“I remember feeling very, very bad about it and then I remember reading a few months later that the UN or whoever had done an investigation and indeed they weren’t killed by Israelis,” Alisa said. “That’s a picture that a lot of people have in their mind, and I had in my mind: that four children on the beach who were playing ball were killed by Israel. And also I think they were invited there or something strange like that.”
The theory reinforced Alisa’s own belief that Hamas was to blame for the war and that the group would go to any lengths to paint Israel as a bloodthirsty villain.
“It’s very, very hard for me to understand,” she said. “If you make the choice yourself, it’s one thing. But if Hamas is making the choice for you and they’re saying: ‘We’re going to make the choice for you that your children are going to be killed so that we can show the media, so they’ll be more pro-Palestinian, so we’ll get more brownie points’ or whatever it is they think they’ll get, I don’t know.”
Helicopters over Assael
The residents of Assael Street all hoped the end of the war in Gaza would bring a close to a traumatic chapter. But it didn’t.
In late October, a group of Jerusalemites gathered at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center—a short walk from Abu Tor—to hear Yehuda Glick, an orange-bearded, right-wing American-Israeli crusader who favored ending Israel’s ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount. While Yehuda was packing up his car after the speech, a man pulled up on a motorcycle and fired four shots into the Jewish activist’s chest before speeding off. Israeli police quickly identified the shooter as a resident of Abu Tor.
Before dawn the next morning, the families on Assael were roused from sleep by low-flying helicopters circling over their street. Israeli counterterrorism teams and border police converged on the home of 32-year-old Palestinian restaurant worker Mu’atez Hijazi, an East Jerusalemite who had spent 11 years in an Israeli prison for a series of crimes, from arson to slashing a guard’s face with a razor blade. After his release in 2012, he settled in a small Abu Tor apartment building two streets below Assael and got a job at the Begin Center where Yehuda gave his talk.
“I’m glad to be back in Jerusalem,” Hijazi told a reporter shortly after his release. “I hope to be a thorn in the Zionist plan of Judaizing Jerusalem.”10
The counterterrorism unit chased Hijazi to his roof, where he was shot 20 times. Israeli police said they killed Hijazi after he opened fire on them. Residents claimed Hijazi was unarmed when he was shot. His family said he was framed. The shooting triggered street battles that spread across Jerusalem. The turmoil led Israel to temporarily shut down all access to the Old City’s central religious plateau, home to al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. It was the first time Israel had done so in more than a decade. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called it a “declaration of war.”
It was starting to feel more like a new war on Assael Street. The deadly shootout fed Avital’s anxieties about living in Abu Tor and fueled her desire to move.
“We never felt directly under threat, but it was very disturbing,” Alisa said. “Very, very disturbing. It sounded like they were on the roof. It was hard for me, too, hearing those noises, not knowing what was going on, not knowing what was a safe explosion and what was not a safe explosion.”
The shootout in Abu Tor was followed by a series of deadly attacks that appeared to be the work of “lone wolves” from East Jerusalem who drove into crowds of Israelis gathered at trolley stops and street corners.
The attacks created new questions for residents of Jerusalem, who started sizing each other up once again as potential threats. Palestinian parents worried that their kids could become another Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Jewish parents worried their kids could be run down while going to school.
Maha Salhab, Avital’s best friend on Assael, thought the “lone wolf” attacks were stupid.
“You don’t get anything by killing people,” she said one afternoon that fall while hanging out across the street at Avital’s place. “You’re going nowhere. You’re just ending lives. That’s not right. That’s not your choice.”
Maha was more interested in Bollywood hunks like Shah Rukh Khan than Middle East politics. But wearing a hijab around West Jerusalem meant that she couldn’t avoid being viewed with suspicion by some people when she went out. In the midst of the string of attacks, Maha (and her kitty) drove to downtown Jerusalem to drop her fiancé off at his job working in a hotel on Jaffa Street. After saying good-bye to him and getting back in her car, Maha saw a group of Jewish boys coming her way. She could tell right away that they were looking for trouble. Maha locked the doors as the boys surrounded her car. One of them started pounding on her window. Maha was sure it was going to shatter. Another one started kicking her car. Maha didn’t know what to do. If she tried to drive away, she’d likely be accused of trying to run over the boys and be swarmed by an angry mob. Maha was trapped. She knew if she made the wrong move it would end badly.
I can drive and just screw you, she thought, but why? I don’t want to hurt you. They’re not really men. They’re just kids. I’m like their mother. So what are they doing?
Before things got out of control, Maha spotted an Israeli military jeep in her rearview mirror and saw her salvation.
“Help!” she shouted as the boys backed off. “They’re trying to attack me!”
The soldiers scared the boys off and escorted Maha back to her house on Assael Street where she tried to calm down.
“It was really terrifying,” she said the next day.
Maha understood the fear Israelis felt from the spike in random attacks. But she didn’t see why she should personally be held accountable.
