A Street Divided (18 page)

Pini's military intelligence work in the occupied West Bank led him to the Jordan Valley where he met regularly with people like Saeb Erekat, one of the Palestinians' leading political negotiators. There seemed to be plenty of common ground between them when they met. Perhaps because he knew Arabic well and spent so much time in the West Bank, Pini saw Palestinians as more than bloodthirsty extremists scheming to destroy Israel.

When tensions were low, Pini took some of his siblings into Jericho for lunch at a local restaurant run by some Palestinians he knew from work.

Jericho was one of the first places freed from direct Israeli military control after the 1993 Oslo Accords set the stage for the rise of the Palestinian Authority. To the Machsomis, the humid town, surrounded by miles of date palms, was a city of legend, the first target Moses chose for attack when he sent
Joshua and his army to conquer biblical Canaan as the Israelites fled from slavery in Egypt.

For days, according to the Bible, Joshua and his soldiers marched around Jericho's walls with priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. On the seventh day, the priests blew their ram's horns, the shofar, until Jericho's walls came tumbling down. Joshua and his army slaughtered almost everyone in the city, man, woman and child.
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The Machsomis were excited and anxious to be driving into Jericho. It was like putting their heads in a lion's mouth. They trusted Pini, but they knew things could always go bad very quickly. When they arrived at the restaurant, Avi was stunned to hear Pini talking to the owners in flawless Arabic.

“I felt for a second that it wasn't my brother,” Avi said of Pini. “He spoke better than the Arabs.”

Because of his sympathies, because of his command of Arabic, Pini had always been something of a black sheep in the family. His younger sister Liora became one of the most religious kids. She got married at 18, had eight kids by the time she was 40, and became a grandmother at 43. She started wearing a tight wrap to cover her hair and long, plain skirts—a style often associated with religious settlers. In time, she became one of those who believed that Jews had a biblical, G-d-given right to the land. To Tel Aviv. To Jerusalem. To Hebron. To Nablus. To Jericho.

“It's our land,” she said. “They need to understand that it's ours.”

A little bit of freedom emboldened the Palestinians, she said, giving them the courage to create chaos.

Liora's animosity increased in the summer of 2014 when three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank were kidnapped and killed.

“They came from Halhoul, by the way,” said Avi, who found no small irony in the fact that the killers came from the same village in which he and his family were treated like royalty by their Arab neighbors from Assael Street in 1967.

The kidnapping of the three teens was followed by the abduction and murder of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a seven-week war in Gaza, and a spike in lone-wolf attacks in Jerusalem that ignited concerns that Israelis and Palestinians were heading for a third Palestinian uprising.

“They run over little girls, they run over soldiers,” said Liora, who backed Israel in 2014 when it resurrected its controversial policy of demolishing the family homes of Palestinian assailants. “If we don't do something to them when they murder us, then they will continue. It's a contagious disease.”

Liora lampooned the Israeli government for not cracking down hard enough on the troublemakers.

“They are the wise men of Chelm,” she said, harking back to the Jewish folkloric image of fools. “They are not dealing with the root of the problem.”

“How do you solve the problem?” Pini asked his sisters in Ma'ale Adumim at the end of a long night talking with his siblings about their childhood in Abu Tor.

“Deport them,” Rivka said.

“Deport whom?” Pini asked. “Whom?”

“I am telling you, this land is ours,” Liora told Pini. “I have no problem taking care of their infrastructure. They should live. They have children too. They should have property, because it's hard to live. But this land is ours, and they should not give even a little piece of it to them.”

If Liora was in charge, Israel would expel the troublemakers and allow only the few who risked their lives to protect Jewish people, the modern-day “righteous gentiles,” to remain. Asked if that would include her childhood friend from Assael, Samira, Liora was noncommittal.

“I'd have to see her first,” said Liora, who liked to remember Assael as she'd left it.

“I want it in my imagination to be the way it was when I lived there,” she said. “I was really happy there. Now it's not the same, even if Jews and Arabs do live next to each other.”

The Next Dividing Line

That was certainly true on Assael, where the Joudans walled themselves off from their old friends and neighbors across the street. They encouraged the city to install a thick iron door to close off the stairway that ran past their home. The barrier prevented Palestinians from lower Abu Tor from using the path as a shortcut through the neighborhood. It cut off the only path on Assael Street connecting the Jewish hilltop to the Arab hillside.

