he was not even three years old at the time, Abdullah has vivid memories of that day. He remembers the smell of the grapevines and the fruit trees. He remembers the sound of the shot that killed his father. He remembers seeing his dad fall.

  “He lay bleeding for three or four hours,” he said.

  Abdullah sat in the garden, holding his dying dad’s hand, as his relatives tried to coax the little boy off the hillside. No one was willing to risk being shot to rescue Hijazi and his son. Abdullah didn’t know what to do. Abdullah’s mother, brothers, uncles and aunts were all trying to coax the young boy out of the sniper’s view.

  “Come, Abdullah,” his aunts and uncles said. “Come down from the garden.”

  Abdullah was too scared to move. And there was no way for his relatives to get to Hijazi without exposing themselves to the hidden sniper.

  As Hijazi lay dying, 13-year-old Zakaria Bazlamit returned from the Old City and saw a crowd gathered at a home down the road, outside the No Man’s Land. It was near dusk, and Zakaria stopped to see what was going on.

  “What are you doing here?” one of his friends asked Zakaria. “Run home, your father’s been killed.”3

  “The neighborhood is built on a slope,” Zakaria said in a 2007 interview with Israeli journalists. “I was downhill and our house at the time was the highest up in the neighborhood. It was difficult to climb, but I ran like a deer. I jumped over the rocks. And, even when I fell, I got up and ran as fast as I could.”4

  When Zakaria got home, his family was gathered in the back of the house, helplessly trying to rescue Hijazi and Abdullah.

  “When I got there, my uncles were already there. I asked where my father was and they told me that he was lying wounded, outside, in the courtyard, but they couldn’t pull him in (because) as soon as someone would stick his head out, the Jews would begin firing,” he said.5

  Like Abdullah, Zakaria’s memories of that day were vivid and detailed. “I saw him from the window, lying in the courtyard, right here, 10 meters from the Jewish houses, moving his arm, his foot,” he said. “He was suffering—and I couldn’t do anything.”6

  The family had to wait until dusk to get Hijazi and Abdullah off the hillside.

  “I was pale and my mother was hysterical,” Zakaria said. “They laid him out on a ladder, which they made into a stretcher, and took him down to the village. There they put him on a vehicle that quickly took him to a hospice in the Old City.”7

  By then it was too late. Hijazi was dead. He was 35.

  If Hijazi had been able to say any final words to his son, they didn’t stick in Abdullah’s mind.

  The next day, the family buried Hijazi outside the Old City walls, in a cemetery close to al Aqsa mosque. Because their house was in No Man’s Land, the Bazlamits had to set up a mourning tent at a family home in the Old City.

  At 13, Zakaria dropped out of school and started taking care of his father’s shop.

  “My uncles told me, ‘You are now the man of the family, you have to support them,’” Zakaria said.8

  For a while, his friends came to visit him at the shop. Then they trickled off. Before long, they just stopped. Zakaria would see his buddies playing in the Old City streets and thought about the life he’d lost that afternoon in February.

  “I hated the Jews for this,” said Zakaria.9

  For the Bazlamits, Hijazi was the first, but not the last, family martyr in the struggle for control of Jerusalem. His wife and kids framed a hand-colored photograph of Hijazi and kept it in their home. Hijazi looked out from the gilded frame with a bewildered gaze. He is smartly dressed in a dark jacket covering a gray pullover. But the black cord wrapped around his white cotton head scarf looks slightly askew. His bushy black eyebrows seem raised in surprise, like he can’t figure out what’s gone wrong. For years, the Bazlamits have looked at Hijazi’s portrait when things go wrong.

  “Our father’s blood is in this earth,” Hijazi’s kids all say in one way or another. “We are not going to leave willingly.”

  No one ever saw the shooter hidden in the tree line on Israel’s side of the border. It could have been an Israeli soldier. Maybe it was an Israeli civilian. Whatever the case, the family said, Hijazi was gunned down in gangland-style retaliation.

  “At the time, whenever a Jew was shot at, an Arab was shot at,” said Abdel Halim, another of Hijazi’s sons. “My father was the victim of a revenge attack.”

  Sparks of War in No Man’s Land

  After the Bazlamits buried Hijazi and came to terms with the void he left, things got worse along the border.

  On February 5, Jordan accused Israeli soldiers of fatally shooting two civilians. The foll
owing day, Israel accused Arab attackers of raping a woman and killing her husband in West Jerusalem. The day after that, Jordan accused Israeli forces of attacking a village in East Jerusalem, killing ten women and children.

  By the time the two sides agreed to meet to discuss the rising death toll, Israel and Jordan had turned in a dozen complaints requesting emergency meetings.

  The delegations finally met on Monday, February 12 in the UN commission office in No Man’s Land, near Mandelbaum Gate.

  From the start, the UN-brokered meetings were thinly veiled political skirmishes between Israel and Jordan. The two countries found plenty to fight over. Often they argued over deadly shootings and serious attacks along the border. But the meetings would frequently devolve into hours of meaningless bickering.

  On that Monday afternoon, Col. Bennett L. de Ridder, the Belgian officer then leading the MAC, started the meeting with an appeal to both sides not to get bogged down in minor disputes.

  “Many of these incidents are of small importance, such as cattle straying across the demarcation line,” he said. “If we can avoid these long talks on small things which happen, we will save a lot of time.”10

  The Israelis and Jordanians wholeheartedly agreed. Then they started arguing.

  Israel and Jordan launched into a debate about whether to discuss the complaints in order of importance, or chronologically.

  Jordan wanted to start with the February 6 attack that killed ten women and children.

  This wasn’t just one incident to the Jordanians. It was a potential spark for a new war with Israel.

  “I would not be exaggerating at all if I say that it might very well lead to the breach of the peace, and the resumption of hostilities, and perhaps in a major war,” warned Azmi Bey Nashashibi, head of the Jordanian delegation.11