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

by Dion Nissenbaum

  If there was ever a time the two sides of the street could have found common ground, Alisa said, it was right after the fence came down in 1967.

  “I think, unfortunately, we didn’t solve these problems in the decade after the Six-Day War, and, as we waited, stupidly, things got worse and worse and worse and less and less solvable,” Alisa said. “I think if we would have maybe solved the problems in the first decade after the Six-Day War, there was still a ray of hope. There were still people who were willing. And now it’s like . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “A friend of mine who saw the video ‘Home’ that the choir did told me: ‘It breaks my heart that it can’t be like they show here,’” Alisa said. “For me, it’s like a little light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is so dark and so long that I don’t know how much of a difference it makes. I really despair over the situation.”

  After living on Assael for a decade, Alisa wasn’t sure whether her relations with her neighbors would save her if things got really bad.

  “There are these young Arab boys and the families on the street and I know we receive protection from them, but let’s say things got really, really, really bad, God forbid, like one of these medieval scenarios and my house was surrounded by people who threatened the people across the street not to help us, would they protect us?” she wondered. “I don’t think they would be able to.”

  It was a reality Alisa was prepared to accept, much the same way that she accepted that she probably wouldn’t risk her life to save them.

  “If these people were threatened, would I protect them with my body?” she asked. “Well, maybe if I was single and on my own I would. But would I sacrifice my life for my neighbors for things that I believed in? Maybe it’s just because I’m not made of that stuff. Maybe I’m not like a fighter. Maybe I’m not that person at all.”

  Alisa wasn’t the only one to question whether there was enough goodwill in Abu Tor to serve as a foundation for her husband’s work. Other residents of Abu Tor who chose not to take part in David’s community-building meetings were privately dismissive of his ideas, especially the more unconventional proposals like women’s yoga classes.

  “Yoga?” said one Abu Tor resident. “I mean, come on. Look, sometimes people who come here from America don’t really understand how things work here.”

  Can Changing One Block Change the World?

  As the violence ripped across East Jerusalem and Abu Tor in late 2014, some people started looking for ways to separate the Arab and Jewish neighbors. By that point, the Israeli military was using the Beit Nehemiah community center at the top of Abu Tor to offer leadership courses to its young soldiers. Israeli soldiers were hanging out at the center where Arab kids came most afternoons to play soccer on the dilapidated concrete field out back. Like Judith Green a quarter century earlier, David found himself fighting efforts by the community center to bar Arab kids from playing on the soccer field.

  “You have security people saying: ‘You have counselors in the army, you have an army presence, and it’s not a smart, safe or appropriate thing to do. Let’s make it sterile,’” David said. “That goes in direct contradiction to certainly what we’re trying to do, but also to the city’s own policy, which says that all of its facilities should be open for use of the community, regardless of religion, sex, etc.”

  It felt like the movie Groundhog Day to Judith, who backed David’s efforts, but seemed burned out by the endless cycle of turmoil and reconciliation.

  “So far it’s been kind of discouraging,” said Judith, whose neighborhood activism stretched back to the 1980s. Most of the proposals seemed to go nowhere. One of the ideas everyone had agreed to try was a walking tour of Abu Tor. The Arab tour guides were a little wary of walking around the poorer parts of the neighborhood with a large number of Jewish neighbors. They wanted to take them around in small, inconspicuous groups that wouldn’t stand out too much. Groups that wouldn’t be as big a target. When the day came for the tour, the Arab residents led the small group around the safe parts of Abu Tor and never ventured into places the Jewish neighbors hadn’t been.

  “It was rather disappointing,” Judith said later. “Anything that David or anyone else can do is definitely a plus. You should do it. But I don’t know at this point. There’s such different feelings in Jerusalem, and in general. At best, it might somehow give a feeling of a little more security if people along the border know each other. It’s sad. It’s a very sad situation. I don’t feel like it’s dangerous, but it’s sad. It’s a loss of potential. At best, it’s keeping things quiet.”

  David was undeterred. By early 2015 he was meeting with his Arab counterpart on the city community council, and the two were planning to team up to bring more money to Abu Tor.

  “I’m feeling a sense of pride and patriotism in doing what I’m doing, because this is my definition of what Zionism is,” he said. “Zionism is making Israel a light unto nations. Zionism is treating the stranger with the same laws. Zionism is Judaism. Judaism is social justice, and that’s how I interpret both, not as recipes for separation and control, but as recipes for how a society should function, with a majority and minority, Jewish and democratic.”

  As a young man trying to find his way, David had been critical of his parents’ jobs as psychiatric social workers.

  “They were working on a case-by-case basis and I thought: ‘What a waste of time,’” he said. “Not a waste of time, but it was like you were never going to solve the problem. You were going to solve one person’s problem at a time, which is why I didn’t become a psychiatric social worker, but a community organization social worker and a social planner social worker. So, I suppose that if I were now 18, I might say to my older self: ‘Why are you just trying to work on the interests of Assael Street? You can do that, but it’s not going to bring peace. You should work on trying to get the system changed,’” he said.

  The young David dreamed about changing the world. By the time he was ready to retire, he’d come to realize that changing his neighborhood was hard enough.

