Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem

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INTRODUCTION

On a breezy midsummer evening in 2007, I was walking down Ben Yehuda Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare of downtown West Jerusalem. Framed by low limestone buildings—home to souvenir shops, eateries, and retail stores—this wide passageway brims with tourists and locals. In warmer months, as the sun sets, street performers and religious proselytizers take up the intersections of Ben Yehuda Street and the alleys in the city center. The late-evening buzz attracts all sorts of people who saunter or perch on the stone benches along the walkway, each group congregating in its own space.

As the hour neared seven o’clock and darkness descended, a celebration was in the air: stages were being set up in various locations in anticipation of Ḥotsot ha Yotser, an annual arts and culture festival. This year, the festival coincided with the fortieth anniversary of Jerusalem’s reunification, the Israeli term for the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. As a leftist, secular Israeli-American, I tend to avoid such celebrations for ideological reasons and, atypically for an ethnographer, I escape them due to a general dislike of crowds. As luck would have it, I was in the area searching for a store catering to orthodox Jewish women, as I planned to purchase a long skirt for use in my fieldwork. My research on Jerusalemites’ childhood memories led me to various quarters of the city, into neighborhoods and homes where being properly attired was a matter of blending in and establishing rapport. After getting directions from a young jewelry saleswoman, I hurried down the walkway toward the clothing store, hoping to dodge the assembling crowds, when I was stopped in my tracks. In an alley, a large group of people was sitting on folding chairs before a small stage where men and women of middle age and older took turns at a microphone, telling anecdotes about another, smaller Jerusalem of a few decades ago.

Realizing I had stumbled upon something significant, I stayed to listen, taking notes on old receipts from my wallet and chatting with others standing in the space between the seats and the wall of a building. I had not anticipated needing my digital recorder, which was sitting in my apartment in Talbiyeh, a twenty-minute walk away.

The emcee of the event was Yehudah ‘Atsebah, a man in his sixties. With a pale face and dark brown eyes, he wore a leather paperboy cap and sported a long reddish-gray braid. ‘Atsebah seemed to know many people in the crowd, inviting them to the stage by name. The first storyteller I heard was Shalom Ezra, a short man with a shock of white hair, about eighty years of age. He stood directly behind the microphone with his bright white shirt and looked straight ahead as he told a story called A Rooster for Yom Kippur. Speaking succinctly and with vigor, Shalom related a comedy of errors involving the preparation of a rooster for the ritual meal on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. From piecing together the scrawls on my receipts, I recall the gist of the story. When Shalom was a boy, his family lived in one of the old neighborhoods of Jerusalem. For several months, he joined his brothers in feeding the rooster for the dinner on Yom Kippur, which would be followed by a day of fasting and prayer. The day to butcher the rooster had finally come. It cost three mil to butcher the thing, he said, "At the time, the mukhṭār¹ of the neighborhood was also the butcher; Gershon Feibel was his name. In those days his signature was needed for everything, including marriages and divorces." However, a series of mishaps caused the rooster to be declared ṭaref—ritually impure and thus inedible—one involving a cat walking away with it amid preparations in the kitchen. But Shalom’s mother did not let the matter faze her, exclaiming, I paid for this rooster and we are going to eat it! The whole neighborhood learned of the commotion and offered her parts of their own roosters, but she would not have them. They were going to retrieve the rooster and cook it.

I do not remember how the story ended, but I noted that Shalom Ezra used the Arabic word tfaḍḍal (please, go ahead), and that the currency, mil, seemed to place the story during the time of British rule (1920–1948), reasonably coinciding with Shalom’s childhood. The storytellers who took to the stage after Shalom peppered their tales with linguistic expressions and puns in Turkish, Yiddish, Arabic, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). Their references to ha-safa ha-Yerushalmit, the Jerusalem language, evoked an ambiance of daily communal interactions in late Ottoman- and British Mandate–era Jerusalem. While some of the stories were inherited from an older generation’s oral traditions, this did not preclude the performers from communicating a sense of nostalgia for a bygone world, even if they did not experience it directly.

