Living With Israel’s Security Wall

Jerusalem occupies space in the international headlines that is wholly incommensurate with its size. Big news but a tiny city.

We live on the southern side of the city almost at the edge but can get to the northern edge of the city if traffic isn’t too bad in just over fifteen minutes.

As you head north to the Hebrew University campus for example you pass the Old City then a relatively upscale Arab neighborhood called Sheik Jarakh and then take a right and an immediate left to the university.

If you were to take the right but not the immediate left you would end up in just a couple of minutes in Wadi Joz and then Abu Dis. Not shall we say very Jewish neighborhoods. And not shall we say neighborhoods where many Jews willingly go anymore.

Fortunately in all the trips I’ve made to the university I’ve never missed that immediate left.

Recently though a friend and I purposely missed the left and kept heading straight first into Wadi Joz and then into Abu Dis. She’s Palestinian and for a long time she’s been asking me to spend a day with her in Abu Dis to see the wall up close. Seeing it she was sure would make me a vociferous opponent of the entire project.

She agreed to pick me up in her car (if any of the neighborhood’s residents stopped us she told me we’d be much better off if she did the talking) and told me to wear a baseball cap instead of a kippah.

I was struck by her suggestion. Arabs including Palestinians of all sorts regularly walk the streets of West Jerusalem. I share the sidewalk with them. And the elevator in our office building which also houses the city’s water department. And they ride our buses. And they never seem to think that they have to hide who they are in order to make it out safely.

But being an obedient sort I dressed accordingly jeans and an American t-shirt baseball cap and a camera to look a little tourist-like. She picked me up as promised and within fifteen minutes we were in Wadi Joz. We took the main drag through Abu Dis and there it was looming right in front of us. Can’t exactly miss it.

She parked in front of a grocery store and told me not to speak Hebrew. English only. She went to talk to the grocer to ask him to watch her car and on her way to me (I’d moved over to the wall) snapped a picture of me. It gives you a sense of the size of the thing.

I looked at the graffiti on the wall. From War saw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto. No to the Busharon Wall. The second was at least clever. The first I thought was a bit sick. The Warsaw Ghetto was part of a project very very different from what’s going on here no matter how much one may be opposed to the wall.

There were also a few spray-painted slogans like Kol Ha-Kavod le-Magav – Thank You Border Patrol presumably not written by Palestinians. A few biblical verses about freedom a Star of David made out of dollar signs (presumably not painted by a Jew).

And a biblical verse in Hebrew: Have we not all one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we break faith with one another profaning the covenant of our fathers? (It’s from Malahi 2:10 though the wall didn’t have a footnote.) That one presumably was written by neither the Palestinians nor the Border Patrol.

Some graffiti I thought was missing. Where was the slogan that said Stop the bombings so they take this thing down…? Nowhere. Not a single indication that the wall was a reaction to something. Not an auspicious beginning to the tour.

She wanted to show me a school on the other side of the wall so we started climbing the long dusty road at its foot. Several hundred meters up we came across five young women all in long dresses and full headdress carrying schoolbooks.

My friend asked them how to get to the school. It’s on the other side of the wall they told her in an Arabic that I could barely follow. How do we get across? They pointed to a place where the wall hadn’t been completed and said you climb up there and jump down.

How far down is the jump my friend wanted to know. They said something and laughed and I didn’t follow it. I asked her what they’d said and she too laughed. They said it s a big jump but if you get killed you’re considered a shahid [martyr].

Somehow I suspected that if I died making the jump they probably wouldn’t announce my new shahid status in my shul so we bagged the school.

We got to the top of the hill where some Israeli security guys were loading equipment into a building that had formerly been a hotel but that now because it stood at the top of the village was being used as a lookout post. They eyed us suspiciously and then asked me a few questions but didn’t really bother us.

We hiked around. I took some pictures she explained the layout of the village to me and then suggested we go to her sister’s house on the other side of the wall. No problem since the wall ended there.

Her sister also speaks a perfect Hebrew. She brought out soft drinks and water and then sat down to tell us about life in the village the hardships of the fence. How she used to drive her son five minutes to his school bus (he goes to school at the Arab-Jewish public school in West Jerusalem) but now has to go all the way around Ma’aleh Adumim and how it takes forty minutes on a good day.

It wasn’t clear to me why they didn’t just park on the other side of the fence as we had done and hike to the car but I didn’t ask.

The story to be sure wasn’t a pretty one. The wall is enormous it’s ugly and at least here it cuts right through the middle of the village. True. And it makes life very very inconvenient for a lot of people. No question.

I asked them if the part of the wall we’d just seen had been the part that the Israeli Supreme Court recently said had to be moved. They didn’t quite answer that one. They (sort of) said they didn’t know and I (sort of) knew that wasn?t the entire truth.

I sat and listened drank enough soft drinks to be polite but couldn’t help thinking about one missing fact – why the wall had been built in the first place. That neither my friend nor her sister nor for that matter anyone else we met during the rest of the day seemed inclined to mention.

