A Street Divided (11 page)

Dozens of people came to the park: couples, women with strollers, families from both parts of Abu Tor. Israeli musicians performed South American tunes. The Palestinians played the pear-shaped, stringed oud instrument and drums for more than 100 people. A couple of Palestinian men were so inspired that they got up for an impromptu traditional dabke folk dance performance. Judith was thrilled by the turnout.

“It was really a high point of all the things I had done,” she said. “But it's the kind of thing that you can't do forever.”

A Martyr at al Aqsa

It didn't take very long for tensions to return to Jerusalem.

The year after the Abu Tor concerts, a religious Jewish extremist killed Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Six months later, Israeli voters turned to the right by backing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, a skeptic of the peace process who played to the country's anxieties about a rise in Palestinian suicide bombings.

The 46-year-old “peace through security” politician became Israel's youngest prime minister, narrowly beating incumbent Shimon Peres, an ally of Rabin and an architect of the Oslo peace deal.

Netanyahu took a tough stance with Arafat and resisted concessions pushed by Clinton. Three months into Netanyahu's term, he gave the go-ahead to open a new exit for archeological digs running along the base of the Western Wall, below the Dome of the Rock complex. Israel's archeological excavations in the Old City were seen by Palestinians as a covert effort by the government to gradually take control of the religious site where the first two Jewish temples once stood. While Rabin and Peres had decided that it would be too provocative to open the tunnel exit, Netanyahu decided the time was right.

On Monday, September 23, 1996, just before midnight in the Old City, scores of Israeli police kept watch as archeologists and construction workers opened the new tunnel exit, which emerged in the Muslim Quarter on Via Dolorosa, the main pilgrimage route known as the Way of Sorrows to Christians, who retraced Christ's steps as he carried his cross through hostile crowds on the way to his crucifixion. The tunnel route also ran underneath an elementary school in the Muslim Quarter, stoking Palestinian suspicions that Netanyahu was trying to steal the contested Jerusalem ground from underneath them. Netanyahu's actions led to a predictable response: Palestinian activists poured into the streets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Arafat had started to build the foundations for what he hoped would eventually become an independent Palestinian state.

The protests started in the streets of the Palestinian refugee camps, but they quickly devolved into deadly gunfights between Israeli soldiers and members of the young Palestinian Authority security forces. Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned negotiator viewed by many as one of the more pragmatic voices in the new Arafat-led government, called the tunnel the “tip of the iceberg” of Israel's efforts to covertly extend its authority over the most cherished holy site, one that had been the cause of centuries of conflict.

“What's happening now is not a fight over the tunnel,” she said to CNN at the time. “It is a fight over the soul of Jerusalem and the legitimacy of the peace process.”
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By the time Friday prayers came around that week, at least 40 Palestinians and 11 Israelis had been killed in deadly clashes that quickly became known as the Tunnel Riots.

Thousands of Palestinians flocked to al Aqsa mosque that Friday morning as thousands of Israeli riot police and soldiers fanned out through the Old City to prepare for an inevitable post-prayer confrontation.

Among the 10,000 Palestinians heading to al Aqsa that day was Jawad Bazlamit, one of Hijazi and Wajeeh Bazlamit's many grandchildren. It was a special Friday for the 21-year-old from Assael Street. He was days away from marrying a pretty young Palestinian girl. The Bazlamit house on Assael was filling with relatives coming from as far away as Jordan for the celebration. The women were making stuffed grape leaves and the men were preparing to slaughter fresh lambs to feed the hundreds of people expected to join in the celebration. His father, Abdel Halim, and Jawad's brothers set up a wedding tent in the courtyard to welcome visitors and hung big colorful balloons from the ceiling.

Jawad's 11 brothers and sisters teased him about his marriage and how many kids he was going to have. Because he was one of the younger boys, Jawad was usually quieter than his brothers. He had frizzy brown hair, a thin mustache and a closely cropped beard that wasn't quite full enough to mask his adolescent face.

While his mom cooked Friday lunch, Jawad went off to al Aqsa early to help with a tiling project at the mosque before noon prayers, the biggest of the week, began.

