The Rise and Fall of Dahiyat al-Barid and Other Checkpoint
Stories
Once a prestigious neighborhood, Dahiyat al-Barid has been turned
into a shamefully neglected one, victim of an Israeli policy aimed
at cutting heav¬ily populated Arab areas out of municipal
Jerusalem. Literally meaning "post office suburb", Dahiyat al-Barid
was named after a housing project for Jerusalem post office
workers. It was the posh residential area of East Jerusalem until
the outset of the Intifada when all of a sudden municipal services
stopped. Now the streets groan under piles of garbage, potholes
stud the roads, and no telephone lines are issued.
When Israel imposed its first serious closure on the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT) in March 1993, Dahiyat al-Barid
acquired the dubious honor of becoming the border line between
Jerusalem and the northern part of the West Bank. The main
checkpoint obstructing Palestinian entry into East Jerusalem was
placed right at the principal entrance to the neighborhood, sealing
it.
The residents, all of whom carry Jerusalem ID cards, are now
subject¬ed to daily checks by Israeli soldiers faithfully
staffing the barricade round the clock, peering into people's cars,
eyes hungrily searching for ID cards. Whereas in the past I never
had to plan to get into Jerusalem, now I subconsciously leave one
hour prior to any engagement, knowing full well that I will be
stuck in a long line of cars and buses. And despite the fact that I
live less than 100 meters away from the main entrance to the
neighborhood, when I head home, I am forced to drive more than one
kilometer past the checkpoint in search of a route that will
eventually lead me to my house.
On Saturdays, the wait at the checkpoint is even more protracted.
As there are no impatient settlers in the long lines, the soldiers
figure the Arabs can wait. The checking and searching suddenly
become more thorough and miraculously take triple the time usually
needed to ascertain that one has a Jerusalem 10 and can "legally"
pass.
I cannot say what settlers think of checkpoints; necessary evils, I
sup¬pose. But I do know one thing: when settlers get to a
checkpoint, they don't have to show their ID cards in order to
pass. On the other hand, when I -¬ a Palestinian born and
raised in Jerusalem, of Jerusalemite parents and grandparents
-¬ get to the checkpoint, I'm ordered to show
identification.
Once I tried to get into Jerusalem through another checkpoint known
as the Ramot checkpoint, mostly used by settlers living in the
Ramallah area. When I reached the post, the soldiers, realizing I
was a Palestinian, flagged me down and asked for my ID. I showed it
to the nearest soldier who took it and pronounced I couldn't
pass.
As we were arguing, a settler drove up behind me, swerved around my
car and passed without a word. I asked the soldier why he was
allowed to pass while I was not. "Because he is a Jew," came the
reply.
He ordered me to turn my car around and head back to Ramallah. He
kept my ID card till I made the U-turn. Twenty minutes later, I
passed through the Oahiyat al-Barid checkpoint.
Spurred by the checkpoint headaches at my doorstep, I have decided
to look for a house within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. A
result of my search was a first-hand introduction to the housing
predicament in the Palestinian part of the city. Rent prices have
sky-rocketed over the past few years and are now quoted in dollars.
The minimum rent is $600 per month, equal to the monthly wage of
the average Palestinian in the city. A main reason is the fact that
no building permits are issued to Palestinians. Arab areas are
extensively zoned as "green" (environmentally protected areas to
prevent Palestinian construction on them, and thus the growth of
Palestinian neighborhoods). Fierce battles are fought over the
little avail¬able space left for rent among people who want
office space and residence for highly-paid foreigners (not that all
foreigners are highly paid). There is no priority for the
Palestinian tenant. As a consequence, 50,000 of the 160,000
Palestinians with Jerusalem ID cards have been forced to move
outside the municipal boundaries of the city to set up residence in
finan¬cially more accessible areas.
Boaz Evron
The City of Shalem
The public relations aspect of choosing this year as the 3000th
since the foundation of Jerusalem is obvious enough, and the
organizers of the event may be right in assuming that hardly
anybody would bother looking up the date to check whether it is
correct.
Anyway, they could also argue that King David conquered the place
and made it his capital around the 10th century BCE, give or take a
centu¬ry, and that's what should really matter. The Canaanites
who lived there beforehand all vanished anyway thousands of years
ago, and who cares what they would have thought about this date,
which completely ignores their prior existence? Also, both
Christian and Muslim veneration of the place is based on the fact
that it had first become the holy city of the Jews, so nobody
living should have quarrel with the date chosen.
So the following is just an expression of a party pooper's mean and
nasty temperament. I really do wonder whether any of the initiators
and organizers of the event bothered to open at least the Hebrew
Encyclopedia, which cannot be suspected of underhanded anti-Semitic
bias, under the heading "Jerusalem" (Vol. XX, p. 223 passim). It is
stated there that the city is first mentioned (which does not mean
that it had not existed long before) in the Egyptian Curse scripts
of the 19th century BC, namely almost 4,000 years ago, and was
called in them "Ursalim" ("Ursalimmu" in Assyrian). The apparent
meaning of the name was "city of Shalem," Shalem being a local
Canaanite deity.
Presumably, Solomon's temple was built on the site of the former
Shalem shrine, according to the nice age-old custom of
appropriating and usurping a former holy place to dignify the new
belief, just as the Spaniards built Mexico City's grand cathedral
on the site of the Aztec tem¬ple of the sun. The Muslims did
the same thing when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of
the Second Temple, and the Crusaders of course converted the place
into a church, until the Muslims recaptured the city and converted
it right back. And so it goes.
The deity Shalem had, of course, nothing to do with "shalom"
(peace), despite the PR hot air to the contrary. One can definitely
state that, histor¬ically speaking, the city is anything but a
city of peace. Perhaps no tract on earth has absorbed so much human
blood through the millennia-repeated destructions and massacres by
Israelites, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, down to
the blood-lettings of the present century. And all this in strange
contrast to the dreamy, dusty-golden, seemingly peace¬ful
appearance of the city.
Donald B. Redford, in Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times,
(Princeton, 1992) notes that the Pharaoh Akhenhaten stationed a
governor• in Jerusalem (in the 14th century BCE, namely 3,400
years ago) to control and subdue the nomadic Apiru. Most scholars
are of the opinion that the "Apiru" are the ancient Hebrews.
This action, attested to by the contemporary documents, is in
interest¬ing contrast to the fact that neither in Joshua nor
in Judges is there any Egyptian presence in Canaan mentioned, this
being the presumed age of the Judges. Although this presence is
also attested to by contemporary archaeological finds, who are we,
plain and fallible mortals, to contest the authority of the Bible?
Let the scholars fight it out.
A final cynical thought: now that the PR people have decided that
the city is 3,000 years old, it won't take long before it becomes
an article of faith. Future historians will begin to doubt the
archaeological evidence in front of their own eyes, and future
encyclopedias will quote the ancient Egyptian inscriptions with
hesitation. After all, post-modernism has taught us that everyone
has his own "narrative," that no "narrative" is more "privileged"
than the other, and that the very concept of evidence and truth is
an exploded superstition. Perhaps Jerusalem itself is then a
mirage.
