For Citizens, Jerusalem Remains Divided

By James Feron, New York Times news service

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — A thick stream of workmen flows down the long hill from West to East Jerusalem every afternoon — Arab laborers returning from jobs in the Jewish sector. The hill, near the old city wall, used to be part of Suleiman Road. For nearly two decades it stood unused and grown over in the no-man’s land between Jordanian and Israeli Jerusalem.

In 1967 the city that had been divided in one Arab-Israeli war was reunified in another. The street was cleared, repaved and renamed by the victorious Israelis. Now it is Paratroopers Brigade Road. Ignore Change The Arabs do not bother with that name, and it is not the only change they ignore, if they can.

Nearly two years after the six-day war, Jerusalem stands whole, but still divided. An East Jerusalem schoolteacher, Joseph Nasri Nasr, put it this way: “There’s a difference between removing the physical barriers between the two halves of the city and removing the barriers between the people themsleves.

“It is true that most parts of the populations of East and West Jerusalem go into each other’s sectors quite frequently. But I don’t think they like each other very much. “When I go to West Jerusalem I have to look over my shoulder; if I go to a coffeehouse, I have to watch what I say. Perhaps I try to hide the fact that I am an Arab.

“I know what happened to me on several occasions when they found out that I was an Arab. They started looking at me and feeling apprehensive about my presence.” There was apprehension, too, on that morning three weeks after the battle for Jerusalem had ended when the dividing barriers were torn down and the enemy populations were allowed to mingle.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 9x to 16x; the sentence naming the schoolteacher and his three quoted paragraphs were each read twice on crops of their own, because this record turns on a name. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no page number, and the dateline is the place word JERUSALEM with no date, so the newspaper and the date of 23 February 1969 rest on the hand-typed slide label. The page supports the season closely through its own content — “Nearly two years after the six-day war” of June 1967, a Security Council deadline of 23 May, and legislation of “Last August” — which places it in the spring of 1969. This is New York Times News Service copy, credited under the byline, so it will have run in other subscribing papers the same week and the Sacramento attribution rests on the label. “Removing the barriers between the people themsleves” is as the paper set it; the transposition falls INSIDE the schoolteacher’s quotation and has deliberately not been repaired, so a corrected copy of this text would no longer match the page. “Ignore Change” is a crosshead set in the body. The separate column at the foot of the clipping, “A Senator’s Notebook”, is by someone else and is not part of this story.

Cite this clipping

"For Citizens, Jerusalem Remains Divided," The Sacramento Bee, 23 February 1969. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-024. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-024