Authors: Dion Nissenbaum
“I told my children to be careful,” Hijazi said.
When Israeli forces came once again in 2013 to arrest Ahmad and accused him of being part of a plan to kidnap a soldier, Hijazi figured he knew who had informed on his son.
It didn't matter that Abu Fadi was dead; fairly or not, Hijazi still feared the family. Every day his son is in an Israeli cell, Hijazi is reminded of the absence in his home. He keeps photos of Ahmad, shaved head, dressed in a dark-blue track suit, on the mantle near the television. Hijazi spends his days watching TV in his living room, right outside Ahmad's empty bedroom where Israeli police broke through the window during their second house raid. Ahmad's wife and young son sometimes sleep there, on the twin bed with the thin mattress, below a silver frame with wavy rays of sun emanating from a picture of the young couple.
The Bazlamits visit Ahmad in the high-security Israeli prison whenever they can. But it's a long trek. And they can't stand seeing Ahmad through the thick prison glass, knowing that Israeli intelligence officials are listening to every word they say, looking for evidence to keep Ahmad behind bars even longer.
“There is a state of quiet, and sometimes a state of quiet scares you more than the other way around,” Hijazi said. “It's like the sea. You can see when a sea is tumultuous. But it's the sea that appears calm that might drown you.”
A Second Life in Abu Tor
Abu Fadi's final years were painful and private. As the cancer spread through his body, Abu Fadi spent more and more time in his home office going through his papers. He started getting rid of everything. Photos. Letters. Memos. Abu Fadi made sure that he took most of his secrets with him when he died.
“I don't think he wanted people to know who he was,” his wife said. “He didn't want me to know very much either.”
When Abu Fadi was gone, vandals stole two of the three security cameras he'd installed to keep watch outside his house. Mostly, Imm Fadi stopped paying attention to the live video feeds. But she didn't feel entirely safe. One afternoon she saw a young man who'd scaled the front wall and the iron shutters to get onto their tile roof. She thought the guy was Jewish, but she couldn't be sure. Whatever the case, she later had coils of razor wire strung out along the edge of her roof to prevent anyone else from climbing over. The barbed wire returned to Assael. And Imm Fadi launched a new chapter in her life. She stopped constantly wearing the head scarf her husband always told her to wear when she went out. She learned the Hebrew her husband had prevented her from studying. She started looking after elderly Israelis and made some money to support her family. Imm Fadi packed what was left of Abu Fadi's political paraphernalia and gave it to one of her sons. She did what she could to move on.
But Abu Fadi's presence still loomed over the house. Imm Fadi hung a large portrait of her late husband above the television in the living room, right below a pair of exposed fluorescent lights that cast his stern, unsmiling gaze in an unflattering yellow pallor.
Every time she or her kids sat down on the leopard-print-covered couches to watch the flat-screen television mounted on the wall, Abu Fadi looked down on them with the same dour look he had flashed at people his entire adult life.
“No one accepted him as he was,” his wife said one night in her living room. “When people needed him, he was a good man. When they didn't need him anymore, he wasn't important.”
Imm Fadi thought the trajectory of history had proven her husband right in choosing the Israeli side of the fight.
“A long time ago, whoever sent their son or daughter to study on the Jewish side would be thought of as a collaborator,” she said. “Now, everyone sends their son or daughter to study on the Israeli side.”
After years of acceding to her husband's demands, Imm Fadi cut her own path. One of the first things she did was distance herself from her husband's politics.
“The Likud choice was imposed on us,” she said. “If I were to go vote now, I would maybe leave it blank. I feel different now.”
Still, Imm Fadi felt a certain responsibility to vote since she was one of the few Arab Jerusalemites who had Israeli citizenship that gave her the right to cast a ballot in national elections.
“I think, because I'm an Arab and I have the opportunity to vote, I should vote for somebody who will help us,” she said. “We should look for a party that represents our ideas and vote for them. Had Abu Fadi been alive, I wouldn't have been able to discuss who serves us as an Arab.”
Imm Fadi figured they were doomed to eternal war with the Jewish people. She was just tired of it all. After so many years of fighting, Imm Fadi just wanted to work, to look after her family, and take off her shoes at the end of the day knowing she'd done some good.
