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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  For the most part, the Machsomis in Ma’ale Adumim were isolated from the violence outside. The armed settlement security made sure no suicide bombers got into Ma’ale Adumim.

  Rachel was getting used to life in Ma’ale Adumim when she received another surprising message from Iran: Her sister Malka was alive. Rachel’s relatives had tracked Malka down in Iran. They brought Rachel pictures of her sister and her two kids: a boy and a girl.

  The photos brought tears to Rachel’s eyes, and she thought about that day in Iran when the direction of their lives diverged forever. She wondered if she’d ever see her sister again. It seemed impossible. Malka was a citizen of a nation whose leaders saw Israel as a cancer in the Middle East that needed to be removed.

  “It’s just a pity that we couldn’t save her,” Rachel said in 2014. “We couldn’t get her out.”

  “Deport the Troublemakers”

  Rachel and her family were forever grateful that they’d left Iran. To them, Israel was a beacon of opportunity in a region filled with tyrants, dictators and kings who used fear, intimidation and ignorance to keep a thumb on their citizens. At the Israeli tax authority where she worked, Rivka saw Israeli equality day after day. She saw the Arab workers brought in under the country’s affirmative action programs.

  “There is that equality between Jews and Arabs,” she said. “They are given opportunities to integrate into our society.”

  In small measures, Rivka tried to build bridges with the Arabs who worked in her office.

  “We have a cleaning lady who is Arab, and I even give her my bank card so she can take out money for me,” she said. “She goes in the morning and buys bread and milk for the office because we can’t get out.”

  Rivka and her husband moved in with her mom in Ma’ale Adumim, a decision driven by financial constraints and a desire to be there for her mother as she got older. Rivka inherited her parents’ hospitality gene. She always made sure her guests in the busy house—visitors, brothers, sisters, husband, nephews, nieces—had something to eat or drink: homemade soup, kibbe, warm bread, some more juice or soda, sweet tea or coffee, honey-soaked baklava . . .

  When Rivka looked at the Palestinians, she saw people who appeared to be doing better than she was, people who didn’t seem like they had much to complain about.

  “It’s not that I’m jealous, but they have everything,” Rivka said. “Look at the universities. They study. They get degrees. They’re doctors. They have everything. So what are they lacking? Just to rule themselves?”

  So they didn’t have the right to vote. Rivka wondered what more the Palestinians wanted.

  “They are the best car mechanics,” she said. “They are the best laborers in construction. The best builders. They’re also in medicine. Manual labor. So what happens in their villages? They’re dealing more with explosives there.”

  After decades at Ma’ale Adumim, Rivka came to see the settlements as important security buffers, especially at a time when Islamic extremists from groups like the Islamic State seemed poised to turn their sights on Israel.

  “This is for our security,” she said ruefully, thinking back on those days on Assael Street. “It would be so much better if there was that wonderful neighborliness, that harmony among Jews and Arabs. It was so much more fun. Today, it’s really not. I remember my childhood, when we were neighbors with them, and I really miss those days. It’s lacking in my life. As a child, I wasn’t scared to walk around the village that was all Arabs. Today, there’s no way that I would go into an Arab village.”

  Weary of another spiral of violence, Rivka wondered if it wasn’t time for the Israeli government to start expelling troublemaking Palestinians and their families—a controversial idea known as “transfer” whose popularity has waxed and waned over the years, depending on the levels of anxiety and violence.

  “The people that make problems, they need to be deported with their families so others can see and be an example,” she said. “That way they’ll start getting scared and then we’ll live the way we should—in peace. As soon as we use power against them and deport all these problematic types, then it will be quiet.”

  Rivka didn’t see the point of giving the Palestinians any land for a state.

  “It doesn’t matter how much we give them, it will never be enough,” she said. “Even when we’re not here, we’ll always be a bother. Even if we’re somewhere else, we’ll always be a nuisance: because we’re Jews.”

