A Street Divided (16 page)

Haim reassured the man and extended his hand.

“Finally,” he said. “We've been neighbors for so long and at last we can shake each other's hand.”
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The two men talked about the flowers and the Jordanian soldiers who had harassed Eid. The old man was defiant. He'd had his fill of people coming to ask him about flowers and home repairs.

“Why are you harassing me?”
he'd told the Jordanian soldiers.
“I only threw her flowers.”

With the barbed wire gone, there seemed to be little separating the families on the upper side of the hill from those down below. Ziad's mother, who Rachel called
Imm Ziad—
the mother of Ziad—brought fresh baked bread. Imm Ziad and the other women across the way took to affectionately calling Rachel
Imm Ibrahim
—the mother of Avraham, her firstborn son. Imm Ibrahim would go across the street to knit with Imm Ziad and Nawal Bazlamit,
Imm Hijazi
, the woman who had thrown bread over the barbed wire to Haim.

The Jewish mothers cherished their new nicknames. It was a sign of the intimacy the families shared in Abu Tor. Rachel's kids taught Ziad some Hebrew and Ziad taught them some Arabic. Imm Ziad taught Rachel and Malka how to make spicy stuffed squash. The girls from the neighborhood played hopscotch on the open patch of dirt on top of the hill where they'd hid during the Six-Day War. They climbed trees together and tossed rotten fruit at each other. The older boys—the “bad” boys—walked down the hillside to a small clubhouse where they shot pool with Arab kids in their part of the neighborhood. Sometimes one or two of them took a drag from a cigarette.

On Friday nights, when Haim headed to the neighborhood synagogue for Sabbath prayers, his kids would rush across the old barbed-wire line to the Yaghmour house where they would gather around the TV to watch the weekly Arabic language movie on Israel's Channel One. Sometimes Rachel would come watch too.

The Bazlamits and Yaghmours would make hot, thick, sweet, cardamom-infused coffee for Haim on Fridays after the sun went down and religious dictates prevented him from making it for himself. Some Saturdays, during the Jewish Sabbath, Ziad would turn on the TV for Malka—the mother they called Imm Ismael
—
when she wanted to watch an Arabic language show that reminded her of home.

“My mother always said: ‘They are not Muslim,'” said Malka's son, Yanki, of the Yaghmours. “‘They have Jewish blood.'”

The trust between the families grew quickly. Then the Yaghmours and some of the other Arab neighbors extended special invitations to the Machsomis and the Joudans: Please come join us for lunch with our families in Hebron.

The Machsomis were elated. There was no greater sign of respect. It was an invitation they were happy to accept. They piled into a couple of cars and drove south to Halhoul, a small village near Hebron, near the Cave of the Patriarchs holding the tomb of Abraham, the prophet revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews as the father of their faiths.

They arrived to a massive feast. The Palestinian families laid out freshly made
labneh
yogurt and olives. They brought out steaming lamb, slaughtered just to welcome their special guests from Jerusalem. The Machsomi kids looked at each other, all thinking the same thing:
Is this meat Kosher?
Haim and Rachel had never said anything to their neighbors. It hadn't crossed their minds to say something.

“What do we do?”
Haim asked Rachel.

“We have to tell them,”
she replied.

Haim walked up to the men and explained the problem. Their embarrassed hosts huddled to talk about the culinary crisis. Then they quickly took the meat away and brought more fruit and vegetables for their honored guests. There were still lots of things the families had to learn about each other.

The visit solidified the bonds the new neighbors were building in Abu Tor. Eid started gardening for the Joudans. Unbeknownst to Eid, he was working for the woman who had complained to the United Nations about his return to No Man's Land a few years earlier.

One day, Israeli police turned up at the Joudan home with some concerning questions. They were looking for Gina, the friendly French tenant who had become a big part of the Joudans' daily lives before the war. But Gina was gone. She was missing. And Israeli officials wanted to speak to her. The Israelis told the Joudans she was wanted for questioning. They wouldn't say why. But the Joudans figured that she had to be a spy for Russia or some other enemy of Israel. It would become one of the war's unsolved mysteries.