Yanki gained a reputation as the guy who “kept an eye” on his Arab neighbors. Like his mom, Yanki didn't think twice about calling Israeli authorities to report Arabs across the way whom he suspected of illegally building on their own property. The Abu Tor of today, he said in 2014, was not the Abu Tor of yesteryear. Too much had happened since then to bridge the divide: years of stone-throwing; Palestinians cheering for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War; suicide bombings; rockets from Gaza; a guy from Abu Tor, Mu'atez Hijazi, trying to kill a right-wing Israeli. It all made one thing clear to Yanki: You can't trust Arabs.

“My mom helped a lot,” Yanki said. “My mother and father helped so many times. But, you know what? When I see the bombs explode, when I see my fucking neighbor here killing a guy in the city, Hijazi, when my neighbor was clapping and singing ‘Bomb Tel Aviv,' I hate them all.”

Yanki didn't see his neighbors across the street as people who wanted peace. He saw an ungrateful community that had forgotten who brought them electricity, who brought them paved roads, who brought them running water, who brought them jobs and medical care and a life better than anything they could have dreamed of under Arab rule.

“They don't know,” Yanki said. “They grew up like this, so they want America. But they don't know that their parents already got America—from Israel.”

If they weren't happy in Abu Tor and they wanted to live under Palestinian rule, Yanki said, his neighbors could move to the Gaza Strip and deal with its militant Hamas government.

“They don't know what it is to suffer,” he said of his Arab neighbors. “So that's why I tell them: ‘Go to Gaza. That's the way you're supposed to live until now. Then, appreciate it: Israel.' They don't. They don't want to live like me. They want to take over me.”

Like Yanki, Avi Machsomi lost faith in peace talks. He came to question the idea that giving up land would really solve fundamental problems. But he was willing to let go of some areas—those places where Jewish people didn't go. Avi ticked off the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhoods he'd be willing to give to the Palestinians: Shufat. Jabal Muqaber. Issawaya.

“I don't want them,” he said. “They can stay there. We can put a fence up.”

It was a plan with practical benefits for every Israeli driver.

“There will be more space on the road,” he said. “It's not because I am a racist. There are Arabs that I work with that I really love. But there are other Arabs, let them stay there.”

Avi was ten when the fence came down in Abu Tor and the neighborhood underwent its renaissance. But that environment, he said, was almost impossible to re-create. He especially felt the divide with the neighboring Palestinian town of Azariya, on the hillside between Ma'ale Adumim and Jerusalem.

“When we grew up in the neighborhood it was Jews and Arabs, living together,” Avi said. “Now I can't be friends with those in Azariya. I work with a lot of Arabs and we get along. If it was us and them trying to make peace, we'd have peace in a week. There would be no problems. No problems. Because we talk. We talk like friends and we work together. When I talk to them I ask: ‘Why? We can do it this way. You eat with us. We're together.' If we, Arabs and Jews, the simple people, would sit, there would be peace. It would be completely different. I don't see any problem when we talk—Jews and Arabs. The problem is the hatred and the incitement. If I go to Azariya, I don't know if I will come back. On the other hand, if they come here, it's great for them. They have a nice time. They have fun.”

In 2014, Avi figured he'd probably be OK if he went to Azariya, but he wasn't certain.

“There are Arabs, even if I go to Azariya, they will help me,” he said. “But we can't trust them, because we don't know who we will run into over there.”

Unbeknownst to the Machsomis, their old neighbors from Assael Street were living in Azariya. It was where the Bazlamits built their small apartment building on the edge of town, where Israel built the 26-foot-tall concrete walls that cut them off from Jerusalem. The wall that had cut the Bazlamits' property in Azariya out of Jerusalem just kept growing. The line was gerrymandered to run a jagged route across the rocky hilltops of the Judean Desert and enclose Ma'ale Adumim and the Machsomis.

Eventually, the wall was supposed to grow to put the Machsomis on one side, inside Israel, and the Bazlamits in Azariya on the other.

By and large, the Machsomis came to see the new dividing line as an unfortunate necessity. And if the Palestinians wanted a state, they were going to have to accept the new realities. For the Machsomis, Ma'ale Adumim and the other settlements in the West Bank would always be part of Israel.

“There's nothing they can do,” Avi said. “This is the situation.”

Avi dismissed claims from Palestinian farmers in Azariya that parts of Ma'ale Adumim were built on their fields.

“Here it was just desert,” he said. “There wasn't a house here, so why didn't they do anything here before? Now we've built here. It is what it is. There's nothing you can do.”

Whereas his sisters were uncompromising on what they would be willing to give up to resolve decades of tumult, Avi was not. If push came to shove, he said, he'd be willing to give up Ma'ale Adumim. Really.