  Of Rachel’s kids, Pini, who spent his career in the Israeli military, grew up to be the most conciliatory. Pini saw the inequities. There was no question: Jews living in West Jerusalem had it better than the Arabs in East Jerusalem.

  “If we compare the infrastructure in the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, I also wouldn’t accept that type of discrimination,” Pini told his oldest brother and sisters one night in 2014 at their mother’s home in Ma’ale Adumim. “You see the differences very clearly. It’s logical that there will be bitterness.”

  Pini’s military intelligence work in the occupied West Bank led him to the Jordan Valley where he met regularly with people like Saeb Erekat, one of the Palestinians’ leading political negotiators. There seemed to be plenty of common ground between them when they met. Perhaps because he knew Arabic well and spent so much time in the West Bank, Pini saw Palestinians as more than bloodthirsty extremists scheming to destroy Israel.

  When tensions were low, Pini took some of his siblings into Jericho for lunch at a local restaurant run by some Palestinians he knew from work.

  Jericho was one of the first places freed from direct Israeli military control after the 1993 Oslo Accords set the stage for the rise of the Palestinian Authority. To the Machsomis, the humid town, surrounded by miles of date palms, was a city of legend, the first target Moses chose for attack when he sent Joshua and his army to conquer biblical Canaan as the Israelites fled from slavery in Egypt.

  For days, according to the Bible, Joshua and his soldiers marched around Jericho’s walls with priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. On the seventh day, the priests blew their ram’s horns, the shofar, until Jericho’s walls came tumbling down. Joshua and his army slaughtered almost everyone in the city, man, woman and child.28

  The Machsomis were excited and anxious to be driving into Jericho. It was like putting their heads in a lion’s mouth. They trusted Pini, but they knew things could always go bad very quickly. When they arrived at the restaurant, Avi was stunned to hear Pini talking to the owners in flawless Arabic.

  “I felt for a second that it wasn’t my brother,” Avi said of Pini. “He spoke better than the Arabs.”

  Because of his sympathies, because of his command of Arabic, Pini had always been something of a black sheep in the family. His younger sister Liora became one of the most religious kids. She got married at 18, had eight kids by the time she was 40, and became a grandmother at 43. She started wearing a tight wrap to cover her hair and long, plain skirts—a style often associated with religious settlers. In time, she became one of those who believed that Jews had a biblical, G-d-given right to the land. To Tel Aviv. To Jerusalem. To Hebron. To Nablus. To Jericho.

  “It’s our land,” she said. “They need to understand that it’s ours.”

  A little bit of freedom emboldened the Palestinians, she said, giving them the courage to create chaos.

  Liora’s animosity increased in the summer of 2014 when three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank were kidnapped and killed.

  “They came from Halhoul, by the way,” said Avi, who found no small irony in the fact that the killers came from the same village in which he and his family were treated like royalty by their Arab neighbors from Assael Street in 1967.

  The kidnapping of the three teens was followed by the abduction and murder of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a seven-week war in Gaza, and a spike
in lone-wolf attacks in Jerusalem that ignited concerns that Israelis and Palestinians were heading for a third Palestinian uprising.

  “They run over little girls, they run over soldiers,” said Liora, who backed Israel in 2014 when it resurrected its controversial policy of demolishing the family homes of Palestinian assailants. “If we don’t do something to them when they murder us, then they will continue. It’s a contagious disease.”

  Liora lampooned the Israeli government for not cracking down hard enough on the troublemakers.

  “They are the wise men of Chelm,” she said, harking back to the Jewish folkloric image of fools. “They are not dealing with the root of the problem.”

  “How do you solve the problem?” Pini asked his sisters in Ma’ale Adumim at the end of a long night talking with his siblings about their childhood in Abu Tor.

  “Deport them,” Rivka said.

  “Deport whom?” Pini asked. “Whom?”