  “I have been on a constant diet,” he said. “I wanted to change the entire world. Then I wanted to change the Jewish world. Then I just said, ‘OK, I’ll just change Israel.’ At this point, I’m on my block.”

  And even changing his block isn’t easy.

  “I don’t know how far I’m gonna go,” said David, who likes to think that what he’s doing matters to more than just the people on his street.

  “It’s still beyond me and beyond one person,” he said. “So I can still say I’m working on the system.”

  Seven

  The Good Arab

  They call him rebbe.

  Rabbi Khaled.

  Khaled’s Jewish coworkers reverently refer to this balding, clean shaven, middle-aged Muslim East Jerusalemite as rebbe because of his encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism. Khaled Rishek takes pride in being able to argue, in Hebrew, over the finer points of Abraham’s biblical land claims. Given the chance, he will talk for hours about the complex meaning of obscure Old Testament stories.

  “Khaled,” they say, with a friendly pat on his balding head and a squeeze of his clean-shaven face, “knows Judaism better than most Jews.”

  For 30 years, Khaled has worked at the YMCA in West Jerusalem, an island of Arab-Jewish coexistence whose 152-foot-tall Byzantine bell tower has served as a geographic guidepost and solitary icon for decades.

  To his Jewish coworkers at the Y, to his Jewish neighbors on Assael Street, to his Jewish friends in Israel, Khaled is the Good Arab.

  “You’re not like those other Arabs,” they tell him before retreating into their homes. “You’re not like those Arabs down the hill—causing all the trouble.”

  “People always focus on the negative,” his Jewish colleagues at the Y say when things get tense, “but look at us: We are Muslim and
Jew, working together.”

  To all of them, Khaled represents the Israel they imagine it to be: a place where Arab and Jew live and work—side by side—in peace. Especially when things get tense, Khaled’s colleagues and neighbors turn to him for reassurance that everything is going to be all right.

  “They say: ‘You are not like the other Arabs.’ But this doesn’t make me feel good,” he said one night in 2014 outside his home on Assael Street, while Israeli soldiers and masked Palestinian kids fought running street battles a few blocks away.

  “I am part of them,” he said of the stone throwers. “I am not part of you.”

  To Jewish families on the western side of Assael Street, families like Khaled’s on the eastern side serve as a buffer from the disaffected Palestinians living in cramped homes and neglected neighborhoods right below.

  “I say to anyone who wants to move into this area: ‘You’ve got to realize that you’re living right next to the ghetto,’” said Elon Bezalely, a British-Israeli financial adviser who lives with his wife and two kids across Assael from Khaled.

  “That street,” he said with a nod toward Assael, “is the border.”

  Practically and metaphorically, Khaled represents the first line of defense for his neighbors on the other side of the street. The entrance to Khaled’s home sits in the middle of a steep, narrow stairway next to the Bazlamit compound. Most likely those stairs sit on the old dirt path that the UN inspectors walked up to the Yaghmour house in 1966 when they came to find out who had returned to No Man’s Land. Khaled bought the Yaghmour house in 1990 from Ziad, grandson of Eid, the farmer who’d handed some poppies to Rachel Machsomi over the border fence. Like that of the Bazlamits’ across the concrete stairway, Khaled’s alley wall features hand-painted images of the Dome of the Rock, the black Ka’aba of Mecca, and celebratory crescent moons.

  While Assael has been swept up in sporadic demonstrations over the years and has occasionally been tagged by political vandalism, the street had never been at the epicenter of major confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian stone throwers.

  In the summer of 2014, Khaled could feel the troubles closing in on Assael Street. The kidnapping and killing of the three Israeli teenagers—Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach—was followed by the kidnapping and killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. When Israeli police arrested the Jewish suspects four days after the Palestinian boy’s killing, his father wondered if the government was going to destroy the homes of the suspects the way they’d destroyed the home of the Palestinian killer. Angry mourners at the boy’s funeral threw rocks at Israeli soldiers keeping watch. The soldiers responded with tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets. Demonstrations spread to the West Bank.

  Then Netanyahu sent the Israeli army back to crush Hamas in Gaza. As with previous clashes, the Palestinian death toll vastly outnumbered the Israelis’. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and six civilians were killed during the 50-day operation. In Gaza, more than 2,000 lost their lives, including about 500 children—an average of ten kids a day. Israel was accused of killing scores of civilians by hitting crowded UN schools being used as shelters that offered minimal protection from Israeli artillery, mortars, rockets and bombs. The story from Gaza that Khaled and his family were seeing on the Arabic language cable stations was not the same one their Jewish neighbors on the other side of Assael Street were getting on their Israeli news programs.

  The new surge of violence created deep psychological gashes for Palestinians and Israelis. Parents on both sides had reason to worry that their kids might not come home at night. People began to wonder if they were about to be consumed by a new Palestinian uprising. Pundits alternatively dubbed it the Silent Intifada, the Jerusalem Intifada, the Firecracker Intifada, the Children’s Intifada and, perhaps most wryly, the Post-Modern Intifada.

