A Street Divided (13 page)

A few hours later, Carol saw the small city vehicle pull up outside and went to say hello. It was a cold, gray, drizzly day so she offered them tea or coffee. When she came out a few minutes later, the two Jewish city workers had been joined by a Palestinian guy from the municipality, two Bazlamit men and another neighbor.

The city official seemed irked, but Carol didn't know why.

“Why did you complain?”
he asked Carol.

“I didn't complain,”
Carol replied.
“I made a request for the city to remove some graffiti.”

The men gathered in front of her house talked amongst themselves in Arabic—and they weren't happy. The city official explained to Carol that the graffiti was meant to welcome the Bazlamits back from their pilgrimage to Mecca. He told her it was an honor for the couple and a celebration for the family. Then they told her she shouldn't ask the city to paint over it. Carol was shocked. Someone had written something in Arabic on her wall. She asked the city to come take care of it. And now she was being treated like she had done something wrong?

“It was very threatening,” she said. “It was really scary.”

Feeling backed into a corner, Carol capitulated. She told the city workers to go. She'd let the graffiti stay. Carol went back into her house and stewed. She'd been intimidated. She understood that the Bazlamits wanted to celebrate. But it was also
her
wall, not theirs.

“Maybe if they had come to me, even though there was no reason to paint on the wall, and said: ‘Listen, there was this huge honor etc. etc., we'll paint it and then paint over it in a month,' I most likely would have agreed,” Carol said.

The more she thought about it, the more Carol felt like she'd been unfairly coerced. It was her wall, after all. So she called the city and asked them to send someone back out to paint over the welcome-home graffiti.

“I understood that it is a sign of respect to a family and an honor when they make the Hajj,” she said of the graffiti. “But, from a moral standpoint, it was wrong to paint on somebody else's wall.”

When the city crew came out the next day, they tried again to dissuade her from having her wall whitewashed. This time she was adamant. They painted over the graffiti on her side of the street. The next morning Carol came out to find all four of her car tires had been slashed.

Any neighborly goodwill that might have remained between Carol and the Bazlamits drained away. Carol was irate. She had no clout on the street, but the situation was untenable.

“The tension was scary bad,” Carol said.

Carol wasn't sure what to do. The Bazlamits called it a terrible shame and said they had no idea who slashed her tires. Some Palestinian friends of Carol's suggested that she take part in a
sulha
—a neighborhood reconciliation meeting—with the Bazlamits. Carol had little to lose. One afternoon, she walked over to the Bazlamits home to try and bring some peace back to the street. There didn't really seem to be that much reconciliation happening while they drank small cups of hot tea with freshly picked mint leaves and a coating of granulated sugar at the bottom. Carol expressed her regrets and the Bazlamits accepted her contrition.

“I didn't think I needed to apologize, but I did because I was kind of scared,” she said.

Though her heart wasn't in it, Carol shook hands with the Bazlamits and hoped that might end the fight between them.

“I was afraid,” Carol says. “I thought, if I do a sulha, then maybe they won't do something violent, like slashing tires.”

The sulha didn't change the way the neighbors really felt about each other. Carol stopped using the garden door as much as she could. She stopped parking her car on Assael altogether. Soon, Carol was looking for another place to live. The charm of living in Abu Tor, the allure of Assael, was gone.

Before she moved out, Carol took her girls on one last weekend away. They came home to find their cottage had been ransacked and robbed. The thieves took pretty much everything that was worth anything. Television. Stereo. Jewelry. Her VCR and, with it, hours and hours of irreplaceable family videos, including her grandmother's last Passover.

“That was most painful,” she said. “They don't have any need for that. It was my family memories.”

Carol might have chalked the robbery up to living on the edge of a poor neighborhood—except for the drawing in her bedroom, above her bed. A crude phallic image that was clearly meant to humiliate her.

“I don't believe it was just a random break-in,” she said. “In a random break-in you don't have time to paint an obscene picture on the wall.”