I was struck by the contrast between this modest yet discursively rich event and the ostentatious atmosphere with its blaring music and Israeli flags. The festival’s concurrence with the commemoration of the 1967 war imbued it with a politicized air. At a time when the first orthodox Jewish mayor presided over a right-wing municipal government, and the separation barrier neared completion in Jerusalem, these storytellers were recalling a smaller, more intimate city that appeared at odds with the nationalistic environment surrounding us.

Some of these raconteurs, I learned, were members of a local storytellers’ circle called the Jerusalem Parliament. In Israeli parlance, a parliament refers to an informal gathering of old timers, vatikim, who pass the time telling stories. During my initial fieldwork in 2007–2008, several forums like this were operating in the city (and beyond), along with guided tours, radio programs, and exhibitions dedicated to Jerusalem’s culture and history.² They formed part of a wider generational embrace of nostalgia in a city whose identity is in perpetual struggle and is subject to scrutiny both locally and abroad. Together, these older residents created community by evoking an earlier era characterized by modest means, neighborliness, and religiosity tempered by humor; themes that I would recognize again and again in tales about Jerusalem.

A year later in June, I signed up for a walking tour of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.³ Perched on a hillside north of the Old City, this traditionally aristocratic neighborhood extends east of Road Number 1—the highway dividing East from West Jerusalem—toward the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Between Sheikh Jarrah and the Old City to the south is a 1.3-kilometer stretch of Palestinian residential neighborhoods that lead toward Salah ad-Din Street, a busy artery of shops, hotels, and restaurants that make up the center of East Jerusalem. Sheikh Jarrah watches over them, weary and detached like an impoverished grandfather, a shadow of its former self. Over a century old, the neighborhood displays a bewildering mix of opulent villas, narrow sidewalks, dust and honking cars, and a midday rush of schoolchildren. Amid the neglected streetscape, where trees and benches for repose are scarce and trash collection irregular, the visitor may chance upon the well-kept interiors of the American Colony Hotel, a small string of restaurants along Shim‘on ha-Tzadik Road, and the private residences of relatively comfortable Palestinians. These verdant oases break the monotony and the heat of the street and convey a sense of old-time charm and comfort.

Huda al-Imam, the director of the Centre for Jerusalem Studies, led us, a group of foreign visitors and a couple of Palestinian locals, around the upper section of Sheikh Jarrah. We stopped before historic houses, consulates, a hospital, and hotels, chatting with residents who recalled what the area was like before Israel occupied it in 1967. The tour culminated with a visit to the solidarity tent of the al-Kurd family, who had been threatened with eviction from their home. Religious Jewish settlers had already illegally occupied part of the dwelling through a long-term process of displacement sanctioned by the government, attested to by a border guard post, its Israeli flag prominent among the houses. More evictions ensued in the years that followed, and Friday demonstrations by Israelis and Palestinians opposing this confiscation lasted for a while, attracting foreigners and local celebrities.

The idea of this tour again, Imam stated in English before we embarked, is a solidarity tour to the al-Kurd family who are today facing this threat, but again we will walk around the streets, we will go into some homes where we will be hosted by people who will tell you a little bit about the place; the history of the people who are living here from their perspective. At the end of the tour we descended from the main road down a path that wound around houses occupied by settlers to reach the home of the al-Kurds. When we arrived at the solidarity tent—a white cloth stretched over the courtyard leading to the family home—several people were sitting around looking solemn as they talked on mobile phones and with one another. White plastic chairs faced the main wall, which was covered in posters bearing messages in Arabic and English: hopeful wishes and statements like This is apartheid! expressing a subglobal equivalence between occupied Jerusalem (and by extension, Palestine) and South Africa. We were invited to sit as orange soft drinks were passed around in plastic cups, a familiar gesture of Arab hospitality.

