A Street Divided (29 page)

The families on Assael grumbled about the building inequities, but they only got worse.

“I'm not concerned on a personal level,” Amjad said. “I am only concerned so that I can get a license.”

Living With a Looming Wrecking Ball

The disparities drove Amjad toward a meticulous obsession with life on Assael. He tracked down rare satellite maps of the street taken right after the 1967 war. He collected city maps and legal documents that he stuffed in white plastic bags that became his makeshift filing cabinets. He filled his shelves and drawers with demolition orders for their home, paperwork from attorneys, and fines from the city.

The Risheks got their first home demolition order in 1993, soon after they built the second-story addition. The threats to demolish their house come every year, sparking an annual battle to prevent wrecking crews from turning up on their front door. They hire attorneys and seek court intervention to block the demolition orders. Every year they pay thousands of dollars in fines.

Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, Amjad rummaged through bags and bags of paperwork while his wife looked on with a mix of admiration and disbelief. One of his teenaged daughters came home from school and changed into a zip-up sweatshirt, black tights and a T-shirt with a simple statement on the front, in Arabic: “We are all Gazans.” She slumped on the living room couch while her dad dug through his paperwork, searching for one thing or another. When it became clear that her dad was going to keep talking about boring stuff, she retreated to the small room she shared with her sisters.

Amjad's wife laughed at the stacks of maps, architectural drawings, reports, letters and legal papers and wondered what good would come of it all.

“All you have gotten for us is no space to live in a house threatened with demolition,” Wafa told her husband.

It was a joke. But the problems constantly weighed on Amjad.

“We are living in the context of a racist Israeli policy against the residents of East Jerusalem in every sense of the word,” Amjad said as he held up the latest demolition order imposed on his home.

The Risheks know that the orders aren't hollow. The Bazlamits had to destroy part of their compound after losing a battle with the city. To prevent the city from sending bulldozers into his yard, Moussa Salhab personally dismantled a veranda the city said he'd illegally built. The families lived under a constant psychological siege while defending their homes. They were never sure where the next attempt might be made to drive them off. Amjad didn't know where the next threat might come from. In 2009, he found out.

That year, Amjad got an official letter from the Israeli Interior Ministry. Israel had concluded that Amjad was living outside the country—a precursor to stripping an East Jerusalemite of their residency permit. Amjad gathered up his water bills, his electricity bills and his tax bills and brought them all down to the ministry to prove that he was living in
Jerusalem.

“
Is Assael Street in Israel or Romania?”
he sarcastically asked the city worker.

The official didn't like Amjad's tone and had him thrown out. Amjad had to beg for another meeting to clear things up. Amjad saw it as part of a calculated effort by Israel to force Palestinians out of Jerusalem.

“They send letters hoping people will panic,” Amjad said. “It's one way of decreasing the Palestinian population. They exploit our ignorance of the law and our fear of confronting them.”

The following year, Amjad went to the city to get a copy of their land registry document—the coveted
Tabu.
He paid for the copy, but when the clerk returned to the desk he told Amjad he couldn't find anything with his name on it.

“Check again,”
Amjad said.
“Look, here's my ID.”

“No,”
the clerk told him. “
Your name's not here.”

“Forget my name,”
Amjad told the clerk.
“Check the previous owner: Ziad Yaghmour.”

The clerk checked the records again.

“There is no Yaghmour,”
he said.

“Who owns the land then?”
Amjad asked.

“This land,”
the clerk told him,
“is owned by the Moriah Company of Jerusalem.”

The clerk gave Amjad paperwork showing that their property was owned by Moriah, the city's development arm.

“This is my land,”
he told the clerk before leaving,
“not Moriah's.”

Amjad was in a panic. He called his wife at home to confirm he had the right number for his land. He went back to the clerk, who told Amjad that if he had a problem he should make an appointment with the head of the land registry office.

“I want to see her now,”
Amjad said.
“You can call the police and kick me out, but I'm not leaving until I find out what's going on.”

After some arguing, Amjad talked his way into a meeting. The director dispatched someone to research the history of the land and bring it back to her.

“Sorry,”
she told him after reading the paperwork,
“your name was never put on it. There's no such thing as an Amjad Rishek.”

“I called my brother,” Amjad said. “I told him: ‘We're in big, big trouble.'”

Khaled was in his manager's office at the Y when Amjad called.

“I have the original land documents,”
Khaled told him,
“but I don't know where they are.”

Amjad drove back home, found the
Tabu,
returned to the office and marched back to the manager where they tried and failed to keep him from going in to see her. Amjad laid the documents down on her desk.

“One says I don't belong and one says I do,”
he told her.
“Which is the correct one?”

The director looked over the paperwork, checked her computer and turned back to Amjad.

“Have you ever used this paper for anything?”
she asked, referring to the city documents claiming the land as city property.

“No,”
Amjad told her.

“There has been a mistake,”
she said before tearing up the paperwork showing Moriah as the owner of his land.
“Don't pay anything,”
she told him.
“We will give you all the documents that you want.”

The endless uncertainty hangs over Amjad and his family. And it reinforces his feeling that coexistence programs in Abu Tor that promote yoga and street fairs are pointless.

“Why would I go to David's meeting?” Amjad asked. “Look at my life. David doesn't know anything. These are systemic policies from the highest levels of government. It is bigger than me and bigger than David. It's not that I rejected David's invitation for personal reasons. I rejected it because it doesn't make sense.”