Once again, the Bazlamits expressed shock. Carol didn't believe it.

“I had a good relationship with people on the street,” she said. “I felt safe and comfortable letting my kids walk outside. Things just got out of control with this family. They really misbehaved.”

Carol had no idea why the Bazlamits took a dislike to her. Perhaps they looked down on her because she was a divorced mother. Maybe they thought poorly of her because she didn't cover her short, curly brown hair and defer to men.

“I don't think the men in the family liked me because I was an independent, single woman,” she said.

Carol did what she could to be neighborly. Sometimes she helped the women across the street to bang the dust out of the big rugs they'd brought into the street to clean. She'd rescue wayward toddlers who wandered down the road toward the busier street at the beginning of Assael.

“Maybe there are just too many people living in the house to know what's going along with everybody,” she said. “It's a hard family to get along with.”

Years later, that era of Carol's life was still so distasteful that she asked that her real name not be used when telling her story in this book.

Demolition Crews Come to Assael

By the time Carol moved away, the Bazlamits had cemented themselves as the street's foundation stone. Permit or not, the Bazlamits had created a three-level warren of seven houses stacked together like Lego blocks. Four generations of Bazlamits, dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins and babies, were living on the land. Nawal was living in a house built on top of the courtyard where her father-in-law had been shot in 1951. Her brothers-in-law built their own homes on the hillside below. Each one had a demolition order hanging over their heads. From one edge of the property to the other, the Bazlamits were swamped by court orders and demands to pay thousands of dollars in fines for illegally building. They handsomely paid lawyer after lawyer to keep the demolition crews away.

The Bazlamits were squeezed. They'd hoped to spread out with the apartment building in Azariya, but they'd been pushed back to Assael so that Israel wouldn't strip them of their Jerusalem residency. And it was pointless to apply for permits from a city bureaucracy that seemed to do all it could to conjure up reasons to reject their applications or, worse still, find reasons to seize the land.

Israel's complicated laws made it easy for the state, when it wanted, to find reasons to confiscate land. The nation's Absentee Property Law gave Israeli officials lots of ways to take control of property. The law allowed Israel to take all, or part, of a piece of land that was owned by anyone it determined lived outside the country. There had been years of battles over whether the law applied to East Jerusalem, but they knew it was always best to assume the worst. Israel had tried to seize part of the Bazlamits' property by arguing that some of the family members who owned the land lived in Jordan.

While they fought the attempt to take the family land, the Bazlamits also had to beat back repeated demands that they tear down their illegal rooms.

Israel held the threat of home demolitions over the heads of tens of thousands of East Jerusalemites. Every year, heavy Israeli construction excavators razed dozens of Palestinian homes in the city, leaving hundreds homeless and keeping countless more wondering if they were next.

When they weren't paying lawyers to stop the attempts to seize their property or demolish their homes, the Bazlamits had to deal with penalties handed out for violating other city laws. One time they were fined for putting solar panels on their home. Another time they were cited for hanging laundry from their roof—a daily routine that the city decided was a physical blight on the neighborhood.

Abdullah built two small apartments for two of his sons and spent more than 15 years fruitlessly trying to get the city to remove them from the threat of demolition.

The only thing that topped the Bazlamits' frustration with the endless series of costly legal battles was their incredulity over the city's approval of a towering three-story apartment building two doors down.

While almost all of the Arab families on the eastern side of Assael had tried in vain for years to get building permits, it didn't escape their notice that the owners of the one big building that got approval to build were Jewish.

“We are fighting the city and the courts every day,” Abdullah said. “Now, if I bring a Jewish man to take this house, they will give him a big house, a big building.”

In 2012, Mohammad, Abdullah's older brother, finally lost the fight to protect his small house on Assael from demolition. With no other options, Mohammad and his family moved their stuff out of the rooms before the demolition crews came to knock part of their house down.

The Bazlamits got the message. Their property and Assael didn't have any special protection. If anything, it was clear to them that their street, their property, was still on the front line and that they still had to fight, every day, to hang on.

