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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  The family spent years working to make the money they needed to construct a three-story apartment building on a wide, open slope.

  Mohammed Bazlamit moved to the building with his wife and four kids in 2000. He’d gone into debt to build the place, but it was worth it. They had space for everyone. The family set up a small carpentry business on the ground floor. Their business profited because the town was on the road running between Jerusalem and Jericho, near the Dead Sea.

  The Bazlamit boys and their families were settling into their new home outside Jerusalem when the city started burning. On the last Thursday in September 2000, hundreds of Israeli riot police protected opposition leader Ariel Sharon and a group of Likud Party members as they walked up to the 35-acre compound above the Western Wall and across the site that once held the first two Jewish temples—the Temple Mount.

  Palestinians were outraged by what they saw as another attempt by Israel’s right wing to reclaim the plateau for Judaism, to build a new Jewish temple and destroy Islam’s holy sites in Jerusalem. After 45 minutes, Sharon and his allies descended amid volleys of stones, trash and chairs.42 Dozens of people were injured as the protests grew.

  “The Temple Mount is in our hands—and will remain in our hands,” Sharon said after the visit. “It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount.”43

  Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned the visit as “a dangerous process conducted by Sharon against Islamic sacred places.”44

  Sharon saw nothing wrong with his visit and rejected implications that he was stirring up trouble.

  “What provocation is there when Jews come to visit the place with a message of peace?” he said. “I’m sorry about the injured, but it is the right of Jews in Israel to visit the Temple Mount.”45

  The clashes that followed only grew in size, scope and intensity. Coming one day before the week’s biggest prayers at al Aqsa, Sharon’s visit set the stage for a bigger confrontation. Palestinian demonstrators wound up that Friday’s prayers by throwing stones at Jewish worshippers praying down below at the Western Wall. Riot police were ready. They fired rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas and live rounds as protestors spilled out of the Old City and spread across East Jerusalem neighborhoods.

  By day’s end, at least seven Palestinians were dead—the first martyrs of the second intifada. To the surprise of many Israelis, the outrage wasn’t contained to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This time, it stretched into Israel. Arab-Israelis, who make up nearly 20 percent of the country’s population, took to the streets, where 12 were killed. The clashes marked the beginning of a new fissure in Israel. Jewish-Israelis began more and more to look upon the Arab citizens as a potential fifth column, a possible security risk that they couldn’t contain with concrete walls and checkpoints.

  Two weeks after Sharon’s inflammatory visit to the Temple Mount, two Israeli soldiers made a wrong turn and ended up in Palestinian Authority custody in Ramallah. In scenes captured on video and shown around the world, an angry mob stormed the Palestinian police station and brutally lynched the two reservists. The image from that day, seared in the minds of Israelis, was of the large, surging crowd cheering as a young man in a white T-shirt stood in an open window of the police station and triumphantly raised his hands in the air, as the blood of the Israelis dripped from his open palms.

  Very quickly, Israelis rallied around a new plan for dealing with the Palestinian problem: Build a wall. A security barrier. Bulldozers and planners fanned out along Israel’s border with the West Bank and started walling off the country, regardless of the international line separating the two. Miles of concrete and electronic fencing cut into parts of the West Bank so the walls could protect rapidly expanding Israeli settlements that had already eaten away at land that once might have been part of a Palestinian state.

  Israeli leaders characterized the project as an unfortunate security barrier and dismissed all suggestions that it was an attempt to unilaterally redraw the Middle East map once again by taking more Palestinian land.

  “They are annexing part of the West Bank to Israel,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Yasser Abed Rabbo said in 2002 as the first walls were going up outside Jerusalem. “All of this aims at the same thing: to limit the Palestinian lands.”46

  Initially, the US government expressed reservations about the idea.