  “I am telling you, this land is ours,” Liora told Pini. “I have no problem taking care of their infrastructure. They should live. They have children too. They should have property, because it’s hard to live. But this land is ours, and they should not give even a little piece of it to them.”

  If Liora was in charge, Israel would expel the troublemakers and allow only the few who risked their lives to protect Jewish people, the modern-day “righteous gentiles,” to remain. Asked if that would include her childhood friend from Assael, Samira, Liora was noncommittal.

  “I’d have to see her first,” said Liora, who liked to remember Assael as she’d left it.

  “I want it in my imagination to be the way it was when I lived there,” she said. “I was really happy there. Now it’s not the same, even if Jews and Arabs do live next to each other.”

  The Next Dividing Line

  That was certainly true on Assael, where the Joudans walled themselves off from their old friends and neighbors across the street. They encouraged the city to install a thick iron door to close off the stairway that ran past their home. The barrier prevented Palestinians from lower Abu Tor from using the path as a shortcut through the neighborhood. It cut off the only path on Assael Street connecting the Jewish hilltop to the Arab hillside.

  Yanki gained a reputation as the guy who “kept an eye” on his Arab neighbors. Like his mom, Yanki didn’t think twice about calling Israeli authorities to report Arabs across the way whom he suspected of illegally building on their own property. The Abu Tor of today, he said in 2014, was not the Abu Tor of yesteryear. Too much had happened since then to bridge the divide: years of stone-throwing; Palestinians cheering for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; suicide bombings; rockets from Gaza; a guy from Abu Tor, Mu’atez Hijazi, trying to kill a right-wing Israeli. It all made one thing clear to Yanki: You can’t trust Arabs.

  “My mom helped a lot,” Yanki said. “My mother and father helped so many times. But, you know what? When I see the bombs explode, when I see my fucking neighbor here killing a guy in the city, Hijazi, when my neighbor was clapping and singing ‘Bomb Tel Aviv,’ I hate them all.”

  Yanki didn’t see his neighbors across the street as people who wanted peace. He saw an ungrateful community that had forgotten who brought them electricity, who brought them paved roads, who brought them running water, who brought them jobs and medical care and a life better than anything they could have dreamed of under Arab rule.

  “They don’t know,” Yanki said. “They grew up like this, so they want America. But they don’t know that their parents already got America—from Israel.”

  If they weren’t happy in Abu Tor and they wanted to live under Palestinian rule, Yanki said, his neighbors could move to the Gaza Strip and deal with its militant Hamas government.

  “They don’t know what it is to suffer,” he said of his Arab neighbors. “So that’s why I tell them: ‘Go to Gaza. That’s the way you’re supposed to live until now. Then, appreciate it: Israel.’ They don’t. They don’t want to live like me. They want to take over me.”

  Like Yanki, Avi Machsomi lost faith in peace talks. He came to question the idea that giving up land would really solve fundamental problems. But he was willing to let go of some areas—those places where Jewish people didn’t go. Avi ticked off the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhoods he’d be willing to give to the Palestinians: Shufat. Jabal Muqaber. Issawaya.

  “I don’t want them,” he said. “They can stay there. We can put a fence up.”

  It was a plan with practical benefits for every Israeli driver.

  “There will be more space on the road,” he said. “It’s not because I am a racist. There are Arabs that I work with that I really love. But there are other Arabs, let them stay there.”

  Avi was ten when the fence came down in Abu Tor and the neighborhood underwent its renaissance. But that environment, he said, was almost impossible to re-create. He especially felt the divide with the neighboring Palestinian town of Azariya, on the hillside between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem.

  “When we grew up in the neighborhood it was Jews and Arabs, living together,” Avi said. “Now I can’t be friends with those in Azariya. I work with a lot of Arabs and we get along. If it was us and them trying to make peace, we’d have peace in a week. There would be no problems. No problems. Because we talk. We talk like friends and we work together. When I talk to them I ask: ‘Why? We can do it this way. You eat with us. We’re together.’ If we, Arabs and Jews, the simple people, would sit, there would be peace. It would be completely different. I don’t see any problem when we talk—Jews and Arabs. The problem is the hatred and the incitement. If I go to Azariya, I don’t know if I will come back. On the other hand, if they come here, it’s great for them. They have a nice time. They have fun.”