Note

Four

The Settlers

They knew it was time to leave when the Arabs kidnapped their queen.

Malka. Their little 13-year-old queen. Even her younger sister agreed that Malka, which meant “queen” in Hebrew, was the prettiest one. She had long, wavy hair and always got compliments from people about her beautiful eyes. Malka was three years older than Rachel, who adored her sister's beauty and confidence. Rachel was the dutiful one who helped their mom with the housework. Growing up, the sisters were inseparable.

There was good reason for the girls to cling to each other. They were a minority of a minority: They were the only Kurdish-Jewish family living in a small Arab village in Persian Iran.

Their dad was always traveling for work. To where, exactly, the girls never really paid much attention. To them, Chaima was an absentee father who came around once a week to ask them and their brothers to do their chores and look after their mother while he was gone.

The family came from a small village in a sliver of Kurdish Iran near the country's western borders with Turkey and Iraq. There wasn't much for a father to do there, so they moved around. Their dad didn't have enough money to live in the big city of Tehran, so they settled for a while in the small Arab town. They were the only Jewish family there, something that didn't escape anyone's notice. Though life for Jewish families in 1940s Iran was far from ideal, they were able to light their Friday night Shabbat candles without fear. But Iran's close ties to Nazi Germany and its history of Jewish pogroms meant that the family never felt that comfortable in their own country. The simmering hostility started to boil again when Israel was established in 1948.

And then the Arabs kidnapped Malka.

One day, Malka didn't come home. She was just gone. She had been taken by an Arab man. It took days to get word to her dad and days more for her dad to get home.

“It's time to go,”
Chaima told his family when he finally returned.
“We're going to Israel.”

In 1950, the family boarded a plane in Tehran and flew to Israel. Rachel Aharoni, then ten years old, arrived on the windy Mediterranean coast with her parents, grandmother and four brothers.

Malka was left behind.

Rachel and her family were part of a growing wave of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa that was flooding Israel. Although many Jews had lived successful lives in Muslim-majority countries, the establishment of Israel stoked smoldering hostility toward Jewish families across the region.

In response to the growing dangers, Israel launched a series of missions—some of them secret—to spirit the Jews out. Operation Magic Carpet brought nearly 50,000 Jewish immigrants from Yemen to Israel.
1
Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought more than 120,000 from Iraq.
2
Operation Yachin brought thousands more from Morocco.
3

More than 260,000 Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, including 30,000 from Iran, streamed into Israel during those first few years, swamping the new country and presenting an overwhelming challenge.
4
Many of the new arrivals, like Rachel and her family, were dropped off at Israel's Ellis Island: Sha'ar Ha'Aliya, the Gateway to Immigration. The doorway for the Jewish diaspora to “return” to Jerusalem. It was supposed to be a temporary processing center for the hundreds of thousands flowing into the new country. But Israel wasn't prepared for the surge of immigrants, the
Olim,
and had nowhere to put them all. The numbers at Sha'ar Ha'Aliya just kept growing, and Israel's primary gateway turned into a sprawling refugee camp.

The camp was established on Israel's northern Mediterranean coast, at an old British army barracks in Haifa. When the camp officials ran out of space in the barracks, they moved people into canvas tents. The tents swelled with new arrivals from France and Morocco, Italy and Iran, Germany and Tunisia.

Very quickly, the camp was plagued by overflowing outhouses, rat infestations and endless lines.
5
There were lines for breakfast. Lines for lunch. Lines for dinner. Lines to see a doctor. Lines to fill out the paperwork they needed to get out of there. People had to wait for hours to take showers—when there was enough water to take them. The camp smelled of stagnant sewage from overflowing toilets and acrid smoke from cooking fires dampened by sharp winds blowing over the Mediterranean Sea cliffs.