One by one, we heard testimonies by a lawyer, a member of the Sheikh Jarrah steering committee, and finally Umm Kamel, the family matriarch. They described how the settlers had calculatingly seized part of the al-Kurd house and were now pressing through the Israeli courts to permanently evict the family. Our guide introduced Umm Kamel as a woman of resistance who has been resisting not for days, but for weeks and months and years to keep this house a Palestinian house. Volunteers, among them foreign nationals, had been staying in the home at night to prevent the settlers from expelling the family completely.⁴

After about thirty minutes of testimonies, the attendees from the tour group began to trickle out. The sun was setting and I also felt an uncomfortable urge to leave. The stories were overwhelming and the talking was drawn-out; as an Israeli I felt my presence was not welcomed. Later I would regret not having kept my digital recorder on during the entire event: I had recorded the tour but stopped short after a few minutes in the solidarity tent. The tour of pre-1967 Sheikh Jarrah had seemed more relevant to my interest in the past, too often overshadowed by stories such as that of the al-Kurd family. Yet I had made the mistake of separating two narrative events that by local logic were entirely related, and continually tried to get past stories of the occupation to an authentic kernel that was untainted by it.

What does the storytelling event on Ben Yehuda Street have in common with the visit to the solidarity tent in Sheikh Jarrah? The connection was not obvious to me at first. As a student of folklore, I had been accustomed to thinking of particular kinds of verbal performances as storytelling. Shalom Ezra and his peers were recognizably part of such an event. Happily coinciding with my interest in childhood memories of Jerusalem, theirs was a ready group of old-timers who took pleasure in the craft of storytelling, in nostalgia, and in one another’s company. The testimonies imparted at the al-Kurd solidarity tent did not constitute a classic storytelling session per se: Umm Kamel’s story could be classified as a testimony or an eyewitness account in a news segment. Listeners exposed to such events in their travels across Palestine may group her account with so many other occupation stories. Nonsympathizers might call it complaining. But this was as much of a storytelling event as the one that took place in the Ḥotsot Ha Yotser festival. What is more, both narrative occasions engaged in representing Jerusalem and what it means to be a Jerusalemite to a public that is posited in particular ways, in a context that implicitly and explicitly refers to the other. Shalom’s tfaḍḍal signals an Arabic linguistic and cultural presence amid a Jewish landscape formed of Hebrew words. Umm Kamel’s corner of the world under the solidarity tent is surrounded by Jewish settlers whose actions have created the conditions for her story.

Ultimately, each raconteur spoke of the loss of a world where the reverse was the case: Arabic expressions formed part of the oral culture of Jerusalem in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, even as the language politics of the yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) came to prioritize Hebrew over foreign languages such as German, Yiddish, Arabic, and Russian (Halperin 2010). The expression tfaḍḍal gestures to that bygone world, uttered from a present that recognizes its displacement. The articulation of this loss is carefully positioned between the recognition of Zionist victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which ushered in a new political and linguistic era, and the private subjugation of Jewish Arabic speakers, who by the late 1950s had comprised more than half of Israel’s population, the majority having immigrated to the new state from Muslim lands. Likewise, the shrinking of Umm Kamel’s world has been in the making at least since 1948. But her loss is immediate and her story marks her weird initiation into the fate of so many Palestinians, who call upon local and foreign publics to bear witness. Collapsing the generic boundaries that separate these two narrative occasions, we arrive at the more significant issue of what they accomplish: both performances index issues of representation of local identity in a world historical moment of conflict; of who has the right to narrate Jerusalem’s landscape; and of the ways in which stories frame the past and the present.

