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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  Each week, Micah and the kids would gather for more than three hours of rehearsal at West Jerusalem’s YMCA, in a room with pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon hanging from the walls. The kids would learn songs in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Then they’d sit down to talk. The group sessions were meant to give the singers a place where they could shed many of the misconceptions they brought with them. Micah wanted the private talks to be a place where kids could let down their guards and find common ground in a city that always seemed to be pulling them apart.

  The choir became one of Avital’s passions. The group got invitations to perform in Japan and London. They joined forces with Israeli singer David Broza for an album featuring covers of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?” and Cat Stevens’s “Where Do the Children Play?”

  The songs brought the kids together. The talking could be cathartic, and it sometimes left kids in tears. Things with the group got really bad in the summer of 2014, when it seemed like the city might be heading into another spiral of violence.

  War Comes to Abu Tor

  As the second intifada wound down and the suicide bombings in Jerusalem tapered off, people on both sides of Assael gave thanks that they had all survived, that the intense fighting had passed over their street.

  No one could be sure, but many people thought Assael was spared because of the unusual ties that held the street together. That protected feeling evaporated in 2014 when Abu Tor became a flashpoint for what some people saw as the start of the third intifada.

  After years of keeping the turmoil at bay, Assael Street was dragged into the tumult. Stinging clouds of tear gas filtered through living room windows as Israeli soldiers battled a new generation of stone-throwing Palestinians in the streets below. The new war appeared to be sweeping through Assael—and it put the Maeir-Epstein’s values to the test.

  At the start of 2014, the problems in Abu Tor appeared serious, but isolated. In February, the neighborhood was hit by a series of firebombings. That wasn’t too unusual. Vandals, criminals and demonstrators occasionally targeted Jewish houses and cars in Abu Tor. They robbed homes and slashed tires. They hurled stones through windows and tossed Molotov cocktails at parked cars. Usually the spikes in trouble passed.

  This time, things got worse.

  In June, the nation was captivated by the kidnapping of the three Jewish-Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank. Everyone was talking about the fate of Naftali, Gilad and Eyal. Israel launched a new crackdown—the country’s largest military operation in the West Bank since the peak of the suicide bombings nearly a decade earlier. Israeli forces searched thousands of homes, rounded up more than 400 Palestinians and, for the first time in years, demolished the home of a Hamas member arrested for murdering a Jewish Israeli during Passover.

  When the boys’ bodies were discovered under piles of stone in a field not far from Hebron 18 days after they were abducted, Netanyahu called the killers “human animals,” launched air strikes in the Gaza Strip, and essentially vowed to exact revenge.3 Hours after the nationally broadcast funerals—for Naftali Fraenkel, a 16-year-old American-Israeli; Gilad Shaer, 16; and Eyal Yifrach, 19—three men, led by an Israeli settler, did just that.

  In an abduction captured by security cameras, two men walked up to a scrawny 16-year-old Palestinian teen with a goofy haircut in East Jerusalem, asked him for directions, then wrestled him into a car that sped off as the boy shouted “Allahu Akbar.”4

  The three men took Mohammed Abu Khdeir to a nearby forest, beat him with a wrench, poured gasoline over his bloodied body and set him ablaze while he was still alive. Palestinians uttered his name the way Israelis mentioned Naftali, Gilad and Eyal. Both sides saw the killing of their children as a sign of utter depravity, a clear signal that it was impossible to live together with a people who could to that to an innocent boy.

  The killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir became a catalyst for new protests. Every night, street fights would break out between masked Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Israeli riot police. The evenings were filled with the sounds of shattering glass and of fireworks aimed at Israeli soldiers. The winds pushing through the valleys smelled of tear gas and acrid rubber from burning tires. Israeli forces used high-pressure water cannons to spray protesters with a foul-smelling, yellow-colored, laboratory-designed riot-control liquid called “Skunk.”

  Four days after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed, Israeli police arrested six people and charged three of them with the boy’s murder. Israel was shocked by the brutal revenge killing. It forced Israelis to reconsider the country’s carefully cultivated image of itself as a benevolent nation. Netanyahu called Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s father in order to distance himself and his calls for vengeance from the Israelis who actually carried it out.

  “The murder of your son is abhorrent and cannot be countenanced by any human being,” Netanyahu told Hussein Abu Khdeir.

  As many Israelis expressed revulsion over the unimaginable implications and repeated the mantra, “That’s not us,” Naftali’s mother, Rachel Fraenkel, went on TV to denounce the Jewish attackers.