Thousands of Palestinians crowded into al Aqsa for the prayers while thousands more lay out their prayer rugs on the cold stone outside. More than 3,500 Israeli riot police and soldiers had set up an exceptionally large security cordon. Shortly after noon, as prayers were winding up at al Aqsa, scores of demonstrators started throwing stones at hundreds of police positioned along the edge of the mosque compound. Wearing helmets and body armor, the police threw tear gas at the crowds and opened fire with rubber-coated metal bullets and live fire.
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“A martyr has fallen!” someone shouted.
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Thousands rushed back into al Aqsa and shut the heavy wood doors as bullets zipped through the narrowing entrance. Thousands more scampered up the stone stairs outside and rushed toward the Dome of the Rock as police closed in from all sides.

Sharif ‘Abd a-Rahman ran straight into a group of policemen who smacked him to the ground with batons.

“Jerusalem is ours,”
the Israeli soldiers told Sharif in Hebrew.
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Sharif, a 22-year-old from the Arab-Israeli town of Abu Ghosh in the hillsides between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, asked them for mercy—in Hebrew.

“I am an Israeli citizen with an Israeli passport,”
he told them.
“Help me.
”
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His pleas did no good. The police officers kept beating him until he was limp. The clash lasted about 20 minutes. When it was over, three Palestinians were dead, including Jawad Bazlamit.

The coroner determined that he had been shot in the eye—at close range—by a rubber-coated bullet. The bullet was found lodged deep in his brain.
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Like his grandfather 45 years earlier, Jawad became a Palestinian martyr.

Friends of Jawad told his family that he hadn't been one of the stone throwers, that he had been shot while praying inside al Aqsa. An investigation by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem was unable to find anyone who saw Jawad get shot. B'Tselem said he had been killed on a plateau near the Dome of the Rock looking out on the Mount of Olives.
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It didn't matter where or how Jawad had been killed. His shooting threatened to ignite new tensions in Abu Tor and across Jerusalem. Scores of Israeli forces converged on Assael Street to quickly quash any problems. Abdel Halim went to talk to the soldiers. He was worried they would make things worse. He assured them there would be no trouble and asked them to leave him to bury his son. They did.

“We don't care for problems like this,”
he told them.
“God gives and God takes away. This is a lifetime relationship. We're not going to make problems with our Jewish neighbors.”

The Bazlamits served sweet tea with sage and small cups of thick, unsweetened coffee to stunned relatives and friends under the rented wedding tent they'd transformed to shelter mourners. Jawad's mother, aunts and sisters wept in the street. Jewish and Muslim neighbors came to pay their respects.

“He was a nice boy,” said Rafi Goeli, whose father had stretched the borders of No Man's Land for their home in the 1950s. “I'd known him since he was a baby.”

Although they didn't know Jawad, Herman Shapiro and his son, Alex, also came to say sorry and sit with the family in the tent. The father and son took a seat on red plastic stools the Bazlamits had borrowed for the wedding and sat near Abdel Halim as he came to terms with the loss of his boy.

“Even though I didn't know the deceased, it's a shock,” Alex told a CNN reporter.
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An ultra-Orthodox Jewish father living on the street above the Bazlamits didn't know the family, but still felt badly for their loss.

“I have strong right wing political views, but this death is so sad, I feel it personally,” he told CNN.
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Jawad's mother was inconsolable. Her surviving sons supported her, kept her from collapsing to the ground, and washed the tears from her face with handfuls of water.

“How, I ask you, would Netanyahu feel if he had lost a son?” Abdel Halim told the CNN journalist who came to his house. “In that, we are all the same.”
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Abdel Halim told journalists that he had decided not to play verses of the Quran over loudspeakers at his home to avoid upsetting the Jewish families on the other side of Assael Street who were observing Sukkot, a weeklong holiday commemorating the 40 years of Jewish wandering in the desert.

“They did not harm us,” Abdel Halim told an Associated Press reporter. “Why should we provoke them?”
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Not everyone in Abu Tor felt badly about Jawad's death.