“You can’t live someplace that you could wait for a bus and just be killed,” she said. “It would be chaos. It’s not fair. I won’t hurt you, but you can’t hurt me either. I was just parking. The police, if I didn’t see the lights, I would be dead. I don’t know what they were thinking to do really. There was fire in their eyes. I don’t want to hate them. I don’t have to hate them. But it was really scary.”
If there was a silver lining, David saw it in Maha’s decision to ask Israeli security for help.
“I’m a citizen too,” Maha told David.
“Undoubtedly there are times when the police go beyond what they’re supposed to do, when they’re violently carrying out their work when they could have carried it out less violently,” he said. “But, by and large, I think there is still a general understanding, certainly the Jews believe this, and I think the vast majority of Arab-Israelis believe it, that there is still a basic commitment to law and to fairness and to defending civil rights.”
Alisa praised Maha for being level-headed.
“The truth is, if I was in that kind of situation I would stay in the car and hit the gas,” Alisa said. “I would have hit them.”
Maha was rattled. In her 22 years, it was by far the scariest thing that had happened to her in Jerusalem.
“I was born a Muslim, does that mean I am a terrorist or something?” she asked. “No. I am still kind, so why do you judge?”
Maha had little interest in political discussions. But it was impossible to escape the politics on Assael Street. Even her social life became political. Her Muslim friends gave her grief because of her friendship with Avital. But that friendship wasn’t something Maha was willing to give up. For years Maha watched the toll politics took on her father as he fought the city’s efforts to claim rights to the open garden lot next to the family home. Israel wouldn’t accept Moussa Salhab’s claim that the land was his family’s. The documents Moussa had were never good enough to prove his case. Moussa’s fight with Israel consumed years of his life and much of his salary. He took the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court—and lost. Any day, the family expected Israel to seize the land and turn it into an expensive
new apartment building.
Maha saw everyone on Assael Street as pawns in a big political game she wasn’t willing to spend her life playing. She was more interested in planning her wedding and figuring out how to get a good IT job in Israel. She resented being lumped in with Islamic extremists simply because she covered her hair.
“Who would like to be called a terrorist because of their religion?” she asked. “ISIS, they’re not even Muslims. We don’t kill people just like that. You don’t do that. It’s politics, not religion.”
Maha was just as dismayed as Avital and her family by the string of attacks by East Jerusalemites.
“You don’t get anything by hatred,” she said.
Maha and her family had Jerusalem IDs, not full Israeli citizenship. She had little interest in defining herself as Palestinian, Arab-Israeli or anything else with a hyphen.
“I’m human,” she said. “That’s it.”
To her, the war between Israelis and Palestinians could be as silly as the fight between Real Madrid and Barcelona, the rival Spanish soccer teams.
“I’m Barcelona. Oh, you are Real Madrid? You should die,” Maha shook her head. “It’s only a football game. If politics were in the hands of women, well, we are really soft. It would be very good. All the world would be pink. I would make the street pink, like Hello Kitty. And I would put [Bollywood hunk] Salman Khan in charge, as my assistant, of course.”
“Don’t Talk to Her Like That”
Maha and Avital got together when their schedules allowed. But once they got into their teens, things changed for Avital on Assael. Avital was taller than a lot of girls her age. She let her long brown hair down while the older girls on the other side of the street started wearing hijabs to cover theirs. Though Maha and Avital both wore tight jeans to school, it was Avital who started getting uncomfortable looks from the boys on the street when she walked home. The boys would talk in Arabic and laugh as she passed. Sometimes they would whistle and make crude noises.
“Every time I walk past them with her, they look at Avital,” Alisa said one rainy night while visiting David at his cluttered office overlooking Emek Refaim, the “valley of ghosts,” the trendy street filled with cafés, courtyard restaurants, bakeries and boutique jewelry stores.
“They don’t do it all the time,” David replied. “They’ve done it a few times and, ever since then, Avital has the feeling that if they are looking at her, that’s what they are thinking.”
“Every time I walk past them with her, they look at Avital,” Alisa repeated. “And they look at her—”
David cut her off: “What’s wrong? I would too.”
“Excuse me,” Alisa said firmly, with a sharp look. “They look at her in a way that, as a woman, I would feel very uncomfortable.” To David, it was just boys being boys. Checking out girls isn’t something only Palestinian boys do.
“But David, you’re from a different culture,” Alisa said. “I was living in Israel in the late ’60s and early ’70s and the country was very different than it is now. It was much less Western. It was very, very uncomfortable to walk down the street as a young teenager who was wearing a miniskirt or Western clothes and not religious clothes. It was very, very uncomfortable, and it limited us as young women. And this was Jewish boys.”
David didn’t see the situation the same way as Alisa and Avital did. To reduce the awkward walks, Avital started leaving her house through the garage and stairs that led up to the street above Assael, giving her an exit that didn’t go past the boys sitting on the steps every day.
When the residents on the eastern side of the street suggested that they remove the chained gate blocking the concrete stairway running past the Joudans’ home that once connected the two halves of the neighborhood, Alisa worried that it would mean her daughter would be subjected to even more leering.
