After the street fight, Sara ran into a couple of them at the store. She wasn’t sure which families they came from, but her teacher instincts kicked in.
“You don’t know what you’re doing to your little brothers and sisters,” she told them. “You don’t know what you’re doing to all the little kids on the road. I saw them running into their houses. They’re going to have nightmares for years about that.”
The boys laughed at Sara and blew her off. That only fueled her frustrations. To her, Assael was an ideal place to live. The street brawls made her think twice.
“Stupid,” she said of the brawl. “That is a terrible part of their culture.”
Sara wasn’t willing to accept that kind of violence as a normal part of neighborhood living.
“It shocked me,” she said. “I worked in Bethlehem and Beit Hanina and I hadn’t seen that kind of violence. That was just really a childish kind of violence.”
It didn’t matter much what people like Sara thought. Abu Fadi and his sons weren’t afraid to settle a problem with a street fight. The neighbors would get into confrontations over the smallest of things. One American couple living on the street took to calling them the “Friday Night Fights.” One of the biggest triggers was parking—something that was always in short supply on the street.
Because it had once been little more than a ridgeline trail, Assael was so narrow that it was impossible for cars to park on both sides without blocking the street. Most of the families on the western side of Assael had off-street parking garages. And street parking on the west side of Assael was banned. The best place to park was at the end of the cul-de-sac, where about a dozen cars could park in a line under a 15-foot-tall pink stone wall on the western side of the street, below the Goeli home where the UN had prevented the Great Toilet Fight of 1966 from becoming the trigger for a bigger problem. But the lot was often full, especially at night when everyone was home.
Everyone on the eastern side of the street jealously guarded the parking spots outside their homes. Families hung hand-painted “No Parking” signs from their fences and rushed out to shout at people who ignored the warnings. As surveillance technology evolved and the prices for high-tech equipment dropped, families on Assael installed cameras outside their houses. One after the other, the residents of Assael Street set up security cameras with the lenses trained on their parking spaces and front doors. Some families ran the live feed on their television sets while they did other things around the house. So it’s no surprise that one of the biggest battles on the street between Abu Fadi and his neighbors started as a fight over parking.
One afternoon in 2009, one of the Mujahed boys parked outside Abu Fadi’s home. One of Abu Fadi’s sons came out to tell him to move it—and things quickly got out of hand. The bad blood between the two families had thickened. Neither guy was willing to back down. Abed Mujahed came out to defend his son. Abu Fadi came out to protect his boy. Abed said he was thrown down his front steps by Abu Fadi when his neighbor stormed into their house. Abu Fadi’s sons said they were pelted with stones and left with bloody gashes on their faces. Israeli police arrived and hauled men from both families off to jail.
When tempers cooled, members of a neighborhood reconciliation committee, a sulha, tried to mediate. They heard from both families and decided that Abed was in the wrong. They told Abed to pay Abu Fadi $2,500. For Abed, it was the final indignity. He stopped talking to Abu Fadi’s family altogether.
Sins of the Fathers and Their Sons
Though most of the people on Assael Street only knew Abu Fadi by reputation, there was one man who knew his history intimately: Hijazi Bazlamit, the grandson of the man shot dead on the Abu Tor hillside in 1951. The younger Hijazi and Abu Fadi shared a common history in more ways than one. Their past went back much further than this street. Back to the days when they were both young men, about the same age, trying to figure out how to adjust to life under Israeli rule.
Like Abu Fadi, Hijazi had cast his fortunes with Israel as a young man. More than anyone else on the street, because of his work as an Israeli policeman, Hijazi knew what it felt like to be called a collaborator. But the two had met even earlier. Hijazi had hired Abu Fadi to work with him at a small vegetable market. The partnership soured when Hijazi accused Abu Fadi of stealing from him. That set the tone for the two men’s tangled, lifelong relationship. Although Hijazi had spent years enforcing Israeli laws, he had no sympathy for what he considered to be Abu Fadi’s betrayal.
“It is well known that the Israeli occupation seeks to find people who are vulnerable, and he was the perfect case,” Hijazi said.
