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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  Collaborator.

  Beware of the collaborator: Abu Fadi.*

  To call someone a collaborator in Jerusalem is to make them a marked man. Abu Fadi wore it as a badge of honor. He wielded it as a weapon. He used the fear his neighbors on Assael Street had of collaborators to intimidate. He was not cowed. He was proud.

  Sitting in his dimly lit living room smoking cigarettes and playing backgammon with a friend one afternoon in 2007, Abu Fadi said he didn’t care what his Arab neighbors thought of him. As far as he was concerned, they could move to some other Middle East nation and live under one Arab tyrant or another.

  “Israel is the best country in the world,” he said between rolls of the dice. “Period.”

  If someone asked Abu Fadi whether he preferred to be called an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian-Israeli or a Palestinian, he would choke on the question.

  “I’m Israeli,” he said, again and again. “One hundred percent Israeli.”

  With the thick living room curtains drawn, Abu Fadi sat on the edge of his couch in dress pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt that showed off a heart-shaped tattoo on his shoulder. His den felt claustrophobic, and the smoke choked the room. It seemed like Abu Fadi had embraced his reputation as a small-time thug. He silently sized up strangers while sitting on his chocolate-colored fabric couch set with fake gold frames.

  Abu Fadi pointed to a wood carving hanging on the living room wall.

  “See that?” he asked.

  It was the shank-shaped map of Palestine as it existed under British rule until 1948, the land meant at that time to be split so two new countries—Israel and Palestine—could live side by side. The image is ubiquitous in Palestinian iconography. It serves as a reminder that there was once, not so long ago, a place called Palestine. Uncompromising Palestinian nationalists hold up the old lines as borders they hope to reclaim someday by eliminating Israel from the map. Abu Fadi looked at the image and saw something else.

  “That,” he said, “is Israel.”

  Not Palestine. Not Israel and Palestine. Just Israel.

  It’s a view not even Israeli moderates imagine when they look at the image. It’s the view of the most uncompromising of Israelis who see the land—all of the land—as the G-d-given property of the Jewish people. It’s the kind of thing you hear from armed Israeli settlers living in illegal West Bank trailer park compounds where they have defied their own government to seize more land.

  Abu Fadi didn’t care that Jews didn’t consider him one of G-d’s Chosen People. He was Israeli. A full Israeli citizen, unlike most of his neighbors on the eastern side of Assael Street. That gave him a right most of them didn’t have: to vote in Israel’s national elections. For him, that was more than enough.

  Abu Fadi didn’t just cast his own ballot in Israel’s national elections. He helped get out the vote for the party he loyally backed: Likud. The political party that gave life to Israel’s settlement movement. The party of Ariel Sharon, known as the “Butcher of Beirut,” who was forced to resign as Israel’s defense minister after being held personally responsible for the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the city’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Likud was the party of Yitzhak Shamir, who helped kill British officers ruling Palestine in the 1930s, rose to become prime minister and helped champion the settlement movement that methodically gobbled up parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than anything, for Abu Fadi, Likud was the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who sent Israeli spies to Jordan in 1997 to try to kill Hamas militant leader Khaled Mashal, and the prime minister many held responsible for sparking the 1996 “Tunnel Riots.”

  Abu Fadi’s modern political hero was Netanyahu: Bibi. Abu Fadi’s truth-teller. An Israeli Ronald Reagan who believed that the only way to peace was through strength.

  “Likud is the only party that can bring peace,” he said.

  Abu Fadi was a Likudnik through and through. He religiously attended Likud Party meetings. He collected photographs of himself shaking hands with Likud’s luminaries as if they were baseball cards of his favorite players. He had an autographed picture from Bibi. He had photos with Ehud Olmert, the Jerusalem mayor who became prime minister in 2006. Abu Fadi faithfully voted Likud. And he made sure that his wife did too. Abu Fadi proudly called himself a “son of the state.” A son of Israel.

  “What I like is the freedom,” he said. “Only in Israel can you say what you think.”