It was as my friend expected an unsettling day for me. But not for the reasons that she’d thought. No one can deny the massiveness of the wall. No one can deny its ugliness. Or that it poses real hardships. Or that it may not have been built in all the right places.

But no one can deny either that the reason we like many other Israeli parents worry much less about whether our children will make it home is because of that wall.

And the reason that Jerusalem and much of the rest of the country has been exceedingly quiet recently for almost five previously unimaginable months is also because of the wall. And why before the wall this was a different country. A country terrorized. By people who came from places like Abu Dis. Who for the most part can no longer get in.

It was their absolute unwillingness to even mention Israel’s need for the fence that contrary to her expectations and her hopes slowly but inexorably eradicated most of the misgivings I’d had about the fence at least in principle.

My friend and her sister are Israeli citizens in addition to being Palestinian (a long story). They live on opposite sides of the fence. (Another long story.) But both speak Hebrew both work in West Jerusalem and both understand Israeli culture as well as anyone else. And neither in an hour of talking about the fence and a day of touring the area ever mentioned any reason why Israel might do such a thing. That silence much more than the fence is what I found disconcerting. And surprising.

More surprising of course than the ruling at the International Court of Justice. Everyone knows that the wall is a problem. Israel’s Supreme Court said the same thing. Which is why the Court ruled just days before the ICJ ruling that significant stretches of the fence had to be moved. Eliminate the hardship the Supreme Court effectively said as much as you can. While the ICJ essentially said with admitted hyperbole on my part Eliminate Israel as soon as you can. How else to explain a ruling that the fence must be taken down and the Palestinians compensated for their losses without any serious reference to Israel’s security concerns?

There’s no question we didn’t build this fence the smart way. We built it too slowly. And we should have plotted the course of parts of it differently. And our soldiers guarding it are not sufficiently trained which is why it’s been announced that the patrolling of the fence will shortly be assigned to a private firm presumably with better trained people. All of those problems are real.

But so were the problems that the fence was meant to address and about that no one seems to have anything to say. Not the ICJ not the Palestinian and Israeli protesters who want it brought down and not my friend who so desperately wanted me to see it.

It was that silence that complete blindness to what had been happening in this society for four years which left me feeling less concerned about the fence and more overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness a sense that what we have now is the best we’re going to see.

At the end of the day I was left saddened not outraged. Saddened almost beyond words because I left convinced that though we may one day get to non-belligerence we’re not going to see peace. The hatred is too deep the distrust too embedded.

They see us as a massive military power while we can’t remember one instance when their leadership said (in Arabic which is all that matters) that we have a right to exist. They accuse us of not caring about their standard of living and we see them as unwilling to acknowledge what we’ve lived through for the last four years.

Where they see a massive invasion and disruption of their village we see protection for our kids. They read the ICJ ruling with approval and we see Europe unrepentant repeating its wholesale willingness to see the Jews vulnerable. One wonders how or if we’ll ever get beyond that.

When we made our way back to the grocery store to get my friend’s car we saw some kids huddled around the ice cream freezer just outside the store chatting about what kind of ice cream cones they wanted to buy. I realized suddenly that they were speaking English a perfect American English without a trace of an accent.

I went over to them and asked them where they were from. San Francisco they told me delighted to meet another American. What were they doing here I asked. Their whole family lives in Abu Dis they told me and they come for the whole summer every summer. We chatted for a minute and then they asked me what I was doing here.

I live here I told them.

In Abu Dis? they asked with surprise.

No there I said and pointed to West Jerusalem clearly visible one hill over.

At which point the eldest probably about fourteen years old looked alarmed. Her body language shifted. She shepherded her siblings and cousins away from the freezer without buying any ice cream and as politely as she could ushered them away. Had we met at a Ben and Jerry’s store in the Bay Area it all would have been very pleasant. But because we met over an ice cream freezer in Abu Dis thousands of miles away I was suddenly the enemy. Because of the wall? Or because I exist?

My friend and I were quiet as she drove me back to West Jerusalem. What did you think? she asked. But she didn’t want to know. What I thought was that though I genuinely like her very much and admire a lot about her and though Elisheva and I enjoy having her and her husband over for dinner the wall didn’t create the gulf between our worlds. It just formalizes it. What did I think? What I couldn?t tell her was that I was thinking of Abram and Lot and the verse that says ?the land could not support them staying together? (Gen. 13:6). And wondering if it was no less true today than it was thousands of years ago.

And wondering if indeed it is still true where that leaves us. Nowhere good that’s for sure. Without much hope. With just a deep sadness the kind that gnaws at you and won’t go away. With the sense that (with apologies to Robert Frost) huge fences make tolerable neighbors. With the fear that this may for the foreseeable future be the best we can hope for.

And with the hope however faint that someone will show us otherwise. Dr. Daniel Gordis is director of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows and the author most recently of Home to Stay: One American Family’s Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel.