A Street Divided (4 page)

“The question as to who opened fire first is almost impossible to ascertain,” Riley said before the April 23, 1953, meeting broke up. “I am not interested in the question of who is right or who is wrong. I am interested in the parties reaching conclusions whereby they can avoid similar incidents in the future.”
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His appeals swayed no one. Six months later, Maj. Gen. Vagn Bennike, a famed member of the Danish resistance to Nazi rule in World War II who was then serving as chief of staff for the UN Truce Supervision Organization that oversaw the commission's work, warned the UN Security Council that the problems in the divided city were about to explode.

“Jerusalem, when tension increases between Israel and Jordan, is a dangerous powder keg,” he wrote in a report to the UN Security Council in New York.
12

After years of circuitous arguments over the “width of the line,” Israel and Jordan finally made one breakthrough in 1955: They agreed that their borders would stretch to the outer edge of the lines drawn by Dayan and Tell. That helped resolve one problem with the map. But it failed to address the bigger one created by the existence of No Man's Land in the first place.

Killing Wild Dogs in Abu Tor

In May 1956,
Life
magazine photojournalist David Rubinger got a call from an Israeli member of the MAC who had a tip: The United Nations was preparing for an unusual rescue mission in Jerusalem. They were coordinating a cease-fire so they could search for dentures lost in No Man's Land.

The dentures belonged to Miriam Zahade, a 42-year-old cancer patient at a French hospital that sat right on the edge of Jerusalem's No Man's Land.
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Zahade was living out her last days on the border line, under the care of Catholic nuns. The West Jerusalem hospital sat on one of the narrowest strips of No Man's Land between Israel and Jordan. The arched windows of the three-story stone building looked directly across at the Old City walls and the gateway to the Christian Quarter. Israeli soldiers used the hospital rooftop to keep watch on Jordanian Legionnaires on the Old City wall ramparts 100 feet away. This section of No Man's Land was one of the most volatile. Coils upon coils of barbed wire stretched along the street. More than one person at the hospital was hit by errant bullets over the years. In the hospital's church, the stained-glass image of St. Francis of Assisi took a bullet hole right through his heart. Nuns, doctors and patients all entered the hospital from the back. The entrance facing the Old City, with stairs leading right onto No Man's Land, was closed off. Going out that door could be deadly.

So when Miriam's dentures tumbled out a window and into No Man's Land that day in May, it seemed like a lost cause. It was spring, and Miriam was sitting by a window overlooking the border. She accidentally coughed her dentures into a piece of paper and threw them out the window. The paper fell into the weeds and trash below. By the time Miriam realized she'd tossed her dentures into No Man's Land, there was nothing she could do. Miriam was distraught. She refused to speak for days.
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The nuns came up with an improbable solution: Why not ask Israel and Jordan to declare a cease-fire so the UN could send a search party into No Man's Land to recover the dentures? In a rare moment of unity, both armies agreed to hold their fire so the UN could rescue the dentures.

With Jordanian Legionnaires watching from the Old City walls on the other side of No Man's Land, a French officer carrying a white flag led five nuns and an Israeli soldier into the rubble to hunt for the false teeth. It wasn't an easy mission. The street between the hospital and the Old City was cluttered with boulders, trash, overgrown bushes, shrapnel and, quite possibly, unexploded mines from the 1948 war. Miriam kept watch on the search from the hospital windows above.

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Rubinger, who took photos of the unusual rescue party.

Dressed in their white habits with their distinctive
Flying Nun
–esque hooded cowls, the women picked through the detritus without any luck. As the minutes dragged on, the search seemed futile. Then one of the nuns spotted something in the grass, rummaged through the garbage and hoisted the dentures into the air. Smiling, Sister Augustine triumphantly showed the dentures to Miriam looking down from the window above as Rubinger snapped photos. When the pictures appeared in
Life
magazine, the French commander who led the search party complained that it made him look like a fool.

