A Street Divided (17 page)

Like Israeli general Uzi Narkiss in the 1950s, Israeli politicians in the 1980s knew that what mattered most was not the border itself “but the number of Israeli civilians living permanently on the line,”
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so they kept moving families into Ma'ale Adumim. Toothless denunciations from friends and foes around the world didn't matter much as long as the building continued.

In 1983, the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing released a special promotional video to entice families interested in Ma'ale Adumim. Architect Thomas Leitersdorf stood on the rocky, treeless hillside overlooking the Judean Desert and sketched out his vision for transforming the barren land into a “garden city.”
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The Machsomis were sold. They had gotten an offer they didn't think they could refuse.

A developer offered to buy their home on Assael Street and build them a better one in Ma'ale Adumim. At the time, Israel was offering various incentives for people to move to settlements: tax breaks and benefits that made it much more affordable to build and live in places like Ma'ale Adumim. The Machsomis decided to move to the red hilltop four miles outside Jerusalem.

The Yaghmours cried as they said good-bye to the Machsomis. No two families on opposite sides of Assael Street had been closer.

“She was the best one for us as neighbors,” Randa said of Rachel, Imm Ibrahim.

The Machsomi girls and boys hugged their friends and set out to start a new life a few miles away as part of the burgeoning settlement movement.

For the Machsomis, the move was more practical that political, more economic than ideological. They could get more for their money in this new Jerusalem suburb. Moving to the hilltop right outside Jerusalem, with rows of uniform red-tiled homes, didn't feel like being a settler.

As a teenager, Rivka was more concerned about making new friends than figuring out the geopolitical implications of her new home. Although she was born and raised on the old borderline in Jerusalem, Rivka hadn't spent much time learning about the changing geographic realities of the region.

“When I first came here, I didn't understand [what] the idea of a Green Line was,” she said over coffee one night in 2014 at the family home in Ma'ale Adumim. “I didn't even know what the Territories were. I didn't know there
were
Territories.”

To Rivka, Ma'ale Adumim was a boring Israeli frontier town, far from her friends in Abu Tor. The family spent six months in a temporary home in the settlement while construction crews finished building their new modest, one-story, four-bedroom home.

Rachel and Haim got to know their new neighbors and embraced their religion more strongly. Rachel wrapped her head in a scarf to cover her hair and started spending more time at the synagogue.

“I like it better here,” Rachel said of living in Ma'ale Adumim. “I loved it when I lived there, but when I came here I like it more.”

Rachel decorated the home with tall vases of plastic flowers and photographs of revered Sephardic rabbis, including Baba Sali of Morocco, a leading figure in Kabbalism, a mystical branch of Judaism that won Hollywood notoriety when pop star Madonna started studying it. Between her big goldfish tank and a living room couch, Rachel placed a large framed photograph of the son she'd lost to leukemia when he was barely 40. Right above her living room couch, Rachel hung an elongated photograph poster of the Western Wall with G-d's commandment written below: “Return to me, and I will return to you.”

A New War for Abu Tor

The Yaghmours tried to keep in touch with the Machsomis. The first Passover the Machsomis spent in Ma'ale Adumim, the Yaghmours drove out to the settlement with big trays of breads, fruits, cheeses, olives and sweets for their old neighbors. Randa Yaghmour drank coffee with Rachel at her Ma'ale Adumim home. But it wasn't the same—for any of them. Though Ma'ale Adumim was a 25-minute drive from Abu Tor, the divide between the two was already growing.

“The kids became soldiers,” Randa said of the Machsomi children.

By Israeli law, one after the other, the Machsomi kids signed up to join the army. Pini, the son Rachel had left behind in the house during the Six-Day War, started his military service soon after the family moved to Ma'ale Adumim. He eventually joined Israeli military intelligence—Unit 8200, a secretive group known for picking up everything from embarrassing phone calls from Jordanian queens to orders from Arab leaders to attack Israel. To do his job well, Pini learned Arabic. Avi never seemed to miss an opportunity to tease his younger brother about it.