“It is written in the Quran that we will always fight with the Jews,” she said. “Now we have given up. We have surrendered. I don't see any good coming out of all the protests.”
Imm Fadi saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on her husband's life. As she got older, the slurs aimed at her and her husband stung less and less.
“Before I used to hate it,” she said. “Now, I don't care. Fadi says: âMy father was a collaborator. He's dead. No one on their last day will be held accountable for another person's sins.'”
“Our Father Protected Assael”
Perhaps the only thing worse than being branded a Palestinian collaborator in Jerusalem is being the son or daughter of someone who has been tarred as a traitor. The schoolyard taunts are biting and relentless. Nothing can stir up a street fight faster.
In 2005, Arab-Israeli director Hany Abu-Assad's Oscar-nominated movie,
Paradise Now,
brought the issue of Palestinian collaborators to a global audience. The film traced the decisions of Said and Khaled, two young men from the West Bank city of Nablus who had been chosen to carry out suicide bombings in Tel Aviv.
As he tries to justify his plans to the woman he has fallen in love with, Said reveals that his father was an ameelâa collaborator.
“The crimes of the occupation are countless,” Said tells her. “The worst crime of all is to exploit the people's weaknesses and turn them into collaborators. By doing that, they not only kill the resistance, they also ruin families, ruin their dignity, and ruin an entire people. When my father was executed, I was ten years old. He was a good person. But he grew weak. For that, I hold the occupation responsible. They must understand that, if they recruit collaborators, they must pay the price for it. A life without dignity is worthless. Especially when it reminds you day after day of humiliation and weakness.”
The film won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and was the first film representing Palestine to be nominated for an Academy Award. The same indignities depicted in the film played out on Assael Street for Abu Fadi's kids, especially the older ones. They were constantly being taunted and getting in fights at school or on the street. Abu Fadi sent his two oldest kids to a school across town so they wouldn't have to face the heckling from mean-spirited kids in Abu Tor. But there was no way for any of them to really escape their father's reputation. Mahmoud repeatedly came home from school and wept in his room.
“I don't have one friend on the street,”
said Mahmoud, one of Abu Fadi's three sons.
By the time he was 30, Mahmoud was divorced and remarried. His first marriage had been tumultuous. When he was alive, Abu Fadi would drive to his son's house to try to defuse tensions. After he died, there was no one to help keep things together, and the couple fell apart.
Arab families refused to let their daughters marry into Abu Fadi's family because of his reputation. Abu Fadi's kids found the treatment they received from their neighbors to be duplicitous and hypocritical. None of the neighbors had any problem asking Abu Fadi for help when they had issues with the city. None of them called him a collaborator when they needed something.
“The word collaborator is used to put people down,” said his oldest son, Fadi. “Because he was able to solve their problems with Israel, they think he's a collaborator, even though solving their problems is in their benefit.”
Mahmoud rejected the suggestion that his father had embraced an Israeli identity. Mahmoud saw his dad as an unsung hero who had suffered the slurs of his neighbors while he did all he could to help them.
“Instead of having an Israeli identity, my father protected the whole neighborhood,” he said.
None of the kids was more protective of their dad's image than Abeer, the eldest of three daughters. Among Abu Fadi's kids, Abeer was the most successful. She studied law at Israel's prestigious Hebrew University, worked in the Israeli Justice Ministry and went into private legal practice before she was 30. She dyed her hair blond and wore stylish skirts and jackets that accentuated her figure. As the eldest daughter, she was closest to her father. Abeer saw nothing to be gained by talking about her dad.
“It's private,” she said one evening at their house when she came home from work in late 2014. “I don't want to share this with anyone.”
Like her brother, Abeer bristled at the suggestion that her father had embraced an Israeli identity.
“Why are you talking about these things?” she asked her mother and brothers. “It's private.”
