Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (12 page)

It makes sense on some level at least. Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem like Um Tuba and Sur Baher look and feel like more like clean and prosperous sections of Baghdad than anywhere else in the city. Israeli Jews don’t live there, nor do they want to. The overwhelming majority of Israelis would not even notice if they lost these areas because they’ve never seen them in the first place.

Many parts of municipal Jerusalem are like this. The city limits go all the way up to Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority has its offices, and all the way down to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. These in-between places were annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, but they were sparsely populated Arab villages at the time. The residents didn’t feel like they lived in Jerusalem. The only reason some feel like they do today is because they’re walled off from the nearer cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem by the security barrier. These areas are only technically in Jerusalem. When I drove there in my rental car, I not only felt like I had left Jerusalem, but I also felt like I had left Israel.

The Old City and the adjacent neighborhoods are another matter entirely. This is the heart of Jerusalem. “Most Israelis are very uneager to have that area go to the Palestinians,” Lozowick said.

An increasing number of Jerusalem’s Arabs are also uneager to be shoved over to Palestine. Few bother asking them if they might rather remain in Israel, even though more and more of them are filing for citizenship. Even the Old City’s Christian Quarter and the Armenian Quarter would be given to Palestine, according to almost every proposal for dividing the city.

Still, many Israeli officials admit both implicitly and explicitly that partition along one line or another may one day happen whether they like it or not. In the 1960s the municipality hired urban planner Israel Kimchi to plan for the eventual reunification of Jerusalem, and today he’s working on plans for its eventual redivision. Like most Israelis, he hates the idea of partition, and not only because in his younger years he dedicated himself to reunification. He has visited every divided city in the world, and he does not like what he has seen. While we all know about the terrible wall dividing Berlin during the Cold War, fewer know what Nicosia on the island of Cyprus looks like today. The Turkish military controls the northern half while the (Greek) Cypriot government maintains its hold on the south. Kimchi has seen it, and so have I. A ghastly and heavily militarized dead zone cuts Nicosia in half, including the most beautiful part of the old city. Kimchi vividly recalls the years before 1967, when Jerusalem was in a similarly wretched condition. “It was terrible,” he said. “We had minefields in the city.”

He is especially unhappy with the idea of redividing the Old City and the rest of the Holy, or Historical, Basin, and he’s trying to come up with a work-around.

“Neither side is going to give up this area,” he said. “Certainly the big neighborhoods will not be given up. The focal point of the Old City and the area around it, the Historical Basin—if the two parties are unable to run it together—can be administered by a third party.”

Like who, for instance?

“Like the government of New Zealand,” he said. “I don’t know. The Swedes. Israel won’t accept the United Nations, but some kind of international force without the United Nations. France, New Zealand, Australia, the United States. We haven’t made a decision, but this is the political line now among the politicians. It’s one possible solution. Both sides—the Israelis and the Palestinians—want to keep the city open.”

Whether the Old City and the Historical Basin are partitioned into two states or subtracted from both and turned into a third place, there will have to be a line somewhere dividing Israel from Palestine. And it’s rather unlikely at this point that the Palestinians will accept anything less than full sovereignty over the Arab parts of Jerusalem, since Clinton included them in his offer to Arafat in 2000.

So Lozowick and I took a walking tour of central Jerusalem where the future border might be if that’s what happens. We followed the line that the folks at the Geneva Initiative drew on a Google Earth map. It looks a lot less plausible on the ground than it does in satellite photographs, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that dividing the Historical Basin again might not be possible.

Take the neighborhood of Abu Tor, for instance. It’s on a hill just south of the Old City. The eastern side is Arab, and the western side is Jewish. The Green Line runs through its center. From 1948 to 1967, a blockwide no-man’s-land separated Arabs from Jews, but the neighborhood has since been reunited.

