22/2/98

The last Jews of Beit Hanina

    Maybe she worries too much, this mother glancing nervously out her window to the playground below, where her four young children play.
     The window provides an insight to Vered Gorodetzer's gnawing frustration: she has a panoramic view of all the Jewish suburbs of north Jerusalem, but she lowers her eyes, and sees her own neighborhood in the foreground: Beit Hanina.
    Hers is the only Jewish family in Arab Beit Hanina, in addition to seven older individuals. All of them live in one building, hidden behind trees at the end of a narrow lane: 13 Jews amid 19,020 Arabs.
     Vered's frustration is that she wants to be part of a community where passersby say "Shabbat Shalom" to each other, where women like her get together for coffee and a chat, where her kids can hang out with their pals at the makolet down the block.
    Deliverymen sometimes refuse to come here. And there's the property tax: Vered got a staggering NIS 12,000 arnona bill for her 183-square-meter apartment. "Pensioners in the building have to pay NIS 9,000, and they don't have any income. It's outrageous."
    But she can't get out.

    "Who would buy here? In 10 years, there won't be any Jews left. I don't want to sell to Arabs, out of consideration for the others in the building. We all want to sell, but we're stuck."

    Eleven years ago, the Gorodetzers moved into the building, known as Beit Hashiva, with a heady mix of idealism and optimism.  

    "When I saw the house I fell in love with it. We moved in on the assumption we'd have a Jewish neighborhood here. What happened? I feel very disillusioned."

    What happened was a double whammy.

    They arrived in the early days of the intifada, which then appeared likely to blow over soon; it didn't, and other Jews who might have considered joining them were scared off.

    (Beit Hanina seemed certain to become a major Jewish suburb in 1967, especially after prime minister Levi Eshkol visited Beit Hashiva that year. But while construction mushroomed all around them -- creating Pisgat Zev, Neve Ya'acov, French Hill and Ramot -- Beit Hanina, then a sleepy, detached village of a few homes, was left out.)

    The crushing blow was that Jewish-owned land connecting them to Pisgat Zev is finally being developed -- not with homes, which would have linked the communities, but with a highway, which cut them off.

    "When they started building it, I realized that's it, we're sunk." The beginning of that road was, for Vered's enclave, the end of the road.

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IT IS FOR her children, aged three, five, seven and nine, that Vered, 37, wants to get out. She wouldn't mind going back to the Galilee, where she was born and raised to Irish and Indian parents on a religious kibbutz. However, her husband Eli, a computer programmer, won't leave Jerusalem for business reasons.

    Eli was a young Kachnik who, a couple of decades ago, was among the first group of Jews to move into the Old City's Moslem Quarter. Vered is a Moledet supporter.

    Are they settlers?

    "No! We live in Jerusalem! It's a funny thing: this house has always belonged to Jews, since 1967; there are Jews in Baka and German Colony who live in Arab houses, but no one calls them settlers. We live in a Jewish house."

    She believes that "if the Arabs want to live in peace with us, fine, if not, they should leave."

    OK, so it's the Jews and not the Arabs who want to leave Beit Hanina, despite the fact they do live together peacefully.

    "They're very nice people. Some of them heard we want to move, and they called us and said please don't, we like you.

    "This was the only street in town that didn't have nationalist graffiti during the intifada. Our neighbors didn't want to upset us." Only once did they have a problem: about seven years ago, "a local newspaper wrote about us, made us look very bad, and two firebombs were thrown at the building."
    Yet she has only high praise for her neighbors. "Sometimes the Arabs along the lane will see an unfamiliar Arab walking toward our house, and they call to warn us someone suspicious is coming."
    She smiles warmly at a recent incident. "My father came one day to visit, got off the bus and headed the wrong way. He was wearing a kipa. And a woman shouted at him: 'Are you looking for the Jewish house?' Then she showed him our lane."
    Jewish-Arab coexistence has its peculiar ironies in a place like this. When there's trouble, such as during the intifada, it is not the Jews who cower in fear -- it's Arabs. Christian Arabs shutter their stores and barricade themselves indoors; they may be more frightened by Moslem fervor than the Jews.
    Still, Vered worries. Her children are outside. She is alone, unarmed. She cannot convince herself that life here is as safe as it seems.
    They're good people, she stresses. But they're not her own.
    On Friday afternoons, all over the city, Jews bustle about preparing for Shabbat, there's an emphatic communal dynamism; in Beit Hanina, it is already the Moslem Sabbath, and the streets are quiet.
    On Saturdays, while Jewish Jerusalem is at rest, Vered's neighborhood is abuzz with the sounds of commerce and construction.
    "It's a strange feeling," Vered sighs. "This is my home, but it's in the wrong place."