When pressed to talk about their lives on Assael Street, Abeer got visibly angry and walked out of the living room. Her mother chased after her and the two got in a heated argument before asking their visitors to leave them alone. Abeer wanted nothing to do with people picking apart her family's lives. Her father had been misunderstood. It seemed like their family had been forever scarred, physically and emotionally, by Abu Fadi's decisions. If any of them were ever going to have a chance to define their lives for themselves, they had to get out from under Abu Fadi's shadows.
“He's dead,” said Abeer, who appeared to be on the brink of crying as my Palestinian colleague and I left the family home for the last time. “What else is there to say? Abu Fadi is dead.”
Note
*
The names of Abu Fadi and his family have been changed.
It took the hands of a healer to secure a breakthrough in modern-day Israeli-Palestinian relations on Assael Street.
Alisa Maeir-Epstein could see that the psychological walls dividing East and West were thick and high. Alisa knew she would have to summon all her energies to bring some healing to Abu Tor.
A rare window of opportunity had opened: Alisa had a chance to bridge the divide by using her New Age Reiki healing skills to infuse her Arab neighbor's body with soothing energy.
It was as if her life had led her here, to this dead-end street on the front lines of Jewish-Muslim relations.
Before she arrived on Assael in 2005, Alisa lived a nomadic, spiritual life. She'd ventured into the most remote valleys of Pakistan to live with a marginalized tribe in the shadows of the Khyber Mountains. She spent countless nights on the Red Sea desert beaches in Egypt with Bedouin friends, not far from Mount Sinaiâthe rocky range where Moses received the Ten Commandments.
Alisa had traveled north to Israel's captured Golan Heights to offer prayers at the Middle East's version of Stonehenge: a mysterious 5,000-year-old monument of concentric stone circles that some consider one of the earth's “energy fulcrums.”
But the most significant journey came when Alisa was in her 20s. While exploring America one summer, Alisa found her way to South Carolina where she sought spiritual guidance from an East German healer, a Reiki Master, who showed her how to use the power in her hands to heal.
Renate Sorensen wasn't what Alisa expected to find when she went looking for a spiritual guru. Renate was in her 50s and frumpy. She wore large, thick, purple-rimmed glasses and talked about spiritual energy with a quiet, lyrical German accent. Her hair shot out at different anglesâlike an ungroomed cat. She wore unflattering button-down sweaters over checkered shirts.
“She looked like a funny old lady, walking down the street with a big pocketbook to buy cottage cheese,” Alisa said. “But she turned out to be this incredibly enlightened, great being.”
Alisa didn't exactly command a room with her physical presence either. She was about five feet tall, with a petite frame that made her look younger than she was. She kept her thin, silverish hair cut pixie-short, then started dying it blond as she got older. But she'd served as an officer in the Israeli military and knew how to take care of herself in a way that only a woman who has traveled around the world alone knows how to do.
Renate taught Alisa something else: the skills she needed to tap into universal spiritual energyâthe Reikiâand use her hands to heal the sick. A Buddhist monk developed Reiki in Japan in the 1920s as a way for people to fill up on that invisible energy when it got low. He taught Reiki students how to “lay their hands” on a patient and infuse them with healing power. Alisa learned how to use special hand movements to clear the body's chakrasâthe body's spiritual energy spots. Reiki devotees raved about it. The International Center for Reiki Training basically says Reiki teachers can perform miracles. It's a claim not that uncommon in a place like Jerusalem. Reiki treatments, the center says, create a “wonderful glowing radiance that flows through and around you.” Reiki “treats the whole person, including body, emotions, mind and spirit, creating many beneficial effects that include relaxation and feelings of peace, security and wellbeing. Many have reported miraculous results.”
1
It made sense to Alisa. She'd felt the invisible energy flows. So it seemed logical to her that, with proper training, she could harness that power. Anyone could tap into it. But the ability has to be passed from teacher to student in a Reiki “attunement” ceremony. When Alisa was ready, Renate “attuned” Alisa so she could tap into the healing powers. After lots of lessons and practice, Alisa became a young Reiki teacher.
Reiki has long been dismissed by Western medicine as New Age hocus-pocus, but Alisa believed in it. She had seen its power. Now Alisa had the chance to put all her training to use in Jerusalem.
It wasn't what she expected to be doing with her life: Alisa was a reluctant spiritual warrior.