“It is not fitting for a French commandant to be seen looking for false teeth,”
the French officer told Rubinger.
*

The incident came to define the hospital and the small ways Israel and Jordan were able to find common ground, at least for some false teeth.

“For humanitarian reasons, you can do a lot, even in a time of war,” said Sister Monika Duellmann, who took over as director of the French hospital in 2004. “It's difficult to get a cease-fire that will hold, and they got one for the teeth—because it's not political and it's not religious.”

Rubinger, arguably Israel's most famous photojournalist, often sought out surreal stories along the jagged dividing line. The photographer went everywhere he could go. One place he always worried about entering was No Man's Land.

“It wasn't very good for your health to go to No Man's Land,” Rubinger said. “It was easier to get to the moon than it was to get across the border.”

Seven months after the search for the dentures, Rubinger got a chance to get another look at No Man's Land. In December 1956, faced with a growing wild dog problem in the city, Israel and Jordan agreed to join forces to lay out poisoned meat in No Man's Land as part of a joint anti-rabies campaign. The dog problem was particularly bad in Jerusalem's Abu Tor neighborhood. Abu Tor had been cut in two by the 1948 war. The top of the hillside neighborhood was inside Israel, but most of Abu Tor was part of
Jordan. The two countries were separated by a skinny band that cut across a steep hillside of stone homes and small orchards.

Led by a Scottish major with the UN and with an Israeli paratrooper keeping watch, Rubinger clicked away as Israeli and Jordanian veterinary workers tossed the deadly meat into the fields. Rubinger followed the team along the coils of barbed wire running between the homes and neglected terraced gardens. No Man's Land seemed deserted, and bitter winter winds swept up the valley. The team walked along Barbed Wire Alley, a rocky path that would one day become Assael Street.

“It felt like you were going somewhere nobody ever goes,” Rubinger said. “Like virgin territory.”

While they were throwing out the meat, they heard something moving in the abandoned homes below. They watched warily as a Jordanian soldier came their way. He wore a long wool coat and a scarf that covered all but his eyes and nose. The soldier waved and made his way toward Rubinger and the anti-rabies team. In the chilly afternoon breeze, the Jordanian soldier walked up to a low stone wall in No Man's Land and handed the Israeli paratrooper a glass of hot tea so he could warm himself up. Rubinger was amazed to see this small act of kindness between two soldiers from enemy nations.

“That was unique,” he said. “Not just rare. Unique. The border between Israel and Jordan was such that nobody crossed alive.”

A few months later, Rubinger drove to Qalqilya, a small village up north that was right on the Israel-Jordan border. The dividing line put the village in Jordan and its fields to the west in Israel. That created endless problems. The villagers had a hard time accepting that they lived in one country while their old farmlands were now in another. It was even harder to explain to their sheep, cows and donkeys, which gave little thought about new nations and wondered more about where they were going to get their next meal. It was a problem that dogged UN officials who complained that the borders made no sense.

“Had the line been drawn to respect village boundaries, little trouble would have resulted,” said E. H. Hutchison, a commander in the US Navy who took over as chairman of the Jordan-Israel MAC in 1953. “The inhabitants of the villages so affected are not prepared to respect the invisible line or political decrees that are supposed to keep them from the lands they and their forbearers have owned and cultivated for hundreds of years.”
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That day in 1957, Rubinger had been tipped off that a big international trial was going to be held in Qalqilya. When he arrived, Israeli and Jordanian officers were gathering on the border to decide the fate of a cow.

“They had a court sitting on the road, in the middle of the road, that had to decide whom the cow belonged to,” said Rubinger, who was so captivated by the unfolding legal battle that he shot three rolls of film.

The uniformed Jordanian and Israeli officials set up three folding metal tables on the road in No Man's Land between large metal anti-tank barricades shaped like big toy jacks. The aggrieved Arab farmers, wearing long formless
thobes
and white flowing kaffiyehs held on the head by a double knot of black cord, met on the road to plead their case. Jordanian and Israeli soldiers milled around as the men argued over whose cows were whose. The cows in question were led before the judges for examination. The court issued its decree. Decades later, Rubinger couldn't remember just how it played out. And nothing was left in his photo archives to jog his memory.

