A Street Divided (14 page)

The camp workers wouldn't force Malka to stay, so they sent her and her family all the way back to Sha'ar Ha'Aliya, nearly 100 long miles, until they could find something in Jerusalem for the immigrants. They finally found one room for the Joudans in the city. That was enough. The family moved in and used government coupons to buy butter and eggs while they settled into their new life.

In 1952, Israeli officials came to the family with a proposal. They had a house for the family—but there was a catch. It was on the border, right above the Arab and Muslim families on the other side of the barbed wire.

“I don't care,”
Malka told them.
“I lived among them before. As long as I have a place to raise my kids, I don't care.”

Rachel Machsomi and Malka Joudan quickly became friends. Their kids would play soccer and hide-and-seek together while the women spent hours talking about their kids and their husbands. While working in the garden and hanging up clothes to dry, the women would occasionally see the women on the other side of the barbed wire a few yards away. The water well for the people living in No Man's Land was just down the hill from the Machsomis' house, so Rachel and Malka began to see the other women routinely. Rachel could sometimes smell the scents coming from the Arab houses below, where the mothers and wives would bake fresh pita bread in their wood ovens. It smelled like home.

The neighbors separated by the barbed wire tried their best to create a sense of normalcy for their families. When chickens from one side of the divide scampered over to the other side, people would shoo them back to their homes—most of the time.

But there was no getting around the fact that they all lived in a dangerous neighborhood. Two of Israel's nine Jerusalem guard posts—known as the Palm Tree and the Lion—sat on the high ground in Abu Tor. The narrow band separating Israeli and Jordanian soldiers made it one of the most contentious stretches of the border. UN officials were frequently called upon by one side or the other to step in and mediate disputes.

Over the years, soldiers and civilians on both sides fired potshots that sent people diving for cover. When Israeli forces invaded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in 1956 to challenge President Gamal Abdel Nasser's territorial ambitions and nationalization of the Suez Canal, Jordanian forces fired shots of solidarity along the Jerusalem border. One bullet slammed into the Joudans' back window, bending the iron bars that faced No Man's Land. The tensions got so high that Israel moved some of the families off the front line with Jordan for six months while the Suez crisis played itself out, ending with Israel withdrawing its forces from Egypt in the spring of 1957.

“It was the most dangerous neighborhood to visit,” said Maya Joudan, the daughter Malka was carrying when she arrived in Israel in 1951. “Nobody came there.”

Romeo and Juliet on the Border?

Maya and her family shared their one-story home with another family from Iran. The Jacobys rented a small room attached to the back of the house, on the edge of the garden overlooking No Man's Land. The Jacoby, Machsomi and Joudan kids all played together. The older kids looked after the younger ones. Some of the kids were intimidated by Maya's dad, Avraham.

Avraham, a balding man with dark skin and a hawkish nose, could be stern. His kids thought their dad looked like Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. The Jacoby children could hear the Joudan kids crying after being punished by their dad. And Avraham wasn't afraid to try to teach the neighborhood kids some manners as well.

Shimshon Jacoby, who was born in 1951, used to get in boyish fights with Avraham's sons. Avraham didn't take too kindly to Shimshon's roughhousing. When Shimshon was six or seven, Avraham grabbed him under his knees and shoulders, lifted him up and started carrying him toward the border separating Israel from No Man's Land.

“I'm going to throw you to the Arabs,”
Avraham told Shimshon, who writhed and pleaded for mercy until he broke free.

The incident scarred Shimshon for years. Avraham meant to scare Shimshon. And it did the trick. Decades later, Shimshon remembered that day vividly.

“For years, I was afraid of Arabs,” said Shimshon, a businessman with a tall, broad, Alfred Hitchcock–type build. “Because Arabs were like . . . darkness.”