“If there was a conduit that went from the Arab neighborhood into the Jewish neighborhood and the Arab men hung out there, it would cause much more of an issue for the young women as well, which, for women, is a big issue,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with the Arab citizens of Abu Tor walking through the Jewish parts, but once there’s this sexual issue, because it’s two completely diverse cultures, it’s very problematic.”
To David, the problem had much less to do with Arab-Jewish relations than male-female relations.
“I probably would engender the wrath of females if I were to say: ‘Well, just ignore it, start talking to them, they’re saying that because you’re not relating to them. You’re just kind of walking by, so develop a relationship and you will get past this.’”
Alisa sighed.
“He doesn’t get it,” she said of her husband.
“It’s not a matter of Avital not getting it . . .”
“No,” Alisa said. “I said you don’t get it. You don’t get it.”
“I was going to say the majority of women don’t get it,” David said wryly.
Alisa ignored her husband’s mischievous goading.
“It’s a cultural thing,” she said. “It’s not political, and it’s not Mideastern.”
Alisa wasn’t sure what to do to. She figured she’d have to talk to the boys’ fathers and see if she could get them to have a word with their sons.
“The truth is, if she walks through a scuzzy neighborhood in Jerusalem and boys did that, she’d feel uncomfortable also,” she said. “It’s not because they’re Arab.”
One afternoon in the fall of 2014, while Alisa was taking out the garbage, she saw a couple of the younger teenage boys who said something about Avital in Arabic that she didn’t understand. Alisa walked back to say something.
“Who speaks Hebrew?” she asked the boys.
The boys looked a little scared.
“I do,” one of the boys eventually said. “We were just saying that you were Avital’s mother.”
“You know,” she told them, “Avital is very good girl. She doesn’t wear a hijab because she is Jewish. She’s not Arab. But she’s a very good girl. And I don’t want you to talk to her like that.”
The kid translated Alisa’s words to the other boys, who gave her sweet embarrassed smiles before she said “thanks” in Arabic and went back into her house.
The small confrontation embarrassed Avital, who wanted to draw as little attention to the issue she could.
“That’s the beginning of a dialogue that I’m going to have with them,” Alisa told Avital later.
“Oh god,” Avital groaned before retreating to her room to decompress after school. “Don’t keep doing it.”
Alisa didn’t know how much good it would do anyway.
“They don’t listen to women,” she said. “They listen to men. It’s a cultural thing.”
David and Alisa taught Avital not to draw broad conclusions about Arabs because of the leering boys on Assael. And Avital had enough Arab friends to know they weren’t all the same. One afternoon when they were talking about life in Abu Tor, Avital told her mom that she wasn’t opposed to falling in love with a Palestinian.
“You know what, Mom? If there was a really nice Palestinian person, I would totally marry the person even if he wasn’t Jewish,” she said before turning to her visitors. “I think I’m less strict than my parents. But they will welcome anyone in my life, because if I love the person, they need to love that person. I don’t think it’s such a big deal.”
The idea made Alisa uncomfortable.
“It would make your life very complicated,” she told Avital. “Not because of your family, but because, to be in Israel, in a mixed marriage between two peoples who have a lot of issues, is very hard.”
“I think you’re more strict than me, I’m saying,” Avital told her mom.
“I’m not talking about my reaction,” Alisa replied. “I’m talking about any young
couple.”
Later, Alisa said her concerns about Avital marrying a Palestinian had more to do with culture than politics.
“It’s not a national issue,” she said. “It’s a cultural Jewish issue. If I lived in America I wouldn’t be so happy if she married a non-Jewish person. I’m not prejudiced. If she fell in love I’d say: ‘I’d really rather prefer that we keep it in the tribe.’ But it’s not a nationalist thing. And it would be such a hard life. I know mixed couples in Israel. It’s such a hard place. Many of them leave the country.”
“Maybe We Have to Wait”
The tension on the street made Alisa question how much good could come from her husband’s bridge-building work. How, she wondered, could Israel make peace with people who carry out “honor killings” of girls, young women who could be condemned to death for dishonoring their families by doing something as innocent as flirting with a boy?
“There is such a culture gap,” she said. “It’s not like making peace between the Irish and the British. . . . If I was an objective person coming from space, if I wasn’t part of this, I would say: ‘How could this group come to any understanding with [that] group if the culture is so different?’”
In all her travels, Alisa tried to find the things that connected everyone. Underneath all the differences, Alisa saw unity.
“I think each culture manifests another facet of who we are,” she said. “I traveled in India, Nepal, Tibet, Central America, even when I was in far islands in Scotland, every culture I’ve been to has taught me more of what it is to be a human being.”
Living on Assael forced Alisa to question her own assumptions about coexistence.
“Maybe my sense that we have a commonality is overblown,” she said. “Maybe it’s very hard for a liberalized, Western society to come to an understanding with people who still think, like 60 percent of them think, honor killings are an appropriate thing. I don’t know. Maybe we have to wait until there is some kind of more serious modernization of the Palestinian people. Not that anything’s wrong with them now, but maybe that’s the only way that we can talk. I don’t want to put them down. I don’t think modernization is so great. But maybe that’s the only way these two societies can meet.”
A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 22