A Street Divided (23 page)

By the time Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire at the end of August, more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were dead. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and six Israeli civilians were killed.

The series of crises took a particular toll on the Jerusalem Youth Choir.

Even on the quietest of days, group dialogue was a challenge. The day after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed, Micah thought about canceling practice.

“No one told me there was going to be a war,” said Micah, who knew full well that war was always a very real possibility in Jerusalem.

One of his singers was from Shu'fat, where the Palestinian teen had been abducted. Shu'fat had been engulfed in protest, and Micah figured there was no way the girl would make it. But he went ahead anyway. He sent word to the kids: “If you can make it safely, please come.” Partway through the practice, the girl from Shu'fat walked through the door. Micah was stunned.

“How did you get here?” Micah asked her. “I mean, how did you physically get here?”

“I woke up to gunshots this morning and I was sitting in my house listening to all the demonstrations and all the bullets and all the tear gas and I was going insane,”
she told him.
“I had to get out. I left, walked down the street. The soldiers tried to stop me, but I ran and got away. This is exactly where I want to be.”

The summer of 2014 wasn't the first test for the Jerusalem Youth Choir, but it seemed to be the biggest. Perhaps because Mohammed, Naftali, Gilad and Eyal were the same age as the singers. Some members of the Youth Choir knew the three Israeli teens who had been kidnapped and killed. Others knew the Palestinian boy and his family.

On their closed Facebook page and in their dialogue groups, the idea of a “safe space” to discuss difficult issues seemed to be dissolving. Members of the choir threatened to walk out over Facebook posts by other singers in the group. Micah organized emergency meetings that devolved into shouting matches, girls weeping and kids storming out of the room. The choir appeared to be coming apart. And the timing couldn't have been worse. The group was preparing for its first major international tour.

“We were about to go to Japan in the summer and then we went to war and had a very hard time—a very hard time—getting along,” Avital said.

Because she had grown up on Assael Street, Avital had sympathy for the Palestinians' frustrations. But hearing the anger and hostility coming from some of the other choir members was hard for her to take.

“One time everyone was kind of yelling at everyone in the choir,” she said. “I was so shocked it was happening. It's really hard to keep this whole group together, to keep it from not exploding, because there's so much heat and so many other kinds of opinions.”

Like many singers in the choir, Avital was conflicted. Her brother-in-law was one of the Israeli soldiers bringing weapons and supplies to units along the Gaza Strip border, so she had an instinctual desire to defend him and the army. But the images coming out of Gaza of dead women and children made it hard for her to justify. Halfway through the fighting, Avital tried to sort through her feelings in an emotional Facebook post.

“what's on my mind?” she wrote,

well my brother in law is in the army and i am so worried about the soldiers. i hear almost ever day someone dies it breaks my heart. also in gaza people are dying. this war is killing so many people from both sides. its taking father/brother away from family's. if we want to live in peace we need to stop this i am
NOT
saying that our army is wrong but people are dying because of this. we will not have peace until this ends not just war but until they stop wanting to kill us and a innocent people and i am
not
saying its okay im not really saying anything, i am saying what i am reading every day for the past 3 weeks on every news Chanel and papers. what i want to say is i feel guilty every time my phone beeps and says bad news from any sides and i will keep reading and praying that everything will be okay but i know that will take too long. and i will keep praying until it stops for
good.

Though the meetings were volatile, Micah knew that the group had to talk things through for the choir to be something more than another superficial coexistence program.

“People cry, people walk out of the room, people threaten not to come back, but it's important because otherwise it's not real,” he said. “It's fantasyland where I have all these friends from other places, but I don't know anything about them.

“For me, that gets to the core about why it's important to have singing and the dialogue,” he said. “Singing creates the community, and the dialogue enables it to be real. The dialogue makes it not an imaginary space, it enables it to survive in the midst of all the awful things that are going on.”

When the fighting was over, Micah got in touch with an old friend from his Whiffenpoof days who had become a minor YouTube musical celebrity to see if he'd be interested in making a video with the choir. Though he'd never been to Jerusalem, Sam Tsui agreed to do a cover of
American Idol
winner Phillip Phillips's hit single “Home.”

The inspirational lyrics resonated for Micah, especially after a trying summer.
Settle down,
it urges listeners.
Don't let demons fill you with fear.
Trouble might get its hooks in you, but you're never alone. There's always hope.

Released in October 2014, the four-minute video showed Palestinian teens in the chorus walking through their neighborhoods, alongside Israel's towering separation walls, and a Jewish member of the group praying at Israel's military cemetery. The Arab and Jewish kids eventually come together and celebrate their unity while dancing around a campfire. The video became a viral YouTube hit that quickly got a respectable 250,000 views. One newspaper writer called it “the most optimistic video about Israel and the Palestinians.” Though there was plenty of tension and there were cliques in the choir, it managed to thrive. When the time came, they flew off to Japan as planned.

“Truthfully, I was one of the only people I knew who wasn't depressed all summer,” Micah said. “And it's because I was working with the choir.”

As the fighting intensified that summer, Jewish residents of Abu Tor talked about setting up new neighborhood watch groups. They created escape plans for their families. They placed baseball bats and handguns strategically around their homes.

“Everybody usually tolerates each other, but it's like a temperature gauge,” Abu Tor resident Harvey Brooks, an American-Israeli bassist who'd played with Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, told the
Jerusalem Post
that July. “When the temperature goes up, things get bad.”
8

His wife, Bonnie, said the image of Abu Tor as an island of coexistence was exaggerated.

“Arabs and Jews normally live peacefully here, but it's not the way it should be, because when push comes to shove it becomes tribal,” she said.
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A Peacenik Goes to War

David and Alisa found their own beliefs tested by the Gaza war. Neither liked to see women and children being killed by the Israeli military, but they didn't think Israel had a choice.

