Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (11 page)

Arab shopkeepers in the Muslim and Christian quarters sell their merchandise not only to tourists from just about everywhere but also to their Jewish Israeli neighbors. You’re as likely to hear Hebrew spoken as Arabic, and most of the time you can’t tell by looking who is a Jew and who is an Arab. Most of the Old City’s Arabs return to their homes at the end of the day on the east side of the city, and most Jewish Israelis retreat to houses on the west side, but the two communities mix here every day and, at least superficially, get along as well as people in any other civilized city. There is little crime and even less political violence. It certainly isn’t a war zone, or at least it isn’t today.

 This fragile de facto peace may be the foundation for a genuine and lasting peace later, but most proponents of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would erect, for the first time, a real international border through the heart of Jerusalem. There’s a chance it might work, but if it doesn’t—and the odds are remote that it could work well anytime soon—the collapse of this delicate and hard-earned status quo could do serious damage to the city so close to the hearts of both peoples.

*  *  *

Israel has been at war since the day it was born. When the Jewish state declared independence from the British Mandate in 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq invaded and vowed to destroy it. The war lasted until the following year, when separate armistice agreements were signed with each aggressor. The Jordanian-Israeli armistice line slashed right through the center of Jerusalem, with the Jordanians controlling eastern, northern and southern sectors and the Israelis controlling western Jerusalem and an enclave in the east on Mount Scopus. The line became known as the Green Line. Neither Israel nor Jordan ever declared it the border, because it was simply drawn where each army happened to be standing at the time of the cease-fire. Each side knew, or at least hoped, that it was only a temporary armistice line, that there was nothing holy about it, that the final status was still up for grabs and would be later decided by negotiation or conquest.

Israel’s toehold in the western sector was surrounded on three sides and connected to the coastal plain by a narrow strip of land just a few kilometers wide. The Jordanians held the high ground overlooking that corridor, and they dug in on the tops of the hills surrounding it and the city. Despite the armistice agreement, Jordanian soldiers frequently used those positions to fire artillery shells, mortars and sniper rounds at Jewish civilians below.

Jerusalem had a Jewish majority when Israel declared independence, but Jews caught on the Jordanian side of the line were killed, expelled or taken to prison camps, their property confiscated or destroyed. Cultural and holy sites were ravaged. The Jordanians tore up an enormous 2,000-year-old cemetery on the slope of the Mount of Olives with bulldozers, razed the Jewish Quarter of the Old City to the ground and smashed its synagogues into rubble.

Abdullah el-Tell, commander of Jordan’s 6th Regiment of the Arab Legion and later the military governor of Jerusalem’s Old City, even boasted about it. “For the first time in 1,000 years,” he said, “not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”

Jordan, Egypt and Syria launched their second war of annihilation in 1967. The Israelis handily defeated all three armies in six days and pushed the 1949 armistice lines outward. They took the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan.

Egypt and Jordan later relinquished their claims to Gaza and the West Bank and signed peace treaties. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. Israel never annexed these territories, because adding millions of Palestinian Arabs to its population would threaten its Jewish majority over the long term. Israel did, however, annex the formerly Jordanian-occupied parts of Jerusalem, partly because Israelis yearned to reunite their capital but also because they vowed to never again let a hostile army surround them on high ground.

One of the first things the government did after its victory in 1967 was build Jewish neighborhoods in empty places that were formerly used by the Jordanian army. About 200,000 Israeli Jews now live in areas like French Hill, Ramat Shlomo and Gilo on the other side of the Green Line. Residents can look down the dizzying heights into the heart of the city from hilltops once occupied by snipers and artillery crews. Some of the new neighborhoods went up in areas that were Jewish before the Jordanians destroyed them after Israel’s declaration of independence.