She'd spent much of her life wandering the planet, exploring its hidden corners and contemplating the world's mysteries; she'd always been restless. Perhaps it was because she was a “military brat,” born on a US Air Force base in central California to an Air Force doctor and a civilian psychologist who moved around. Maybe it was growing up in the Bronx, a New York neighborhood filled with different accents and friends who were always on the move. Whatever the case, Alisa seemed most at home when she was somewhere else.
Like many Jewish Americans, Alisa's life straddled Israel and the United States. On July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon, 13-year-old Alisa arrived with her family in Israel, where they settled into their new lives. The move was jarring for Alisa, who thrived on New York City's miniskirt, rock-music culture and chafed at being thrown into a more sedate all-girls religious school in Israel.
“I was going to be a New York Jewish-American princess,” she said. “When I got to Jerusalem, it wasn't like that at all. I wasn't glad at the time, but my parents did me a great service moving to Israel.”
Alisa studied Jewish history and geography at Jerusalem's Hebrew University before returning to the United States to get a master's degree in education from Harvard in 1982. Then she veered off the traditional path to get an alternative degree in holistic education. She studied psychology and art, movement and meditation. She'd found her true path.
“Touchy-feely,” she said. “That's my stuff.”
“What Am I Doing Here?”
Alisa found her home in Israel, but she still felt unsettled. She felt a spiritual connection to the land and an emotional one to the country, but Alisa couldn't understand why she was so rooted in a place that seemed to thrive on perpetual turmoil. On one particularly emotional visit to her “spiritual rabbi” in South Carolina when she was seeking some guidance through her 30s, Alisa asked Renate the simplest of questions:
“Why am I here?”
“I am somebody who pursues spiritual development and meditates and all I want is for people to be in peace,”
she told her mentor.
“What am I doing in Israel?”
Alisa felt the weight of the Middle East conflict taking a spiritual toll. She was tired of having to wear psychological armor, even on the best of days, in Jerusalem. She was wondering if she was meant for something else. Renate told Alisa that living in the Holy City was her calling.
“They need people like you there,”
Renate told Alisa any time she thought about leaving Jerusalem.
“That's your destiny: to be in a place of strife.”
It was hard for Alisa to accept.
“I find it very difficult on an emotional level to be there sometimes,”
Alisa told her teacher.
“Why do I need to be in this place where it's so difficult for me emotionally, to be where people have such hatred, and, if there isn't a right reason to fight, they go out and make one?”
“Places like that need people like you,”
Renate replied.
Eventually, Alisa came to see her new life on Assael as part of her spiritual journey.
“Maybe on some deep level, I believe; I'm not sure, but I believe, maybe that's why I'm here,” Alisa said one day between sips of organic green tea. “Maybe that's what I'm doing on this street.”
By nature, Alisa was an extrovert. She seemed to flourish when she put her values to the test. So when the opportunity presented itself, Alisa put her healing hands to work on her Palestinian neighbor.
The opening came one afternoon in 2006, soon after she'd moved with her family to Assael, when she saw a woman picking lemons in a well-tended orchard across the way. Alisa always wondered about the homes on the eastern side of Assael. This place stood out because it was the only one with a big orchard. The deep lot, a rare open space on the hillside crowded with homes, was sprinkled with orange and lemon trees. The rectangular two-story stone house rising above the trees was set back from Assael and slightly down the hill. Alisa looked down from the street at her Palestinian neighbor picking fruit. The woman in the yard, her hair covered in a plain scarf, caught a glimpse of Alisa watching her from the street above and offered her some lemons. Alisa gratefully acceptedâand not just because the ones in her own yard weren't ripe. The woman, Ihsan, invited Alisa into the house for coffee where she introduced her sister-in-law, Khulood Salhab. Alisa didn't really speak Arabic and her Arab neighbors didn't know much Hebrew. They couldn't say much more than
shalom
and
salaam
to each other, so they had to rely on other ways to connect. They struggled through their first conversation and turned to Khulood's English-speaking daughter for help translating.