“I'm left of center, but I don't see what alternatives we had,” David said. “When Hamas comes out and says it's totally legitimate to be sending rockets, it's totally legitimate to butcher people in a synagogue, you have to consider those people your enemies.”

David recognized the irony of being an American antiwar activist growing up to be an Israeli war advocate. To him, the evolution was easily explainable.

“If someone comes to kill you, you have the right to defend yourself and kill them,” he said. “I didn't feel that was the case in Vietnam.”

David's transformation was so thorough that he had signed up to serve in the Israeli military as a reserve soldier after he made aliyah, even though he wasn't required to do so. During the first Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was firing Scud missiles at Israel, David helped run an emergency call center for panicked people who couldn't get their gas masks on their kids or didn't hear the “all-clear” sirens.

“I felt like this was my home,” David said. “In Vietnam, where America was calling Communism the enemy and napalming the hell out of an entire country, I just didn't feel that fell in the category of self-defense. But the Israel Defense Forces are on call to prevent things from happening. The actions I was involved with in the Army were defensive—and I have no problem with that.”

Both David and Alisa were particularly appalled in the summer of 2014 by the Western media's coverage of the fighting in Gaza, which they both found to be glaringly anti-Israel.

“Where else can you tell me, where else, in what other war zone anywhere in the world in the last 20 or 30 years, are you aware where someone made telephone calls, sent SMSs [text messages], and dropped leaflets to warn people that there was going to be a bombing 20 minutes before there was going to be a bombing?” David asked. “Where? Tell me? I had a problem with the Gaza war, and that is that it happened. If Hamas had said: ‘We're willing to stop if you stop,' we would have stopped.”

David and Alisa struggled to explain the situation to Avital. On one hand, they wanted to protect their 16-year-old. But it was impossible. They had family and friends who were serving in the Israeli military. And the kids in the choir would talk about it all the time. The singers from East Jerusalem had a much different take on the war than those from West Jerusalem.

“It was very difficult for Avital to kind of hear what she understood to be a war of defense on our part, to be talked about as war crimes by people whom she's singing with,” David said.

David and Alisa would talk about the war and tell Avital about their belief in Good and Evil. Alisa posted an animated video on Avital's Facebook wall showing Hamas as a devious schoolyard bully who goads a reluctant Israel into fighting back and then convinces their teachers and the world that Israel was the aggressor.

The two-and-a-half-minute video ends with a black screen, the Star of David, and the words: “The world is not elementary school. Sometimes you just have to defend yourself.”

Alisa encouraged Avital not to take what the Arab kids said at face value and to check out the stories they told. But Alisa sometimes appeared to unwittingly rely on Internet conspiracy theories to buttress her views that the world had unfairly demonized Israel during the Gaza war. Alisa seemed to indirectly rely on one American conspiracy theorist's view that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for the killing of the four Palestinian boys on the Gaza beach—an attack seen by dozens of Western journalists.

While Israeli officials apologized for the shelling and called it a “tragic” accident, one Internet researcher in the United States cobbled together an outlandish theory that the incident was staged by Hamas, that the boys had been executed the day before and that militants had used planted explosives as a distraction while they placed the boys' bodies on the beach in front of the international press corps.

“I remember feeling very, very bad about it and then I remember reading a few months later that the UN or whoever had done an investigation and indeed they weren't killed by Israelis,” Alisa said. “That's a picture that a lot of people have in their mind, and I had in my mind: that four children on the beach who were playing ball were killed by Israel. And also I think they were invited there or something strange like that.”

The theory reinforced Alisa's own belief that Hamas was to blame for the war and that the group would go to any lengths to paint Israel as a bloodthirsty villain.

“It's very, very hard for me to understand,” she said. “If you make the choice yourself, it's one thing. But if Hamas is making the choice for you and they're saying: ‘We're going to make the choice for you that your children are going to be killed so that we can show the media, so they'll be more pro-Palestinian, so we'll get more brownie points' or whatever it is they think they'll get, I don't know.”

Helicopters over Assael

The residents of Assael Street all hoped the end of the war in Gaza would bring a close to a traumatic chapter. But it didn't.

In late October, a group of Jerusalemites gathered at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center—a short walk from Abu Tor—to hear Yehuda Glick, an orange-bearded, right-wing American-Israeli crusader who favored ending Israel's ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount. While Yehuda was packing up his car after the speech, a man pulled up on a motorcycle and fired four shots into the Jewish activist's chest before speeding off. Israeli police quickly identified the shooter as a resident of Abu Tor.

Before dawn the next morning, the families on Assael were roused from sleep by low-flying helicopters circling over their street. Israeli counterterrorism teams and border police converged on the home of 32-year-old Palestinian restaurant worker Mu'atez Hijazi, an East Jerusalemite who had spent 11 years in an Israeli prison for a series of crimes, from arson to slashing a guard's face with a razor blade. After his release in 2012, he settled in a small Abu Tor apartment building two streets below Assael and got a job at the Begin Center where Yehuda gave his talk.

“I'm glad to be back in Jerusalem,” Hijazi told a reporter shortly after his release. “I hope to be a thorn in the Zionist plan of Judaizing
Jerusalem.”
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The counterterrorism unit chased Hijazi to his roof, where he was shot 20 times. Israeli police said they killed Hijazi after he opened fire on them. Residents claimed Hijazi was unarmed when he was shot. His family said he was framed. The shooting triggered street battles that spread across Jerusalem. The turmoil led Israel to temporarily shut down all access to the Old City's central religious plateau, home to al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. It was the first time Israel had done so in more than a decade. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called it a “declaration of war.”