  The Political Pugilist of Assael

  Abu Fadi was the political pugilist of Assael. He bulldozed people with views so extreme his neighbors didn’t know what to say. He was to the right of most Israelis when it came to the idea of a Palestinian state. Although much of his family lived in Hebron, although his youngest brother became a member of the Palestinian Authority police force, Abu Fadi was opposed to the creation of an independent Palestine. Sometimes he even pushed the extremists’ argument that the Palestinians were an invented people with no historic claims to a land once called Palestine.

  He was aghast at the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip after Israeli forces removed all of the country’s settlers from the Mediterranean enclave in 2005. To him, the 2007 takeover was a sign that Palestinians should never be allowed to govern themselves, that they would always pose a risk to Israel.

  “I have not recognized the Palestinians as a people, let alone their state,” he said. “They have Gaza—that’s enough for them. It’s even too big for them.”

  Abu Fadi wasn’t willing to cede more ground to Palestinian politicians for any proposed peace deal. He saw it the way uncompromising Israelis saw the landscape.

  “There are 22 Arab countries,” he said. “They have a lot of land. Israel is small.”

  Abu Fadi arrived on Assael Street with a fearsome reputation—one he did little to dispel.

  “It was known at the time that he was a collaborator,” said Judith Green, who moved to the street above Assael in the 1980s, shortly before Abu Fadi arrived in the neighborhood. “We found out that he was planted there as a scout, a kind of lookout, to keep an eye on the streets below.”

  Abu Fadi became part of the neighborhood when he married Imm Fadi. He was 21. She was 17. Imm Fadi’s family was woven into the fabric of Abu Tor, from the ridgeline to the valley below. Her father bought the property on Assael Street when it was being used as a temporary sheep stable. When Imm Fadi got married, her new husband paid the property taxes and transformed the shell of a building into their new home.

  By the time he moved to Assael Street in the 1990s, Abu Fadi’s thick, wavy hair was beginning to give way, leaving behind small brown patches above his ears and random strands that did nothing to conceal his baldness. Abu Fadi seemed suspicious, wary of people’s intentions and always prepared to defend his views.

  Before Abu Fadi and his family moved to Assael, their neighbors said, they had been run out of two other communities.

  In the late 1970s, Abu Fadi and his wife moved to Al Ram, a small West Bank town between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Abu Fadi started working with the town’s Israeli-backed Village League, a move seen by Palestinian nationalists at the time as working for the enemy.

  The Village Leagues were Israel’s equivalent of South Africa’s Apartheid-era Bantustans—they were efforts to prop up co-opted allies in constrained positions of power meant to retain Israel’s political and military dominance over the Palestinians.

  The Village Leagues were created during Likud’s first years as Israel’s ruling party. Israel picked the members of the Village Leagues and chose people it thought would be malleable allies who could counter the influence of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

  Members of the Village Leagues were given enough power and support to clamp down on their fellow Palestinians. They grilled drivers at checkpoints. They acted as the security arm of the Israeli government. They wer
e textbook examples of collaborators.

  It was an accusation that Abu Fadi was willing to fight over. Again and again. Abu Fadi’s views didn’t win him much favor with his neighbors. Neither did the stories that came to Assael with him.

  No one on Assael sowed more confusion than Abu Fadi. He quietly reported his neighbors when they tried to build new verandas for their houses without securing building permits from the city. He argued with them over parking and politics. People on the street heard shouts and screams from Abu Fadi’s house that hinted at violent fights inside. They got used to seeing Abu Fadi wave his gun when things on the street got tense.

  “Abu Fadi scared everybody,” his wife said. “They would fear him.”

  Abu Fadi spent hours smoking and drinking coffee at his neighbors’ houses. Though they saw Abu Fadi as a collaborator, the families on Assael repeatedly turned to him for advice. They asked for help getting construction permits from the city. They asked him how to prevent the city from demolishing their homes. Sometimes he’d help. Sometimes he wouldn’t. He could be mercurial in deciding when and for whom he would step in.