  “I don’t know if you’re going to solve the problem with a fence, unless you’re solving the underlying problems of the Palestinians feeling disenfranchised,” Colin Powell, who was serving as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, said at the time.47

  At the end of 2003, Israel gave the go-ahead to build a ten-mile stretch of the wall between Jerusalem and Azariya. And these were walls. Not the less-obtrusive electric fencing that ran across some parts of the West Bank. These were 26-foot-tall concrete slabs, rising one by one as the wall snaked through the dense hillside neighborhoods surrounding Jerusalem.

  The Bazlamits weren’t sure exactly where the wall was going to go. They talked to neighbors in Azariya who told them different stories. They spoke to Palestinians working on the crews building the wall, who only knew so much. The only thing they knew for sure was that the route of the wall appeared to be heading right for their home.

  Unbeknownst to them the route had already been decided, with the help of the Catholic nuns living on the hillside above them. The nuns ran a small foster home for Palestinian kids from Jerusalem and the West Bank.

  In early 2003, Israeli military officials came to see the sisters to ask them an existential question: Which side of the wall did they want to be on? There wasn’t an easy answer. But they had to decide. If they chose to be on the western side, “inside” Israel, then they’d be cut off from Palestinian families they worked with in the West Bank. If they chose the eastern side, “outside” the walls, they would be cut off from Jerusalem and the invaluable social network the city offered.48

  They choose to be inside the wall.

  The Israeli officers came back to show the nuns a map of the wall route that circled around their property. But when the construction crews showed up, the bulldozers pushed through the church land.49

  Margaret Cone and Deal Hudson, Christian travelers from America who met with the nuns later, said the women were aghast at what was happening.

  “What are you doing?” Sister Lodi shouted at the men.50

  An Israeli soldier pointed a gun at the nun and gave her a curt order.

  “Sister, go back in your house,” he said. “We are not to talk to you; we are ordered to come here to do what we are ordered to do.”51

  The crews pushed through the convent’s orchard of olive and lemon trees as the nuns helplessly looked on. At least they could say that they were inside the wall. The Bazlamits weren’t so lucky.

  When the bulldozers finally came over the ridge, they carved a route right through the Bazlamits’ backyard. The construction crews started erecting towering sections of concrete, cutting the Bazlamits in Azariya off from Jerusalem. The new dividing line ran through the Bazlamit land once again.

  “We spent all our money and even went into debt in order to have a good life for our kids, and look what happened,” Mohammed said.

  The wall turned a 25-minute drive from Assael Street into a circuitous trek that could take an hour or longer.

  More importantly, even if Israeli leaders wouldn’t say it, the Bazlamits knew what the wall meant. Anyone living on the other side—the outside—was no longer going to be considered part of Jerusalem. The wall would create a physical and psychological divide that was likely to be followed by an official revocation of their status as Jerusalemites. It was one way to whittle away at the Palestinian population in the city. But there was nothing the family could do.

  “We are undesirable creatures,” Mohammed said in 2007. “I fee
l it, and, now, every Arab is made to feel it.”

  The Bazlamits first tried to beautify the wall by planting orange, olive and almond saplings at its base. Kids came to paint defiant slogans on the concrete wall: Ya Sharon, ya kalb. Sharon, you dog.

  Nawal couldn’t help but notice a pattern. More walls cutting them off from the life they once knew. Each time, by a matter of feet.

  “They kicked us out before,” Nawal said during one 2007 visit to the family land in Azariya. “And now they have kicked us out again.”

  Worse than having Israel’s new wall as their backyard fence, the Bazlamits’ carpentry business had just been crippled. People from Jerusalem weren’t going to drive a traffic-snarled 45 minutes to get to their little family shop. It wouldn’t be long before they would have to shut the shop down altogether.

  “This closure, this siege, only makes the conflict bigger,” said Mohammed.

  Dealing with the long drive might have been tolerable. But the thought of losing their Jerusalem residency was not. The concrete walls conveyed an unmistakable message.