“Annexing East Jerusalem was a dramatic event,” said Orly Noy from the Ir Amim organization, a center-left human-rights NGO active in East Jerusalem. “That meant that, at least according to Israel, all of Jerusalem became a part of the sovereign state of Israel. That means all Israeli laws apply, including the right of the Arab residents to become citizens. Israel never annexed the West Bank, and even according to Israeli law, the West Bank is not part of the sovereign state of Israel.”

She unfolded a map of Jerusalem that her organization produced with two thick colored lines on it—the Green Line, which was the 1949–67 armistice line, and another line in blue that marks the edge of the Jerusalem municipality since annexation. This blue line is what the state of Israel now considers the border.

The Green Line is invisible in Jerusalem. You’d have no idea where it is just by looking. “After annexation,” Noy said, “it became a national task to erase the Green Line. We didn’t want anything to remind us that the city was ever divided.” The blue line on Ir Amim’s map, though, cannot be missed on the ground. The Israeli government built an imposing concrete wall there during the Second Intifada to keep Palestinian suicide bombers from the West Bank out of Israel.

“Most of us don’t expect a real peace anytime soon,” said Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick, the author of the books
Hitler’s Bureaucrats
and
Right to Exist
. “So we suspect that the reality of that barrier after several decades will become the border. That’s why it was so important for the Palestinians to push the fence as close as they could to the Green Line.”

Palestinian negotiators say they refuse to sign a peace treaty unless the eastern side of Jerusalem—the portion Jordan temporarily conquered and annexed—is ceded to them for their capital. And that can’t happen if the separation barrier becomes a permanent border. Before the wall was built, the blue line hardly meant anything. It still doesn’t mean anything to the international community, which never recognized either Jordanian or Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, but to Israelis and Palestinians, it means everything.

The Green Line doesn’t exist on maps in city hall. The only line that matters there is the expanded municipal blue line. Everything between the two is controversial. The Palestinians say the Green Line should be the border. (I’m referring here to Palestinians who at least say they’re willing to recognize Israel and its right to exist. The terrorist organization Hamas and its fellow travelers insist that Israel shall cease to exist inside any borders.) The Israelis, meanwhile, say the municipal line, where the separation barrier sits, is the de facto border already, at least for now. The two sides may one day compromise with a new line, but no one knows where that line would be drawn, and no one knows for sure it will even happen. In the meantime, city hall has no choice but to govern Jerusalem as the unified city it effectively is.

“Around 200,000 Jews live in neighborhoods built on the other side of the 1967 line,” Deputy Mayor Yakir Segev told me in his office. “These neighborhoods have always been considered parts of Israel that will remain under Israeli sovereignty in any agreement, whatever the agreement is. No one will dream of evacuating these big Jewish neighborhoods in the name of anything. All Israelis, and even the Palestinian Authority, understand that we’re going to keep these neighborhoods and give them something else in return.”

Most Israelis also want to keep the core of East Jerusalem, where about 200,000 Palestinians live. Israel offered them citizenship when it annexed their part of the city. Few accepted it, though, so Israel declared them residents of Jerusalem, issued them the same identification cards Israeli citizens use and extended to them all the legal rights of citizenship except for the eligibility to vote for members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Since then they’ve enjoyed all the benefits of living in Israel, which are substantial. And over the past 43 years, they’ve developed a political culture unique to the area. Hardly any of them participated in the Second Intifada, for instance. And after the Second Intifada, thousands finally decided to take the offer of citizenship.

“They feel threatened by the fact that they might be forced to become citizens of Palestine,” Lozowick said, “so twelve to fifteen thousand of them have recently filed citizenship papers. And around 20,000 of them were already Israeli citizens. The number is growing all the time. There is tremendous social and political pressure on them from the Palestinians in the West Bank not to do that because everybody recognizes that if the number of Arabs in East Jerusalem reaches a critical mass of Israeli citizens, then Israel will not be able to divide Jerusalem. The entire city will be made up of Israeli citizens.”

Hillel Cohen, author of
The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem
, told me the political mainstream in Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods is not one of “resistance” but rather of “passivism.”

