Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > July > 09 > Entry
Jerusalem, divided.
The Jerusalem Post could not have put it better in an editorial last week:
“There is a gnawing sense that the tranquility residents have enjoyed for some years now, since the unofficial end of the second intifada, may be over — and that the biggest danger emanates from within the boundaries of the city itself.”
This, after a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem killed three Israelis by crushing them with the front-end loader he was driving on a busy downtown street.
So, perhaps I should not be surprised that The Jerusalem Post will not deliver to my new house.
I live 50 yards or so from the 1949 Armistice Line. My neighborhood, Musrara, was split into two countries — Israel and Jordan — until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Jerusalem was “reunified.” There is no longer a physical border, but the boundary remains. Arabs live to the east, Jews to the West.
The fact the Jerusalem Post, a leading Israeli English-language newspaper that dates to the British Mandate of Palestine, will not deliver to my address, 14 Hanevi’im — The Prophets Street, a thoroughfare through downtown Jerusalem — is one more example of a divided city.
“We do not deliver to your area,” the newspaper representative told me over the phone. I told her that I live a block from the American Consulate, and surely it must receive The Jerusalem Post. Perhaps the newspaper deliveryman can add me to his route?
A few days later, the answer came: If you can provide us with an address on the other side of the street, we can deliver your paper there, and then you can cross the street and pick it up.
For The Jerusalem Post, crossing the street was out of the question.
Comments
By JohnNOsa
September 1, 2008 3:11 PM | Link to this
very good
By QRGarrettsa
September 2, 2008 4:17 AM | Link to this
very good