Hijazi traced Abu Fadi’s corrosive life to his childhood, from a sober young boy who was beaten by his father to a young man who fled an abusive home and found a new beginning working for Israel.
“They started giving him money,” he said of the Israeli government. “They started asking for information. They found out that he had the perfect appetite for that kind of work.”
The two didn’t cross paths again until the late 1980s, when Hijazi started moonlighting as a part-time security guard for the editor of a small East Jerusalem newspaper.
“My first day on the job, they came to me and said: ‘We’d like to introduce you to the head of security,’” he said. “I was shocked to see [Abu Fadi], because I knew he wasn’t a clean man.”
The two men didn’t talk about their past as they worked out security for the editor. When the newspaperman had to get around town, Hijazi would drive in the front of the convoy and Abu Fadi would provide security in the back.
After a few weeks on the job, Hijazi said Abu Fadi came to him with a proposal. Abu Fadi was worried that the editor would get rid of his security, so he came up with a plan to stage an attack on his convoy. Hijazi wanted no part of it. He told the editor of the plan, but his boss wanted proof. When the day of the planned ambush arrived, Hijazi said he thwarted the attack by leading the convoy down another route. He was fired by Abu Fadi that day. But that wasn’t the end of the incident. Not long after he was fired, Hijazi said he was heading home from work when a car pulled up alongside him and opened fire. The shots missed, and Hijazi sped off after his attacker. He knew who it was before the cars pulled up outside Abu Fadi’s home.
“I chased him, I hit him, and I hit him some more,” Hijazi said. “His wife and children were begging me to stop.”
Hijazi said he left Abu Fadi bruised and beaten in his home. Hijazi thought that might be the end of it—until Abu Fadi moved to Assael Street a few years later.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Hijazi said. “How has he moved into this house? On my street?”
Their history clouded their families’ relations. And it soon carried over into their sons’ relationships as well.
“He found an excellent opportunity to take revenge,” Hijazi said.
The hostility between the two men constantly simmered. Abu Fadi accused Hijazi’s young sons of spray-painting the threatening “beware of the collaborator” graffiti on Assael Street.
“If you think my sons did it, then take it to the police,” Hijazi defiantly told Abu Fadi.
Things came to a head one day in 2010 when Hijazi’s son, Ahmad, confronted Abu Fadi’s oldest son about an unpaid debt. The argument quickly got physical and Ahmad took a swing at Fadi. The two families agreed to take part in a neighborhood sulha, but it did almost nothing to defuse the situation. To the Bazlamits, it was a neighborhood fight over money. To Abu Fadi, it was a politically motivated attack. Israeli prosecutors accused Ahmad of plotting to kill a collaborator, Hijazi said.
“They made it into a political issue, but my son didn’t intend to escalate things,” Hijazi said.
Disputes kept breaking out and the two families wound up on opposite sides of a courtroom more than once. One time, the Bazlamits asked an Israeli judge to kick Abu Fadi off Assael Stree
t. They accused Abu Fadi and his sons of spreading rumors and lies about the Bazlamits.
“Please, Your Honor,” Hijazi asked the judge. “For the sake of our family, for the sake of our neighborhood, please remove them from the area. We aren’t the ones creating the problem. They are.”
The courts tried to keep the two families apart by telling them to steer clear of each other on the street, Hijazi said. But Assael was so small that it was impossible to do. Abu Fadi and his family couldn’t drive to their home on the dead-end street without going past the Bazlamits.
When Abu Fadi died of cancer in 2011, Hijazi thought that might be the end of it.
“None of us went to the mourning when he died,” said Hijazi, who saw Abu Fadi as a traitor to his people, someone unworthy of a Muslim burial. “We’re not supposed to drink with him. We’re not supposed to eat with him. He harmed his people, so we refused to have anything to do with his farewell.”
Hijazi wasn’t the only one who was silently grateful that Abu Fadi was gone. Abed Mujahed was also thankful to be rid of a man who had been the source of so many problems for him and his family.
