A Street Divided (22 page)

Many ignored his e-mail. Some people thought of it as the naïve endeavor of an American-born Israeli who didn't really understand how the Middle East worked. But there was enough interest to get everyone together to see what they could come up with.

In April 2014, more than a dozen of Abu Tor's Jewish residents met at David's place to talk about what they could do to bridge the gap. They drank green tea and talked for hours about crime and speed bumps, yoga and garbage bins, parking and politics. It wasn't much, but it was something. It was more than most people on that side of the road were willing to do. Some people took to calling David the “mayor of Assael Street.”

The group decided to go to the Palestinian families in Abu Tor with some suggestions. They wanted to host a coexistence street fair on Assael and thought it would be nice to set up an organic community garden where Jewish and Arab neighbors could share the secrets of their green thumbs. They thought Hebrew-Arabic-English classes might be a hit. And they proposed yoga classes for any and all women and girls from Abu Tor. Ideas in hand, David had to figure out how to get the families on the other side of the street involved. It wasn't as easy as inviting them over for tea. David wanted to help. But he didn't think he could dive into the biggest problems on that side of the street right away. David wanted to start with small things that wouldn't create too many waves.

“One of the things that one has to keep in mind is the political situation, and it was my strategy that it would be important to talk about common interests, neighborly relations, people's lives, and to keep out as much as possible discussion of politics, political parties, political issues, unless they're related to getting something done,” he said.

The challenges became clear when David reached out to a group of young East Jerusalem leaders to see if they could work together on something—getting speed bumps, hosting a community meeting, whatever might work. The group said no. They saw working with David as “normalization.” They weren't willing to take part in anything that could be criticized as helping to prop up Israel and undermine Palestinian nationalism.

Eventually, David found people willing to help: the Bazlamits agreed to host a meeting in their courtyard. The small group gathered underneath the family's grapevines, on the same slope were an Israeli sniper killed the elder Hijazi Bazlamit in 1951. The Palestinians had a list of concerns. They wanted dumpsters with lids for the street, so the cats and dogs wouldn't keep dragging trash into the road. They wanted the city to clean the stinky sewer grates that made the street smell, especially in the summer. They thought speed bumps on one of the main roads through Abu Tor might slow down drivers who zoomed past the entrance to Assael at dangerous speeds. They talked about turning the small patch of empty land at the entrance of the street into a little park. They were small things. David figured he had to start somewhere. Garbage bins and speed bumps seemed to be as good a place as any.

Songs of Freedom

As the couple found ways to break through the mistrust on Assael, David and Alisa bumped into unexpected difficulties raising their youngest daughter, Avital. Avital was seven when they bought their house on Assael Street. Any move can be a challenge for a kid. And moving to Assael proved to be an especially trying one for Avital. Though she kept going to the same school—an alternative private “democratic” program where students had complete control of their education—she had to make new friends on the street. Since most of the kids spoke Arabic, that was hard.

Avital was tall for her age and athletic. She liked to wear pink plastic Crocs and zip around the dead-end street on her purple scooter with her long brown hair whipping across her face.

“I like our street,” Avital said. “At first I thought it's annoying that there are Arabs here. I didn't know anything about them. I can't understand their Arabic. But then my dad helped me to play with them and we would play together every day.”

David taught Avital a little bit of Arabic to help her make friends. At night, they would sit and learn basic sentences in Arabic that she would repeat over and over.

“Shu ismek?”
David would ask while Avital played
Sims
on the computer. (“What's your name?”)

“Ismi Avital,”
she would respond. (“I'm Avital.”)

“Ween inti saaken?”
David would ask. (“Where do you live?”)

“Ana saaken fil Shayara Assael,”
Avital would say. (“I live on Assael Street.”)

Avital tried it out on the young girls across the street, who giggled at her Arabic. As she got older, Avital became better friends with one of the neighbors who spoke English well: Khulood Salhab's middle daughter, Maha.

