Jerusalem Divided

By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem

The real estate agent who showed me my apartment pointed out the views of Mount Zion, ringed by cypress trees, and the walled Old City with its minarets and church spires piercing the blue Jerusalem sky. But she neglected to say that the apartment had a drawback: its proximity to hell. A few hundred paces downhill, and you are in the Valley of Hinnom, where Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe that on Judgment Day, the gates of hell will open up as sinners go tumbling into the flaming vortex.

Living on the edge of hell, I could deal with. (I even thought it might entitle me to a discount on the rent. No chance.) Besides, Hinnom is deceptively pastoral; down in the valley I often see a white stallion grazing under an ancient olive tree. But I wasn't prepared for the living hell inside my neighborhood, Abu Tor. Here, Arabs and Israelis live next door to each other yet are divided by mutual fear and suspicion.

Over years of strife, Jerusalem's Arab and Israelis have perfected their radar for telling each other apart and for knowing when they've strayed too far into hostile territory. Every morning, I watch an Arab worker quicken his pace as he traverses to the Israeli side of my street. He lowers his eyes to the pavement to avoid trouble from Israeli cops who are frequently waiting there, checking IDs. On Hebron Road, he flags down a cramped, Arabs-only bus because if he boarded one of the big, air-conditioned Israeli ones, passengers might think he was a suicide bomber. For their part, Israelis avoid the Arab side of Abu Tor. A Jewish-American widow who lives in the apartment building next door won't venture to the Arab-owned corner shop just 100 yds. (about 90 m) away, no matter how badly she needs a cigarette. And Abu Tor is no different from any other mixed neighborhood in the city; a survey last year found two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. Given the choice, most Arabs would mirror such a preference.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sit down with other Arab leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a forthcoming Middle East summit in Annapolis, Md., the future of Jerusalem, a city holy to three religions, will be a constant shadow over the negotiations. Palestinians have long demanded that the eastern part of the city should be the capital of the state of which they have dreamed for decades. For Jews, who pined 2,000 years for Jerusalem, victory in the Six-Day War of 1967--and with it, control over the whole city--was a moment for the ages. And for 40 years, all who have negotiated for an end to the hostility between Israelis and Palestinians have known that the question of Jerusalem would have to be settled one day.

In 2000 President Bill Clinton, as part of a set of "parameters" he laid out for ending the conflict, proposed a legal split of the city, with Israel handing the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem over to Palestinian rule. Such a formula presupposes that Jerusalem is capable of a neat division. But it is not. Somehow, any separation of the city into component parts has to recognize that there are myriad economic and cultural links among political adversaries. Moreover, the monuments and shrines of the Old City attract visitors from all over the world: Muslims who want to worship at al-Aqsa Mosque; Jews seeking to pray at the Western Wall; Christians keen to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or follow the Stations of the Cross. Try as one might, it is not possible to count out the lanes of the Old City so that each of them is controlled by only one faith, one ethnicity. (Clinton proposed "shared functional sovereignty" for the Old City.) Dividing Jerusalem, says Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer and expert on Jerusalem affairs, is "a political impossibility and a historical inevitability. It will take microsurgery, and I'm afraid the politicians will go at it with a hatchet."

Hummus And Dead Sharks

Hatchets and bludgeons won't do the job of remaking Jerusalem into two capitals--for though the city is crisscrossed by a thousand invisible lines that separate the lives of Arabs and Israelis, those lines can be porous, allowing a current of people and influences to flow back and forth. Upper-class Arab women cross westward for Pilates classes or to go shopping, and Israelis venture into the Old City for tasty hummus and a puff on a narghile. One recent Friday, a procession of black-coated ultra-Orthodox Jews hurrying through Damascus Gate toward the Western Wall ran into a crowd of prayer-going Arabs. They all stopped to gape at a large, dead shark hanging from a hook outside a butcher's shop. It was one of those fleeting moments when Arabs and Jews forgot their differences and stared in awe at one of God's truly scary creatures. But it doesn't take much--a stabbing in the Old City, a riot or an explosion--for the lines of this invisible grid to seal up. Then the Holy City splits in two.