“Your Arabic is better than your Hebrew,” Avi told Pini more than once in their lives. Avi was the classic oldest brother who had embraced his role as the man of the family when Haim passed away at the young age of 59. Avi's sisters and brothers turned to him for perspective, direction and laughs. Avi was the only one of the Machsomi kids to stay in touch with people on Assael Street after the family moved to Ma'ale Adumim. Perhaps because he was oldest, he had the deepest connections to Abu Tor. Even after he married in 1977 and moved to Gilo, a West Bank settlement on the southern edge of Jerusalem, Avi came back to Abu Tor every Friday to play soccer at the field behind the hilltop community center.

When the Palestinian uprising gathered strength in the late 1980s, Avi stopped going down into the Arab streets in Abu Tor where he'd once played pool, gotten his hair cut and bought milk for the house.

“You couldn't get anywhere close to there,” he said. “They started throwing stones. Then it was war.”

Like the Machsomis, the Jacobys cut a deal with an aspiring developer and some of the family moved to a different part of Jerusalem. The Joudans stayed on in their home. And it wouldn't be long before they found themselves in the middle of a new fight for Jerusalem.

Young Palestinians in Abu Tor used the narrow stairways running between the houses during their cat-and-mouse confrontations with young Israeli soldiers, who chased them through the neighborhood. The Joudans were right on the front lines once again. Everyone knew where the Jewish part of Abu Tor really began: right outside the Joudans' door, where the barbed wire once ran. Their home was repeatedly hit by stones during the first Palestinian uprising.

“Every day we were attacked,” said Yaacov, the neighbor known as Yanki who used walks with his Chihuahua, Timmy the Sixth, to keep an eye on things. “They were coming up and down and it was scary. They would break the windows and run. They'd kick the door. Every night.”

Though the Palestinian stone throwing didn't touch Ma'ale Adumim, it hardened the views of the settlers living there. Palestinians from nearby villages and towns were stoning Israeli settlers and soldiers as they drove along West Bank roads. If Rachel had ever really thought there could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the intifada solidified her belief that it was impossible.

“I don't have faith in them,” Rachel said in 2007. “They were throwing stones for no reason. They were killing people for no reason. They were killing innocent people—for no reason.”

The disillusionment grew in the years that followed the first intifada. Sporadic bursts of peace talks and diplomatic progress always seemed to be the small respites between the fighting.

The lynching of two Israeli army reservists at the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000—the brutal mob attack whose ferocity was captured in images of one Palestinian attacker showing his bloody palms to a cheering crowd—came to encapsulate many Israelis' perception of relations with the Palestinians.

“When you get close to an Arab village, you don't want to go in because you don't know if you're going to come out,” Rivka said in 2014. “It's just a few people, not one, two, three, but it's a few that are causing all this trouble. I know people who are Arabs and they're really good and you see that they want peace, too. Nobody wants this, but those people are ruining it for people on both sides. It's a pity.”

By the start of the second intifada, Ma'ale Adumim's continued expansion made it seem inevitable that it would never be handed over to Palestinians in any peace deal. Israel declared Ma'ale Adumim its first official city in the West Bank after its population hit 15,000 in 1991. A decade later, its size had nearly doubled.

There always seemed to be new construction in the settlement. Red-tiled single-family homes rose in clumps alongside multistory apartment buildings. Israel built a highway link with a special tunnel to connect Ma'ale Adumim to Jerusalem. Ma'ale Adumim created everything its residents could want: malls, cafés, health clubs, pools, libraries, even its own art museum.

Developers transformed the “Founder's Circle,” where the original families set up camp in 1975, into a major industrial zone that eventually housed hundreds of businesses, including SodaStream, the Israeli company that would create an international celebrity controversy by hiring American actress Scarlett Johansson as its public face.

For the most part, the Machsomis in Ma'ale Adumim were isolated from the violence outside. The armed settlement security made sure no suicide bombers got into Ma'ale Adumim.