Though Maha was six years older than Avital, the two found plenty of things to bond over, like doing their nails together and trading makeup tips. Maha was protective of Avital and liked to spend time with her, even though some of Maha's friends told her that it was a bad idea to hang out with Jewish girls. Avital didn't care that Maha covered her hair with stylish, colorful hijabs. Mostly they just made each other laugh. Avital quickly grew taller than Maha, who had no tall genes from her parents. The biggest things about Maha seemed to be her dark eyes and eyelashes. Where Avital was outspoken, Maha was demure. Maha mothered her favorite kitten like a baby. She took the kitty to the vet when she was sick and drove her around town in the family car when she needed to do errands.

While Avital didn't stick to her dad's Arabic lessons, she loved the nights spent singing while he played guitar. Every Friday night for Shabbat, the family would sing old American civil rights tunes and folk songs from the '60s. They'd sing traditional Sabbath tunes and John Denver hits. In 2007, the Epstein Family Singers—David, Avital, and the three older kids—spent eight hours in a recording studio to produce a nine-song CD. They sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Oh, Freedom.” They were impressive enough to be asked to perform a few tunes at Jacob's Ladder, the country's premier country and bluegrass festival at a hotel overlooking Lake Tiberias, the place where Jesus Christ had gathered his disciples and walked on water before traveling to Jerusalem.

In 2011, an energetic, young redheaded American guy came to Avital's school looking for singers. Micah Hendler, a skinny guy with rectangular glasses who is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, wanted to create a new youth chorus of high school students from East and West Jerusalem. He was looking for kids who wanted to “transcend conflict through song.”

Micah, a one-time member of Yale's famous a capella singing group, the Whiffenpoofs, wanted to build a Jerusalem chorus where Arab and Jewish kids could meet on common ground to sing songs and talk about their lives. Micah enlisted Palestinian girls from Jerusalem's refugee camps and Israeli boys who lived in the West Bank settlements encircling the city. There were Muslim girls who covered their hair and those who didn't. There were Jewish girls who went to ultra-Orthodox school and those, like Avital, who were getting an alternative education.

Each week, Micah and the kids would gather for more than three hours of rehearsal at West Jerusalem's YMCA, in a room with pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon hanging from the walls. The kids would learn songs in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Then they'd sit down to talk. The group sessions were meant to give the singers a place where they could shed many of the misconceptions they brought with them. Micah wanted the private talks to be a place where kids could let down their guards and find common ground in a city that always seemed to be pulling them apart.

The choir became one of Avital's passions. The group got invitations to perform in Japan and London. They joined forces with Israeli singer David Broza for an album featuring covers of “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?” and Cat Stevens's “Where Do the Children Play?”

The songs brought the kids together. The talking could be cathartic, and it sometimes left kids in tears. Things with the group got really bad in the summer of 2014, when it seemed like the city might be heading into another spiral of violence.

War Comes to Abu Tor

As the second intifada wound down and the suicide bombings in Jerusalem tapered off, people on both sides of Assael gave thanks that they had all survived, that the intense fighting had passed over their street.

No one could be sure, but many people thought Assael was spared because of the unusual ties that held the street together. That protected feeling evaporated in 2014 when Abu Tor became a flashpoint for what some people saw as the start of the third intifada.

After years of keeping the turmoil at bay, Assael Street was dragged into the tumult. Stinging clouds of tear gas filtered through living room windows as Israeli soldiers battled a new generation of stone-throwing Palestinians in the streets below. The new war appeared to be sweeping through Assael—and it put the Maeir-Epstein's values to the test.

At the start of 2014, the problems in Abu Tor appeared serious, but isolated. In February, the neighborhood was hit by a series of firebombings. That wasn't too unusual. Vandals, criminals and demonstrators occasionally targeted Jewish houses and cars in Abu Tor. They robbed homes and slashed tires. They hurled stones through windows and tossed Molotov cocktails at parked cars. Usually the spikes in trouble passed.

This time, things got worse.