  “He would control them,” Imm Fadi said. “He had a controlling personality.”

  “The Anaconda of Assael”

  For many, Abu Fadi was like a dark cloud hanging over the street. When there were problems on Assael, they were more often between Abu Fadi and his Arab neighbors than between Arab and Jewish residents of the street.

  “Abu Fadi is the black snake of the neighborhood,” said one of his Arab neighbors on Assael. “The Anaconda.”

  Unlike the other Arab homeowners on the street, Abu Fadi had no problems getting the permits he needed in the 1980s to build a new house for his family to replace the abandoned ruins on his wife’s family land. That only fueled suspicions that Abu Fadi was a collaborator. Abu Fadi did little to dissuade his neighbors from having that notion.

  “If there was a problem, Abu Fadi could fix it,” Imm Fadi said.

  It was better to be on Abu Fadi’s good side. Those who weren’t, those who knew his reputation, made sure that Abu Fadi didn’t feel welcome on Assael Street.

  In Jerusalem, there could be no greater disgrace for anyone—Palestinian or Israeli—than to be called a collaborator. A traitor to your country. To your people. To your religion.

  Jerusalem has been the setting for some of history’s most epic betrayals.

  King David’s son Absalom betrayed his father and stole his throne. The Abu Tor hillside is said to be the place where David’s spies waited for word from allies inside the city walls about the fate of the kingdom.

  Down the valley from Abu Tor, Judas betrayed Jesus Christ with a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane. Some say Judas then hanged himself in the Valley of Slaughter below Abu Tor.

  Like the Bible, history is rarely kind to collaborators.

  French women who collaborated with Nazi occupiers during World War II had their heads publicly shaved before they were paraded through a dangerous gauntlet of men spitting taunts and threats. In the fight to create Israel, Jewish militants killed dozens of Jews accused of helping British rulers in Palestine.

  The fate of small-time collaborators could be just as unforgiving.

  During the fight against South Africa’s racist Apartheid regime in the 1980s, black activists would fill rubber tires with gasoline, force them over the heads of suspected collaborators and set them ablaze. The deadly tactic was known as “necklacing.”

  Palestinian collusion with Zionists working to establish the state of Israel was so controversial that religious scholars issued a decree in 1935 meant to stop Muslims from selling land to Jewish buyers. The fatwa declared that anyone who sold land to Jewish buyers was not only taking land from Muslims, they were “a traitor to Allah.”1

  Collaborators were deemed heretics who should be shunned, if not killed, even if the collaborator was your son, father, sister or mother. Their crimes were so great, the scholars declared, that they were to be denied a Muslim burial.2

  The stigma only got worse after 1948. Palestinians developed different terms for collaborators: Agent. Informant. Land dealer.

  They all became targets. They were ostracized and demonized. They would be killed in the cruelest of ways. Lynch mobs pulled them from their homes and hanged them from lampposts. Their bodies were dragged through the streets behind slow-moving motorcycles for all to see.

  Ameel.

  During the first intifada, when Abu Fadi and his family moved to Assael, more than 700 suspected Palestinian collaborators were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The backlash against those who sided with Israel increased during the second intifada.

  In 2001, as the al Aqsa Intifada was intensifying, Yasser Arafat oversaw the execution of two accused Palestinian collaborators. One was shot dead in Gaza City. The other was killed in Nablus, one city at the center of the uprising. Thousands gathered in the West Bank town’s square to watch six masked Palestinian Authority police officers shoot the man. Palestinian leaders justified the killings as unfortunate outgrowths of the fight for freedom.3

  “The collaborator betrays his own people either because he is in a position of weakness and suffering (i.e., under torture or in need of health care during detention, etc.) and/or perceives the occupying power to be invincible, and he and his people are hopelessly weak,” wrote Palestinian historian Saleh Abdel Jawad in an article at the time of the second intifada titled “The Classification and Recruitment of Collaborators.”4

  “This is why if we look today it is difficult to find Israelis who collaborate with Palestinians,” he wrote. “However there are many cases of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, because at the time, the Jews were also in a position of similar weakness.”