Rachel was getting used to life in Ma'ale Adumim when she received another surprising message from Iran: Her sister Malka was alive. Rachel's relatives had tracked Malka down in Iran. They brought Rachel pictures of her sister and her two kids: a boy and a girl.

The photos brought tears to Rachel's eyes, and she thought about that day in Iran when the direction of their lives diverged forever. She wondered if she'd ever see her sister again. It seemed impossible. Malka was a citizen of a nation whose leaders saw Israel as a cancer in the Middle East that needed to be removed.

“It's just a pity that we couldn't save her,” Rachel said in 2014. “We couldn't get her out.”

“Deport the Troublemakers”

Rachel and her family were forever grateful that they'd left Iran. To them, Israel was a beacon of opportunity in a region filled with tyrants, dictators and kings who used fear, intimidation and ignorance to keep a thumb on their citizens. At the Israeli tax authority where she worked, Rivka saw Israeli equality day after day. She saw the Arab workers brought in under the country's affirmative action programs.

“There is that equality between Jews and Arabs,” she said. “They are given opportunities to integrate into our society.”

In small measures, Rivka tried to build bridges with the Arabs who worked in her office.

“We have a cleaning lady who is Arab, and I even give her my bank card so she can take out money for me,” she said. “She goes in the morning and buys bread and milk for the office because we can't get out.”

Rivka and her husband moved in with her mom in Ma'ale Adumim, a decision driven by financial constraints and a desire to be there for her mother as she got older. Rivka inherited her parents' hospitality gene. She always made sure her guests in the busy house—visitors, brothers, sisters, husband, nephews, nieces—had something to eat or drink: homemade soup, kibbe, warm bread, some more juice or soda, sweet tea or coffee, honey-soaked baklava . . .

When Rivka looked at the Palestinians, she saw people who appeared to be doing better than she was, people who didn't seem like they had much to complain about.

“It's not that I'm jealous, but they have everything,” Rivka said. “Look at the universities. They study. They get degrees. They're doctors. They have everything. So what are they lacking? Just to rule themselves?”

So they didn't have the right to vote. Rivka wondered what more the Palestinians wanted.

“They are the best car mechanics,” she said. “They are the best laborers in construction. The best builders. They're also in medicine. Manual labor. So what happens in their villages? They're dealing more with explosives there.”

After decades at Ma'ale Adumim, Rivka came to see the settlements as important security buffers, especially at a time when Islamic extremists from groups like the Islamic State seemed poised to turn their sights on Israel.

“This is for our security,” she said ruefully, thinking back on those days on Assael Street. “It would be so much better if there was that wonderful neighborliness, that harmony among Jews and Arabs. It was so much more fun. Today, it's really not. I remember my childhood, when we were neighbors with them, and I really miss those days. It's lacking in my life. As a child, I wasn't scared to walk around the village that was all Arabs. Today, there's no way that I would go into an Arab village.”

Weary of another spiral of violence, Rivka wondered if it wasn't time for the Israeli government to start expelling troublemaking Palestinians and their families—a controversial idea known as “transfer” whose popularity has waxed and waned over the years, depending on the levels of anxiety and violence.

“The people that make problems, they need to be deported with their families so others can see and be an example,” she said. “That way they'll start getting scared and then we'll live the way we should—in peace. As soon as we use power against them and deport all these problematic types, then it will be quiet.”

Rivka didn't see the point of giving the Palestinians any land for a state.

“It doesn't matter how much we give them, it will never be enough,” she said. “Even when we're not here, we'll always be a bother. Even if we're somewhere else, we'll always be a nuisance: because we're Jews.”

Of Rachel's kids, Pini, who spent his career in the Israeli military, grew up to be the most conciliatory. Pini saw the inequities. There was no question: Jews living in West Jerusalem had it better than the Arabs in East Jerusalem.

“If we compare the infrastructure in the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, I also wouldn't accept that type of discrimination,” Pini told his oldest brother and sisters one night in 2014 at their mother's home in Ma'ale Adumim. “You see the differences very clearly. It's logical that there will be bitterness.”