Authors: Dion Nissenbaum
The British officer was cunning. He understood what the shoe shiner was saying. And he knew the trouble it could mean for the British. So he told his aide to invite the shoe shiner to his office.
The shoe shiner was afraid.
“What did I do?” he asked.
“Don't be afraid,” the aide told him. “Come, and something good will come out of the meeting.”
When the shoe shiner went to the British man's office, the officer had a proposal for him.
“I see your potential to become more than a shoe shiner,” the officer told him. “I want you to do better. We want you to become a policeman.”
The shoe shiner was wary.
“I don't have any education,” he told the officer.
“Don't worry about that,” he replied. “We will educate you.”
So the shoe shiner took the job. And the first thing the British police asked him to do was to go into the market and get rid of all the illegal stalls.
He went off and did as he was told. He kicked people out of the streets. He pushed them out. His harsh ways earned him promotion after promotion until he became an officer. They eventually put him in charge of all of
Jerusalem. But people hated him left and right. Because of his new wealth and prestige, he forgot where he came from.
He kept up his tough waysâuntil the British came to talk.
“People are complaining about you,” they told him. “People are protesting. You have defamed Britain's reputation. We have no need for you and you should go.”
The man knew what that meant for him.
“Where should I go, my lord?” the man asked.
“If you are no good to your own people, what good are you to us?” the British officer replied.
And so the people killed him.
Hijazi told the story one afternoon in the fall of 2014, between long drags on cigarettes that filled his low-ceilinged living room with smoke. He kept the wall-mounted television on mute and glanced up every now and again to read the scrolling news headlines running across the bottom of the screen. Unlike his father, Hijazi had kept his silver mane as he got older. His bushy mustache shadowed darkened, nicotine-stained teeth as he thought about the story he'd just told.
“People thought about me like they thought about the shoeshine boy,” Hijazi finally said.
For years, Hijazi saw his job in noble terms. He would sit with his friends, his family or anyone else who questioned him, and explain why he was working for Israel.
“As an Arab policeman, I can help you,”
he told people.
“We have the same language, the same culture.”
Most people weren't convinced. “People felt like I was helping the Israeli occupation, not helping them,” he said.
When Hijazi started to rise in the ranks of the Israeli police, he began to see more of what was going on and started questioning his decision. When he looked around, he noticed that Arab police officers all seemed to hit a glass ceiling.
“Why do I just reach one stage when the Israelis can go further?”
Hijazi wondered.
Hijazi started questioning his superiors more and more. Then the Palestinian
intifada
âthe popular uprisingâupended things for Hijazi and the region.
It was December 1987, and Hijazi had been working for the Israeli police for seven years. Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip seemed to be facing stone throwers more often. The hostility was growing. On December 8, Israeli soldiers driving a truck through the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip smashed into a car, killing four Palestinian civilians.
Rumors that the crash was intentional fueled demonstrations that spread across Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel's immediate efforts to contain Palestinian protests only seemed to make things worse.
The following month, Yitzhak Rabin, then serving as Israel's defense minister, vowed to quell the uprising with “force, might, and beatings.”
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Rabin encouraged soldiers to use clubs instead of live ammunition, a policy that earned Rabin the nickname “Bone Breaker.”
A few weeks after Rabin outlined the new Israeli response to the Palestinian intifada, Hijazi saw the end result of Rabin's orders. Hijazi was in London when he was startled to see stomach-churning footage on TV. A CBS cameraman had captured footage of four Israeli soldiers using stones to beat two Palestinian teenagers in a West Bank field.
The video sparked international outrage over Israel's heavy-handed response to the Palestinian uprising. The footage haunted Hijazi when he returned to Jerusalem. And things at the police station seemed to be going from bad to worse. Hijazi and his Palestinian colleagues were left out of meetings held to come up with new plans for confronting problems in East Jerusalem, a place Hijazi knew better than most.