Abu Tor attracted an unusual assortment of characters. In the 1950s, the neighborhood developed an underground reputation on the Israeli side for being home to a number of prostitutes. At some point, some of them may have worked out of the house at the top of the hill, next to the grave of Abu Tor; the house may have once been a mosque or home to a Greek Orthodox patriarch. Others worked out of their homes along the border. The Joudans and Jacobys lived next to a family from Morocco, including a single mother named Leyla who always had a lot of men coming and going.

“There were always a lot of foreigners and UN cars out front,” Maya Joudan said of the Moroccan mother who was one of the first to embrace their Arab neighbors when the fence came down in 1967. “When men would come around, her grandmother would wait outside.”

Because the residents of Abu Tor lived on the border, their lives were always under scrutiny. Everyone kept watch on each other. Israeli border guards scanned the empty houses in No Man's Land for any sign that Jordan was trying to set up secret bunkers. Jordanian soldiers looked for indications that Israeli forces were trying to sneak in heavy weapons banned under a UN agreement that outlined what kind of firepower each side could have along the border. Nothing was above scrutiny. Not even Pinchas Joudan's pigeons.

Pinchas, Avraham and Malka's eldest son, was obsessed with pigeons. He talked about them all the time. He learned how to take care of them and what they liked to eat. After badgering his parents for months, Pinchas convinced them to install a pigeon coop on their roof.

It wasn't long before a white jeep with a blue-and-white UN flag fixed to its body rumbled down the last dirt road on the Israeli side of the border and stopped outside the Joudans' house. Investigators with the UN Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) had arrived to carry out a surprise inspection of the pigeon coop.

“What is that on your roof?”
the UN inspectors asked the Joudans.
“We need to make sure that you aren't hiding any weapons.”

As the kids from the neighborhood gathered around, the UN inspectors took out their notebooks and began their examination of the pigeon coop. They checked the type of wood and took measurements of its size. They examined the pigeons and looked for any hidden compartments in the coop that might be used to hold weapons. Some residents of Abu Tor saw the UN inspectors as buffoons. Pigeon coops? This is what the United Nations is concerned about? But Itzik Joudan, Pinchas's younger brother, looked at the UN inspectors and saw heroes.

That's what I want to be,
13-year-old Itzik said to himself.

Itzik's younger sister, Maya, wasn't into pigeons or soccer. She was a chubby teen who didn't have many friends at school. Maya was lonely, even at home, and she would spend long afternoons staring out the back window at the garden and the No Man's Land just outside their low stone wall. She would eat fresh oranges and figs and pick handfuls of purple bougainvillea running along the walls. If there hadn't been an enemy army outpost across the way, it would have been idyllic.

One day, Maya spotted a handsome young man on the other side of the border. He had a head of thick, dark hair and an athletic build. Maya was intrigued. She walked out to the edge of her garden and peered over the wall. The boy, who couldn't have been much older than her, spotted Maya. She caught his eye and waved. The boy waved back. They were separated by only a few yards, but they didn't share a common language, and a fence ran between them. If they were spotted by soldiers they might be questioned as potential spies for talking to the enemy. But the two teens weren't afraid. Maya started rushing home from school and creeping to the window where she could peek out to see if the boy was there.

“The curiosity was very deep,” Maya said. “It seemed, somehow, that we liked each other.”

Very quickly, their cross-border curiosity grew into an unusual friendship.

“He would come and sit there on the ground and he would lean his head on his hand and his elbow and look at me—and I would look at him,” Maya said. “It was like a silent movie.”

One day, the boy signaled that he wanted to try one of Maya's father's cigarettes. Maya got one from her dad, tied it to a rock with some string, and tossed it over the border fence. The boy took it, tied one of his own cigarettes onto the stone and threw it back into Maya's yard—a thank-you gift for her father.

Maya confided in one of her girlfriends from the neighborhood that she had a secret friend she wanted her to meet. Maya and Dina whispered into each other's ears about the boy across the divide and imagined what his life might be like. After school one afternoon, when Maya and Dina went out back to see the boy, he threw a small, cheap ring over the barbed wire.

“Don't pick it up!”
Maya warned Dina.
“Maybe he put a spell on it to make you fall in love with him.”