  Jawad’s piece was part of a one-day conference held in 2001 to discuss what participants saw as the insidious role of collaborators in undermining the Palestinian uprising.

  “The Palestinian collaborator is an expression of Israel’s larger ‘defense’ policies,” he wrote in his presentation. “Israel is one of those preeminent countries, whose interest in acquiring information has historically acted as a main part of its military power and as a means of control. Collaborators are a part of this process of information gathering alongside the satellites, sensitive listening equipment, wiretapping, unmanned drones, not to mention access to data from schools, banks and other bureaucratic paper trails.

  “The Palestinian collaborator in the Israeli strategy also serves the purpose of creating mistrust, spreading confusion and undermining collective self-confidence within Palestinian society.”5

  Ameel.

  “They Slaughtered Us”

  More than once, Abu Fadi’s home was hit by Molotov cocktails. Abu Fadi enclosed the front of his house in iron shutters that made it look like a movie-sized armored tank. But the attacks still kept coming.

  Some nights the family would be awoken by the sound of shattered glass and stones slamming into their roof, a reminder of the hatred and hostility right outside their door.

  Some mornings they would come out to find new graffiti scrawled on the stone walls of Assael Street: Beware of the collaborator: Abu Fadi.

  Perhaps the biggest confrontation on the street took place when Abu Fadi’s family got into a feud with one of the neighbors over borrowed holiday lights.

  Abu Fadi had loaned strings of lights to the Mujahed family a few doors down so they could hang them for a wedding. It was a common courtesy on a street where someone always seemed to be hosting a celebration of a wedding, birthday or religious holiday. This time, the lights didn’t come back right away. After a month of waiting, one of Abu Fadi’s sons went by to find out where they were. Ramadan was coming up and his family wanted the lights back to decorate their home. The young Mujahed searched his house and found a bag of lights. But they weren’t the rig
ht ones.

  The two young men started arguing. Their voices rose as they threw insults at each other. The younger Mujahed said something about Imm Fadi, an affront about his neighbor’s mom that he probably knew might trigger a neighborhood brawl. And it did. Curses gave way to pushes, pushes turned into punches. Then came the bats and stones. Blood spattered the stone stairs and iron gates as the brawl spilled out onto the cobblestone street. The families issued calls for help—for reinforcements. Dozens of friends and relatives rushed to Assael to join the fight. Abu Fadi waved his gun around as assailants forced their way into his house and rampaged through the rooms.

  “They slaughtered us,” Imm Fadi said.

  Stones smashed into metal gates and car windows. The shouts, screams, curses and accusations woke the neighborhood. Israeli soldiers and police eventually turned up and people scattered. They brought out their dogs to search Abu Fadi’s home for weapons. Abu Fadi and his sons were hauled off to jail, along with some of the neighbors.

  “It was terrible,” said Sara Arnold, who was at her home on the western side of Assael as the feud cascaded down the street. “I heard shots. I didn’t know if it was firecrackers or not.”

  Sara, a prim, short-haired blond with glasses that accented her schoolteacher demeanor, counted herself one of Israel’s liberals. She backed the idea of a Palestinian state and worked with young Palestinian students in poor Jerusalem neighborhoods like Beit Hanina. She opposed Israeli settlements in the West Bank and didn’t think much of Netanyahu. She’d moved to a small place on Assael Street in the late 1990s when things with Israelis and Palestinians seemed to be heading in the right direction. Netanyahu and Arafat signed peace deals—and violence appeared to be on the wane.

  There was a sense that Israelis and Palestinians might not have to live their lives in perpetual conflict. Maybe. Sara and other Jewish residents of Abu Tor would walk down a few blocks to buy things from the Palestinian shops where boys from Assael would hang out.