A Street Divided Read Free

no shortage of tales to be told about the people living along this 300-yard dividing line. These are just a few.
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    There is no escaping a suspicion of bias when writing about Jerusalem.
    â€œDo you think that people will assume biases because of your name?” one friend asked me.
    Probably so.
    My last name, I was taught, is a Jewish-German one meaning “Nut Tree.” My name was an easy target for school-hall wisecracks. I knew what matzoh was, but Judaism played a small role in my life. My mother was the oldest daughter of devout Catholic parents from a Massachusetts mill town. I was baptized in a church, not bar mitzvahed in a synagogue. Growing up,Judaism meant little more than going to my paternal grandmother’s place to eat horseradish at Passover and haul in some comic-book money at Hanukah. Christianity meant going to my maternal grandmother’s place for Christmas to fill up on her warm Spritz sugar cookies and search for hard-boiled, pastel-colored Easter eggs one Sunday morning each spring. While living in Afghanistan in 2010, I met an enchanting Pakistani-Texan doctor who was volunteering at a Kabul hospital. I soon embraced Islam in Indonesia and eventually married that doctor—the love of my life.
    I’ve offered silent prayers in front of the Western Wall, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and in al Aqsa mosque. I am also a vegetarian; one who wears leather boots. I like to think that I am able to set aside my imperfect vegetarian beliefs when I write about nonvegetarians. I hope I am able to set aside my preconceptions in telling this story and that people will be forgiving of inherent biases that may seep into the tale. I hope readers won’t get tripped up if a person is described in one place being Arab and in another as being Palestinian. I hope people won’t dwell on whether a particular piece of land should be characterized as “occupied” or “disputed.” Though the little things are the ones that matter on Assael Street, this story is about much more than the details.
    This book doesn’t provide a political road map with new ideas on how to solve what seems like an unsolvable problem. It’s a snapshot of a small street that was, is, and may always be the front line for one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
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    To me, Assael isn’t just any street. For many years, it was the one right outside my living room window. Like a lot of Western journalists at the time—from the start of 2006 to the end of 2009—I lived in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood.
    Choosing a home in Jerusalem is about more than finding a place with lots of light that’s close to a market. Where you live is often seen as an unspoken declaration about your political leanings. For many Americans, living in West Jerusalem is the default, and any decision to live somewhere else might very well be seen as a slight against Israel. To Israelis, Westerners living in East Jerusalem are likely to be viewed warily because of their presumed pro-Palestinian leanings. Westerners living in Ramallah, in the West Bank, are likely to be branded anti-Israel. To Palestinians, any Westerner who chooses to live in an Israeli settlement is presumed to be unsympathetic to their dreams. Living in Abu Tor, living on the old dividing line, was often meant to signal a willingness to treat both sides fairly, to look at the situation from both perspectives. Politically, culturally, psychologically, this is the street where it mattered which side you chose to make your home. Just living in Abu Tor, choosing a “mixed” neighborhood, was seen by some Israelis as a subtle sign that you harbored anti-Israeli views.
    The invisible border in Abu Tor was easy to see. It was obvious where West Jerusalem came to an end and East Jerusalem began. West Jerusalem ended at the edge of the garden below my living room window, and East Jerusalem started in the forest of