A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page B

called Abu Hani, took a special liking to the Bazlamits. Occasionally, he would risk sparking an international furor by slipping under the fence and into Israel to pick some fruit or vegetables.
    Abu Hani patrolled the area, so he knew what was growing in the fields along the border. He watched the Israeli chickens, oblivious of the international border, crossing into No Man’s Land to lay their eggs. He rescued the Palestinian sheep that sometimes got trapped in the barbed wire and had to be untangled.
    One quiet morning, Abu Hani stepped over the low stone terrace walls on the hillside, crept through the fence and chased down a wild turkey wandering through the Israeli brush. Nearby, he saw some ripe tomatoes growing in someone’s garden. He picked some, stuffed them in his pockets and rushed back into No Man’s Land before anyone could see him.
    Abu Hani slit the turkey’s throat, gutted it and brought it, along with the tomatoes, over to the Bazlamits.
    â€œCourtesy of Israel,” he said. “Enjoy.”
    Life in No Man’s Land settled into some semblance of normalcy. But it was always a point of contention. Israelis kept close watch on who was coming and going. They had given their OK for some Palestinians to live in No Man’s Land, but they wanted to make sure that the Jordanian soldiers didn’t use that as a cover to set up new military positions. In the mid-1960s, one of the Bazlamits’ old neighbors came to visit. Eid Yaghmour and his family were thinking about coming home.
    â€œIs it safe here?” he asked the Bazlamits.
    â€œWill we be OK if we move back to our house?” he asked the Jordanian soldiers.
    Eid Yaghmour’s claim to land in Abu Tor went back even further than the Bazlamits’. He and his brother had bought their property, which ran alongside the Bazlamits’, in the 1930s. The family wanted to see about coming back to the place they’d fled in 1948, thinking at the time that they’d be able to return soon. Sixteen years later, when Eid Yaghmour was 80 years old, he returned to the family’s two-story gray stone home, just up the hillside from the Bazlamits, close to the well. The house was little more than a chilly shell. The windows were open holes. The floors were covered in a thin layer of red sand, created by years of dust storms.
    â€œThe only things living there were birds and snakes,” said Eid’s grandson, Ziad, who was 12 when his family moved to No Man’s Land in 1966.
    1967: “We Have to Go”
    It wasn’t long after the Yaghmours moved back to the border that tensions started rising again.
    The recently formed Palestine Liberation Organization was sending more and more militants over the borders from Syria and Jordan into Israel for sneak attacks. Israeli forces were carrying out more reprisal raids. Shooting incidents along Jerusalem’s border began to intensify. More Jordanian soldiers turned up in Abu Tor.
    â€œDo you have enough food and water?” Abu Hani asked the Bazlamits one day when another battle with the Jewish soldiers seemed inevitable. “You should make sure that you do.”
    When the fighting started in June 1967, the Bazlamits pulled their shutters closed and hid inside a home that was about to be caught in the cross fire of another war.
    Busloads of Jordanian soldiers rumbled into the valley below. They set up new sandbagged positions in homes as families packed up clothes, food and water before fleeing from the border. Though they couldn’t have been in a worse position—framed by border posts—some of the Bazlamits decided to stay.
    At first, it seemed like the Jordanian soldiers might have the upper hand in the battle for Abu Tor.
    The Jordanians hit the Israeli soldiers on the upper hillside with mortars and machine-gun fire. Soon the fire coming from above grew heavier. The Bazlamits could hear the mortars whizzing overhead and the crack of bullets