“When he died, the neighbors came and said: ‘Let’s offer some condolences,’” Abed said. “I refused.”
Abu Fadi’s wife and kids tried to repair some of the rifts with their neighbors on the street. But the underlying hostility continued to resurface.
“I told my children to be careful,” Hijazi said.
When Israeli forces came once again in 2013 to arrest Ahmad and accused him of being part of a plan to kidnap a soldier, Hijazi figured he knew who had informed on his son.
It didn’t matter that Abu Fadi was dead; fairly or not, Hijazi still feared the family. Every day his son is in an Israeli cell, Hijazi is reminded of the absence in his home. He keeps photos of Ahmad, shaved head, dressed in a dark-blue track suit, on the mantle near the television. Hijazi spends his days watching TV in his living room, right outside Ahmad’s empty bedroom where Israeli police broke through the window during their second house raid. Ahmad’s wife and young son sometimes sleep there, on the twin bed with the thin mattress, below a silver frame with wavy rays of sun emanating from a picture of the young couple.
The Bazlamits visit Ahmad in the high-security Israeli prison whenever they can. But it’s a long trek. And they can’t stand seeing Ahmad through the thick prison glass, knowing that Israeli intelligence officials are listening to every word they say, looking for evidence to keep Ahmad behind bars even longer.
“There is a state of quiet, and sometimes a state of quiet scares you more than the other way around,” Hijazi said. “It’s like the sea. You can see when a sea is tumultuous. But it’s the sea that appears calm that might drown you.”
A Second Life in Abu Tor
Abu Fadi’s final years were painful and private. As the cancer spread through his body, Abu Fadi spent more and more time in his home office going through his papers. He started getting rid of everything. Photos. Letters. Memos. Abu Fadi made sure that he took most of his secrets with him when he died.
“I don’t think he wanted people to know who he was,” his wife said. “He didn’t want me to know very much either.”
When Abu Fadi was gone, vandals stole two of the three security cameras he’d installed to keep watch outside his house. Mostly, Imm Fadi stopped paying attention to the live video feeds. But she didn’t feel entirely safe. One afternoon she saw a young man who’d scaled the front wall and the iron shutters to get onto their tile roof. She thought the guy was Jewish, but she couldn’t be sure. Whatever the case, she later had coils of razor wire strung out along the edge of her roof to prevent anyone else from climbing over. The barbed wire returned to Assael. And Imm Fadi launched a new chapter in her life. She stopped constantly wearing the head scarf her husband always told her to wear when she went out. She learned the Hebrew her husband had prevented her from studying. She started looking after elderly Israelis and made some money to support her family. Imm Fadi packed what was left of Abu Fadi’s political paraphernalia and gave it to one of her sons. She did what she could to move on.
But Abu Fadi’s presence still loomed over the house. Imm Fadi hung a large portrait of her late husband above the television in the living room, right below a pair of exposed fluorescent lights that cast his stern, unsmiling gaze in an unflattering yellow pallor.
Every time she or her kids sat down on the leopard-print-covered couches to watch the flat-screen television mounted on the wall, Abu Fadi looked down on them with the same dour look he had flashed at people his entire adult life.
“No one accepted him as he was,” his wife said one night in her living room. “When people needed him, he was a good man. When they didn’t need him anymore, he wasn’t important.”
Imm Fadi thought the trajectory of history had proven her husband right in choosing the Israeli side of the fight.
“A long time ago, whoever sent their son or daughter to study on the Jewish side would be thought of as a collaborator,” she said. “Now, everyone sends their son or daughter to study on the Israeli side.”
After years of acceding to her husband’s demands, Imm Fadi cut her own path. One of the first things she did was distance herself from her husband’s politics.
“The Likud choice was imposed on us,” she said. “If I were to go vote now, I would maybe leave it blank. I feel different now.”
Still, Imm Fadi felt a certain responsibility to vote since she was one of the few Arab Jerusalemites who had Israeli citizenship that gave her the right to cast a ballot in national elections.
