Palestine. Soldiers fought for this ridgeline when Israel was created in 1948. And itâs where the first shots were fired in the 1967 battle for Jerusalem.
On Friday afternoons, the pulse of Jerusalem slows. Muslim families gather after weekly prayers for big meals, long naps and late nights of drinking cardamom-flavored coffee. The pale, tangly bearded, black-hat Orthodox Jewish men drag bike racks into the middle of all the streets leading into their neighborhoods to keep anyone from driving through the area on Shabbat. It kept a lot of wayward tourists in rental cars, delivery scooters, lost foreigners and mischievous teenagers from being stoned. Most shops in West Jerusalem, save for a few cafés, bars and markets, close their doors until sundown on Saturday.
On a spring evening, as a warm desert breeze swept over the low, cinnamon-hued hills and through scrub-filled valleys, it was easy to sit on my rooftop and envision a unified city. At dusk on Friday nights, the air would fill with the sounds of Jewish families marking the start of their Shabbat with loud dinnertime readings from the Torah, Muslim muezzin calling the Jerusalemites to prayer on Jummah from a half-dozen mosque minaret megaphones spread out across the valley below, and Christian church bells clanging from stone towers in the Old City on the far horizon.
On the best of nights, an oversized, orange full moon would rise over the Jordan Valley as fireworks from Palestinian wedding celebrations shot across the sky. On the worst of nights, blue flashing lights bounced off the walls as clouds of tear gas drifted through the streets.
When the acrid jolt of burning trash mixed with pungent tear gas and the singe of gasoline-soaked burning tires, it wasnât hard to imagine that the valley might actually lead to the Gates of Hell.
Itâs a neighborhood where skinny teenage street peddlers walk through the cobblestone streets shouting âkaak kaak kaak,â with wooden trays balanced on their heads and stacked with freshly baked sesame seed bread, sold with small paper packets of fresh zaâatar that smelled of toasted sesame seeds and warm oregano. Every morning during the holy month of Ramadan, a lone Palestinian drummer will march through the neighborhood before dawn keeping a pounding beat to wake everyone within earshot who wants to eat before a long day of fasting.
There were also plenty of neighborhood feuds. I saw my share of late-night arguments that spilled out into the streets. I got caught up in a few Abu Tor disputes myself. Israeli police officers knocked on my front door more than once to complain about the late-night bass beats coming from my rooftop and waking annoyed neighbors. I was even the unsuspecting target of an ill-considered, and ill-conceived, attack on my home. One night, a pair of mischievous, hazily inebriated Western journalists for well-known American media companies decided it would be a hilarious joke if they fired massive bottle rockets and heavy-duty fireworks at my rooftop, 100 yards away. They firedâand missed. Badly. Instead of hitting my long, rectangular rooftop deck, the fireworks slammed into the modern stone apartment building right below me, on the western side of Assael Street. At the time, the place happened to be home of the US consulateâs top security officerâthe kind of guy who was trained to jump when things go bang. It wasnât long before black Suburbans with flashing blue lights came screeching to a halt on Assael Street, and muscular men with sidearms stepped into the street to take control of the situation.
Abu Tor is a gritty neighborhood in more ways than one. The physical grit settles on cups and dishes. It dusts rugs, tables and chairs. Storms coming from the Dead Sea gather force in the narrow valleys and tear through wood-framed canvas Bedouin tent encampments in the Judean Mountains before slamming into Jerusalemâs Abu Tor hillside homes with a fury that