When Maya Met Abdullah

The break in the fence also created an opening for Maya Joudan to finally meet the handsome boy with his cigarettes and love-spell rings. His name was Abdullah Bazlamit. He was 19, just three years older than Maya. He called her
Mazal.

They met on the edge of what had once been No Man's Land for an awkward first hello. They didn't know what to say to each other. Even if they did, they didn't speak the same language. But the curiosity was still there. In fact, it had definitely grown. Maya wanted to know everything about Abdullah and his life. What was his home like? What did he do with his days?

At the time, Abdullah was working at a barbershop in the Old City's Armenian Quarter. Maya wasn't supposed to go to the Old City on her own. But she was so taken by Abdullah that she wanted to see Jerusalem through his eyes. Maya and one of her friends put on baggy Palestinian dresses to conceal their identities before they walked with Abdullah to his shop. The visits seemed dangerous and daring. Maya was sneaking away from her home—
and
doing it with a boy from across the old border. If her parents found out, she'd be in big, big trouble. But Maya wasn't afraid. She wanted to spend time with Abdullah. Maya picked up Arabic quickly. She prided herself on having a sharp enough ear to distinguish Arabic spoken by Jerusalemites and that spoken by Hebronites. Maya got to know Arabic so well that she could get Abdullah and his friends laughing by telling classic jokes about dumb Hebronites—with a Hebronite accent. Maya and Abdullah became minor neighborhood celebrities when an Italian journalist came to write about their unlikely friendship. Their photos were splashed across pages of an Italian magazine, Maya said.

But the more time Maya and Abdullah spent together, the more it became obvious that there would always be a divide between them. Religious. Cultural. Social. There were so many obstacles. At the end of the day, both of them knew what it would mean to be more than friends. It wasn't going to happen.

“We became very good friends, but I knew it would never become a romance,” Maya said. “I knew enough that Jews didn't get romantic because of the religious differences. It was like we were buddies.”

Over the next year or two, Maya and Abdullah drifted apart. Maya went off to study in Canada. Abdullah got married, had kids and moved to Abu Dhabi.

“We really had a great time,” Abdullah said. “But it was superficial. That innocent relationship had no place in my new life.”

While Maya and Abdullah's friendship dissolved, the families on both sides were getting ever closer. At the start of Passover, when the Machsomi family had to get rid of all the
chametz,
or bread, in the house to commemorate the rushed flight from Egypt, they sold it to the Yaghmours. On the last day of Passover, the Machsomi family would go to a nearby park for an afternoon picnic and come home to find that the Yaghmours had laid out a huge spread of freshly baked breads and homemade cheese, jam and fresh olives.

They weren't just neighbors. They were becoming friends. Haim did what he could to help all the Arab men who came to ask him for advice. But there was only so much one person could do. Haim wanted to do more for Abu Tor. So he took his case to City Hall. In 1969, Haim drafted a petition asking Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek to fix up the neighborhood. More than two dozen Arab and Jewish residents signed the appeal for the city to deal with the sewage and poor lighting in No Man's Land.
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The letter, believed to be the first of its kind signed by Arab and Jewish residents of a united Jerusalem, asked the mayor to help them “complete the blessed work which has begun in our quarter. . . . We are happy to be pioneers in bringing together the hearts of the two people.”
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The bonds kept getting stronger. The Machsomis all walked across the road to celebrate Ziad's wedding. The Yaghmours piled into cars to go to Avraham's 1977 wedding at a Jerusalem wedding hall.

“The center of our life was with them,” said Rachel's son Pini, the baby left behind during the 1967 war. “It wasn't like there were Jews
and
Arabs—it was Jews-and-Arabs.”

The Machsomis would buy shoes for their kids from their neighbor Abed Mujahed's shoe shop in the Old City. Ziad and Avraham worked together for years at a Jerusalem printing press. Rachel brought Ziad's wife, Randa, ointments for their son's dry skin from the small medical clinic where she worked. Randa learned how to make ice cream and cakes with the Machsomis. And the Machsomis took their shot at learning to make spiced chicken and rice. When Randa's father in Hebron wanted to reach his daughter, who didn't have a telephone, he would call the Machsomi home and ask for Randa.