Cooling Off in No Man's Land

Livestock disputes weren't all that unusual at the time. UN records from that era are filled with files upon files about stolen mules, missing cows and “imposter” sheep. Diplomats assigned to Jerusalem routinely found themselves mediating feuds over livestock. Journalists in Jerusalem could only take them so seriously. “Jordan Yields Wrong Sheep,” read one headline on a short story in the February 11, 1958, edition of the
Jerusalem Post.

“Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem became a sheepfold yesterday morning when the Jordanian authorities herded 30 sheep into no-man's-land for return to Israel,” the reporter wrote. The sheep were finding their way back through Mandelbaum Gate, the central link between Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem.
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The handover seemed to be going along well, until the Israelis inspecting the returnees discovered that most of the sheep weren't theirs. They were, the article reported, “imposters.” The sheep were turned back by Israel to Jordanian officials who vowed to track down the real sheep.
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Crossing the border was impossible for most people. Mandelbaum Gate was used mostly by UN officials, diplomats, merchants and few others. Little about it was inviting. The 50-yard crossing was dominated by the remnants of a two-story stone home owned by a Jewish immigrant named Simcha Mandelbaum. The only piece of the house to survive the 1948 war was part of a wall with an elegant stone arch that rose above a No Man's Land cluttered with rusting armored personnel carriers, coils of barbed wire and lines of conical, concrete anti-tank barriers known as Dragon's Teeth.

At Christmas, busloads of Christians on the Israeli side were allowed through the gate into Jordan so they could visit the biblical birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem, just down the road from Jerusalem. Occasionally, Israel and Jordan used the gate to hand over mischievous boys caught exploring No Man's Land.

The No Man's Land at Mandelbaum Gate served as an unusual backdrop for engagements and weddings between brides living on one side of the border and grooms living on the other. Israel and Jordan agreed to hold their fire so some couples, separated by the border, could get engaged amid the tangles of barbed wire and Dragon's Teeth.
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They looked on as the families raised toasts to newlyweds married in No Man's Land.
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In 1958, Raphael Israeli, then a 24-year-old Israeli army captain, was chosen to be a delegate on the Jordan-Israel MAC. His youth and inexperience meant that Israeli came to the job with distinct disadvantages, so the ambitious Israeli officer did all he could to even the scales. Israeli, who was born in Morocco and left when he was 14, used his knowledge of Arabic to establish a decent rapport with the Jordanian delegation led by Col. Mohammad Daoud Al-Abbasi, a deft debater who would go on to become his country's prime minister. The two officers got so close that Abbasi, nearly 20 years older than Israeli, quietly gave his Israeli counterpart a present at the UN commission office in No Man's Land when one of Israeli's kids was born.

“Don't tell anybody,”
Abbasi told Israeli as he handed him the gift,
“because if anybody knows I brought a present to a Jew, to a Zionist, they will hang me.”

One of the biggest tests for the two came in 1962 when Israeli got an urgent call in the middle of the night telling him to get dressed and come to the UN office in No Man's Land right away to meet Abbasi.

“What's happened?” Israeli asked, fearing the worst.

“Just come,”
the UN official told Israeli.

When Israeli got there, Abbasi was in a panic.

“Rafi,”
the Jordanian officer said,
“you have to help me. We have a problem.”

The crisis wasn't over a deadly shooting or a child missing in No Man's Land. It was over a runaway horse. And not just any horse. This one belonged to the head of Silwan, the crowded Arab village outside the Old City that rose on the hillside across the valley from Abu Tor. The man's horse had run across the valley, up the Abu Tor hillside, past the barbed wire and into Israel, where it was set to be placed under quarantine for 40 days.

In this case, with this horse, that wasn't going to work. The horse's owner called Abbasi and told him in no uncertain terms to bring his horse back without delay.