I noticed it the first time one day when I took a cab downtown. I avoid buses; they blow up on occasion. Next to the Old City walls, the taxi turned left off King Solomon Street. And there, at the start of Jaffa Road (West Jerusalem's main street), a police van was parked at an angle across the asphalt and a metal police barricade left just one lane open. A cop with an M-16 rifle stood eyeballing each car that rolled by. He let us pass without stopping. Neither the driver nor I looked Palestinian. I glanced back to make sure: Yes, there was really a checkpoint framed between the stone buildings. A half-remembered picture flashed in my mind of a downtown street ending in concrete wall -- a black-and-white photo of divided Jerusalem before the 1967 war. The checkpoint was hardly as substantial as concrete. But it stood -- like a physical Freudian slip, an unintended reference to nastiness buried in memory -- no more than meters from where the armistice line once sliced the city in two.
The checkpoint made no sense. "Eternally united Jerusalem" has longbeen an Israeli principle of faith, and remarking on the erased border betweenJewish and Arab Jerusalem is a civil heresy. The checkpoint also made perfectsense: A couple of weeks before a Palestinian woman had blown herself up on JaffaRoad, killing an elderly man and wounding dozens of people. The police and thearmy are desperate to intercept people wearing explosives, and the obvious lastline of defense runs between the Jewish and Palestinian sides of the city.
The next time I passed that corner, the checkpoint was gone. But when I rodemy bicycle up the hill from my West Jerusalem home, I found another roadblock --a police van, a jeep, uniformed men -- on the road to the Palestinianneighborhood of Sur Bahir, precisely where the Israeli-Jordanian border oncedivided the city. They were there to check Palestinians, not me. But simple fearis enough to keep me from crossing that line. I've entered Sur Bahir just once inrecent months; I went with a Palestinian cabbie and identified myself as anAmerican journalist, not an Israeli.
Jerusalem is shrinking around me, redividing. True, political borders have notbeen marked between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, as then-Prime Minister EhudBarak proposed at Camp David two years ago, defying all rules of Israelipolitics. The barbed wire that rent the city for 19 years has certainly not beenrestored. The new boundaries are blurred, uncertain, permeable. There are phantomcheckpoints that appear and vanish. The redivision mocks political ideologies.But there's no doubt: Without negotiation or agreements, my city is contractingas I watch.
I moved here in 1977, a decade after Israel annexed East Jerusalem. The citywas wide open. It straddled the old border between Israel and Jordan. It alsostraddled the boundary between West and Mideast; that was its allure. My mentalmap of East Jerusalem was vague, but I felt no trepidation going there. Onemidnight on a whim, I led several friends to the Old City, which wecircumnavigated atop the walls in utter darkness, afraid only of dozing in classthe next day. I rode Arab buses; I visited an occasional friend who'd rented abig house in an Arab neighborhood. I had to notice there were no sidewalks orstreetlamps in those quarters, consistently neglected by the Israeli City Hall. Ishopped at a bookstore called Universal Library on Saladin Street in the Arabcommercial district; the store had a quirky selection in English on Mideastpolitics.
When the first Palestinian uprising erupted in 1987, the city contracted justa bit. Occasionally a Jew was stabbed in Jerusalem. It seemed unwise to end up inalleyways of the Arab part of town. After the Oslo process began, the Arab sideremained marked on Jews' mental map in a shade of danger. But East Jerusalemites,who carry the blue ID cards of Israeli residents, still came to work atrestaurants and building sites, even when West Bank Palestinians were barred fromthe city.
Gradually, the city and areas beyond it reopened. Bethlehem to the south andRamallah to the north were turned over to Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority.Israelis ventured into Bethlehem to shop on Saturday, when stores are closed inJewish Jerusalem. An intrepid few went to listen to jazz in Ramallah. One day Ireturned to Universal Library. The dusty English books all dated from before1987. I strolled backstreets, only looking over my shoulder a bit, just slightlyready to jump at shadows.
Even in East Jerusalem, though, I knew I'd crossed a border. My almost-safetywas a payday loan against the expected time of peace when, East Jerusalemitespresumed, they'd be living in the Palestinian capital. On Saladin Street, I was aforeign correspondent.
