A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page B

here,” the told Hedva. “Go home.”
    Hedva returned to her house along the border, where Israeli officials were in the process of transforming the barbed wire dirt path into a new Jerusalem street that would eventually be named Assael.
    â€œMade by God”
    Literally, Assael means “made by God.”
    Some residents say the Israelis chose the street name to symbolize the place where the jagged wound cutting across Jerusalem was healed.
    But the street name isn’t meant to be translated literally. Jerusalem officials actually named it after one of King David’s nephews, Asa’el, who grew up to become one of his uncle’s battlefield commanders, a fighter “fleet-footed as a wild gazelle” whose death in battle was one in a series of tit-for-tat biblical killings. People here will argue over how the name should even be spelled in English: Assaell. Assael. Asa’el. They all refer to the same place, but different people will tell you that one way is the right way to refer to this narrow Alley of God.
    Some Palestinian kids from Abu Tor simply refer to it as the “Street of the Martyr Jawad,” a young man from Assael Street who was killed by Israeli forces at al Aqsa mosque one Friday afternoon in 1996, becoming the second man in his family to be shot dead by an Israeli gunman. His grandfather, Hijazi Bazlamit, was the first.

Three
    The Martyrs
    The shot came from a hidden rifle on the hillside above, and Hijazi Bazlamit fell by his son’s side.
    Another bullet crack echoed across the valley—and down went Hijazi’s brother.
    Abdullah Bazlamit, then a toddler still unsteady on his feet, froze.
    While his wounded uncle crawled to safety, Abdullah watched his father slowly bleed to death as the sun cast afternoon shadows across the Abu Tor No Man’s Land.
    Along Jerusalem’s border, the death of Hijazi Bazlamit in February 1951 was one of many. Sniper shots killed women, children and farmers on both sides. Jerusalem’s border was far from settled. Especially here in Abu Tor. Most of the Palestinian families living in Abu Tor fled in 1948 when the Jordanian Legionnaires fought to a stalemate on the hillside.
    When Dayan and Tell sat down with their pens to carve up Jerusalem in November 1948, the Israeli general drew a red line on the map that passed to the west of Hijazi Bazlamit’s house and the Jordanian officer drew a green line that passed to the east.
    The Bazlamits’ home, like countless others along the newest Middle East borders, was now trapped, as UN officials would dub it, “between the lines.” 1
    In this section of Jerusalem, the No Man’s Land was a narrow belt about 50 yards wide and 300 yards long. A short strip of homes in Abu Tor was caught in No Man’s Land—maybe a dozen compounds in all.
    Many of the Bazlamits’ neighbors, along with those who lost houses on the other side of the barbed wire to the new state of Israel, sought safety with relatives somewhere else. Others wound up in refugee camps between Jerusalem and Jordan. Not the Bazlamits. Wajeeh Bazlamit, Hijazi’s wife and the matriarch of the family, refused to let war drive her from the family’s Abu Tor home.
    The family had shuttered their house when the war swept through Jerusalem and quickly returned once the shooting stopped. They found they weren’t welcome in their own home. They were in limbo. Their house sat on land that belonged to neither Israel nor Jordan. It posed a problem for everyone. There was good reason to kick the families out of No Man’s Land. By definition, it was unsettled territory. Something for Israel and Jordan to keep fighting over. Although the Bazlamits’ simple stone block house lacked the grandeur of the nicer homes in Abu Tor, the family wasn’t going to leave.
    Israel and Jordan were never able to agree on a plan to officially divide No Man’s Land. So there remained, as Dayan put