I grew up in the French Hill neighborhood, one of the settlements that was established on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem – annexed to Israel – and located a short distance from neighboring Issawiya. No concrete wall separated the neighborhoods, yet a chasm lay between them. The children of Issawiya were not part of my childhood landscape. In fact, I don’t think we even knew of their existence altogether, let alone their disgraceful living conditions: the crowding, the poverty, and the heavy hand controlling every aspect of their lives.

Eventually, pretexts of security and the relentless obsession over the “demographic threat” gave birth to a physical wall in Jerusalem. The wall tore away parts of the city that, from the start, had been annexed to it by force, and its residents were left in a deceptive twilight zone between belonging and not belonging – residents of Jerusalem, but separated from it in practice. Paradoxically, the panic that the construction of the wall engendered among the Palestinian residents and the difficulties resulting from the burgeoning separation led to the opposite demographic change that Israel had hoped for: an influx of tens of thousands of Palestinians who feared, justifiably, that remaining on the detached side of Jerusalem endangered their very status as residents.

Jerusalem is a city of many paradoxes, in which forces of unity and separation act simultaneously, all the time. It is a city with visible and invisible walls. A stranger who stumbles upon Jerusalem might be impressed by the many spaces shared by its Jewish and Arab residents: on the light rail, in the malls, in the post offices. Looking farther afield, the stranger will certainly also see the separation wall that tore the residents of East Jerusalem from their natural linkage with the West Bank, ruptured communities, and ripped families apart.

Cleaving Palestinian residents of Jerusalem from the West Bank was not accompanied by an improvement of their civil status nor their rights within the city.

Within “the city that is knit together” the invisible walls are more present than ever. The shared spaces are those that were imposed on its residents, primarily due to the severe lack of proper infrastructure in East Jerusalem, which forces residents to come to West Jerusalem to obtain services. Voluntarily shared spaces hardly exist, save for a few exceptions: the Hand in Hand Bilingual School, in which my daughters studied; the Feel Beit cultural center; and a handful of other spaces in which Jewish and Arab residents of the city meet out of respect and a true desire to get to know each other. Beyond these, blindness and denial continue to hold sway.
The blindness and denial are one-sided, of course. Palestinians do not have the privilege of forgetting the Jewish presence in the city that continues not only to rule over them with an iron fist but also cuts the ground from under their feet, constantly, and sometimes literally. But among the Jewish residents, these traits enable a kind of selective vision, as if to filter out the Palestinians from their sight. We can live our entire lives in this city without knowing about night-time incursions into Palestinian neighborhoods, arrests of children, and home demolitions. Even when they are detained in a row right before our eyes—as we drive out of the tunnel opposite Damascus Gate, for example —the Palestinians are on the other side of these hidden walls, which turns them into invisible people.
When I visit my mother in French Hill, not far from the house in which I grew up, the loud noises of explosions coming from the direction of Issawiya echo in the living room. “I guess there’s a wedding happening,” my mother says. Deep inside I know, and she knows, that these are explosions of a different kind.