  In 2014, Avi figured he’d probably be OK if he went to Azariya, but he wasn’t certain.

  “There are Arabs, even if I go to Azariya, they will help me,” he said. “But we can’t trust them, because we don’t know who we will run into over there.”

  Unbeknownst to the Machsomis, their old neighbors from Assael Street were living in Azariya. It was where the Bazlamits built their small apartment building on the edge of town, where Israel built the 26-foot-tall concrete walls that cut them off from Jerusalem. The wall that had cut the Bazlamits’ property in Azariya out of Jerusalem just kept growing. The line was gerrymandered to run a jagged route across the rocky hilltops of the Judean Desert and enclose Ma’ale Adumim and the Machsomis.

  Eventually, the wall was supposed to grow to put the Machsomis on one side, inside Israel, and the Bazlamits in Azariya on the other.

  By and large, the Machsomis came to see the new dividing line as an unfortunate necessity. And if the Palestinians wanted a state, they were going to have to accept the new realities. For the Machsomis, Ma’ale Adumim and the other settlements in the West Bank would always be part of Israel.

  “There’s nothing they can do,” Avi said. “This is the situation.”

  Avi dismissed claims from Palestinian farmers in Azariya that parts of Ma’ale Adumim were built on their fields.

  “Here it was just desert,” he said. “There wasn’t a house here, so why didn’t they do anything here before? Now we’ve built here. It is what it is. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Whereas his sisters were uncompromising on what they would be willing to give up to resolve decades of tumult, Avi was not. If push came to shove, he said, he’d be willing to give up Ma’ale Adumim. Really.

  “They can have Ma’ale Adumim,” he said as his incredulous sisters showered him with friendly insults. “Do I really care? My real hope is that we live in peace and that they can come to our house. That’s the dream. My dream is that we live in peace and that we’ll live together, without hatred. No slogans.”

  While the Machsomis stayed close to Jerusalem, Maya
Joudan moved to Canada, where she and her brother Itzik both settled with their families. Like Pini Machsomi, Maya took great pride in her knowledge of Arabic and the relations she’d forged on Assael Street.

  “I had more trust in them than my own people,” she said. “I will do anything with them with huge trust in my heart.”

  Unfortunately, Maya said, it didn’t run both ways. If Jordan had won the war in 1967, how would they have treated the Israelis?

  “If it was the other way around, for one moment do you think that they would come to our home and help us?” she asked. “Do you think that they would stop the donkeys going to the well and put running water in their homes? That they would put lights in the street? Do you think they would come and introduce us to proper lighting? That they started having stoves? They went above us so quickly. Do you think they would have done that?”

  No, she said. They had much to be grateful for. So did she. Maya looked back on her childhood in Abu Tor and saw a certain kind of paradise.

  On one visit home, Maya came across the beautiful Palestinian embroidery stolen from one Arab house in 1967. The cloth sat for years in a closet at her childhood home in Abu Tor. Maya decided to bring it back to Vancouver. It had been sitting in the darkness long enough. Maya carefully ironed the hand-embroidered flower and put a cut-out photograph of her son when he was three years old in the middle. She put it in a frame and hung it above her bed in Vancouver. Something, she said, to remind her of her heritage.

  “This is my past,” Maya said. “And you need to surround yourself with things that mean something to you.”

  Five

  The Collaborator

  Ameel.

  The slur followed him everywhere he went.

  Friends would whisper it behind his back with a hiss.

  Ameeeeel.

  Assailants would shout it from the street as they tossed Molotov cocktails at his house. Guys would spray-paint the warning, the implied threat, on the stone walls outside his home on Assael Street: