The new walls of Jerusalem: Part 2 • The long walk to class
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"This is what I'm afraid of – I'll be like a prisoner here," Ahmed says. "When the wall closes around us, all the benefits of being a Jerusalemite will be taken away from us. Any minute, they can take our residency status away."
Khaled Malhi, Ahmed's uncle, posits his theory, a popular one here. "Shuafat Refugee Camp is between several [Israeli] settlements and is preventing them from connecting to each other, so they want to squeeze it out."
He faces a similar challenge every day to get to his job in the kitchen of an East Jerusalem hospital. It used to take him five minutes to get to work; now he leaves himself an extra hour.
Not everyone here accepts the future with resignation. Some of the residents are trying to fight the path of the wall making its way past their homes.
In Ras Hamees, a neighborhood adjacent to Shuafat that is also slated to be left outside of the wall, activists have submitted a petition to the Supreme Court, with the help of Israeli lawyers, to change the route of the barrier.
Jamil Sandouki, the head of the local neighborhood committee, takes some flack from others for even bothering to mount a legal challenge: They charge that it legitimizes the wall's existence. But Mr. Sandouki didn't see any other way. Just in the past year, he says, everyday life has been getting more unbearable.
"Now, we need to spend hours in the morning standing in line, and with a car, you're in line for at least an hour just to get out of Shuafat," he says.
While waiting on a high court decision, he watched from his window here a few weeks ago as huge cranes dropped sections of the wall into place, surround by a group of soldiers. The ash-colored barrier now cuts through the land outside his window – which had afforded a rather pastoral view – and then suddenly stops, waiting for new pieces to be put into place.
The huge cement blocks landed on the ground as he looked out from his living room. "I suddenly felt like someone was taking away my breath. It's like someone taking away your oxygen. My son kept saying, 'Daddy, look, they're bringing another block.' "
Sandouki pulls five-year-old Mohammed between his knees. "My son asked me, 'What mistake did we make that we are having this wall built around us? What did we do?' And what can I answer him?"
All anyone here talks about, he says, including the women and children, is the wall.
Meanwhile, the price of his house is now about a fifth of what it was before the last intifada started in September 2000. People who can afford to are scrambling to move to other, "safer" Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, while people from the West Bank, hoping that this address will afford them some measure of access to Jerusalem or a coveted Jerusalem ID card, are arriving in their place.
The barrier, many say, is wreacking havoc on the local real estate market. Families who can are willing to pay higher prices to make sure they're inside, a crunch that leaves the working class out. Others fear that being inside the wall will cut them off from relatives or work outside the barrier, and are contemplating whether it would be better to be on the Palestinian side instead, or at least maintain an address there.
Sandouki sees the proverbial writing on the wall. He recently bought a house in Bet Safafa, an Arab neighborhood that has been part of Jerusalem since 1948 and is in no danger of being cut off from the city. He's already had his official address changed – one's neighborhood is printed on the ID card that everyone must carry – and when it gets bad enough, he plans to escape.
Sandouki raises his eyebrows at his window, where the winter sky is growing dark just after 4 p.m. and breathes out a lungful of frustration. "I'm going to die if I have to live here with this wall."
