Free A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page B

Claus
    Down the hillside, below the narrow stretch of Abu Tor No Man’s Land separating Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, Arab residents retained their connection to work and life in the Old City across the valley.
    Many took buses and walked to their jobs as cobblers, shopkeepers and sandwich makers. They all knew there was a new country at the top of the hill. It wasn’t clear how long it was going to stay. Arab leaders across the Middle East assured their citizens that Israel wasn’t going to last. Jordanian soldiers moved into the neighborhood and took over Palestinian homes to use as forward posts along the new border with Israel. They rolled out barbed wire to mark the western edge of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a newly independent country that freed itself from British rule in 1946.
    Right beyond the barbed wire, as the hillside pitched up sharply, was No Man’s Land. Most of the homes there were empty. Loose metal shutters slammed against stone walls when storms swept across Abu Tor. For the kids living below the barbed wire, No Man’s Land was a No-Go Zone. It was dangerous. It could be deadly. They knew Israeli soldiers were keeping watch from positions hidden in the tree line above them, but they could rarely see them. They knew, as some say in Islam, that Allah was as close to them as their jugular vein.
    Saliba Sarsar was born in East Jerusalem seven years after the city was split by Dayan and Tell. Saliba grew up on the lower slope of Abu Tor, where he would sometimes sneak into the deep, wide fields and forests in the more lightly guarded No Man’s Land to the south of Abu Tor, out where the United Nations had its headquarters. But Saliba and his friends steered clear of the dangerous gash of No Man’s Land that ran above their neighborhood.
    â€œWe heard all kinds of horror stories about people being shot in No Man’s Land and we never ventured in there,” Saliba said.
    Jordanian Legionnaires kept close watch on Abu Tor and got to know the families living in the neighborhood. They were suspicious of everything, even candy innocently tossed over the barbed wire.
    One day in Abu Tor, Saliba said, a pack of gum came sailing over the barbed wire along No Man’s Land and landed in the dirt. A man living nearby walked over to pick it up. The gum caught the attention of a Jordanian soldier, who came over to interrogate the man and make sure that the packet of gum didn’t contain any secret messages.
    The Sarsars were one of the families split by the 1948 war. When the shooting started, Saliba’s grandfather, Jani Korfiatis, was living with his wife in Jerusalem’s largely Arab neighborhood of Katamon. When the gunfire stopped, Jani was on one side of the border and the rest of his family was on the other. The son of Greek pilgrims didn’t see the need to leave his Katamon home when Israel was established. But his decision cut him off from the rest of his family living in Abu Tor. Like others living in Jerusalem in 1948, Jani had no clear idea what dividing the city was really going to mean.
    â€œIt was their home,” Saliba said, “so they just stayed where they were.”
    When the barbed wire went up, Jani went down to see the Jordanian Legionnaires in charge of the neighborhood: “Take good care of my daughter,” he told them. “Take good care of my family.”
    Every year at Christmas, Israel and Jordan allowed a few thousand Christian pilgrims to cross from West to East Jerusalem, through Mandelbaum Gate, so they could see family and visit Christ’s biblical birthplace in Bethlehem. Saliba’s grandfather was one of the few living on the west side of the city who got the yearly pass to visit. Each year, Saliba and his siblings counted the days until they could see their grandfather. Jani always brought them sweets from Israel and other gifts that they couldn’t get in East