The girls ran to Dina's grandmother, who had moved to Israel from Morocco and knew a thing or two about spells and witchcraft.

“If you go to the bathroom on the ring before you touch it,”
she told the girls,
“it will cancel out the spell.”

The girls ran back to the barbed wire and found the ring in the yard where they'd left it. The boy on the other side was gone. Dina looked around, squatted over the ring and peed on it. If there had been any kind of love spell, it definitely had been broken.

The Price of Poppies in No Man's Land

As the cross-border relationship blossomed, some new neighbors arrived across the way in the fall of 1966. Malka and the families on the western side of the street could hear banging and shouting
just down the hillside at two abandoned Palestinian homes in No Man's Land.

A group of men was cutting down mimosa trees and working inside the vacant houses.

Malka listened to the men sawing, hammering and talking all day. She knew something wasn't right. There weren't supposed to be people building things in No Man's Land. Malka kept an eye on the homes below from her garden, where her daughter was secretly flirting with the Arab boy on the other side of the border.

After more than a week of watching, Malka's anxiety boiled over. What were they doing over there? Something was wrong. On day ten of the work, Malka called the United Nations to tell them there was a serious problem on the border.

In September 1966, the UN team, waving its blue-and-white flag, once again drove over to Abu Tor to check out reports of trouble.

“For the past eight years, the two houses in question have been empty,” Malka told the UN investigators, army captains from Ireland, France and Belgium. “For the past ten days, I noticed work in the yards of the houses. I heard hammering and the sound of furniture being moved in the house. . . . I am very anxious about the ‘new neighbors' that have just arrived.”
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Malka told them she'd seen the men working day and night. She saw upward of 20 people bringing bedding and other supplies into one of the homes.

“This morning around 10:00, I saw two Jordanian officers entering the above mentioned yards,” she told the UN team. “They came into the southern house, but before entering they took off their rank markings.”
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That raised questions for the UN investigators. Maybe the Jordanian army
was
trying to set up a secret bunker in No Man's Land.

While the men questioned Malka about what she'd seen, a Jordanian major joined two UN officers from Italy and Norway as they drove along the eastern edge of No Man's Land, on the Jordanian side, until they spotted the pair of two-story stone homes at the center of the complaint. They found the gate through the barbed wire and headed up the sloping dirt path past low, crumbling, terraced garden walls in No Man's Land. They walked up to a squat, two-story stone block house where they found a young boy and told him to go get the owner. Out came 80-year-old Eid Yaghmour,
Abu Ali
, a longtime Abu Tor farmer with thick, rough hands, a whitish-gray handlebar mustache and neatly trimmed beard. The UN investigators peppered him with questions.

“I am an old man,” Eid Yaghmour told them. “I cannot work. I was only leveling a piece of tin. I was repairing a piece of tin to fit a manhole for sewage.”
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A sewer cover? The UN team asked him to show them what he was talking about. Eid Yaghmour went to find the suspicious piece of tin and handed it over to the UN officials. The investigators measured the man-made sewer cover and scrupulously documented its dimensions. They took photographs of the homes and the trees, the stone walls and the terraced gardens. They drew detailed sketches of the houses that pinpointed every chicken coop, room and wall on the property.
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“How long have you been living in this house?” a UN inspector asked.

“I left my home about 10 years ago,” Eid told them. “I returned to live in my house about two weeks ago.”

“How long have you owned these houses?”

“I bought the land and I constructed the houses in which I am living approximately 50 years ago,” Eid said. He seemed somewhat exasperated. He couldn't move a stone or bang on some tin without the UN coming to investigate.

“The house was visited by the UN two weeks ago, and also a week ago,” he said. “Now I request to be permitted to clean the herbs and stones around the house.”

The UN officials gave him no answer, wrapped up their questioning for the day and returned to the MAC office to type up their findings. The following morning, the UN officials returned to question the Yaghmours' next door neighbor, Zakaria Bazlamit, the 28-year-old shoemaker living with his family next to the homes under investigation.