Because Arabs still live in the eastern half and Jews still live in the western half, it would be easy enough—at least theoretically—to just make the Green Line the border. The border, however, would go right down the middle of a dead-end street where Jews live on one side and Arabs live on the other. If a wall or a fence is built on that border, residents won’t be able drive down or park on their own street. And if there won’t be a wall or a fence, anyone could cross the border without passing through customs or security, whether they’re tourists, spies, job seekers or suicide bombers.

“If you assume,” Lozowick said, “as the Geneva people do, that dividing Jerusalem will lead to everyone living happily ever after, then you can say there may be a question of who is in charge of paving the road, but otherwise it will work. But what if—for whatever reason, and despite everybody’s best intentions—after the city has been divided, it doesn’t work?”

A Palestinian could throw a hand grenade into Israel from inside his living room, and vice versa.

“No one here is a settler,” Lozowick said. “This is the pre-1967 border. No one can say the Israelis shouldn’t be here so close to the Arabs. This is where the original line was. There are a lot of places like this in Jerusalem.”

What if there’s peace between Israel and Palestine, but then Israel and Syria go to war? What would happen in Abu Tor? And how would the Palestinians feel if their neighbors across the street lived in a democracy with social security, health care and high wages, while they lived in a corrupt authoritarian system without any rights? And what would happen if Hamas takes over the West Bank, as it has taken the Gaza Strip, and places terrorist nests mere feet from houses in the center of Israel’s capital?

Drawing a new border would be even harder inside the walls of the Old City.

On a street near the Armenian Quarter, a house that is slated for Israel is wedged between two houses that would go to Palestine. Houses in the Old City are ancient. They lean on each other. Jewish and Arab buildings lean on each other throughout. If one comes down, those next to it will also come down. It is not physically possible to weave a border between them. Only a European Union–style nonborder without a fence, wall, customs booth or security checkpoint is even possible. There’s no room for anything else.

It’s even stranger where the Muslim Quarter abuts the Jewish Quarter. Arabs own shops at street level while Israeli Jews own apartments upstairs. The ground floor on that street would be in Palestine, while the second floor would be in Israel.

I asked Lozowick if the people who drew this theoretical border have ever walked around in the Old City and looked at what they were proposing.

“I asked them that,” he said, “and they wouldn’t answer. They wave their hands.”

*  *  *

After looking at the proposed division of Jerusalem, I drove to the already divided city of Hebron in the West Bank with talk-radio host Eve Harow. I’ve visited too many places in Israel and the West Bank to keep track of, and none are more ominous and disturbing than Hebron.

Five hundred Jewish settlers live in a cramped section of the city. Hundreds of Israel Defense Forces soldiers are stationed there to protect them because they’re often shot at by their Palestinian neighbors. A small number of tourists occasionally drop by to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest Jewish site in the world, but they understand there’s a chance they’ll be murdered by gunmen.

As a direct result of ethnic strife in the city, Palestinian movement is restricted or prohibited in a large swath through Arab neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the Jewish settlement area. It is completely locked down by Israeli soldiers. Shops have been forcibly closed, their doors welded shut and covered with spray paint. This is in Hebron’s Old City, the part of town that would be filled with thousands of tourists and pilgrims from all over the world if it weren’t a war-torn slum made ugly by hatred and security measures. The Israeli military describes this section of Hebron as the “sterile zone,” but it’s not an operating room in a hospital. It was once a vibrant ancient city, but today it looks like a ghost town emptied by a violent catastrophe.

This, Lozowick wrote, “is what happens when Israelis and Palestinians agree to divide a city, but can’t agree to live together in peace. The blame for lack of peace is irrelevant: each side will doubtlessly say it’s all the fault of the other, but the result won’t be any nicer thereby. The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East need urgently to visit Hebron.”

*  *  *

Maybe Jerusalem will be divided again and maybe it won’t. Partition might solve the problem and it might not. Nobody knows, though a number of major players, including the most experienced diplomats, have convinced themselves otherwise.