It was clear from the start that the Farsi- and Arabic-speaking Jewish families from Iraq, Iran and Morocco were different from their Yiddish-speaking cousins from Germany, England and America. The language barriers fueled misunderstandings in the camp. It wasn't surprising to see frustrations over the endless lines boil over into arguments and fistfights.

The fact that the camp was enclosed by fences, barbed wire and armed guards didn't always make people feel welcome in the new Jewish nation.

For those who had survived the Holocaust and lived under Nazi rule, it was a shock to discover that Israel's official gateway looked like it could be a concentration camp. Some became so enraged by the situation that they tried to tear down the fences and escape.
6

Rachel watched as family after family packed their suitcases and boarded buses headed for new homes somewhere else in Israel. Rachel didn't know where they were going, but she knew it had to be better than that terrible welcome camp. The family shared two small tents for months. Rachel and her brothers were sent every day with buckets to stand in long lines for water. They spent months in limbo while their dad kept looking for ways to get them out.

When their day to leave finally came, Rachel was thankful. Like many others, Rachel's welcome to Israel was a constant reminder of how her family's fortunes could change very quickly. It was a painful lesson that stuck with Rachel as she embarked on the next chapter of her life in Israel.

“The people who emerged from this flawed process were emboldened, often disappointed, vocally and physically defiant, and carried with them a strong sense of entitlement to the goings-on in their state,” said Israeli historian Rhona Seidelman.
7

To deal with the continued flow of immigrants, Israel created more than 100 refugee resettlement camps—
ma'abarot.
In 1951, Rachel and her family packed their things and headed off to one of the ma'abarot near Jerusalem. They were finally able to move into a home with four walls, but they were still living in a refugee camp and wondering if they'd made the right decision to leave Iran.

The Aharonis soon joined a small group of Kurdish and Moroccan families in creating a small
moshav
—a farming cooperative—on a fertile hillside that Palestinians said belonged to villagers who fled in 1948. Rachel began doing odd jobs around the moshav—picking fruits and vegetables, cleaning houses. Her father sent her to an all-girls boarding school, but she and her friends got so bored that they came home after a few months.

There wasn't that much more to do on the farm, but Rachel liked hanging out with her family. When she turned 16, talk turned to marriage. Rachel had lots to offer. She was petite, with long, dark brown hair, and self-assured for her age. One of her second cousins told Rachel she knew just the guy: her brother. Haim was funny and smart. He was witty and adventurous. And he lived with his family in one of Jerusalem's most unsettled neighborhoods—Abu Tor. Haim lived above the barbed wire, between Israeli guard posts, on the edge of the country.

Rachel didn't know much about life on the border; it certainly sounded dangerous. But living in Jerusalem would be the fulfillment of a fantasy. Was this the answer to her prayers? Rachel wasn't sure. Haim's older sister kept pressuring Rachel to marry him. She showed Rachel photos of Haim and told her they didn't do him justice. He had woolly, dark hair and big, boxy, black-rimmed glasses. He had the long, smooth fingers of a guy who liked to read and the deep dimples of a young man who liked to smile. Eventually, Rachel's family agreed. When she finally got to meet Haim Machsomi, after they were engaged, Rachel was kind of disappointed with her second cousin. The Dream Guy fantasy she had created in her mind didn't match the reality.

“He wasn't what I was dreaming of,” Rachel said. “But, afterwards, when we had kids, he spoiled me.”

Little Iran in Abu Tor

Life in Abu Tor wasn't what Rachel had dreamed about either. Living on the edge of Israel in 1957 wasn't easy. It felt like they were always being watched. By the Jordanian Legionnaires across the border. By the Israeli soldiers manning sandbagged positions hidden below tall, skinny evergreens scattered across the hilltop. When the shooting started and the sound of gunfire echoed through the valleys, it was hard to tell where it came from and where to run.