“They can have Ma'ale Adumim,” he said as his incredulous sisters showered him with friendly insults. “Do I really care? My real hope is that we live in peace and that they can come to our house. That's the dream. My dream is that we live in peace and that we'll live together, without hatred. No slogans.”

While the Machsomis stayed close to Jerusalem, Maya Joudan moved to Canada, where she and her brother Itzik both settled with their families. Like Pini Machsomi, Maya took great pride in her knowledge of Arabic and the relations she'd forged on Assael Street.

“I had more trust in them than my own people,” she said. “I will do anything with them with huge trust in my heart.”

Unfortunately, Maya said, it didn't run both ways. If Jordan had won the war in 1967, how would they have treated the Israelis?

“If it was the other way around, for one moment do you think that they would come to our home and help us?” she asked. “Do you think that they would stop the donkeys going to the well and put running water in their homes? That they would put lights in the street? Do you think they would come and introduce us to proper lighting? That they started having stoves? They went above us so quickly. Do you think they would have done that?”

No, she said. They had much to be grateful for. So did she. Maya looked back on her childhood in Abu Tor and saw a certain kind of paradise.

On one visit home, Maya came across the beautiful Palestinian embroidery stolen from one Arab house in 1967. The cloth sat for years in a closet at her childhood home in Abu Tor. Maya decided to bring it back to Vancouver. It had been sitting in the darkness long enough. Maya carefully ironed the hand-embroidered flower and put a cut-out photograph of her son when he was three years old in the middle. She put it in a frame and hung it above her bed in Vancouver. Something, she said, to remind her of her heritage.

“This is my past,” Maya said. “And you need to surround yourself with things that mean something to you.”

Five

The Collaborator

Ameel.

The slur followed him everywhere he went.

Friends would whisper it behind his back with a hiss.

Ameeeeel.

Assailants would shout it from the street as they tossed Molotov cocktails at his house. Guys would spray-paint the warning, the implied threat, on the stone walls outside his home on Assael Street:

Collaborator.

Beware of the collaborator: Abu Fadi.
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To call someone a collaborator in Jerusalem is to make them a marked man. Abu Fadi wore it as a badge of honor. He wielded it as a weapon. He used the fear his neighbors on Assael Street had of collaborators to intimidate. He was not cowed. He was proud.

Sitting in his dimly lit living room smoking cigarettes and playing backgammon with a friend one afternoon in 2007, Abu Fadi said he didn't care what his Arab neighbors thought of him. As far as he was concerned, they could move to some other Middle East nation and live under one Arab tyrant or another.

“Israel is the best country in the world,” he said between rolls of the dice. “Period.”

If someone asked Abu Fadi whether he preferred to be called an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian-Israeli or a Palestinian, he would choke on the question.

“I'm Israeli,” he said, again and again. “One hundred percent Israeli.”

With the thick living room curtains drawn, Abu Fadi sat on the edge of his couch in dress pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt that showed off a heart-shaped tattoo on his shoulder. His den felt claustrophobic, and the smoke choked the room. It seemed like Abu Fadi had embraced his reputation as a small-time thug. He silently sized up strangers while sitting on his chocolate-colored fabric couch set with fake gold frames.

Abu Fadi pointed to a wood carving hanging on the living room wall.

“See that?” he asked.

It was the shank-shaped map of Palestine as it existed under British rule until 1948, the land meant at that time to be split so two new countries—Israel and Palestine—could live side by side. The image is ubiquitous in Palestinian iconography. It serves as a reminder that there was once, not so long ago, a place called Palestine. Uncompromising Palestinian nationalists hold up the old lines as borders they hope to reclaim someday by eliminating Israel from the map. Abu Fadi looked at the image and saw something else.

“That,” he said, “is Israel.”

Not Palestine. Not Israel and Palestine. Just Israel.

It's a view not even Israeli moderates imagine when they look at the image. It's the view of the most uncompromising of Israelis who see the land—
all
of the land—as the G-d-given property of the Jewish people. It's the kind of thing you hear from armed Israeli settlers living in illegal West Bank trailer park compounds where they have defied their own government to seize more land.

Abu Fadi didn't care that Jews didn't consider him one of G-d's Chosen People. He was Israeli. A full Israeli citizen, unlike most of his neighbors on the eastern side of Assael Street. That gave him a right most of them didn't have: to vote in Israel's national elections. For him, that was more than enough.

