The bullet came from Beit Jalla, an Arab village across the valley from Salameh’s home in the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo. This time, though, it wasn’t quite fighting as usual in Israel’s West Bank. Salameh may live in Gilo, but she’s also Palestinian-and it was the first time Palestinians firing from Beit Jalla hit one of their own. “We’re in a delicate situation,” says Salameh, lying supine on her couch, recovering from her wound. “We live so close to Israelis, it’s hard to separate us from them.”
Salameh’s injury underscores the complexities-and wretched geography-of the continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It may seem like a simple case of Arabs on one side, Jews on the other, but then there are families like hers, living in a Jerusalem suburb built 30 years ago on West Bank land.
Salameh’s neighbors are Jews, but she sends her children to school in Beit Jalla, home to her extended family-and where Palestinian gunmen sometimes take shots at Israelis in Gilo.
Some nights, Salameh says, she sits up listening to the throbbing of Palestinian gunfire from the village; the bullets striking the stone buildings surrounding her home with the shrill twang of a Western shoot-out. Then she hears the hollow roar of Israeli shells fired from tanks flanking her home and wonders who has it worse-her relatives in Beit Jalla or her neighbors in Gilo.
Salameh’s situation is especially sensitive. Her home is one of only two in Gilo where Palestinians live. But the reality of Palestinians and Israelis living in close proximity on disputed real estate is endemic to this conflict. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, Jews and Arabs are tangled like the braided strands of a traditional Jewish challah bread, glaring at each other across ravines, sharing roads and sometimes even neighborhoods in a cohabitation of terror.
Their proximity reflects a decades-old Israeli policy: to build settlements so close to Palestinian towns that dividing the area and ceding parts of it would become impossible. Now, with fighting in the West Bank and Gaza raging for seven months, the policy has backfired. Palestinians in Ramallah live close enough to the settlement of Psagot to lob grenades in the backyards of Israelis-and sometimes they do. Residents of Tekoa and Tkua, mirror communities of Israelis and Palestinians respectively, now live in the shadow of last week’s double murder of two Israeli teenagers-an act so gruesome that even Israel’s tabloid newspapers refused to publish pictures of the victims. In Hebron, where Jews settled in the heart of an Arab urban center, it takes thousands of troops to keep neighbors from butchering each other.
On the way to Hebron recently, my taxi driver made the questionable decision to overtake a slow-moving car with Israeli license plates. As we passed it, the settler driver thrust his hand out the window and pointed his pistol at my face. In the West Bank, settlers are targeted on the roads almost everyday, shot at by Palestinians from behind trees or around bends-or from passing cars. Just this week, an Israeli woman was shot dead while driving to her home near Ramallah. Our settler would not be caught off guard; if this was going to be another shoot-out, he was bent on drawing first.
I remembered the drill from the 1980s, when drive-by shootings in my native California were a trend: slow down and fall in. Stay behind the shooter. Don’t give him a reason to target you. But that was California, where normal sunny living was occasionally disrupted by spasms of arbitrary violence. In the wild West Bank, arbitrary violence is the regime. My taxi driver hit the gas.
For the Salameh family especially, it’s a thorny state of affairs. The concrete community that surrounds their home was built in 1970 on West Bank land Israel had captured a few years earlier. But the Salameh home, perched on a hill overlooking the valley, has been there since 1948. Ironically, in the shifting demography of this conflict, the family arrived in Gilo during the first Arab-Israeli war as refugees from another part of Jerusalem. Their neighborhood now houses 30,000 Jews and about 40 Palestinians. “We try not to make waves here,” said Salameh’s brother-in-law, Walid, who also lives in the family home. “We need to stay on good terms with both sides.” If only others in the area shared that philosophy.