“I think, because I’m an Arab and I have the opportunity to vote, I should vote for somebody who will help us,” she said. “We should look for a party that represents our ideas and vote for them. Had Abu Fadi been alive, I wouldn’t have been able to discuss who serves us as an Arab.”
Imm Fadi figured they were doomed to eternal war with the Jewish people. She was just tired of it all. After so many years of fighting, Imm Fadi just wanted to work, to look after her family, and take off her shoes at the end of the day knowing she’d done some good.
“It is written in the Quran that we will always fight with the Jews,” she said. “Now we have given up. We have surrendered. I don’t see any good coming out of all the protests.”
Imm Fadi saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on her husband’s life. As she got older, the slurs aimed at her and her husband stung less and less.
“Before I used to hate it,” she said. “Now, I don’t care. Fadi says: ‘My father was a collaborator. He’s dead. No one on their last day will be held accountable for another person’s sins.’”
“Our Father Protected Assael”
Perhaps the only thing worse than being branded a Palestinian collaborator in Jerusalem is being the son or daughter of someone who has been tarred as a traitor. The schoolyard taunts are biting and relentless. Nothing can stir up a street fight faster.
In 2005, Arab-Israeli director Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated movie, Paradise Now, brought the issue of Palestinian collaborators to a global audience. The film traced the decisions of Said and Khaled, two young men from the West Bank city of Nablus who had been chosen to carry out suicide bombings in Tel Aviv.
As he tries to justify his plans to the woman he has fallen in love with, Said reveals that his father was an ameel—a collaborator.
“The crimes of the occupation are countless,” Said tells her. “The worst crime of all is to exploit the people’s weaknesses and turn them into collaborators. By doing that, they not only kill the resistance, they also ruin families, ruin their dignity, and ruin an entire people. When my father was executed, I was ten years old. He was a good person. But he grew weak. For that, I hold the occupation responsible. They must understand that, if they recruit collaborators, they must pay the price for it. A life without dignity
is worthless. Especially when it reminds you day after day of humiliation and weakness.”
The film won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and was the first film representing Palestine to be nominated for an Academy Award. The same indignities depicted in the film played out on Assael Street for Abu Fadi’s kids, especially the older ones. They were constantly being taunted and getting in fights at school or on the street. Abu Fadi sent his two oldest kids to a school across town so they wouldn’t have to face the heckling from mean-spirited kids in Abu Tor. But there was no way for any of them to really escape their father’s reputation. Mahmoud repeatedly came home from school and wept in his room.
“I don’t have one friend on the street,” said Mahmoud, one of Abu Fadi’s three sons.
By the time he was 30, Mahmoud was divorced and remarried. His first marriage had been tumultuous. When he was alive, Abu Fadi would drive to his son’s house to try to defuse tensions. After he died, there was no one to help keep things together, and the couple fell apart.
Arab families refused to let their daughters marry into Abu Fadi’s family because of his reputation. Abu Fadi’s kids found the treatment they received from their neighbors to be duplicitous and hypocritical. None of the neighbors had any problem asking Abu Fadi for help when they had issues with the city. None of them called him a collaborator when they needed something.
“The word collaborator is used to put people down,” said his oldest son, Fadi. “Because he was able to solve their problems with Israel, they think he’s a collaborator, even though solving their problems is in their benefit.”
Mahmoud rejected the suggestion that his father had embraced an Israeli identity. Mahmoud saw his dad as an unsung hero who had suffered the slurs of his neighbors while he did all he could to help them.
“Instead of having an Israeli identity, my father protected the whole neighborhood,” he said.
None of the kids was more protective of their dad’s image than Abeer, the eldest of three daughters. Among Abu Fadi’s kids, Abeer was the most successful. She studied law at Israel’s prestigious Hebrew University, worked in the Israeli Justice Ministry and went into private legal practice before she was 30. She dyed her hair blond and wore stylish skirts and jackets that accentuated her figure. As the eldest daughter, she was closest to her father. Abeer saw nothing to be gained by talking about her dad.
A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 18