  “They have us surrounded,” Nawal said that afternoon while walking along the concrete wall behind her sons’ apartment building.

  Dressed in a long black coat with a white scarf covering her hair, Nawal smiled at the graffiti as she walked in the shadows of the gray barrier. There was nothing they could do. So the Bazlamits moved back to Abu Tor, where the families crowded into the expanding warren of squat homes on Assael Street.

  Building on the land had always been difficult. Israeli laws made it virtually impossible to get permits. The problems stemmed from Israel’s reliance on antiquated laws used to determine the legitimate owner of a piece of land. The constant churn of countries, empires and invading armies made hanging on to authentic property records a challenge.

  While the laws made it hard, the government made it harder. Jerusalem officials always seemed to come up with one reason or another for denying building permits. Paperwork problems. Design problems. Construction problems. The rationale for saying “no” seemed to be limitless.

  “We feel like they are always trying to kick us out,” Nawal said.

  So the Bazlamits built without official permission. They had to. The family kept growing, and it needed more space. The kids were spilling out of the compound and taking over the street. The young Bazlamit boys sped down to the dead end on their bikes and did wheelies as the road sloped back toward their house. They used Assael’s walls, gates and garage doors to kick balls that very often sailed into people’s protected yards. The kids would either climb over the fences to rescue the balls or ring the doorbell and sheepishly ask for the ball back.

  The constant sound of kids playing on the street didn’t go over well with all the neighbors. Some were annoyed at constantly having to throw balls back into the street. Others were startled to find Bazlamit boys climbing over their fences. One longtime neighbor, Malka Joudan, complained that the “Arabs”—the kids—deliberately screamed and shouted when they went past her house, launching her Chihuahua into a barking frenzy all afternoon.

  Each day before dawn during the month of Ramadan, one of the Bazlamit men would walk down the street and through the neighborhood banging a bass drum to wake families up for the big suhur meal meant to get them through the day until the iftar dinner after the sunset. The pounding of the bass drum couldn’t help but wake up everyone in the neighborhood as the echoes thumped across the hillside.

  God, Graffiti and a New Divide

  No one on Assael was more bothered by the Bazlamits than Carol, an Israeli-American realtor who lived across the street with her two daughters. Carol’s arched, blue iron garden door opened onto three small steps, right across the street from the Bazlamit compound. The steps were a perfect place for the neighborhood boys to sit, drink tea, smoke sticky, apple-flavored tobacco from a tall shisha water pipe, and watch what went on down the street.

  Carol moved to Assael in 1998 and loved her little cottage, especially the small garden with the white picket fence. She adored Abu Tor, especially Assael Street. Her daughters played with Palestinian girls on the other side of the street. There was something romantically poetic about it: Jewish and Muslim girls living across from each other, playing, laughing, creating a common, guileless bond that could transcend the bitterness and hatred that clouded their parents’ lives. Carol stood in her door on Assael Street and smiled with pride as she watched their lives unfolding.

  “The thing for me that was so beautiful about that is the girls had no common language,” Carol said, “but they would find common language in their play.”

  Carol imagined being part of the new generation of Jerusalemites who would conjure up a solution that had eluded the city for eons.

  “In my fantasy world, people would live together and it would be an ideal world,” she said. “It wasn’t so much.”

  At some point, for Carol, things went sour on Assael. She loved the girls right across the street. But not the Bazlamit kids. They seemed unruly and inconsiderate. The boys were always sitting on the steps. She could never keep them all straight and remember who was whose son. They were always tossing candy wrappers and soda cans into her garden. They were always bickering over the limited parking spaces—all on the eastern side of the street.

  They just seemed to be disrespectful.

  “It wasn’t a racist thing at all,” Carol said. “They were just not good people. Their last name could have been Cohen, and had they behaved the way they behaved, I would have had exactly the same issues with them.”

