A Street Divided Read Online Free PDF

it was Abdullah El-Tell, a tall commander wearing a red-and-white diamond-checked scarf carefully accenting his crisp uniform; he would become a vital emissary for leaders of the two nations.
    Carving Up Jerusalem
    It was November 30, 1948. Israel was seizing the advantage across the Middle East battlefields. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were on the run, heading for Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt. Israel had taken control of most of Jerusalem but didn’t have the most important part: Arab forces had routed Israeli fighters from the Jewish Quarter and taken full control of the Old City. Israel and Jordan were ready to stop shooting at each other. And they were asking Dayan and Tell to create new maps to ensure that the guns would stay silent.
    Sitting in the abandoned house that day in 1948, the two military commanders faced the difficult job of splitting Jerusalem. They laid the map out on an uneven surface as dozens of officers from both sides looked on. Dayan used a red grease pencil. Tell used a green one. Their lines rarely met. For the men, the lines were drawn only to reflect the general position of their forces on the front lines. They were supposed to be temporary cease-fire lines that would give diplomats some breathing room. The two men didn’t expect their rough work to mark the final, firm border.
    So, without much concern, the men created chunks of No Man’s Land between their red and green lines. It amounted to nearly 750 acres of land in Jerusalem to keep fighting over. 1 In some places, No Man’s Land was wider than a football field. In others, it was thinner than a tight city alley.
    One reason the line failed to completely end the fighting was that the map the military officers used wasn’t detailed enough. When the map was magnified to settle land disputes, it became clear that the grease pencil lines weren’t thin enough—about four millimeters thick in some places—to accurately fix the borders. Israel and Jordan would continue to argue over every millimeter. When the generals finished their work in 1948, the United Nations set up a special committee—the Mixed Armistice Commission, or MAC—to broker border disputes between Israel and Jordan. The UN team set up shop in the new No Man’s Land near the heavily guarded border crossing between East and West Jerusalem. The office would be the scene of endless disputes over the serious and the surreal. The absurdity of the arguments seemed to grow each year. A rotating series of UN commissioners tried in vain to stop the bickering. But how could the commission settle disputes if Israel and Jordan couldn’t agree on where one country ended and the other one began?
    â€œIt’s not enough to have a line,” said Raphael Israeli, a Hebrew University scholar who served for five years as an Israeli representative to the MAC. “The question is: What do you understand about the line?”
    In the densest parts of Jerusalem, the “thick of the line” cut through the streets, cleaving buildings in half or enveloping them entirely. The border drawn by Tell around the Old City posed a particular conundrum for Jordan. Tell’s line covered the Old City walls where Jordanian soldiers kept constant watch. That made it impossible for Jordan to agree to any interpretation of the border that accepted the inner edge of the line as the outer edge ofJordan’s border. It would have created an absurd situation in which the walls of the Old City were in No Man’s Land and the walled city itself was part of Jordan.
    Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli politician who served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem soon after Israel captured the city in 1967, later described the map as a “cartographer’s nightmare and a geographer’s catastrophe.” 2
    The inability to resolve the issue led to years of fatal confrontations in No Man’s Land. Israeli soldiers patrolling along the disputed lines were