Rachel moved into a small home with her new husband, his sisters and their widowed mother. Haim and Rachel didn't have much privacy. But they were building a community. There were only a handful of Jewish families living on the Abu Tor border. Almost all of them were immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Many were from Iran. Avraham and Malka Joudan, who had come from Iran in 1951, had been living there for years. So had the Jacobys, some of whom liked to point out that they were the “real” Iranians—
Persian
Iranian Jews, not
Kurdish
Iranian Jews. Haim's uncle, Eliyahu Goeli, lived a little ways up the hillside, where rebuilding the family outhouse would one day spark an emergency UN investigation.

The Abu Tor hilltop was becoming a Little Iran on the outer edge of Israel.

It was no coincidence that the country's newest, poorest immigrants ended up living on Israel's front lines. There was already a divide between the usually darker-skinned Sephardic Jewish families coming from the Middle East and North Africa and the normally lighter-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish families coming from Europe and North America. Everyone knew who got better treatment.

But living on the edge of Israel had one perk those on the other side of the railroad tracks didn't get: Abu Tor had a panoramic view of the Old City, a chance, every day, to see the Temple Mount, where G-d collected dust to create Adam, where the faithful had once kept Moses's stone-tablet Ten Commandments in the Ark of the Covenant. Every day, they could look out on the place where the High Priest could talk directly to G-d.

They could see their Temple Mount, still out of reach, on the other side of the barbed wire, in Jordan's hands.

Every day, the Jewish residents of Abu Tor would turn toward the Temple Mount with their prayers.

“Return in mercy to Jerusalem Your city and dwell therein as You have promised,” they would recite as they looked across the dark divide separating them from the Temple Mount. “Speedily establish therein the throne of David Your servant, and rebuild it, soon in our days, as an everlasting edifice. Blessed are You L-rd, who rebuilds Jerusalem, speedily cause the scion of David Your servant to flourish, and increase his power by Your salvation.”

Each day, the words were a reminder of the unfulfilled prayers for construction of the third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. The biblical prophecy has been the catalyst for repeated clashes with Muslim protesters in the Old City over who has the right to control the small spiritual plateau on which the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque have dominated the skyline for centuries. One day, the Jews would return.

In 1959, with their family getting bigger every year, Haim and Rachel moved to a larger home closer to the fence. The old stone Palestinian house had a big garden with a balcony that looked out on the neglected orchards, crumbling terrace walls and stone block homes sitting empty in No Man's Land. But their new place had a large living room with mosaic tile and lots of light. Apart from the fact that it looked directly out on No Man's Land, it seemed like a perfect place to raise their kids.

Rachel spent her time taking care of the garden, picking fruit from the trees to make jam, hanging the laundry, and keeping an eye on her children as they scrambled over a hillside that was always within sniper range of the Jordanian soldiers down below.

Some days the border separating the two sides seemed lower than others. One day Haim's mother chased a turkey into No Man's Land and returned to tell her son that she'd heard a child crying in one of the Arab homes. Haim was surprised, and told his mother she couldn't cross through the barbed wire again.
8

“Why not?” she asked her son. “They're our neighbors.”
9

This isn't Iran, Haim told her. “You could get shot.”
10

Haim's message took awhile to sink in as the neighborhood began to grow and the blurred border became more defined. The Machsomis' immediate neighbors, Avraham and Malka Joudan, had endured the same trauma when they arrived in Israel as immigrants from Iran in 1951. Malka, who got married at the age of 14, was pregnant with her fourth child when she and her husband were loaded into a cargo plane and flown to Israel, where they were immediately sprayed down with some unknown liquid (meant, they assumed, to prevent the spread of one possible disease or another) and subjected to days of bewildering questions from Israeli officials.

The couple arrived at Sha'ar Ha'Aliya with three kids, a few Persian carpets, some gold jewelry, and small satchels of clothes. They were bundled off to one of the dismal ma'abarot 20 miles from Jerusalem where Malka, in the final weeks of a tough pregnancy, refused to get out of the truck.

“They promised to bring us to Jerusalem,”
she said.
“This is not Jerusalem.”

The camp officials and truck driver tried everything to get her to get out. They tried sweet talk and threats. She wouldn't budge.