Abu Fadi didn't just cast his own ballot in Israel's national elections. He helped get out the vote for the party he loyally backed: Likud. The political party that gave life to Israel's settlement movement. The party of Ariel Sharon, known as the “Butcher of Beirut,” who was forced to resign as Israel's defense minister after being held personally responsible for the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the city's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Likud was the party of Yitzhak Shamir, who helped kill British officers ruling Palestine in the 1930s, rose to become prime minister and helped champion the settlement movement that methodically gobbled up parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than anything, for Abu Fadi, Likud was the party of Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who sent Israeli spies to Jordan in 1997 to try to kill Hamas militant leader Khaled Mashal, and the prime minister many held responsible for sparking the 1996 “Tunnel Riots.”

Abu Fadi's modern political hero was Netanyahu:
Bibi.
Abu Fadi's truth-teller. An Israeli Ronald Reagan who believed that the only way to peace was through strength.

“Likud is the only party that can bring peace,” he said.

Abu Fadi was a Likudnik through and through. He religiously attended Likud Party meetings. He collected photographs of himself shaking hands with Likud's luminaries as if they were baseball cards of his favorite players. He had an autographed picture from Bibi. He had photos with Ehud Olmert, the Jerusalem mayor who became prime minister in 2006. Abu Fadi faithfully voted Likud. And he made sure that his wife did too. Abu Fadi proudly called himself a “son of the state.” A son of Israel.

“What I like is the freedom,” he said. “Only in Israel can you say what you think.”

The Political Pugilist of Assael

Abu Fadi was the political pugilist of Assael. He bulldozed people with views so extreme his neighbors didn't know what to say. He was to the right of most Israelis when it came to the idea of a Palestinian state. Although much of his family lived in Hebron, although his youngest brother became a member of the Palestinian Authority police force, Abu Fadi was opposed to the creation of an independent Palestine. Sometimes he even pushed the extremists' argument that the Palestinians were an invented people with no historic claims to a land once called Palestine.

He was aghast at the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip after Israeli forces removed all of the country's settlers from the Mediterranean enclave in 2005. To him, the 2007 takeover was a sign that Palestinians should never be allowed to govern themselves, that they would always pose a risk to Israel.

“I have not recognized the Palestinians as a people, let alone their state,” he said. “They have Gaza—that's enough for them. It's even too big for them.”

Abu Fadi wasn't willing to cede more ground to Palestinian politicians for any proposed peace deal. He saw it the way uncompromising Israelis saw the landscape.

“There are 22 Arab countries,” he said. “They have a lot of land. Israel is small.”

Abu Fadi arrived on Assael Street with a fearsome reputation—one he did little to dispel.

“It was known at the time that he was a collaborator,” said Judith Green, who moved to the street above Assael in the 1980s, shortly before Abu Fadi arrived in the neighborhood. “We found out that he was planted there as a scout, a kind of lookout, to keep an eye on the streets below.”

Abu Fadi became part of the neighborhood when he married Imm Fadi. He was 21. She was 17. Imm Fadi's family was woven into the fabric of Abu Tor, from the ridgeline to the valley below. Her father bought the property on Assael Street when it was being used as a temporary sheep stable. When Imm Fadi got married, her new husband paid the property taxes and transformed the shell of a building into their new home.

By the time he moved to Assael Street in the 1990s, Abu Fadi's thick, wavy hair was beginning to give way, leaving behind small brown patches above his ears and random strands that did nothing to conceal his baldness. Abu Fadi seemed suspicious, wary of people's intentions and always prepared to defend his views.

Before Abu Fadi and his family moved to Assael, their neighbors said, they had been run out of two other communities.

In the late 1970s, Abu Fadi and his wife moved to Al Ram, a small West Bank town between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Abu Fadi started working with the town's Israeli-backed Village League, a move seen by Palestinian nationalists at the time as working for the enemy.

The Village Leagues were Israel's equivalent of South Africa's Apartheid-era Bantustans—they were efforts to prop up co-opted allies in constrained positions of power meant to retain Israel's political and military dominance over the Palestinians.

The Village Leagues were created during Likud's first years as Israel's ruling party. Israel picked the members of the Village Leagues and chose people it thought would be malleable allies who could counter the influence of
Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Members of the Village Leagues were given enough power and support to clamp down on their fellow Palestinians. They grilled drivers at checkpoints. They acted as the security arm of the Israeli government. They were textbook examples of collaborators.

It was an accusation that Abu Fadi was willing to fight over. Again and again. Abu Fadi's views didn't win him much favor with his neighbors. Neither did the stories that came to Assael with him.