In a chapter titled Is There a Folk in the City? Richard Dorson writes that in the city, genre folklore—fairy tales, legends, and epics that have long commanded the attention of scholars—has become increasingly displaced by other kinds of oral tradition, which deserve the attention of collectors (1971, 43). This book foregrounds narratives of residents, communities, and institutions that merge emotionally evocative experiences of Jerusalem with ideological perspectives to establish a sense of belonging and authenticity in both subtle and overt ways. I use the term narrative broadly to refer to verbal and material expressions such as personal reminiscences, guided tours, street plaques, graffiti, and museum exhibits. Finally, I take up recent architectural projects, municipal posters, and other inscriptions as signs of an emerging narrative shaping the city according to neoliberal and nationalist policies. In the chapters that follow, I consider how both events in Jerusalem’s recent history and ongoing power struggles inform Palestinian and Israeli denizens’ stories about their city as well as how the other side is implicated in them. In a piece titled Shouting Match at the Border, Roger Abrahams writes, to analyze lore in terms of how the group projects and plays upon its own image, in relation to stereotypes of other groups within a complex society and a pluralistic cultural situation, is to alter significantly the very study of folklore. Under such circumstances, lore can be used to gauge the intensity of the feeling of separateness between different segments in the larger polity (1981, 305). Framing the lore of Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem as a shouting match calls attention to borders that are manifest in articulations of group identity (Jansen 1963) and inquires into the strategic value of borders in demarcating lines between and within Israeli and Palestinian societies.

Thematically, this book hones in on the resonance of the border that divided Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan from 1948 until 1967 (figure 1), exploring its continued significance for residents and for cultural representations of the city in subsequent decades. The 1948 war signifies a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East. Following the 1947 UN resolution to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states and to internationalize Jerusalem—a motion accepted by the Jewish Agency for Israel but rejected by the Arab states—fighting ensued between Zionist and Palestinian Arab forces in Jerusalem (Krystall 1999). Britain’s final withdrawal in May 1948 from Palestine, which it had ruled with a mandate from the League of Nations for nearly thirty years, led to an all-out war between Zionist forces and the armies of five neighboring Arab countries. The result was the establishment of the State of Israel and the concomitant fragmentation of Palestinian society known as the Nakba (the catastrophe), with the exodus of over three-quarter million Palestinian refugees from their homeland, mostly to surrounding Arab countries.

Situated in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem’s ensuing division has become emblematic of the unfulfilled goals of two nationalist movements. At the conclusion of hostilities in 1949, Israeli and Jordanian military leaders divided Jerusalem with an armistice line, also known as the Green Line. Jews lost access to the sites they hold sacred, most importantly the Western Wall, a vestige of the outer ancient Jewish Temple compound located in the Old City, which ended up on the Jordanian side.⁵ The Palestinians had in turn lost the majority of their historic homeland and the prospect of a nation state, with hundreds of thousands awaiting their fate in refugee camps and beyond. On the ground, the demilitarized zone severed contact between Israelis and Palestinians who found themselves living in Israeli West Jerusalem and in Jordanian East Jerusalem, respectively (figure 2).⁶ As a result, young people grew up with an intimation of trouble from the other side, manifesting their fantasies, fears, and curiosity through their games and folklore as well as in their choice to frequent or avoid particular areas of the city. Recalling the infamous Berlin Wall, the image of a physical border, patrolling soldiers who occasionally shot to kill, and stories of children venturing too far into No Man’s Land left a palpable mark on this period of Jerusalem’s separation, a split echoed in Israeli and Palestinian historiographies.

Figure 1. Jerusalem on the Map. Adapted with permission from the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

For nineteen years partition became a fact of life until the outbreak of war on June 5, 1967 between Israel and five Arab countries, which resulted in Israel’s territorial expansion along all fronts. Among the areas it annexed were the highlands to the west of the Jordan River (the West Bank), including East Jerusalem and the Old City within it (figure 3). Jerusalem’s boundaries were expanded to include Palestinian village lands around the periphery, whereupon neighborhoods were built to house Jewish Israelis. The Palestinian population in the annexed areas was subsumed under military occupation. Those who were present when Israel conducted a census of Jerusalem received permanent residency status, which conferred certain benefits.⁷ Though eligible to receive Israeli citizenship under some circumstances, most Palestinians declined to apply for political reasons (B’Tselem 2010). Making matters worse, since 1995, Israeli measures to reduce the Palestinian population—about a third of the city’s three-quarter million inhabitants—have resulted in the revocation of residency status from those who failed to prove that Jerusalem was their center of life (B’Tselem 2013).