In June, the nation was captivated by the kidnapping of the three Jewish-Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank. Everyone was talking about the fate of Naftali, Gilad and Eyal. Israel launched a new crackdown—the country's largest military operation in the West Bank since the peak of the suicide bombings nearly a decade earlier. Israeli forces searched thousands of homes, rounded up more than 400 Palestinians and, for the first time in years, demolished the home of a Hamas member arrested for murdering a Jewish Israeli during Passover.

When the boys' bodies were discovered under piles of stone in a field not far from Hebron 18 days after they were abducted, Netanyahu called the killers “human animals,” launched air strikes in the Gaza Strip, and essentially vowed to exact revenge.
3
Hours after the nationally broadcast funerals—for Naftali Fraenkel, a 16-year-old American-Israeli; Gilad Shaer, 16; and Eyal Yifrach, 19—three men, led by an Israeli settler, did just that.

In an abduction captured by security cameras, two men walked up to a scrawny 16-year-old Palestinian teen with a goofy haircut in East Jerusalem, asked him for directions, then wrestled him into a car that sped off as the boy shouted
“Allahu Akbar.
”
4

The three men took Mohammed Abu Khdeir to a nearby forest, beat him with a wrench, poured gasoline over his bloodied body and set him ablaze while he was still alive. Palestinians uttered his name the way Israelis mentioned Naftali, Gilad and Eyal. Both sides saw the killing of their children as a sign of utter depravity, a clear signal that it was impossible to live together with a people who could to
that
to an innocent boy.

The killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir became a catalyst for new protests. Every night, street fights would break out between masked Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Israeli riot police. The evenings were filled with the sounds of shattering glass and of fireworks aimed at Israeli soldiers. The winds pushing through the valleys smelled of tear gas and acrid rubber from burning tires. Israeli forces used high-pressure water cannons to spray protesters with a foul-smelling, yellow-colored, laboratory-designed riot-control liquid called “Skunk.”

Four days after Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed, Israeli police arrested six people and charged three of them with the boy's murder. Israel was shocked by the brutal revenge killing. It forced Israelis to reconsider the country's carefully cultivated image of itself as a benevolent nation. Netanyahu called Mohammed Abu Khdeir's father in order to distance himself and his calls for vengeance from the Israelis who actually carried it out.

“The murder of your son is abhorrent and cannot be countenanced by any human being,” Netanyahu told Hussein Abu Khdeir.

As many Israelis expressed revulsion over the unimaginable implications and repeated the mantra,
“That's not us,”
Naftali's mother, Rachel Fraenkel, went on TV to denounce the Jewish attackers.

“The shedding of innocent blood is against morality, is against the Torah and Judaism, and is against the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country,” she told reporters gathered outside her home at the end of the family's seven-day mourning period. “Alongside the pain of this terrible act, we take pride in our country's zeal to investigate, to arrest the criminals and to stop the horror, and we hope that calm will return to the streets of our country.”
5

Naftali's uncle, Yishai Fraenkel, told journalists “there is no difference between those who murdered Mohammed and those who murdered our children. Those are murderers, and these are murderers. And both must be dealt with to the full extent of the law.”
6

With some prodding from Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, Mohammed Abu Khdeir's father, Hussein, spoke with Yishai Fraenkel, who expressed sympathies “from one bereaved family to another.”
7

The small gestures of compassion were soon overtaken by a new war. Two days after the call, faced with a surge in rocket fire from Gaza militants, Netanyahu sent Israeli planes to bomb Gaza. For six weeks, Israel's military pummeled the Gaza Strip. For the first time since 2009, Israeli soldiers entered Gaza where they fought Hamas militants who popped up from hidden tunnels below their feet. Israeli military strikes killed hundreds of women and children in attacks that drew international condemnation. Scores of Western journalists sitting on waterfront hotel patios watched one Israeli strike kill four Palestinian boys who were playing soccer on the beach. Israeli forces hit more than a half-dozen UN schools, killing dozens of Palestinians who had sought refuge from the fighting.