Shlomo Baum, the former Israeli commando and onetime leader of the Abu Tor neighborhood community watch, told the AP reporter that he shed no tears for Abdel Halim or his son.

“If his son had not rioted, he wouldn't have been shot,” Baum said.
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To Baum,
Jawad was an agitator who got what he deserved. To the kids growing up on Assael Street, he became a hero: a Palestinian who had died while protecting
Haram al Sharif,
the Noble Sanctuary. Palestinian children in the neighborhood started calling Assael “Martyr Jawad's Street.”

A New Wall Divides Families

Shortly before Jawad was killed, the Bazlamits had bought a small piece of land just outside Jerusalem in al Azariya, the town on the eastern stretches of the Mount of Olives where Christian tradition says Jesus Christ performed his most transformative miracle: raising one of his followers—Lazarus—from the dead. The town, known to Christians as Bethany, was a short drive from Abu Tor.

The family was getting too big for the compound on Assael. They were running out of land in Abu Tor and Israeli officials never seemed to approve their requests to build anything, no matter how small. So the Bazlamits found three-quarters of an acre of land in Azariya, not far from the Tomb of Lazarus. The property sat just below a Catholic convent and its groves of olive trees.

The family spent years working to make the money they needed to construct a three-story apartment building on a wide, open slope.

Mohammed Bazlamit moved to the building with his wife and four kids in 2000. He'd gone into debt to build the place, but it was worth it. They had space for everyone. The family set up a small carpentry business on the ground floor. Their business profited because the town was on the road running between Jerusalem and Jericho, near the Dead Sea.

The Bazlamit boys and their families were settling into their new home outside Jerusalem when the city started burning. On the last Thursday in September 2000, hundreds of Israeli riot police protected opposition leader Ariel Sharon and a group of Likud Party members as they walked up to the 35-acre compound above the Western Wall and across the site that once held the first two Jewish temples—the Temple Mount.

Palestinians were outraged by what they saw as another attempt by Israel's right wing to reclaim the plateau for Judaism, to build a new Jewish temple and destroy Islam's holy sites in Jerusalem. After 45 minutes, Sharon and his allies descended amid volleys of stones, trash and chairs.
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Dozens of people were injured as the protests grew.

“The Temple Mount is in our hands—and will remain in our hands,” Sharon said after the visit. “It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount.”
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Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned the visit as “a dangerous process conducted by Sharon against Islamic sacred places.”
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Sharon saw nothing wrong with his visit and rejected implications that he was stirring up trouble.

“What provocation is there when Jews come to visit the place with a message of peace?” he said. “I'm sorry about the injured, but it is the right of Jews in Israel to visit the Temple Mount.”
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The clashes that followed only grew in size, scope and intensity. Coming one day before the week's biggest prayers at al Aqsa, Sharon's visit set the stage for a bigger confrontation. Palestinian demonstrators wound up that Friday's prayers by throwing stones at Jewish worshippers praying down below at the Western Wall. Riot police were ready. They fired rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas and live rounds as protestors spilled out of the Old City and spread across East Jerusalem neighborhoods.

By day's end, at least seven Palestinians were dead—the first martyrs of the second intifada. To the surprise of many Israelis, the outrage wasn't contained to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This time, it stretched into Israel. Arab-Israelis, who make up nearly 20 percent of the country's population, took to the streets, where 12 were killed. The clashes marked the beginning of a new fissure in Israel. Jewish-Israelis began more and more to look upon the Arab citizens as a potential fifth column, a possible security risk that they couldn't contain with concrete walls and checkpoints.

Two weeks after Sharon's inflammatory visit to the Temple Mount, two Israeli soldiers made a wrong turn and ended up in Palestinian Authority custody in Ramallah. In scenes captured on video and shown around the world, an angry mob stormed the Palestinian police station and brutally lynched the two reservists. The image from that day, seared in the minds of Israelis, was of the large, surging crowd cheering as a young man in a white T-shirt stood in an open window of the police station and triumphantly raised his hands in the air, as the blood of the Israelis dripped from his open palms.