  Then the troubles washed over Abu Tor. The killing of Mu’atez Hijazi set off nightly clashes that forced people to close their windows to keep the tear gas out of their homes. Mothers on Assael worried about sending their children to take out the trash. Israeli border police installed concrete barriers to temporarily close off the main entrance connecting lower (Arab) Abu Tor to the upper (Jewish) part. That’s when Khaled’s Jewish neighbors started seeking some reassurance when they saw him on the street.

  It was what Khaled did. He was the kind of tall, unassuming guy women would feel comfortable asking for directions if they saw him on the street. He could fade into the background at parties and easily settle into conversations with almost anyone. The sternest thing about Khaled seemed to be the dark, bushy eyebrows that sometimes made it look as if he was scowling.

  Khaled was a Jerusalem baby, the oldest of 11 siblings. Before 1967, his father helped make uniforms for the Jordanian army at a factory in Amman. Khaled was born in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in 1966. The next year, Israel seized control of the Old City, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The tailor’s son grew up playing soccer on the Old City’s tourist-clogged streets and walking with his family to Friday prayers at al Aqsa mosque.

  Living On the Edge of the “Ghetto”

  For neighbors like Elon Bezalely, Khaled and the families on the other side of Assael Street weren’t part of the problem. The Arabs across the street weren’t the ones stirring up trouble. It was Arabs coming from the valley, from the heart of Palestinian Abu Tor.

  “I think the major issues that happen in Abu Tor—such as the car burnings and Molotov cocktails—are, I feel, I’ve got no evidence, I feel it’s predominately from the other side of the valley,” said Elon, who moved from London to Israel in 1997, when he was in his late 20s and the voices of hope in the Middle East seemed to have a slight advantage over the voices of despair.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” his wife said.

  Linda Bezalely had less faith in her neighbors.

  “I know you’d like to think it’s all from Silwan, but I think there are a lot of people who don’t like us in Abu Tor,” Linda said after putting their two young kids to sleep.

  Elon moved to Assael Street in 2007. For Elon, living on the invisible border meant that the price was right. Elon bought the two-bedroom home for $275,000. Linda moved in two years later when the couple got married.

  “Everyone asks: ‘What made you choose Abu Tor?’ and I say: ‘I didn’t. I chose the man,’” Linda said.

  “This,” she said with a nod toward Assael Street, “came with it.”

  The couple’s home is one of the few on the western side of the street that still has an open door leading out onto Assael. And it’s one of the few with a small stoop—a stoop that became an ideal place for the Bazlamit boys to hang out every night and smoke shisha while texting friends and watching who was coming and going on Assael Street. Most days, Linda found the boys on her steps when she came out with her stroller to take her little boy and girl for a walk to the park. Linda was a skinny, athletic, self-assured, curly haired British immigrant who had given up a career as a financial adviser to run dating seminars that offered women advice on how to avoid marrying a “jerk.” Like Alisa Maeir-Epstein, Linda decided she wasn’t going to steer clear of Assael Street. She said hello and tried to be friendly. She didn’t know most of her Palestinian neighbors’ names, but at least she could recognize some of them.

  “I wouldn’t have chosen this area for myself,” she said, “but the truth is we love it.”

  “If you’re willing to put up with, again, the best way to describe it is living right next to the ghetto, then it’s good,” said Elon who, even at home, has the frenetic energy of the hedge fund manager he once was.

  Elon bought his house from Carol, the Israeli realtor effectively driven from the neighborhood because of the bad blood with the Bazlamits across the way. Elon did his homework before he bought the place. He looked up stories on Assael. He checked out Carol and came across an article
detailing her clash with the Bazlamits. For Elon, the problem seemed easily surmountable.

  One of the first things Elon did when he moved in was to reach out to the big Palestinian family across the way to let them know that he was totally cool with them painting on what was now his outside wall, not Carol’s. The Bazlamits were happy to take Elon up on his offer. The next time the family held a welcome home party for someone returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca, the kids brought out their stencils and spray paint cans.

  “Welcome back from Hajj, Abu Zakaria” ran in uneven black Arabic script across the white cement wall that had been the spark for the feud between Carol and the Bazlamits.

  For Elon, the offer was strategic. It allowed him to build up some goodwill with a family that knew what it was like to live on a dividing line. And, perhaps, the Arabic graffiti would serve as a modern-day Passover symbol, shielding his family from problems he hoped would pass over his house, much the same way God passed over the homes of Jews held captive in Egypt who painted red Xs in lamb’s blood on their doors to protect their firstborn children from His wrath.

  “I don’t think people come up this street,” Elon said one night in the fall of 2014, as Israel tried to put a lid on the stone-throwing protests. “But, just in case, there’s a bit of artwork on our side.”

  Their neighbor, Sara Arnold, wasn’t sure letting the family paint graffiti on the wall was such a good idea. Sara had lived above Assael much longer than Elon and Linda. She considered herself a bridge-builder and worked with Arab kids in Jerusalem schools. But she wondered how much goodwill there really was on the street.

  “Are you sure it says what it says?” she asked Elon that fall night while they considered the possibility that they might be on the front lines of the third Palestinian intifada.