Khulood was disarmed by her new neighbor's willingness to come into her house for coffee. She couldn't remember the last time someone from the west side of the street had come over for a friendly visit. Usually, Khulood kept to the Arabic-speaking wives she knew on the eastern side of the street. Those women didn't look down on her for covering her hair and wearing long, formless dressesâas some of the neighbors on the opposite side of the street seemed to do. Alisa seemed right at home from the start. Khulood was charmed by her petite new neighbor with her funny American accent. She wasn't sure whether Alisa would ever come back, so she didn't think about it too much after she said good-bye.
But Alisa kept reaching out, kept stopping by, kept saying hello. Though they didn't share a common language, they used a mix of English, Hebrew, Arabic and hand signs to get to know each other. When one of Khulood's English-speaking kids was around, the mothers would rope them in to translate.
Eventually, like the wives and mothers on Assael who had first met when the barbed wire came down 40 years earlier, Alisa and Khulood found common ground at the kitchen table.
One day when Alisa came over to visit, Khulood was cooking
maqluba,
a mainstay in Palestinian homes, made with layers of spiced lamb or chicken simmered in a pot under rice and vegetables that are flipped maqlubaâupside downâwhen served. The smells of cinnamon, cardamom, allspice and pepper steaming in the kitchen swept through the house.
“
I really want to learn how to make maqluba,”
Alisa told Khulood.
“
Oh, it's easy,
” Khulood said.
“Yallah, let's do it.”
While they cooked, Khulood's shields came down. She confided in Alisa that she was having some aches and pains that weren't going away. Alisa knew how to help: Reiki. Khulood was skeptical. But her kids and her husband encouraged her to give it a try. So Khulood and her eldest daughter walked over to Alisa's house one afternoon to see what it was all about.
Khulood took off her head scarf, a sign of how comfortable she felt with her neighbor, and lay down on Alisa's Reiki treatment table.
With an Arabic-Hebrew dictionary placed next to her aromatic oils, Alisa placed her hands on Khulood. She infused her body with universal energy, giving her more strength to heal.
It seemed to work.
When she got home Khulood felt better. Lighter.
“It was a bit strange,” she said. “But it felt good.”
Khulood was sold. She went back for more Reiki treatments. Then her oldest daughter figured she would give it a try. Then her only son went around to see if Reiki could help him get rid of his migraines. The intimacy of the connection with the Salhabs gave Alisa some hope that people could find common ground, no matter what political, religious, cultural or linguistic differences there might be. It reinforced her belief that she was on the right path, that there was a larger reason she had found her way to Jerusalem, to Assael.
“I've always felt that it was very hard to be here, but this was my destiny, and there was a reason that I was here, beyond my personal Jewish family history,” Alisa said. “It was deeper. Like I was sent here spiritually.”
From Street Worker to Street Fighter
If Alisa was the spiritual warrior of Assael, her husband, David, was the street fighter.
“I believe change has to come from within, from spirit,” Alisa said. “He believes in political and social action.”
David Epstein grew up in a blue-collar Pennsylvania town where he was entranced by the brand of Social Justice Judaism he saw unfolding all around him. He was captivated by the Jewish rabbis marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama and antiwar activists who were giving the Establishment the middle finger. When he got to Brandeis University (alma mater of yippie activist Abbie Hoffman) in the late 1960s, he marched in Boston's antiâVietnam War protests and lived by the motto “don't let school get in the way of your education.” He grew shaggy dark hair and a stringy beard that made him look a bit like Cuban revolutionary and anti-establishment icon Che Guevara.
When the US military called his name for the draft, David cited his religious objection to what he saw as unjust American aggression in Vietnam and refused to go fight for his country, declaring himself a Conscientious Objector. Instead, David studied Hebrew at Brandeis, joined the campus Nonviolent Direct Action League and got thrown in jail for blocking a bus carrying military draftees heading to training camp. When one American soldier decided to go AWOL to protest the war, David stood guard with other activists in a building where they offered the soldier “sanctuary” from arrest. One of his fellow antiwar activists at Brandeis was Katherine Ann Power, a quirky student who distinguished herself by walking shoeless and braless around campus. David and Katherine both served on the student council and marched together in rally after rally.