The Frontâthat is, the front of my home in Abu Tur, Jerusalem, right off the main artery known as Derekh Hebron.
This past Saturday at around 4 oâclock, during my quiet Shabbat afternoon nap, a group of Arab youths went through the neighborhood smashing the windows of some 20 âZionistâ cars. An Arab neighbor later explained, totally deadpan, âThey are protesting the cancer death of the Palestinian inmate in Israeli prison.â

Some Zionists fixed their car windows pretty quickly. Mistake. On Yom HaShoah night, during the Holocaust memorial service, those fixed cars were re-smashedâincluding the car parked in front of the house belonging to the next-door neighbor. That neighbor is a âBuchenwald child,â one of the members of that group who survived, came to Israel, and built a lovely, large family. I know, Dear Reader, that there is âabsolutely no connection,â but somehow my neighbor wasnât surprised by the broken glass.
Abu Tur was a divided community from 1947 to 1967, with a wallâthe old Green Line, on which I liveârunning through it. The story is that kids would kick wayward soccer balls back to the side from which they were lost. Today, with that wall down, the community is still mostly separate, but there is a lot of vehicular and foot traffic as people go to work, school, shopping and the like. People attempt to get along; it is an upwardly mobile community and doing business (while minding your own business) is the main deal. All this, even with a doubling of the Arab population, and with the building of the outer security fence (in Jerusalem appearing once again as a wall); many did not, evidently, wish to be in the poorer âJordan-adjacentâ area.
Here, dialogue starts and sputters. I had a public colloquy with a local Sheikh, which stopped abruptly when he was threatened by his constituency. He got heat, and I got some street cred. âYou manipulative Zionists!â he later joked with me.
The radio and press reported zip about the recent spate of window smashing in Abu Tur. My speculation is that the mainstream doesnât want to deal with it while Kerry is in the region, and the left-wingers like it better when it happens to âdeserving settlers.â
What to do? For now, there is a greater police presence in the area. As for me, I showed the Arab neighbor who indicated that âsomebody should do somethingâ Shaul Magidâs Open Zion column suggesting that, in search of peace, I ought to dance in a Hasidic spirit with my Arab neighbors. At first, my neighbor was perplexed. Then, handing me back my iPad, he said nonchalantly in a really good mock-English accent, âSorry, chap, my dance card is full.â