“Many people still say we all know what the final settlement is going to look like,” said Israeli political analyst Jonathan Spyer when I interviewed him in central Jerusalem, “so we just need to get the two sides together and work it out. To that I say, no. You don’t know what the final status is going to look like. The final status you have in mind is what you came up with by negotiating with yourself.”

It has been years since I’ve managed to find an optimist who lives in the region and believes the conflict will end anytime soon. It’s possible that everybody is wrong about that, but it isn’t likely. This is a part of the world where the past and the present are the most reliable guides to the future. Hillel Cohen summed it up best when I asked him what he expects for Jerusalem 50 years from now. “Some war,” he said and shrugged. “Some peace. Some negotiations. The usual stuff.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Both Israelis and Palestinians are irresistible forces, and they’re both immovable objects. The White House can keep cajoling the two sides to negotiate, and the Geneva Initiative can tinker with its lines on their Google Earth maps, but they need to understand that there’s a chance no progress will be made during their lifetimes and that a premature or botched partition may precipitate ruin.

Chapter Five

Tower of the Sun

Golan Heights, 2010

Before the Six-Day War in June of 1967, the Syrian army built fortified bunkers on the ridge of the Golan Heights and fired sniper rifles, mortars and artillery cannons at Israeli civilians below. The cities, farms and kibbutzim on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and in the wider region around it, were perilous places to live or even to visit when Syria commanded those heights.

“If they saw tractors down there,” Golan resident Hadar Sela said after leading me to one of the bunkers, “or anything moving at all—even a child walking to the store to get milk—they opened fire. There were bunkers like this along the entire ridge of the Golan.”

Israelis have controlled the ridge since they seized it in 1967, when the combined Arab armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt launched a war of annihilation against the Jewish state.

“Syria lost it fair and square,” she said.

The bunker she showed me is just a two-minute walk from her house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv, where she and her neighbors enjoy the spectacular formerly Syrian view of the Galilee far below.

Her family is part of a small but committed Israeli movement to settle the Golan Heights, partly in order to strengthen Israeli control for security reasons but also because building and living on fresh, open, conquered land, for them, is an adventure.

“Nobody came to live on the Golan because it was comfortable or easy,” Hadar said. “I came 20 years later, in 1985. It may sound corny, but in the beginning it was out of a pioneering spirit. It really was, though I know that sounds unfashionable. We remind Israelis of simpler days here.”

Alongside the path to the bunker is a minefield marked off with barbed wire.

“People ask me how I could raise children in a minefield,” she said. “I always say that in Tel Aviv they teach their children not to step into traffic. Here we teach them not to step into minefields.”

Hadar and her significant other, Reuven, hosted me in their house and lent me their spare room for two nights. Their children have grown and built their own houses, so she and Reuven had the space. I enjoyed their company and was glad to escape Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. The same infernal eastern-hemisphere heat wave that was setting Russian forests on fire turned the Mediterranean Sea and the Israeli lowlands into a steam bath. The coastal air felt like soup on my skin even at five o’clock in the morning. The cooler mountain air of the Golan massaged the heat out of my muscles and back.

Hadar was born and raised in Britain. Reuven is a Sabra, born and raised in Israel. “I have nowhere else to go,” he said, addressing his comments not to me so much as to those who think Israelis should go “back” to Europe. His parents were ethnically cleansed from Libya.

The Golan Heights doesn’t feel like Israeli-occupied Syria. At least it didn’t to me, not compared with the West Bank, anyway.

Though the West Bank is technically disputed territory rather than occupied territory—it hasn’t belonged to anyone, according to international law, since the British left in 1948—Area C, where the settlement blocs are located, is under Israeli control. (The Palestinian Authority controls Area A, and the two jointly control Area B.) But Hadar and Reuven’s house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv felt like Israel. There are no Palestinians on the Golan. And the Israelis who settled it come from a completely different part of the Zionist movement than the settlers in the West Bank.