Hijazi noticed that Israelis arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails seemed to be set free quickly while Palestinians arrested for similar things faced harsh interrogations and long
jail terms. He heard about Israeli interrogators putting sacks filled with dirt and shit over the heads of Palestinian prisoners. As the Palestinian uprising rolled into its third year, Hijazi quit.
“I never felt the democracy that they claimed,” he said. “I studied the police laws and I felt that the discrimination was embedded in them. The general law is punishment for all, but implementation of it was only directed towards Palestinians.”
Like the Jerusalem shoeshine boy from his story, Hijazi realized that he'd been manipulated.
“They were using me,” he said. “Even though the nine years were hard and long, I learned a lot. I learned about their internal sense of discrimination against the Palestinians. To them, Palestinians are slaves.”
Hijazi could see little difference between the British and Israeli rulers of Jerusalem, both of whom used divide-and-rule tactics with the Palestinians.
“This is the colonial thinking that we are living with,” he said. “Those nine years were the hardest of my life.”
“A Bullet between the Eyes”
Hijazi's disenchantment grew as the sense of community on Assael started to erode.
Leyla and her family moved away soon after the fence came down. In the early 1980s, Rachel and Haim Machsomi packed up their family and moved out of Jerusalem. The Bazlamits' connections to the other side of Assael were shrinking. And Abu Tor became one of the flashpoints for Palestinian defiance in Jerusalem.
Protesters used burning tires, cinder blocks, boulders and trash to set up makeshift roadblocks in Abu Tor to face off against Israeli forces. Demonstrators set cars on fire and threw stones through windows of Jewish homes. For the most part, the clashes took place down in the valley, far below Abu Tor's Jewish hilltop homes. But the demonstrations weren't contained. Protesters used the network of connecting stairs cutting up the hillside as strategic routes through the neighborhood.
To deal with the tumult, the Israeli police hired a controversial Abu Tor resident to organize a civil guard in the neighborhood: Shlomo Baum.
Baum had a reputation for being an unapologetic advocate for an aggressive Israeli military. His confrontational demeanor and military gait helped him stand out in Abu Tor. Baum had zero tolerance for the street riots spilling into his neighborhood. To him, the stone throwing and car burning were symptomatic of a much larger problem that had to be forcefully confronted.
“Burning cars is only one stage,” he told a
Jerusalem Post
reporter in a 1989 interview, soon after he was named to lead the Abu Tor neighborhood watch. “The next stage is torching apartments. It's not that much more difficult, especially in the summer, when a petrol bomb can easily be tossed through an open window.”
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At the time, Baum lived in a home down the valley in an area of Abu Tor that, like the Bazlamits' neighborhood, had been part of No Man's Land between 1948 and 1967. Baum took over the house as a squatter in 1955 and refused to leave, the
Post
reporter wrote.
“They won't come here,” Baum said. “If they do, they will get a bullet between the eyes.”
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Baum took to the new job leading armed patrols with his usual flair. He started walking the streets of Abu Tor with intimidating dogs, a special insult to Muslim residents, who usually view dogs as unclean animals.
“I don't plan on beating the intifada myself,” Baum told the Israeli reporter. “But if I was in charge, it would have ended in three days. You wouldn't have had Israeli soldiers being stoned.”
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Many Israelis in the area joined Baum. More than two dozen people signed up to take part in armed patrols of Abu Tor. At the time, more than 2,000 Jewish residents were living in Abu Tor, mostly on the top of the hillside, above 9,000 Arab residents increasingly crowded into the valley below.
The head of the Beit Nehemiah community center in Abu Tor, Maya Tavori, showed solidarity with the Jewish residents and banned Arabs from using the playground.
“I'm very skeptical about the idea of living together,” Maya said at the time. “We can live side by side and maybe after 1,000 years the cultures will change and we can live together.”
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Some Abu Tor residents saw Baum's armed patrols as a dangerous move that could make things worse. They quickly drafted a petition calling for Baum's removal.
