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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
For more than ten years, I have been taking walks along the Gabriel Sherover Promenade, an elegant stone path planted with rosemary and lavender, which was built in 1989 by the philanthropist Gita Sherover in memory of her son. The promenade follows the boundary that divided Jerusalem's Jewish and Arab populations until the Six-Day War, in 1967, and it overlooks the arid white hills of the Judean desert, the Old City, the Temple Mount, the golden Dome of the Rock, and the black dome of Al Aqsa. Bakaa, a middle-class Israeli neighborhood, is half a mile to the west; Talpiot, another middle-class Israeli neighborhood, is half a mile to the south; and Abu Tor, a Muslim community, is a few hundred yards east.
Even after the second intifada broke out, in September of 2000, Jerusalemite Jews and Jerusalemite Arabs shared the public spaces of the promenade--a playground, a kiosk, a gazebo--although they did not often interact. The promenade remained quiet until last autumn, when the kiosk and the gazebo were burned down by Palestinian teen-agers. Then, in the early afternoon of January 11th, three teen-aged gang members from Abu Tor emerged from the southern end of the promenade and stabbed a sixty-four-year-old man from North Talpiot named Henry Weil, who was walking by the gardens.
Weil was lucky--the knife missed his heart by an inch, and he survived. About a month later, on February 8th, the gang attacked Moran Amit, a twenty-five-year-old Hebrew University student who was walking with her boyfriend by the promenade, in a wooded area called the Peace Forest. Armed with knives and tear gas, the boys stabbed her numerous times, and she died within hours. (Her boyfriend escaped unharmed.) Eight Abu Tor teen-agers, arrested in connection with the arson and the stabbings, are in jail, awaiting trial.
Almost no one comes here anymore. When I say I am going for a walk, my family and friends are apprehensive. There is always the question of how far I should go. When does it become irrational? And who is that leather-jacketed guy approaching from the other end?
On a brisk afternoon in early April, Shlomo Aronson, who is Israel's leading landscape architect and who designed the promenade, walked with me. We passed through an olive grove, stopping to look at an ancient aqueduct below and at the charred remains of the gazebo. Aronson, a pensive, soft-spoken man in his mid-sixties, was distressed about what had happened to the promenade.
"For more than a decade, the concept of a cosmopolitan, worldly Jerusalem promenade did work," he said. Until two years ago, one could see black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews flying kites with their children, while Palestinian women strolled by in their colorful summer best. "What really gets me is that the attackers came from Abu Tor," Aronson said. "Had they come from one...
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