  Relations became ever more strained. There were more shouting matches in the street. One time someone vandalized Carol’s car with paint. The Bazlamits found Carol to be cool and unkind. Nawal complained that Carol reported her young kids to Israeli police simply because they had sneaked into her yard to pick some fruit. She had very little to say about Carol at all. She dismissed her neighbor with a thinly veiled jab: “One can tell when a person wants to live together and when they don’t want to coexist.”

  Carol started to feel the same way about her neighbors. In 2003, she decided to transform her tiny, unkempt yard into a courtyard so she and her kids would have more space outside their cozy house, which seemed to be getting smaller as the girls got bigger. Carol replaced the small rectangle of dry grass with wide tiles she’d kept in storage. She installed new benches and replaced the white picket fence rising over Assael Street with a cement block wall. Carol painted the inside of the new wall with Southwestern pastels of yellow and blue. She added red, blue and yellow pillow accents, a wood table and dark blue umbrella for shade. Inside, it was serene and beautiful, a little oasis in Abu Tor. From the outside, the whitewashed wall was ugly. It was easy to see where the old wall ended and the new one began. The bottom five feet of the retaining wall was made of rough-hewn stone blocks, cemented in six straight rows. The top five feet, where the white picket fence once protected Carol’s home from the street, was smooth, whitewashed concrete that glowed in the moonlight on Assael Street like a tantalizing blank canvas.

  In 2006, Zakaria and Nawal took one of the most important trips of their lives. They flew to Saudi Arabia to make their pilgrimage to Mecca, a spiritual journey that is one of the five pillars of Islam.

  While the couple was away, their family planned a celebration like no other. They put up strings of lights and balloons. They planned the lamb slaughter and started cooking days before the couple’s return. They ordered dozens of plastic chairs and rented a tent for the courtyard. At night, a few of the younger Bazlamit guys carried paint and brushes out into the darkened dead-end street so they could decorate the walls of their compound. Like their neighbors across the way, the Bazlamits had gradually walled themselves off from the street. What was once a low stone wall was now a tall patchwork of cement blocks topped by sheets of corrugated tin. The Bazlamits painted red crescent
moons and blue stars to signify the couple’s auspicious journey to Mecca.

  “Welcome to the pilgrims,” they spray-painted in Arabic. “A blessed Hajj.”

  They painted images of the Ka’aba, the towering black marble cube that the couple joined thousands of other Muslims in walking around seven times as a sign of their unified devotion to Allah.

  Underneath the spray-painted Ka’aba, the men wrote: “May all your sins be forgiven.”

  They used yellow paint to make the image of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Prophet Muhammad, led by the archangel Gabriel, ascended to heaven.

  But they didn’t stop there.

  As the paint was drying, they turned around, crossed the street and kept painting on Carol’s blank, white concrete garden wall. When Carol woke up the next morning, she was stunned to see the Arabic graffiti on her wall. She didn’t know what it said. She had no idea that it was meant to mark one of the most important moments for the family across the way. She thought the graffiti might be something spiteful. Something hateful. She called the city and asked them to send someone out to paint over the vandalism.

  A few hours later, Carol saw the small city vehicle pull up outside and went to say hello. It was a cold, gray, drizzly day so she offered them tea or coffee. When she came out a few minutes later, the two Jewish city workers had been joined by a Palestinian guy from the municipality, two Bazlamit men and another neighbor.

  The city official seemed irked, but Carol didn’t know why.

  “Why did you complain?” he asked Carol.

  “I didn’t complain,” Carol replied. “I made a request for the city to remove some graffiti.”

  The men gathered in front of her house talked amongst themselves in Arabic—and they weren’t happy. The city official explained to Carol that the graffiti was meant to welcome the Bazlamits back from their pilgrimage to Mecca. He told her it was an honor for the couple and a celebration for the family. Then they told her she shouldn’t ask the city to paint over it. Carol was shocked. Someone had written something in Arabic on her wall. She asked the city to come take care of it. And now she was being treated like she had done something wrong?