Figure 2. Map of divided Jerusalem, 1949–1967. The armistice line (the ‘Green Line’) divided Israeli West Jerusalem from Jordanian East Jerusalem. The outer border line in blue marks Jerusalem’s expanded municipal boundaries after the 1967 war. Courtesy of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

Figure 3. Jerusalem occupied and expanded by Israel in June 1967. United Nations Department of Public Information.

While the circumstances, reasons, and aftermath of the 1948 and 1967 wars continue to be discussed and contested, the period between the wars remains relatively unexamined by scholars. Yet the Armistice Regime (1949–1967) informs the ways that residents experience their personal and national histories, as well as their depictions of Jerusalem. As members of the armistice generation approach retirement age, they increasingly engage their memories through informal and public storytelling performances and guided tours, reading widely consumed memoirs and novels set in Jerusalem, and writing down their own reminiscences, which some publish on their own (e.g., Tleel 2000; Mazar 2002).⁸ Mining this plethora of memory work about a significant yet understudied era, I aim to show that opportunities for narrating (particular versions of) Jerusalem’s history to local and foreign listeners are shaped by state policies, municipal and private funding, and dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity. The very idea of who constitutes an authoritative voice and what is worth telling is of profound import for a city whose stories bear on issues of international legitimacy, domestic policy, tourism, and economic investment. Ultimately, what Shuman (1986) refers to as storytelling rights are embedded in shaping Jerusalem’s future.

I lived in West Jerusalem from February 2007 to August 2008 and again from 2014 to 2016, and made two intervening visits. I spent these periods conducting interviews with Palestinian and Israeli residents in their homes, places of work, cafés, libraries, and even impromptu taxi rides.⁹ A handful of individuals took me on guided tours of their former childhood neighborhoods. When visiting people’s homes, I often asked for, and was shown, personal objects such as photographs, collectibles, and play objects as a way to conjure narratives about the past (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1989; Stewart 1984). Approaching memory through the matter of childhood enhanced informants’ recollections through association with these objects, and enriched my understanding of their significance in their lives and for Jerusalem’s social history. Stock images like the water cistern, the kerosene stove, the itinerant vendor, and games made from found objects punctuated the weekly routines and engagements in locals’ recollections, so much so that they have been memorialized in books and websites.¹⁰

To get a sense of how these personal testimonies relate to public narratives about Jerusalem’s social history, I joined guided tours about Jerusalem’s ethnic and religious communities, holy days and festivals, and other themes. Attending these tours allowed me to gauge how local institutions convey Jerusalem’s heritage to various publics. In the Israeli venues (particularly Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi and Beit Shmuel), the presence of a relatively local audience seemed to rest on the self-assured fact of Israel’s existence, which implicitly grants performers and audiences permission to indulge in reflection on cultural themes, including nostalgia for the days when Jerusalem was physically divided, without the need to assert it as the Israeli capital.

Like its West Jerusalem counterparts, the Centre for Jerusalem Studies, located in the Old City and affiliated with Al-Quds University, also runs tours to towns and villages in the West Bank and Israel. Yet in contrast to the nostalgic and at times celebratory tone of many Israeli presentations of Jerusalem’s past, those initiated by the centre are driven by the pressing need for self-preservation. They inevitably focus the tourist’s eye on the present, juxtaposing a better, at times exalted pre-1948 past with the current state of affairs. Indeed, many of the centre’s cultural and tourism programs appear to be geared toward shaping international opinion rather than satisfying the intellectual and leisure pursuits of Palestinian locals. Paralleling the stories of Shalom Ezra and Umm Kamel, these institutional representations reveal that Israeli cultural projects in Jerusalem posit a local, introspective Jewish public sphere, while the instability and fragmentation that threaten Palestinian society compel projects that evoke a broader public sphere, inviting global solidarity and participation in determining Jerusalem’s political status.