The “Monstrosity” on Assael Street

Nothing stands as a larger testament to the inequities on Assael Street than the massive apartment building that Jewish and Arab neighbors both call a “monstrosity.” It is distinctly out of place on the eastern side of the street. None of the neighbors can figure out how the Jewish-Israeli developers got permission to build it.

The apartment building was built on land once owned by a distant relative of the Salhabs. From what Amjad knew, the Salhabs had sold the land to Canadians who then sold it to Israeli developers. It was the kind of land sale that could get an Arab property owner killed. The new owners came as a shock to longtime residents on Assael Street. For the first time, the Risheks and Bazlamits had Jewish homeowners on their part of the street. It didn't go unnoticed that the property sat next to the home of the collaborator, Abu Fadi.

When the developers started work at the site, Amjad and everyone else on the street could see that something wasn't right. The footprint was huge. It ran from the edge of Assael Street down to the edge of Ein Rogel one block below. There was no open space left. It seemed to be taking up more land than builders were allowed. Amjad took photos of the construction site and brought them to the city.

“How are they able to build this, but I can't get a permit for my home?”
he asked.

The planning office cited various rules and regulations about green space percentages and construction square footage that didn't seem to make much sense. But there was nothing Amjad could do. From the street above Assael, Judith and Jeffrey Green were aghast to see the building going up.

“It was such an eyesore,” she said. “It was just so obviously out of place.”

By law, a building in this part of East Jerusalem was typically not supposed to be more than two stories high. This building looked like it was going to be three, four, maybe five or more. Judith sent a letter to the planning commission that was slightly tongue-in-cheek:
“If you're looking for illegal construction in East Jerusalem to demolish,”
she wrote,
“I know just the place.”
When it became clear that the building was going to tower over its neighbors and block the Old City views of many homes, the Greens and other Jewish residents asked the city to shut the construction site down.

“It was so obvious that what they were doing there was illegal,” Judith said. “We took them to the planning committee and they gave them a command to stop building. They had 200 building violations.”

The developers were furious.

“They were so mad that they threatened to kill our dog,” Judith said.

Construction came to a halt for a few years and the unfinished building sat like countless others across Jerusalem. One day, the workers returned. They had new orders, new money, new permits. How the property owners got them, no one seemed to know. Everyone suspected that they had used some political connections with the city.

“It's definitely a scandal,” Judith said.

The building was like no other in the neighborhood. The red-tile roof was reminiscent of the ones in Israeli settlements spread across the West Bank. From the street below, the floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows of the penthouse looked like they could be the bridge for a
Star Trek
starship. On either side, the building was surrounded by Arab neighbors—the Bazlamits, the Risheks, the Salhabs, the Mujaheds—all of whom were entangled in costly legal battles over their homes. The message to them seemed clear: If you were Arab, you couldn't do anything. If you were Jewish, the sky seemed to be the limit. Perhaps worst of all for the Bazlamits, the new building entirely blocked their view of the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque—a view they had cherished for generations.

“It always seems like they want to kick us out,” said Nawal Bazlamit.

Rumors began to spread that the developers planned to rent the place to nationalistic Israeli settlers who would likely raise a massive Israeli flag from the roof and use the property as a wedge to splinter the neighborhood.

When asked about his building for this book, property developer Yakov Almakayes tried to deflect questions. At first, he claimed that his building was on the western side of the street and wasn't subject to East Jerusalem building restrictions. Then, though he lived in the building for years, he said he couldn't remember exactly where it was. Then he got defensive. He dismissed the neighborhood whisper campaign as hollow talk and salacious rumors.

“Maybe they have different laws and we have different laws,” he said of his Arab neighbors on the eastern side of Assael Street.

Yakov dismissed his neighborhood critics as crazy and embittered.

“People that don't have any future are jealous about people that have a future and success,” he said. “That's it.”

Yakov laughed at any suggestion that he'd threatened to kill the Greens' dog.

“They can say what they want to say, I don't care,” he said. “How can it be true? I have two dogs and a cat in my house. If you can have someone who has two dogs and a cat that wants to kill dogs, I don't know.”

Yakov told neighbors in Abu Tor that he hoped to sell the apartments to rich Jews from overseas who wanted, and could afford, a place in Jerusalem with romantic views of the Old City. But the arrival of the second intifada put a damper on every Jerusalem property owner's aspirations. Hopes of making millions by selling the luxurious, modern apartment building with wraparound windows dried up. Instead, Yakov and his family started renting out the expensive apartments on Assael to Western journalists, US workers and a series of other foreigners.

The building looms over the Arab families as an example of the inequities they face in Jerusalem. It literally casts a shadow on the illegally built homes around it. For Amjad, the building stands as a constant reminder that David's small street improvement projects mean nothing if his home is demolished.

“I still greet my Israeli neighbors and I feel they have the same interest in peace as us,” Amjad said. “I encourage my daughters to go play with David's daughter. But his meeting was meaningless to me.”

David understood the criticism. He knew dumpsters and potlucks weren't going to be a catalyst for Middle East peace any time soon. But, on a street with physical, psychological, political, cultural and linguistic walls, you had to start somewhere.

“It's true that talking about coexistence fairs and graffiti things and changing garbage pails pale in comparison to the fact that somebody can't get a building permit to build something that they can get on the other side of the street, and that when they go ahead and build it anyway ‘the law' is enforced because they have violated the law,” David said. “It's a catch-22 kind of a thing. Down the line, if we work well, we should get to some of those things that are more meaningful. But both sides have to build up a track record of doing some things before we reach those kinds of more difficult things.”