No one on Assael sowed more confusion than Abu Fadi. He quietly reported his neighbors when they tried to build new verandas for their houses without securing building permits from the city. He argued with them over parking and politics. People on the street heard shouts and screams from Abu Fadi's house that hinted at violent fights inside. They got used to seeing Abu Fadi wave his gun when things on the street got tense.

“Abu Fadi scared everybody,” his wife said. “They would fear him.”

Abu Fadi spent hours smoking and drinking coffee at his neighbors' houses. Though they saw Abu Fadi as a collaborator, the families on Assael repeatedly turned to him for advice. They asked for help getting construction permits from the city. They asked him how to prevent the city from demolishing their homes. Sometimes he'd help. Sometimes he wouldn't. He could be mercurial in deciding when and for whom he would step in.

“He would control them,” Imm Fadi said. “He had a controlling personality.”

“The Anaconda of Assael”

For many, Abu Fadi was like a dark cloud hanging over the street. When there were problems on Assael, they were more often between Abu Fadi and his Arab neighbors than between Arab and Jewish residents of the street.

“Abu Fadi is the black snake of the neighborhood,” said one of his Arab neighbors on Assael. “The Anaconda.”

Unlike the other Arab homeowners on the street, Abu Fadi had no problems getting the permits he needed in the 1980s to build a new house for his family to replace the abandoned ruins on his wife's family land. That only fueled suspicions that Abu Fadi was a collaborator. Abu Fadi did little to dissuade his neighbors from having that notion.

“If there was a problem, Abu Fadi could fix it,” Imm Fadi said.

It was better to be on Abu Fadi's good side. Those who weren't, those who knew his reputation, made sure that Abu Fadi didn't feel welcome on Assael Street.

In Jerusalem, there could be no greater disgrace for anyone—Palestinian or Israeli—than to be called a collaborator. A traitor to your country. To your people. To your religion.

Jerusalem has been the setting for some of
history's most epic betrayals.

King David's son Absalom betrayed his father and stole his throne. The Abu Tor hillside is said to be the place where David's spies waited for word from allies inside the city walls about the fate of the kingdom.

Down the valley from Abu Tor,
Judas betrayed Jesus Christ with a kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane. Some say Judas then hanged himself in the Valley of Slaughter below Abu Tor.

Like the Bible, history is rarely kind to collaborators.

French women who collaborated with Nazi occupiers during World War II had their heads publicly shaved before they were paraded through a dangerous gauntlet of men spitting taunts and threats. In the fight to create Israel, Jewish militants killed dozens of Jews accused of helping British rulers in Palestine.

The fate of small-time collaborators could be just as unforgiving.

During the fight against South Africa's racist Apartheid regime in the 1980s, black activists would fill rubber tires with gasoline, force them over the heads of suspected collaborators and set them ablaze. The deadly tactic was known as “necklacing.”

Palestinian collusion with Zionists working to establish the state of Israel was so controversial that religious scholars issued a decree in 1935 meant to stop Muslims from selling land to Jewish buyers. The
fatwa
declared that anyone who sold land to Jewish buyers was not only taking land from Muslims, they were “a traitor to Allah.”
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Collaborators were deemed heretics who should be shunned, if not killed, even if the collaborator was your son, father, sister or mother. Their crimes were so great, the scholars declared, that they were to be denied a Muslim burial.
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The stigma only got worse after 1948. Palestinians developed different terms for collaborators: Agent. Informant. Land dealer.

They all became targets. They were ostracized and demonized. They would be killed in the cruelest of ways. Lynch mobs pulled them from their homes and hanged them from lampposts. Their bodies were dragged through the streets behind slow-moving motorcycles for all to see.

Ameel.

During the first intifada, when Abu Fadi and his family moved to Assael, more than 700 suspected Palestinian collaborators were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The backlash against those who sided with Israel increased during the second
intifada.

In 2001, as the al Aqsa Intifada was intensifying, Yasser Arafat oversaw the execution of two accused Palestinian collaborators. One was shot dead in Gaza City. The other was killed in Nablus, one city at the center of the uprising. Thousands gathered in the West Bank town's square to watch six masked Palestinian Authority police officers shoot the man. Palestinian leaders justified the killings as unfortunate outgrowths of the fight for freedom.
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“The collaborator betrays his own people either because he is in a position of weakness and suffering (i.e., under torture or in need of health care during detention, etc.) and/or perceives the occupying power to be invincible, and he and his people are hopelessly weak,” wrote Palestinian historian Saleh Abdel Jawad in an article at the time of the second intifada titled “The Classification and Recruitment of Collaborators.”
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