“We residents of Abu Tor strongly protest the creation of a special unit of the Civil Guard under the command of Shlomo Baum, well known in the neighborhood as an advocate of violence and coercion against the Arab population, and an inciter of hatred and fear among the Jews,” the petition read. “A unit under his command could only increase tension in the neighborhood, if not lead to unnecessary violence.”
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Judith Green, an Israeli-American archeologist who lived on the street above the Bazlamits, told the
Jerusalem Post
reporter that Baum was “violent,” “aggressive” and “provocative.”
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Baum, she said, painted an ominous picture of Arab residents of Abu Tor as poised to “break into our homes and rape the women.”
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To counter Baum's armed patrols, Judith organized meetings between Arab and Jewish residents of Abu Tor. Judith and her allies convinced the city to lift the ban on Arab kids at the Abu Tor playground. But the Arab kids could tell they really weren't wanted, so they stayed away. It would be a feeling that lasted for years.
“Every time we would go to the park, people would let their dogs loose to scare the children,” Nawal said 15 years later.
The divisions in Abu Tor that at one point seemed small were starting to get wider.
“Abu Tor is kind of a test case,” Judith said in 1990. “I don't see how people can say Jerusalem is a united city when people pay protective services to watch their cars and houses, and the Arabs are afraid to come to our youth center.”
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Baum left no doubt that he was among those who wanted to see the Arab families leave.
“Most people hate them,” Baum told a visiting American journalist.
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Among the Palestinians, the animosity was also building.
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“My hatred for them grows every day,” Samia, a 19-year-old from the neighborhood who didn't want her last name used, told the reporter. “They treat us as if we were not human beings and we were animals.”
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Judith Green saw Baum as a provocateur whose main contributions to Abu Tor were to fuel divisions and intimidate those who disagreed with him.
“He considered himself Lord of Abu Tor,” she said years later. “He was a bully.”
Jewish families living on the western side of Assael Street started shoring up their homes with higher walls and stronger doors. Even as the walls went up, the Bazlamits tried to keep their eyes on their Jewish neighbors. One of the Abu Tor stairways ran right along the edge of the Bazlamit compound. Up above, the next flight of steps ran between the Machsomis' old home and the Joudans' place. It became a regular route for the stone throwers, whose whistles and shouts could be heard echoing off the tin and tile roofs.
One day while hanging laundry on the Bazlamits' roof, Nawal saw some kids throwing stones at Malka Joudan, an Iranian immigrant she called
Imm Ismael,
across the way.
“I rushed down, pushed the kids and screamed at them,” Nawal said.
The kids scattered and, when the police turned up, Nawal told them that the stone throwers had come from somewhere down in the valley.
“They are not our children,”
Nawal told the police.
“Our prophet calls on us to take care of our neighbors,” Nawal said. “It is my duty to protect Imm Ismael.”
Malka's religion didn't matter to Nawal.
“Our prophet said even if your neighbor is Jewish, you must protect them,” she said.
By the time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed an historic 1993 deal with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat as US president Bill Clinton looked on, the walls on the western side of Assael Street were a little higher. Judith and her group eventually managed to put the brakes on Baum's patrols. But the fabric of the street was seriously frayed. The Oslo Accords helped bring quiet back to Assael, but not a renewed sense of community.
Judith tried to capitalize on the new era of optimism by organizing neighborhood dialogue groups and community concerts. Four or five Jewish families from Abu Tor agreed to get together with four or five Arab families in the area. The summer after the Oslo Accords were signed, Judith teamed up with some Palestinian musicians from Abu Tor. With a little support from the city, Judith and the group organized a short series of concerts featuring Arab and Jewish performers. Three were held in the Abu Tor community center where, years earlier, the director had backed segregating Arabs and Jews. The last concert was held on a Friday afternoon on the stone promenade running through the nearby Peace Forest.