NARRATIVE TIME IN STORYTELLING ABOUT JERUSALEM

The first part of this book considers the ways that Palestinian and Israeli residents speak about their city and its place in the wider ethno-national conflict through their memories—both personal and inherited—of the events surrounding the 1948 and 1967 wars. Although a central motivation for this research was to uncover a store of memories that would yield a hidden and nuanced portrayal of Jerusalem, and possibly of close and genial relations between Arabs and Jews, I found that I could not peel away present political realities to find the truth, but that the present shaped contemporary narratives about the city’s past. While locals’ stories about the interwar period (1948–1967) are often colored by nostalgia, loss, and even romanticism for the landscapes and pastimes of their childhood, they also denote grander narratives of their respective nations. Rather than merely recalling the past, residents reconstitute it dialectically within an ever-changing social order. As such, their stories illuminate what it means to be a Jerusalemite in the context of the city’s fraught history.

According to Maurice Halbwachs, memories are a social phenomenon that are acquired in society and are therefore dependent on frameworks of social memory (1992, 82) such as family, religious community, and class. Folklorists understand such social formations as providing the resources for communication and artistic expression, amounting to what Robert Cantwell calls the marrow of culture (Cantwell 1993, 117). Because frameworks of memory are historically and culturally situated, the narratives that they foster and transmit are inflected by the ideological imperatives of the present (Halbwachs 1992, 40).

In the process of forming a national narrative, significant dates and eras serve to create a simplified account of the past by forming a recognizable structure for organizing personal stories as well as commemorative events (Zerubavel 1995). On the whole, Palestinian and Israeli national narratives diverge in their depiction of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Armistice Regime, and the 1967 war and its aftermath, as discerned in the terminology for these turning points and eras, reflecting a dialectic of in/stability (table 1).

Table 1. Turning points and eras in Jerusalem’s recent history

Notes

a. British civil administration formally began in 1920 under High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, and the mandate was granted by the League of Nations in 1922.

b. The term inglim is an amalgamation of English and Hebrew pronunciation used by storytellers as a nostalgic old-timer expression.

c. Abu-Lughod and Sa’di (2007:15) and Sayigh (2007: 142) distinguish terms used for the 1948 war that precede the Nakba, namely sanat al-hujayj (year of escape from imminent and grave danger) and sanat al-hijra (the year of escape), an Islamic reference the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina.

Israelis refer to the 1948 war as the War of Independence, while the Palestinian term for the battles and their consequences is the catastrophe—al-Nakba. Likewise, the moniker Six-Day War underscores Israel’s swift victory over its Arab adversaries in the June War of 1967, while the resulting conquest is variously referred to as united Jerusalem or biblically as built Jerusalem (Psalms 122:3). Israel’s 1980 Basic Law proclaimed Jerusalem to be its whole and united capital, though all embassies are located in Tel Aviv with the exception of the US, which began transferring its embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018. Palestinians term this war al-Naksa, the loss or setback, subsequent to the further subjugation of Palestinians and their land to Israeli military rule in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights (annexed from Syria). They refer to the annexation of these lands, including East Jerusalem, as an occupation, in line with international law.

Oral histories, commemorations, and cultural projects about Jerusalem both reflect and shape these dynamics. In their personal stories, individuals tend to situate their own biological and social maturation vis-à-vis these events, linking personal growth and the unfolding of history. The Zionist master narrative portrays the British Mandate, the war of 1948, and the Armistice Regime as distinct phases in a history that has granted Israel sovereignty over the city in the Six-Day War. Thus, local Israelis ponder and reminisce about the Jerusalem of their childhood from the vantage point of a relatively stable present and of belonging to the dominant group. Children living in West Jerusalem during the period of nation building grew up amid a strong social Zionist ethos that shaped debates about the value of the individual versus the collective and about the place of religion in a putatively secular state. Added to Jerusalem’s geographic and cultural isolation from the more developed coastal region, the city’s residents experienced a period of austerity in the 1950s that is often juxtaposed with today’s sense of materialism