A Street Divided (28 page)

Rena, who spent most of her life working in fitness, still turns to Khaled as a confidante. Khaled may unfairly lash out at Jewish-Israelis sometimes, she said, but he can be even more critical of Arab Muslims. His emotional disdain for Palestinians can be just as cutting, if not more.

“I don't think he's one-dimensional,” Rena said. “I think he's frustrated with his people as well.”

Khaled knew his emotions got the better of him that afternoon when he got back from the post office and lashed out at Rena, and the two of them later commiserated over their passionate discussion. Things blew over and they moved on. That's how it went at the Y.

“They Live Their Lies in Their Cocoon”

While Forsan didn't see Khaled as a bridge-builder, Micah Hendler did. Forsan hired Micah to set up his Arab-Jewish youth choir at the Y. And Micah hired Khaled to be one of the choir's dialogue supervisors. It was Khaled's job to facilitate, and translate, the difficult discussions the Arab and Jewish kids had every time they met.

“I don't think I know anyone in Jerusalem who understands more of what's going on in the city, from every perspective, than Khaled,” Micah said. “I have so much respect for his understanding of what's going on here. And he really lives all of the tensions, even just living on the street and with his identity.”

Even though Khaled has to defend his work when he goes home, he doesn't see any other way. Cutting ties, living separate lives, isn't a solution.

“They live in their lie, they live in their cocoon, and if we do not approach them, if we don't start somewhere, we will achieve nothing,” he said. “We have to start somewhere.”

Forsan saw his work in similar terms. Activists often accused people like Forsan and Khaled of embracing “normalization”—a derogatory term for coexistence programs like those at the Y. They were often accused of undermining Palestinian independence by giving legitimacy to anti-Palestinian policies and working within the Israeli system. Forsan rejected the criticism.

“I am totally pro-normalization,” he said. “I am pro–people talking to each other. I don't see coexistence as a political issue at all. I see it as a way of life, and I refuse to brand it, or even to speak of it in tones of politics.”

Khaled was constantly questioned about his loyalties—by Israelis, by Palestinians, by his own family. His identity and sympathies were challenged at every turn. Everything Khaled did was subject to scrutiny—even how he identified himself: Arab-Israeli? Palestinian-Israeli? Palestinian? Each label came with its own baggage.

Whatever they called themselves, the 1.5 million Arabs living in Israel were always an awkward reality for the country. Israel was established as a home for the Jewish people. Its founders envisaged a democratic, pluralistic nation. But they always imagined Israel would be a Jewish nation—one way or another.

At best, the Arab-Israelis were meant to be a peaceful, fully assimilated minority with full rights and freedoms. At worst, well . . .

In the worst of times, Arab-Israelis were viewed with suspicion. Where
exactly
did their loyalties lie? If they
had
to choose, which side of the hyphen would they lean toward? That's why people paid so much attention to how people like Khaled identified themselves. Were they Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Arab? Were they Israelis of Palestinian ancestry or Palestinians living in Israel?

Israel's most nationalistic leaders saw the nation's Arab minority as a dangerous fifth column that threatened the country's very existence. The hostility tended to rise and fall depending on the political season. Typically, it got worse when things were bad.

“We will have to take another decision, and that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system,” Effie Eitam, a controversial Israeli war hero and politician, said in 2006 after the country's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. “We've raised a Fifth Column, a league of traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so large and so hostile a presence within the political system of Israel.”
6

Even in the best of times, Israel's Arab minority was seen as a source of concern. Israeli politicians and demographers carefully monitored the birth and death rates of Arabs and Jews. They watched with increasing alarm as the Arab birth rate rose and encouraged the country's Jewish residents to have as many kids as possible, something Israel's ultra-Orthodox community was more than happy to embrace.

In 2003, Netanyahu, then serving as Israel's finance minister, called the country's Arab minority a “demographic bomb.”
7
Netanyahu's critics denounced his characterization as racist. Netanyahu worried that a rising Arab population would transform Israel into a binational state—an idea anathema to the Israeli leader and most of the country's Jewish population.

Fear of the Arab minority in Israel fueled the rise of politicians like Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist who gained enough clout to be named foreign minister in Netanyahu's 2009 government. Lieberman consistently backed inflammatory proposals. He suggested that Arab-Israelis be forced to sign a loyalty oath if they wanted to stay in Israel. In 2006, he denounced Arab-Israeli lawmakers who met with Hamas as collaborators and suggested that they should be tried as traitors before being killed.
8
While campaigning in Israel's 2015 national election, Lieberman suggested that Arab-Israelis who didn't back the country be beheaded, an inflammatory declaration that drew immediate condemnation from Arab lawmakers who compared him to Islamic State militants videotaping their gruesome beheadings in Syria.
9

“Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe,” Lieberman told one campaign rally.
10

Israel's Arabs were always made to feel like second-class citizens. And the problem was especially pronounced in Jerusalem, where half of the city is considered by international law to be occupied land. Though Israel effectively annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war and declared the entire city to be its “complete and united” capital in 1980, most of the city's Arab residents had fewer rights than their Jewish neighbors.

When Israel took over East Jerusalem in 1967, the government offered citizenship to Arab residents who were willing to pledge their allegiance to the state of Israel and renounce loyalty to any other nation. It was a step few Arab residents of East Jerusalem have ever been willing to take.

The alternative was permanent residency—and a blue ID card—a status that prevented them from voting in Israel's national elections. Jerusalemites with the blue IDs could vote in city elections, though few Arab residents ever do. There was another problem that made it hard for permanent residents of East Jerusalem: They couldn't automatically pass along the benefits of residency if they married Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

Jerusalem was united geographically, but still divided politically, economically, culturally and socially. The political stratification meant that people on Assael Street had different rights. Some Arab families, like Abu Fadi and his kids, were full Israeli citizens. Others, like Khaled, his wife and their kids, were permanent residents.