It's been that way since the start of the al-Aqsa intifadeh, the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that raged from 2000 until 2002, when Israelis started closing off the Palestinian territories. "The intifadeh was like a centrifuge that flung Arabs and Jews apart," says Seidemann. For Arabs in the city, the divisions have exacerbated the bitterness of 40 years of Israeli rule. Through a combination of purposeful neglect by Israelis and a refusal by Arabs to deal with municipal authorities (doing so might compromise the phantom sovereignty of Palestine, Arab leaders say), the eastern side of Jerusalem is withering like an unhealthy Siamese twin.

That is all too obvious in my neighborhood. On the Israeli side of Abu Tor, there are parks and flowers and streetlights and the garbage gets collected. A blind man can tell where the Arab street begins by the potholes and the smell--there, by contrast, garbage is picked up only if the neighbors pay out of their pockets for a truck to come and haul it away. The kids play in the streets because they have few parks to go to. Some of my Israeli friends are aghast when I tell them where I live; it seems that Abu Tor's Arabs have a reputation for stealing everything: cars, bicycles, even dogs. This is partly because the Israelis have stuff to steal and the Arabs don't. But theft is also a way of striking back at Israelis. "When I walk through their streets, I feel jealousy. The Israelis have everything for their children and we have nothing for ours," says Ahmed Abu Saloum, a theater director. Recently his teenage son was stopped by undercover police and ordered to remove his hat. Saloum says his son replied, "'Why? It's a democratic country.'" Then, alleges the director, "the police took him away and beat him. His body was so bruised, he looked like a tomato."

Arab refusal to cooperate with the Israeli authorities has some odd consequences. In a Jerusalem telephone book, for example, maps of Arab neighborhoods are blank, like unexplored parts of the Amazon in the 19th century. That's because no Arab sits on the municipal committee that chooses street names. On the rare occasion when the committee bothers with East Jerusalem, it is to irritate the Arabs by naming a few streets after Israeli war heroes. Mail is seldom delivered there, and having no street names adds to the Arabs' perception that in Israeli society they are either invisible, nonexistent or branded terrorists. Abu Walid Dajani, a hotel owner whose family has lived in Jerusalem for more than 700 years, recalls writing to Olmert when the Prime Minister was mayor of Jerusalem, outlining the daily humiliations those in East Jerusalem face. "If all our problems are related to security," he asked cynically, "why don't we have a mayor in army uniform?" Olmert, says Dajani, expressed sympathy--but the hotelier insists that the Arabs' second-class status remains unchanged.

Arabs might stand a better chance of improving East Jerusalem if they ran for office in local elections. They don't. Palestinian leaders in the West Bank warn that casting ballots is like collaborating with the enemy. So when the city council elections were last held, in 2003, only 4,000 of 125,000 Arabs voted. As a result, East Jerusalem's residents pay 30% of total municipal taxes, but they get back services worth only 5% of the city's budget. Israeli courts have said the municipality should add 1,400 new classrooms in the East, but so far city hall has built only five.

An Arab with a Star of David

For Arabs, it is axiomatic that their schools would be better--and their health services, their street-cleaning, their roads--if they had greater control over their own part of the city. At the same time, nobody wants to see barbed wire cutting Jerusalem in two, as was the case from 1948 to 1967. Those in East Jerusalem look to the Israeli side for work opportunities and health care. The mere rumor that Israelis and Palestinians might reach an accord in Annapolis prompted a flood of applicants for Israeli citizenship, but only a lucky few will get it; most East Jerusalem Arabs have Jordanian passports. The rush was telling; however much Arabs may feel harassed by Israelis, they fear that annexation of East Jerusalem by the current thuggish Palestinian leadership would lead to a spillover of the chaos and murderous political feuds that plague the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with rival militias fighting over spoils in the holy city. A new "Berlin Wall," says Seidemann, would devastate those who live in East Jerusalem. The average yearly income on the Arab east side is $4,000. That is far lower than the $19,000 a year earned by a typical Israeli in the west of the city, but more than twice as much as the average Palestinian earns in the West Bank. "The East Jerusalemites know that economically, life would be better under the Israelis than under [Palestinian President] Abu Mazen," says Seidemann.

