A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page A

seemed to be devoid of human life.
    â€œWe didn’t hear or see any people—just birds and chickens,” she said. “I lived here for a year and a half before the war and I didn’t hear a single voice.”
    Hedva kept to herself along the border, unaware that, just a few houses away, Jewish and Muslim teens were flirting over a part of the barbed wire where cigarettes and bread flew through the air.
    When the 1967 war began, Hedva launched a one-woman protest: She went to a nearby grocery store to buy a bunch of cakes and handed them out to drivers.
    â€œCakes, not war,” Hedva told them. “Cakes! Not war!”
    Within a few days, as it became clear that the fighting in Abu Tor was over and Israeli soldiers were in control, people like Hedva set out to visit the valley for the first time.
    Hedva was stunned to see children, women, men, animals, all living a few hundred yards below her home. She wasn’t the only Israeli taking advantage of the power vacuum to explore the newly conquered parts of Jerusalem. Hedva watched as scores of Israelis—artists, thugs, soldiers—crossed through the barbed wire so they could loot Palestinian homes abandoned during the fighting. Some people simply moved in, intent on claiming the homes as their own.
    Among those who led the takeover, she said, was Shlomo Baum. Baum was a physically intimidating Israeli military commando who had helped Ariel Sharon set up a special unit in the 1950s to cross Israel’s border with Jordan and carry out reprisal attacks. Commando Unit 101 launched one of the biggest such assaults in 1953, when Sharon and members of the unit led an attack on the village of Qibya in the northern West Bank. Nearly 70 civilians were killed.
    When the 1967 war broke out, Baum and his allies were accused of beating, threatening and intimidating Arab residents in Abu Tor. Israeli police were so concerned about Baum’s actions that they forced him and his friends to sign legal orders barring them from taking over Arab homes in the neighborhood. 11 Baum and his friends, including the owner of a Jerusalem nightclub called Bacchus, said they were doing nothing wrong. They said they had permission from the Israeli army to take over the empty homes. Police confiscated a small, Swedish submachine gun from an empty home they linked to Baum and kept an eye out for his return to Abu Tor. 12
    â€œIt was brutal,” Hedva said. “But it passed.”
    Baum and his fellow opportunists weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the security vacuum in Abu Tor. Hedva knew several young artists who also tried to move into abandoned homes. If everyone else was doing it, Hedva figured she would scout around to see if she could find a better place to live too.
    â€œI always dreamed of living in an isolated place, along with sun and nature,” she said.
    Hedva’s search led her into No Man’s Land, through unkempt trails south of Abu Tor used by wild dogs, where she found a large stone building she decided to take as her new home. It was empty. She had no idea whose it was, but now it was going to be hers. Hedva didn’t have much with her to stake her claim. It seemed unlikely that anyone was going to find her. She was deep in the secluded ravine. For Hedva, it was the fulfillment of a fantasy. The war she’d opposed had ended up leading her to her dream home.
    â€œI am a dreamer,” she said. “And it was like a fairy tale.”
    Although it was isolated from most other houses, Hedva slept on the floor of the building for several days. She listened to the creaks of the windows and the rustling of hungry animals outside. She could hear distant voices now and again, but they never got very close.
    â€œIt was very dangerous, but I so wanted to live there,” she said.
    The fantasy didn’t last. It wasn’t long before Israeli soldiers came across Hedva in the home.
    â€œYou can’t stay