Though there was a stark imbalance in the services provided to those living in East and West Jerusalem, the city's permanent residents came to appreciate the benefits the blue ID provided them, things they weren't eager to give up.

Soon after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed in the summer of 2014, Jamal Rishek and his friends went into the heart of West Jerusalem to meet up with a Canadian friend who had come to town for a visit. The guys tried their best not to “look Arab,” but their Arabic singing at a bus stop caught the attention of plainclothes security who asked to see their IDs, grilled them about what they were doing on that side of town and told them they should go back to East Jerusalem.

To Jamal, it was another reminder that he wasn't welcome, that Israel really wasn't his country. Although he was better off than Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jamal knew their fates were all intertwined.

“I hate the government a lot,” Jamal said. “You can see what happened in Gaza.”

Jamal, a part-time waiter at the Y's restaurant, felt the pull of the street clashes he could hear rolling through the streets below Assael.

“One day I will go,” he said one night in the family living room in the fall of 2014. “I have to go.”

It sounded unconvincing, more like an idle boast than a vow. Jamal was a shy teen who liked to look at the world from behind a camera lens. He was thinking about being a journalist, but the idea didn't seem certain to stick.

Khaled shot Jamal a glare from across the room. His son returned the look with silence.

“If I had a West Bank ID I would go throw rocks,” Jamal eventually said. “But because I have an Israeli ID, I can't. They will catch me.”

For Jamal, the benefits of being an Arab-Israeli outweighed the potential costs of joining the stone throwers. By that fall, Netanyahu and his cabinet had backed tougher penalties for stone throwers, who faced the possibility of spending 20 years in prison. Israel also started making moves to strip troublemakers of their blue IDs. Prison and exile weren't things Jamal was willing to face.

“I have to go to university,” he said. “I have my life.”

It was exactly the kind of view many Israelis hoped would prevent Jerusalem from being consumed by another intifada. For Israel, the more kids who saw that they had something to lose by taking to the streets, the better.

“Jerusalem Is a Cage”

Khaled was well known on Assael for his work. He tried to bridge the divide whenever he could. Khaled served as a vital link for David Maeir-Epstein's coexistence work. Khaled took part in the community meetings and backed the group's effort to provide common ground for people living in Abu Tor.

The group succeeded in getting new garbage bins—with lids—for the street. They backed a plan to install two benches and a chain-link fence on the edge of a neglected open lot at the beginning of Assael Street.

To some people in the neighborhood, including Khaled's younger brother, the benches are a joke. And the meetings were meaningless. Amjad Rishek refused to take part.

“David can do nothing,” Amjad said. “There is something bigger than David.”

Amjad, a beefy man with bookish, wire-rimmed glasses and a shaved, shiny head, was a relative newcomer to Assael. In 1993, he and his wife moved into the newly built, two-bedroom second-story home, right on top of Khaled's place. The couple had four girls, bestowing Amjad with the honorific title
Abu Banat
—Father of the Daughters.

Like many men in the neighborhood, Amjad married a young woman from Hebron and brought her to Jerusalem. Three years earlier, Khaled had married Rita, his stylish wife from a successful West Bank family. Khaled had been able to secure a Jerusalem ID for Rita under Israel's “family reunification” program. But when Amjad went through the same process for his wife, Wafa, he found that the rules had changed. The process was frozen, leaving Wafa in limbo.

Every year, Amjad had to return to Israel's Interior Ministry to secure permission for his wife to stay with him in Jerusalem. The different IDs sometimes made it difficult for the family to travel together outside the city. Some checkpoints are only for those with West Bank IDs. Others bar West Bank residents. That meant the couple had to return to Jerusalem through different checkpoints. That sometimes made short trips outside the city more trouble than they were worth.

“Here in Jerusalem, you live in a cage,” said Wafa, one of the many wives on Assael to wear a hijab and conservative Palestinian dress. “In Hebron, you're able to live.”

As a young man, Amjad was an ambitious contractor who snatched work away from big Israeli firms. He worked as a subcontractor building apartments, offices and stores in high-rises. But contracting feuds consumed Amjad, so he moved on to work for an Israeli nonprofit that helps hundreds of elderly Jerusalemites each day with food, medical care and workshops to make a little money in their golden years.

The Rishek family pooled its money to buy the rectangular stone home in 1990 from the Yaghmours—with the clear understanding that they would be able to get a license to build another story. They even had a paper from the city telling them they would be able to build, Amjad said. But when the time came to apply for permits, they got a different story.

“They started giving us excuses by saying the percentage of the building versus the size of the land blah blah blah, which did not make sense to me at all,” Amjad said.

The city came up with reason after reason to say no to the Risheks. Then, one morning, Amjad began to see construction crews coming down the street, passing his house and going to work on the western side of Assael. Developers were transforming the old Machsomi property into a new, modern apartment building. As it rose, Amjad couldn't believe what he was seeing. Amjad took photos of the construction site. He took pictures of his own property. And he brought them all to the city for comparison.

“
Why are you giving them a permit, but not us?
” he asked.

They came up with more reasons why it was OK for those property owners to build a big apartment building on one side of the street while denying modest building permits to those living on the other.

“We were surprised to see that a Jewish neighbor managed to build a high-rise,” Amjad said dryly. “Bottom line: They do not want to grant any licenses to us.”

So the Risheks decided to do what most Palestinian families on Assael had done: Build without permits. City inspectors came out to check the work, but they couldn't stop it. Amjad and his family moved in, knowing that the wrecking ball was going to shadow their lives until they got an OK from Israel for their house.