A Street Divided Read Free Page A

satellite dishes rising from the crowded compounds on the other side of Assael Street. It looked as if development had swept over the top of the neighborhood, crept down to the western edge of Assael Street, and stopped.
    The higher side of the street was dominated by modern, multistory decorative stone apartment buildings covered with fragrant tangles of jasmine and thick canopies of purple bougainvillea. The balconies were covered with pots of flowering cacti and spiky aloe plants, snapping clothes lines and stacks of three-legged plastic chairs, Buddhist wind chimes and rainbow flag banners flying alongside Israel’s blue Star of David. The big buildings sprawled out alongside a smaller number of refurbished stone homes, places once owned by Palestinian families, with elegant arched doorways, high ceilings and mosaic-tiled floors that were often rented out—at lucrative prices—to Westerners like me. In four decades, the crown of Abu Tor had been transformed from one of the worst places to live in Jerusalem to one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.
    The eastern side of Assael, and the lower part of Abu Tor, well, that was a different story. It was the edge of what some Jewish Abu Tor residents called “the ghetto.” The well-maintained homes at the top of Abu Tor that were owned by influential Israeli politicians, former spies, retired university professors and well-known Jerusalem artists gave way to large warrens of homes that all seemed to be filled with three or four generations of Palestinian families. The stone walls and metal storefront shutters were spray-painted with Arabic and English slogans: free palestine. free gaza. hamas. Cabbies and pizza delivery guys on their scooters sometimes refused to drive through the narrow streets where groups of Palestinian men always seemed to be sitting outside their homes and shops, keeping an eye on who drove past. Few cars came down Assael. It’s a dead-end street used mostly by the people living there. Palestinian kids sped up and down the blue-gray herringbone stone street on their bikes, scooters and skateboards. They set up street-side dumpsters and piles of clothes as soccer goals in the middle of the road. And they grudgingly stepped aside whenever some driver rudely interrupted their games by driving through their “field.”
    Every spring, to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem, thousands of demonstrators, some carrying rifles, others carrying Israeli flags, march down Assael Street singing nationalist songs in a provocative reminder of their political dominance over the Palestinians living on the eastern side of the road.
    Israeli tour guides and young Israeli soldiers regularly lead groups on walks past the tall, salmon-colored, decorative stone retaining walls where they point to battle scars from 1948 and to homes that served as frontline bunkers until 1967.
    My apartment rooftop looked out on Assael and the East Jerusalem valleys. To the north, through stands of tall, pointed fir trees, came the illuminated glow of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City. The Old City wall ran along the horizon until it gave way to the Mount of Olives and its thousands of white graves holding Jewish souls waiting for the Messiah to return. Sloping white carpets of graves eventually gave way to pillars of gray concrete walls snaking across the horizon where Israel’s controversial separation barrier has cut off the Palestinian neighborhood of Abu Dis from the rest of Jerusalem. The horizon curves back south where herky-jerky stacks of houses and paint-chipped apartment buildings cede the hillsides to sharply rising valleys filled with pine, fir, cypress, eucalyptus, lemon and olive trees. On a ridge at the top of the tree line sits the historic stone compound with sunken gardens and its own private pet cemetery that once served as the Jerusalem headquarters for the British High Commissioner in charge of post–World War I