  “The shedding of innocent blood is against morality, is against the Torah and Judaism, and is against the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country,” she told reporters gathered outside her home at the end of the family’s seven-day mourning period. “Alongside the pain of this terrible act, we take pride in our country’s zeal to investigate, to arrest the criminals and to stop the horror, and we hope that calm will return to the streets of our country.”5

  Naftali’s uncle, Yishai Fraenkel, told journalists “there is no difference between those who murdered Mohammed and those who murdered our children. Those are murderers, and these are murderers. And both must be dealt with to the full extent of the law.”6

  With some prodding from Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s father, Hussein, spoke with Yishai Fraenkel, who expressed sympathies “from one bereaved family to another.”7

  The small gestures of compassion were soon overtaken by a new war. Two days after the call, faced with a surge in rocket fire from Gaza militants, Netanyahu sent Israeli planes to bomb Gaza. For six weeks, Israel’s military pummeled the Gaza Strip. For the first time since 2009, Israeli soldiers entered Gaza where they fought Hamas militants who popped up from hidden tunnels below their feet. Israeli military strikes killed hundreds of women and children in attacks that drew international condemnation. Scores of Western journalists sitting on waterfront hotel patios watched one Israeli strike kill four Palestinian boys who were playing soccer on the beach. Israeli forces hit more than a half-dozen UN schools, killing dozens of Palestinians who had sought refuge from the fighting.

  By the time Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire at the end of August, more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were dead. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and six Israeli civilians were killed.

  The series of crises took a particular toll on the Jerusalem Youth Choir.

  Even on the quietest of days, group dialogue was a challenge. The day after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed, Micah thought about canceling practice.

  “No one told me there was going to be a war,” said Micah, who knew full well that war was always a very real possibility in Jerusalem.

  One of his singers was from Shu’fat, where the Palestinian teen had been abducted. Shu’fat had been engulfed in protest, and Micah figured there was no way the girl would make it. But he went ahead anyway. He sent word to the kids: “If you can make it safely, please come.” Partway through the practice, the girl from Shu’fat walked through the door. Micah was stunned.

  “How did you get here?” Micah asked her. “I mean, how did you physically get here?”

  “I woke up to gunshots this morning and I was sitting in my house listening to all the demonstrations and all th
e bullets and all the tear gas and I was going insane,” she told him. “I had to get out. I left, walked down the street. The soldiers tried to stop me, but I ran and got away. This is exactly where I want to be.”

  The summer of 2014 wasn’t the first test for the Jerusalem Youth Choir, but it seemed to be the biggest. Perhaps because Mohammed, Naftali, Gilad and Eyal were the same age as the singers. Some members of the Youth Choir knew the three Israeli teens who had been kidnapped and killed. Others knew the Palestinian boy and his family.

  On their closed Facebook page and in their dialogue groups, the idea of a “safe space” to discuss difficult issues seemed to be dissolving. Members of the choir threatened to walk out over Facebook posts by other singers in the group. Micah organized emergency meetings that devolved into shouting matches, girls weeping and kids storming out of the room. The choir appeared to be coming apart. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. The group was preparing for its first major international tour.

  “We were about to go to Japan in the summer and then we went to war and had a very hard time—a very hard time—getting along,” Avital said.

  Because she had grown up on Assael Street, Avital had sympathy for the Palestinians’ frustrations. But hearing the anger and hostility coming from some of the other choir members was hard for her to take.

  “One time everyone was kind of yelling at everyone in the choir,” she said. “I was so shocked it was happening. It’s really hard to keep this whole group together, to keep it from not exploding, because there’s so much heat and so many other kinds of opinions.”

  Like many singers in the choir, Avital was conflicted. Her brother-in-law was one of the Israeli soldiers bringing weapons and supplies to units along the Gaza Strip border, so she had an instinctual desire to defend him and the army. But the images coming out of Gaza of dead women and children made it hard for her to justify. Halfway through the fighting, Avital tried to sort through her feelings in an emotional Facebook post.

  “what’s on my mind?” she wrote,

  well my brother in law is in the army and i am so worried about the soldiers. i hear almost ever day someone dies it breaks my heart. also in gaza people are dying. this war is killing so many people from both sides. its taking father/brother away from family’s. if we want to live in peace we need to stop this i am NOT saying that our army is wrong but people are dying because of this. we will not have peace until this ends not just war but until they stop wanting to kill us and a innocent people and i am not saying its okay im not really saying anything, i am saying what i am reading every day for the past 3 weeks on every news Chanel and papers. what i want to say is i feel guilty every time my phone beeps and says bad news from any sides and i will keep reading and praying that everything will be okay but i know that will take too long. and i will keep praying until it stops for good.

  Though the meetings were volatile, Micah knew that the group had to talk things through for the choir to be something more than another superficial coexistence program.

  “People cry, people walk out of the room, people threaten not to come back, but it’s important because otherwise it’s not real,” he said. “It’s fantasyland where I have all these friends from other places, but I don’t know anything about them.

  “For me, that gets to the core about why it’s important to have singing and the dialogue,” he said. “Singing creates the community, and the dialogue enables it to be real. The dialogue makes it not an imaginary space, it enables it to survive in the midst of all the awful things that are going on.”

  When the fighting was over, Micah got in touch with an old friend from his Whiffenpoof days who had become a minor YouTube musical celebrity to see if he’d be interested in making a video with the choir. Though he’d never been to Jerusalem, Sam Tsui agreed to do a cover of American Idol winner Phillip Phillips’s hit single “Home.”

