Although named the 'City of Peace' some 5,000 years ago, the Jerusalem oftoday is a town drenched in fear of the suicide bomber, writes NualaHaughey
Zafer Nuseibeh's 10-year-old daughter has developed a reticence about publicly speaking her native language when she crosses from Arab East Jerusalem into the Jewish west of the city. It's not a fear her Palestinian father has encouraged, but rather something she seems to have picked up intuitively.
With their western clothes and their expensive Israeli-registered car, Nuseibeh and his attractive middle-class wife and four children could easily pass themselves off as Jews, so long as they don't speak Arabic. To look like a Jew rather than an Arab around Jerusalem means that instead of getting stopped and questioned at the ubiquitous Israeli army road checkpoints, you will be casually waved through.
So, when Nuseibeh approaches a checkpoint, he turns off the Arabic music on the car radio and switches off his mobile lest it rings and he has to have a conversation in his native language. "I don't want the guard to know I'm an Arab, even though it's not a crime, but it's going to take me longer to be searched," he explains in his American-accented English.
In a deeply-coded society where practically all Palestinians are viewed as potentially suicidal "ticking bombs", racial profiling by Israeli army and police, as well as private security guards, is unquestionably the norm.
The threat of a suicide bomb on a packed bus, in a café or on a busy city-centre street is part of the background noise of daily life in this city, which has borne the brunt of such attacks in the past three years of the current Palestinian Intifada.
Bars, coffee shops and restaurants in Jerusalem's downtown district have armed doormen who search bags and scan customers with metal detectors. Shoppers in the city's fabulous Mahane Yehuda food market have to pass through barriers controlled by armed Israeli soldiers. The constant anxiety kills spontaneity, fuels suspicion, curtails movement, chokes commerce, strains nerves and has virtually wiped out tourism in this holy city. Many Israelis will not shop in the main downtown area; instead, they flock to the city's US-style malls, which have almost airport-level security.
Batsheva and Amnon, a Jewish couple who own the upmarket Eden liquor, wine and cigar shop on Jaffa Road in the heart of the city's tourist district, can ream off half a dozen attacks in their area in recent years. Amnon was opening the shop one morning in June 2001 when a car bomb was detonated across the road, but luckily failed to explode properly. There were other attacks on the nearby pedestrianised Ben Yehuda Street, a shoe shop up the road and the number 18 bus, the latter twice.
Batsheva, a talkative native-born Israeli, knows that their shop, which spills out onto the street and has a wide entrance with no security guard, could be a target for an opportunist suicide bomber repelled from another more secure premises.
"I pray every morning for myself not to get in this situation and when there's bomb attacks I'm very scared to be in this city," she says. "It's the ugliest situation. You want to run away home and on the other hand you want to stay in the store and not move. But what we do to them \ is not nice, also I don't agree I want both sides to solve things." An Israeli policeman enters the shop, his assault rifle hanging down his back, a common sight in this heavily militarised country. He buys some beer and Batsheva chats to him about how quiet it has been in the city in the past two months, with no suicide bombs. "He told me, 'don't worry, there's going to be more bomb attacks'," she says after he leaves.
Annexed by Israel after its capture from Jordanian forces in 1967, Jerusalem is regarded by Israel, but no other major country, as the sacred, united and indivisible capital of the Jewish state. However, the city remains in practice divided along the pre-1967 firing line. Jewish West Jerusalem encompasses the downtown area and Jaffa Road and most of the new areas built since 1967, while the smaller Arab East encompasses the walled Old City and a number of poor, badly-serviced suburbs where 200,000 Palestinians live.
The city's Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants largely live and work separate from each other, although there is some blurring of the divide. Palestinian suicide bombers do not target East Jerusalem, as few Jews enter this part of the city, which Palestinians hope to have as the capital of any future state.
The petty humiliations and harassment facing ordinary Palestinians at the hands of Israeli security personnel in the city means that many choose to stay in their own quarter. Nuseibeh, who runs a coffee-distribution and vending-machine business, is able to trade only in the occupied West Bank and the east of the city. The Intifada has cut his profits by 70 per cent and the general economic hardship of Palestinians under occupation has made merchants such as him increasingly a target for armed robbers, he says.