Instead of peace, though, came the collapse. In Israeli visual memory, the newPalestinian uprising essentially began with the TV picture of a Palestinian manshowing a Ramallah mob his hands, covered in the blood of two lynched Israelisoldiers. In East Jerusalem, nothing similar has happened. That doesn't mean I'dgo alone to neighborhoods where I once felt nearly comfortable. Even city garbagetrucks won't enter Kafr Aqab, at Jerusalem's northern tip. After trash piled upfor months, Jerusalem's city hall agreed to give a local community centerdirector funds to pay Palestinian garbage collectors. On a municipal level, thisis the equivalent of a retreating empire: Vassals rule what once were provinces.
Palestinians have fought this war with the human bomb, the poor man's cruisemissile. One Israeli answer is the checkpoint. A "Roadblock Ahead" sign oncesignaled the line between sovereign Israel and the occupied territories, orbetween Israeli and Palestinian-administered pieces of the territories. Todaythere are checkpoints everywhere on West Bank roads, virtually shutting offPalestinian traffic. Palestinians call them collective punishment; officialIsrael says they are intended only to stop terrorists.
Yet there are also checkpoints inside Jerusalem, marking boundaries thataren't supposed to exist. North of the Old City, along the "seam" -- a way toavoid saying "border" -- between East and West Jerusalem, runs an Israeli-builtthoroughfare. Walking along it one morning, I found the same sight repeated atseveral cross streets leading into the Jewish city: a metal barricade, apoliceman stopping cars, a couple of paramilitary border police. Daring myself, Iturned the other way, down a commercial street leading to the Old City. I was theonly Jew there. A stream of people flowed through the gate into the walled town.I imagined a knife in my back, and flagged a taxi for the very relative safety ofJaffa Road. Two weeks later, a policeman at one of the checkpoints on the seamstopped a suspicious looking car. I could hear the explosion several kilometersacross town. The cop died in the blast, but the suicide bomber hadn't reacheddowntown.
Another day a friend I'll call Jibril, an East Jerusalem cabbie, took me toexplore a second border. We drove to the Mount of Olives, east of the Old City.On the main road a sign announced "roadblock ahead." A metal watchtower onspindly legs stood next to the road. On the ground, two border policemen stoodbehind chest-high concrete barriers while another stopped cars. It looked likethe standard military checkpoint on the Jerusalem-West Bank line -- except thatwe were a mile inside the city. The boundary had unofficially moved in. For EastJerusalemites living beyond it, that means waiting at the checkpoint even toreach the hospital closer to the city center.
We drove down another street. It ended in a wide mound of dirt and hunks ofconcrete, dumped there to force cars to take the single road leading to thecheckpoint. Instead, minibuses pull up beyond the barricade; passengers walkaround the mound and continue on foot into the city. For stopping human bombs,the checkpoint is a door without a wall. When we got out to look around, Jibriltold a cluster of young men that I was aBritish sahafi, a journalist. This was no place for an Israeli.
I went to see a friend, an Israeli lawyer named Daniel Seidemann. Pro bono, hehas filed suit on behalf of East Jerusalemites against roadblocks that isolatetheir neighborhoods. He also represents 900 East Jerusalem children denied placesin city-run schools. His office window looks out on downtown streets wherestrikingly few people were walking around. It doesn't fit, Danny, I told him. Yousupport a politically divided Jerusalem and you're representing Palestinians, yetyou're suing to get their children into Israeli schools. And you're fighting EhudOlmert, Jerusalem's mayor who proclaims that the city will never be divided, anda police minister who is yet more nationalist.
He laughed without smiling. "An army lawyer told me I should be ideologicallydelighted," he recounted. "I said, 'Yes, but that doesn't justify humansuffering.'"
In fact, Jerusalem's roadblocks are a reminder that everyone is losing thiswar. In a survey last December by Palestinian Khalil Shikaki, 85 percent of thePalestinians polled said a two-state solution should include open borders.Palestinians want an end to the occupation but they're hungry for jobs in Israel,and the last thing they've sought is a closed line between Israel and Palestine
"Jerusalem," Seidemann told me, "is not waiting for the political leadership"to implement the peace parameters that Bill Clinton laid out January 2001, underwhich Jewish areas of Jerusalem would be under Israeli rule and Arab areas underPalestinian rule. "In its wisdom, Jerusalem is implementing them on its own."
Here's the difference: Clinton spoke of a city that would be politically splitbut physically open. Today, in wartime, it's officially united but progressivelymore divided for those who live here. Though they may repress the thought, howmany Israelis would rather see barbed wire run through the city so they can walkdowntown without fear? How many Palestinians who favor partition actually wantbarricades to rise along the borders?
There is no end to Jerusalem's dark ironies.