  The inspirational lyrics resonated for Micah, especially after a trying summer. Settle down, it urges listeners. Don’t let demons fill you with fear. Trouble might get its hooks in you, but you’re never alone. There’s always hope.

  Released in October 2014, the four-minute video showed Palestinian teens in the chorus walking through their neighborhoods, alongside Israel’s towering separation walls, and a Jewish member of the group praying at Israel’s military cemetery. The Arab and Jewish kids eventually come together and celebrate their unity while dancing around a campfire. The video became a viral YouTube hit that quickly got a respectable 250,000 views. One newspaper writer called it “the most optimistic video about Israel and the Palestinians.” Though there was plenty of tension and there were cliques in the choir, it managed to thrive. When the time came, they flew off to Japan as planned.

  “Truthfully, I was one of the only people I knew who wasn’t depressed all summer,” Micah said. “And it’s because I was working with the choir.”

  As the fighting intensified that summer, Jewish residents of Abu Tor talked about setting up new neighborhood watch groups. They created escape plans for their families. They placed baseball bats and handguns strategically around their homes.

  “Everybody usually tolerates each other, but it’s like a temperature gauge,” Abu Tor resident Harvey Brooks, an American-Israeli bassist who’d played with Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, told the Jerusalem Post that July. “When the temperature goes up, things get bad.”8

  His wife, Bonnie, said the image of Abu Tor as an island of coexistence was exaggerated.

  “Arabs and Jews normally live peacefully here, but it’s not the way it should be, because when push comes to shove it becomes tribal,” she said.9

  A Peacenik Goes to War

  David and Alisa found their own beliefs tested by the Gaza war. Neither liked to see women and children being killed by the Israeli military, but they didn’t think Israel had a choice.

  “I’m left of center, but I don’t see what alternatives we had,” David said. “When Hamas comes out and says it’s totally legitimate to be sending rockets, it’s totally legitimate to butcher people in a synagogue, you have to consider those people your enemies.”

  David recognized the irony of being an American antiwar activist growing up to be an Israeli war advocate. To him, the evolution was easily explainable.

  “If someone comes to kill you, you have the right to defend yourself and kill them,” he said. “I didn’t feel that was the case in Vietnam.”

  David’s transformation was so thorough that he had signed up to serve in the Israeli military as a reserve soldier after he made aliyah, even though he wasn’t required to do so. During the first Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was firing Scud missiles at Israel, David helped run an emergency call center for panicked people who couldn’t get their gas masks on their kids or didn’t hear the “all-clear” sirens.

  “I felt like this was my home,” David said. “In Vietnam, where America was calling Communism the enemy and napalming the hell out of an entire country, I just didn’t feel that fell in the category of self-defense. But the Israel Defense Forces are on call to prevent things from happening. The actions I was involved with in the Army were defensive—and I have no problem with that.”

  Both David and Alisa were particularly appalled in the summer of 2014 by the Western media’s coverage of the fighting in Gaza, which they both found to be glaringly anti-Israel.

  “Where else can you tell me, where else, in what other war zone anywhere in the world in the last 20 or 30 years, are you aware where someone made telephone calls, sent SMSs [text messages], and dropped leaflets to warn people that there was going to be a bombing 20 minutes before there was going to be a bombing?” David asked. “Where? Tell me? I had a problem with the Gaza war, and that is that it happened. If Hamas had said: ‘We’re willing to stop if you stop,’ we would have stopped.”

  David and Alisa struggled to explain the situation t
o Avital. On one hand, they wanted to protect their 16-year-old. But it was impossible. They had family and friends who were serving in the Israeli military. And the kids in the choir would talk about it all the time. The singers from East Jerusalem had a much different take on the war than those from West Jerusalem.

  “It was very difficult for Avital to kind of hear what she understood to be a war of defense on our part, to be talked about as war crimes by people whom she’s singing with,” David said.

  David and Alisa would talk about the war and tell Avital about their belief in Good and Evil. Alisa posted an animated video on Avital’s Facebook wall showing Hamas as a devious schoolyard bully who goads a reluctant Israel into fighting back and then convinces their teachers and the world that Israel was the aggressor.

  The two-and-a-half-minute video ends with a black screen, the Star of David, and the words: “The world is not elementary school. Sometimes you just have to defend yourself.”

  Alisa encouraged Avital not to take what the Arab kids said at face value and to check out the stories they told. But Alisa sometimes appeared to unwittingly rely on Internet conspiracy theories to buttress her views that the world had unfairly demonized Israel during the Gaza war. Alisa seemed to indirectly rely on one American conspiracy theorist’s view that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for the killing of the four Palestinian boys on the Gaza beach—an attack seen by dozens of Western journalists.

  While Israeli officials apologized for the shelling and called it a “tragic” accident, one Internet researcher in the United States cobbled together an outlandish theory that the incident was staged by Hamas, that the boys had been executed the day before and that militants had used planted explosives as a distraction while they placed the boys’ bodies on the beach in front of the international press corps.