Like his fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, he remains a non-citizen of the Palestinian non-state, but as a resident of East Jerusalem he at least has an Israeli identity card which allows him to travel around Jerusalem and Israel, although it does not confer Israeli citizenship. Palestinians resident in the occupied territories require special permission to enter Israel and East Jerusalem.
Nuseibeh is justifiably frustrated about his ambiguous status and the frequent harassment by the Israeli security forces. "It doesn't matter the money you make, it doesn't matter the job you do. You lead an unstable life. I am 32 years old and I have never seen a day in my life where I felt secure outside my house. This is a terrible feeling, believe me," he says.
While Nuseibeh would quit his country to live in neighbouring Jordan if he could afford to buy a house there, American-born Rabbi Seth Mandell has consciously chosen to make Jerusalem his home.
An orthodox Jew, he quit his small town in Connecticut, where cows grazed in fields at the rear of his house, to move here with his wife and four children to the Jewish settlement of Tekoa near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
Living here brings with it "a level of tension that you live with and you learn to assimilate", he says. Mandell's daughter takes an armoured bus to school in West Jerusalem and if she misses the bus, she has to take a taxi, as she is not allowed to travel on commuter buses, a favoured target for suicide bombers.
Mandell arranged to meet in Café Hillel in West Jerusalem's German Colony, a chic district full of coffee shops, stylish boutiques and hairdressers. This particular spot was the target of a suicide bomb less than two months ago in which seven people were killed. Customers must now pass through a wrought-iron front gate before entering the café. This outside foyer is supposed to act as a bit of a buffer zone for a would-be suicide bomber. It's not very convincing.
A female family friend, also from the US, joins in the discussion. Mandell says he feels more comfortable in Tekoa than here, where he keeps an eye on the people coming through the door. "I would know what was suspicious and what wasn't suspicious," he explains.
"You're wrong," interjects his friend, who did not want to be named. "You know one of the worst things about the suicide bombers aside from the lives that are destroyed is that they dress up as us now, as soldiers and as Hasidem [ultra-religious Jews\] and Israeli teenagers. It used to be that if you saw a young Palestinian youth that looked tough you might get nervous but now everyone is suspicious of everyone and that is the worst thing."
"We are all fatalists," says his friend. "When I tell my children not to travel on buses, they say, 'If it's my time to go, it's my time to go'." With the threat of attack ever-present, one might think that Israelis would suffer from persistently high stress levels. However, a recently published study by the Centre for Traumatic Stress at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem knocks this theory.
The researchers surveyed Jewish settlers in Efrat in the occupied West Bank, who have been the targets of Palestinian attacks, and residents of the quiet district of Beit Shemesh west Jerusalem in Israel proper, which has been untouched by violence. To their surprise, they found there were no significant differences in self-reported stress levels among the two groups. "It is surprising," says Dr Rhonda Adessky, co-director of the centre. "As we could have assumed that given all the terror attacks that people [from Efrat\] would be endorsing higher levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms, but in this survey we are finding that the levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms are relatively low and I think that that speaks to the resilience of the population as a whole, that people have developed somehow coping patterns and a resiliency." Dr Adessky says it is normal for the general population to have some symptoms of heightened anxiety, such as feeling irritable, over-alert or jumpy, "but on the whole people are coping remarkably well, given the circumstances".
Mendall has paid a high price for his choice to live here. His 13-year-old son, Koby, was stoned to death by Palestinians in a cave near his home in the West Bank in May, 2001. To honour their son's memory, Mendall and his wife, Sherri, have set up a summer camp for children touched by the conflict. Asked whether Koby's death has made him consider leaving Israel, he replies that to leave now would be to compound the tragedy. "My children would not only have lost their big brother, but the town they love and the friends they have grown up with. There is nothing worse than losing a child but I can tell you that people choose to live here and continue to live here because they get something out of it that they can't get anywhere else in the world."