A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [222]
In Jerusalem the Trans-Jordanian commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Abdullah al-Tall, and the Israeli commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, met several times to draw a demarcation line between the two parts of the city and to reach an agreement about the passage of convoys to the university campus on Mount Scopus, which remained as an isolated Israeli enclave within the area under the control of the Trans-Jordanian army. High concrete walls were erected along the line, to block streets that were half in Israeli Jerusalem and half in Arab Jerusalem. Here and there corrugated iron barriers were put up to conceal passersby in West Jerusalem from the view of the snipers on the rooftops of the eastern part of the city. A fortified strip of barbed wire, minefields, firing positions, and observation posts crossed the whole city, enclosing the Israeli section to the north, east, and south. Only the west was left open, and a single winding road linked Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and the rest of the new state. But as part of this road was still in the hands of the Arab Legion, it was necessary to build a bypass road and to lay a new water pipeline along it, in place of the pipeline laid by the British, parts of which had been destroyed, and to replace the pumping stations that remained under Arab control. The new road was called the Burma Road. A year or two later a new bypass road was laid and asphalted; it was named the Road of Heroism.
Nearly everything in the young state in those days was named for those who had died in battle, or for heroism, or for the struggle, the illegal immigration and the realization of the Zionist dream. The Israelis were very proud of their victory and entrenched in the justice of their cause and their feelings of moral superiority. People did not think much about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons, many of whom had fled and many others of whom had been driven out of the towns and villages conquered by the Israeli army.
War was a terrible thing, of course, and full of suffering, people said, but who asked the Arabs to start it? After all, we had accepted the partition compromise that was agreed by the United Nations, and it was the Arabs who had rejected any compromise and tried to butcher us all. In any case, it was well known that that every war claims its victims, millions of refugees from World War II were still wandering around Europe, entire populations had been uprooted and others had been settled in their place, the newly created states of Pakistan and India had exchanged millions of people, and so had Greece and Turkey. And after all, we had lost the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, we had lost the Etzion bloc, Kfar Darom, Atarot, Kaliya, and Neve Yaakov, just as they had lost Jaffa, Ramla, Lifta, el-Maliha, and Ein Karim. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had been driven out of the Arab countries had arrived here. People were careful to avoid the word "expulsion." The massacre at Deir Yassin was laid at the door of "irresponsible extremists."
A concrete curtain came down and divided us from Sheikh Jarrah and the other Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
From our roof I could see the minarets of Shuafat, Biddu, and Ramallah, the solitary tower atop Nebi Samwil, the Police Training School (from which a Jordanian marksman had shot and killed Yoni Abramski when he was playing in the yard