“[Rachel] would shout across the street that my dad was on the phone and I'd run over to talk to him,” Randa said.

At times, the Machsomis' living room became an informal neighborhood music hall. Rachel and Haim would host big holiday parties and birthday celebrations. There always seemed to be music and singing coming from their home. Their cousins would come and play the sweet sounding oud, the Middle Eastern string instrument with the bent handle. The songs reminded Rachel and Haim of Iran. They reminded Rachel of her sister, Malka. Rachel always wondered what happened to her. In the late 1970s, two Iranian men came to Rachel with a message.

“We know where your sister, Malka, is,”
they told her.
“We can make contact if you want.”

It seemed too good to be true. She sent word:
“If you can make contact, we want to know how she is.”
Rachel waited for word about her sister. But it never came. The chance to reconnect was cut short when the Shah of Iran was toppled in 1979.

“We're Moving”

Life in Abu Tor in the early 1980s for the Machsomi kids was idyllic. There were plenty of places to get lost for the afternoon and lots of friends to play with. They could go anywhere and knew everyone.

“There was no difference between Jews and Arabs,” said Rivka, Rachel's seventh child, a daughter who was born, perhaps not uncoincidentally, nine months after the Israeli military victory in 1967 that brought down the fence outside their house.

“We didn't have the need for luxury like people today, but we lived really well, and we didn't lack anything,” Rivka said one night at her home in 2014.

The kids would go get their hair cut in the Arab shops. Ziad's mom sold them newspaper cones filled with warmed nuts they would eat while walking home.

“The place was magical,” said Liora Machsomi, who was born four years after the Six-Day War. Liora only knew about the Abu Tor dividing line from her older siblings. To her, the Arab girls across the road were just her friends on the other side of the street. Then, one day in 1983, when Rivka was 15 and Liora 11, the girls came home to find boxes in the house.

“We're moving,”
Rachel told them.

Rivka was shocked. It's a moment that still causes her to go a bit white when she thinks about it.

“They uprooted me from there,” she said, using a blunt Hebrew word to describe leaving Assael Street.

Rivka was just starting high school when her parents decided to leave Abu Tor. She was shattered. They were moving. Not only that, they were moving out of Jerusalem to a desolate, uninviting hillside where a few thousand Israelis were setting up a new community with panoramic views of the Jordan Valley. They were calling it Ma'ale Adumim—the Red Ascent. It would become one of the country's most controversial West Bank settlements.

Israel's settlement movement had been gathering momentum since the 1967 war. Religious Jews in Israel argued that they had a G-d-given right to the newly seized West Bank. It was part of the Promised Land. They referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” embracing the biblical names for the area. Construction of what was to become the West Bank's first major settlement began three months after the Six-Day War. The following year, a small group of ultrareligious activists drove to the West Bank, rented rooms at a Hebron hotel to celebrate Passover, and refused to check out. The Israeli military responded to the protest by moving the group to a nearby military compound that eventually expanded to become Kiryat Arba, another of the most contentious West Bank settlements.

Despite international condemnation it received for building new towns on occupied land, Israel stepped up the effort. In December 1975, without official Israeli government approval, a small group of settlers drove up a hillside between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, set up a couple of simple huts, and declared it home.

The Israelis were part of
Gush Emunim,
the “Block of the Faithful,” a new, aggressive settlement group that challenged the government by repeatedly trying to seize land in the West Bank for Jewish families.

They were forced off the West Bank hillside several times but kept returning to rebuild until the Israeli government relented. In 1977, Israel's new prime minister, Menachem Begin, anointed Ma'ale Adumim as one of Israel's official settlements. By 1983, 3,500 Israelis were living in Ma'ale Adumim. Another 20,000 were living in dozens of other settlements built on confiscated and disputed West Bank land.
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