A Street Divided Read Online Free PDF Page A

border with Jordan. It seemed like a horrible place to live. There was no electricity or running water. Dusty winds whipped through open windows and coated the floors with a thin, grainy carpet of red sand blown up from the Judean Desert. There was no indoor bathroom, an inconvenience that would eventually trigger a major international quarrel requiring United Nations intervention. The house also stood in the crosshairs of two enemy nations. On one side, just past the pine trees to the west, Israeli soldiers kept 24-hour watch. On the other side, down the slope to the east, Jordanian Legionnaires, said by Israelis to have itchy trigger fingers, set up new border posts. Somehow, to Eliyahu, these things seemed like obstacles that could be overcome.
    There was just one little wrinkle in Eliyahu’s plan: The house he wanted to move into wasn’t in Israel. It was part of the dangerous No Man’s Land separating Israel and Jordan. Eliyahu was undeterred. He enlisted help from some Israeli soldiers to drag the barbed wire away from the house so he could move his family to the rim of his new country. It may have seemed like a small thing to Eliyahu at the time, but his actions helped set the stage for generations of international quarrels over the smallest of things.
    In Eliyahu’s case, it would be a volatile international dispute over an outdoor toilet. For others living along this short ridgeline, it would be a makeshift manhole cover, pigeons and freshly picked flowers. On this street, nothing was too small to fight over. Because Israel and Jordan were still arguing over exactly where the border between their two countries ran, the people living along the blurred lines knew every little thing did matter. The border lines were fluid. They were poorly defined. As Eliyahu proved, they were malleable. Where people lived, where they planted their trees, where they built their walls, all of it could change the border separating warring nations.
    By design, Israel and Jordan had created long stretches of No Man’s Land between the two countries to serve as a temporary buffer zone, separating enemy armies until seasoned diplomats could agree on permanent boundaries. That created open geographic wounds all along Israel’s new borders. The most sensitive ones were in Jerusalem, where the lines severed streets, homes and neighborhoods. The zone cutting below Eliyahu’s home would come to be known as Barbed Wire Alley.
    The imperfect division of Jerusalem set the stage for late-night rescue missions to find runaway horses and special UN search parties sent to hunt for false teeth lost in No Man’s Land. Israeli and Jordanian officers held special court hearings in No Man’s Land to decide the fate of wayward cows that wandered from one country into the other. There were arguments over missing sheep. Lots of arguments over missing sheep. One Israeli tree-planting project in No Man’s Land led to one of most surreal arguments ever to be fought at the UN Security Council before the world’s most powerful nations.
    Young couples divided by war started their marriages in Jerusalem’s No Man’s Land. At least one husband with a volcanic temper ignored the very real possibility that he might be killed by a sniper’s bullet when he angrily stormed into No Man’s Land after a violent argument with his estranged wife.
    The problems were the creation of a pair of battlefield generals who had no intention of cementing the borders of Israel and Jordan when they drew the lines in 1948.
    In the waning months of the war, Israeli and Arab League officers crowded into a small Jerusalem home, just outside the Old City walls, where they lay out a large map and began to argue over the lines. For the Israelis, the mapmaker was Moshe Dayan, the easily recognizable military commander with the iconic black eye patch, who was then leading the country’s forces in and around Jerusalem. For the Arab Legion,