If the city is ever to be legally divided--while maintaining its identity as a shared space--there are lessons to be learned from the thousands of Arabs who have figured out how to weave their way through Jerusalem's web of invisible barriers. They often dress like trendy young Israelis and, at army checkpoints, switch the car radio to Israeli music and speak a few words of Hebrew to soldiers. "I live in two different worlds," says Ammar Obaidat, who rose from gardener to head elephant keeper at the Tisch Family Zoological Gardens, "and I have to keep a balance between my work and traditions of my Muslim family. It's not easy." Shopping in the Jerusalem Mall, Obaidat speaks Hebrew with his wife and kids, hoping to blend in. But since his wife wears a hijab, or head scarf, the family is immediately tagged as Arab.

Obaidat is lucky. The zoo where he works is regarded as the one place in Jerusalem where Muslims, Christians, secular Jews in shorts and tank tops and ultra-Orthodox Jews wearing their 18th century finery all co-exist happily; director general Shai Doron thinks that's because the presence of other animals reminds visitors that despite their differences, they are all members of the same species. And Doron has no tolerance for ultra-Orthodox visitors who demand that he fire Arabs in the cafeteria because they might be plotting to poison Jews.

Arab ambulance drivers, like Arab zookeepers, have learned how to navigate Jerusalem's many borderlines. "I'm suspicious-looking in so many ways," laughs Nasser Izhiman, a volunteer driver and medic for the Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance service. "An Arab guy wearing the Star of David on my jacket? Nobody knows what to think." In fact, Arab medics--MDA has 75 Arabs among its 1,500 Jerusalem volunteers but is trying to recruit more--are invaluable. Not only can they help serve East Jerusalem, with its maze of unnamed streets, but they are also indispensable for the city's hermetic ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) Jews, who cannot accept help from a fellow Jew on the Sabbath. "When three Arabs turn up at the door, it's the last thing the Haredi expect, but they're grateful," says Izhiman.

Arab drivers won trust from their own community several years ago after they saved the life of an elderly Arab chieftain whose family members were Old City militants. In East Jerusalem, Arabs no longer hurl stones at MDA ambulances, once seen as symbols of the Israeli oppressor. Yet still, the divisions of the city leave their scars. The ambulances are allowed to enter Eastern neighborhoods only with a police escort. Waiting for police cars often wastes precious seconds during an emergency call, so Izhiman and his colleague Morad Alian will often collect the patient in their own cars and drive him to the idling ambulance, still waiting for the police escort.

Always, always, the pain and hurt of the city can break through and curdle the best intentions. Izhiman describes what it was like to cope with the aftermath of a suicide bombing. "We're trying to help the injured, and people are pointing at us, yelling, 'You're Arab! You did this to us, and what, now you're here to save lives?' It was like a knife in my heart." Adds Alian, "On the Israeli side, human lives are being lost, and the Arab side is demanding rights for statehood. I'm caught in between, angry and frustrated. All I can do is focus on my training and try to keep the wounded from dying."

That straightforward bias toward life holds a lesson. Arabs and Jews will always view the past--and their city--in different ways. "The Israelis," says Seidemann, "will always look at 1948 as Independence Year, and the Arabs as [the time of] al-naqbah--the disaster." For Jews, 1967 was the moment that an undivided Jerusalem came under their jurisdiction for the first time since the Romans destroyed the temple; for Arabs, it was the year of another calamity. But whether they like it or not, Arabs and Jews are destined to live in the same small city. Alian, the volunteer ambulance driver, notes a recent change he has seen in his medical work. In the past, he says, many Arabs refused to give blood for fear it would go to the Jewish enemy. "Now they mind less," he says. It's a straw in the wind; Israelis and Arabs are destined to live side by side, to share streets, markets, falafel--even blood. But only if they share Jerusalem more equally can it be less hellish for all.

The City Of Faiths

Jerusalem, sacred to three religions, can't be neatly divided. Israeli settlements extend to the east, beyond Arab neighborhoods, while the Old City is a jumble of streets and faiths, attracting visitors from afar

[This article contains a diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.]

JERUSALEM...

...A PATCHWORK CITY

1 DOME OF THE ROCK

2 DAMASCUS GATE

3 Tisch Family Zoological Gardens

Distance from here: about 2.5 miles (4 km)

4 EAST JERUSALEM

With reporting by Jamil Hamad, Aaron J. Klein / Jerusalem