“The mainstream is against armed struggle in Jerusalem,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the problem will be solved soon, but I think this will continue to be the mainstream. There has also been a development of a new identity. They have a separate identity within the larger Palestinian identity. There are many sub-identities. They can be Christian, Israeli, Gazan, from the West Bank and the Diaspora. Now they have a Jerusalem-Palestinian identity.”

That identity is practically defined by cognitive dissonance. They’re Palestinians and loyal to their people’s cause, but they have more political, civil and human rights in Israel than anyone has in the West Bank, Gaza or in any of the Arab-majority countries. Israel—despite its relentless delegitimization in Palestinian society—is an imperfect but nevertheless nice place for Arabs to live, even as alienated minorities.

Many Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are of two minds on the subject. Some almost seem to have two personalities.

“There are two different political lexicons among the Palestinians,” Cohen said, “and you can hear both from the same people. A person will tell you the Jews should be killed because they’re the enemies of God, they don’t have any rights here and so on. But the next day he’ll say we’re all brothers, we’re all human beings, we have to coexist here in the Holy Land. I hear both from the same people. If they say one thing to one person and something else to somebody else, I can understand that. I don’t have an explanation for why I hear such different things from the same person.”

I asked one Arab shopkeeper in the Old City which side of the border he’d rather live on if one were ever drawn up. “The Israeli side!” he said instantly and emphatically, as if there were no other possible answer. I couldn’t imagine his saying the opposite later. “None of us want anything to do with the Palestinian Authority. They are corrupt. They are impossible. They are not straight. No one can deal with those people.” He doesn’t think the Israelis are “straight” either, but he insists they are better. “Which side would
you
rather live on?” he asked me rhetorically.

Another Arab shopkeeper I spoke to in the Old City said exactly the opposite. “Some want to stay in Israel because the economy is better,” he said, “but not me.” And like many Palestinians Cohen knows, he wildly contradicted himself. “I’ll compromise on the 1967 lines even though I don’t like it,” he said. “If I don’t compromise on the 1967 lines, I will get nothing.” So he sounded at first like a moderate, but not 20 minutes later, he said he yearned for the apocalypse. “ I hope Iran gets the bomb,” he said. “I am ready to die. As long as Israel is destroyed, I am ready to die.”

The history and details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are endlessly complex, and the Palestinian side is wildly contradictory and baffling to the Western mind, but the nature of the conflict is rather straightforward.

“You’ve got two nations that want the same land,” Cohen said. “Both have strong ties to this country and strong narratives that they tell themselves and the world. And they both see Jerusalem as the center of their existence, religiously and politically. Israel was wise, strong and lucky enough to occupy the whole territory, and it tries to control it. But it’s very difficult to control a population that doesn’t accept your rule, so there are clashes. And some good people are trying to find a solution.”

What those good people hope to do is draw a new line between the Green Line and the blue line that both sides can agree on.

President Bill Clinton suggested dividing the two countries demographically. The Jewish-majority areas would go to Israel, while the Arab-majority areas would go to Palestine. Something a lot like this was proposed at the time of Israel’s founding. Areas with a Jewish majority would become a Jewish state, while areas with an Arab majority would become a Palestinian state. The Arab side in 1948 refused partition and opted for war. It happened again in 2000, when Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat refused the American-Israeli partition offer at Camp David and launched the war of the suicide bombers.

One day, however, Palestinian leaders may well say yes, so an NGO called the Geneva Initiative drew up a specific proposal for the division of Jerusalem based in large part on Clinton’s parameters. You can look at their maps on their website. Jewish population centers in Jerusalem on the other side of the Green Line would officially become Israeli territory once and for all, as would the geographically contiguous settlement blocs in the West Bank. Smaller and more remote Israeli settlement outposts would be evacuated and ceded to Palestine. Most Israelis would find this acceptable if a stable and enduring peace were to follow.