Many people still consider the future of Jerusalem as the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I agree that it’s the most important issue, because it symbolises everything that is in conflict here. It has the religious, national and territorial dimensions. It is the symbol and the reality of the conflict, a microcosm of it. Everyone wants the city, everyone is fighting for it, and everyone is willing to die for it. So it is a lot bigger in terms of meaning than in its size, it has history, heritage and sentimentality, it’s both beautiful and ugly, the city of love and the city of hate. Jerusalem is the heart of the conflict, and I have always believed that it is the first issue that the Israelis and Palestinians must try to work on. If we could come to an agreement, to understand the meaning of living together here, of sharing Jerusalem and overcoming divisions, then we could solve all the other problems.

Let’s talk about Jerusalem as a divided city.

Jerusalem has been divided since 1948, and it became even more divided after 1967. Today, it is one of the most divided cities in the world, even though we don’t have a wall running through it. Actually, we have many invisible walls in the city that separate all the different group, the religious Jews from the non-religious Jews, the rich from the poor, the Israelis from the Palestinians. There is this geography of fear. Everyone knows their part of Jerusalem, and where it is safe to stay, and where it is not safe to be, and people are very careful if they have to go into an unsafe area, they try to sneak in and to run out again as fast as possible. You can see on days when there is tension, or an Israeli incursion into the Palestinian areas, that the separation and the division become even stronger.

Is the division purely geographical?

Well, it is a very segregated city, everything in Jerusalem is either Israeli or Palestinian; there is no place in the city that does not have one or the other as its identity, even the foreign institutions - the Catholic organisations in the city, for example, are split into Catholic Israeli and Catholic Palestinian. Then there is the division in the psychology of the people, who know that they don’t live in a unified city. It’s not even that the city has an East-West division, because the East-West division was never that accurate, it’s divided by far more than direction, for there are many different divisions within it. It’s divided even in terms of service provision: we had an office in East Jerusalem across from Damascus gate, we bought an air conditioner, and then called the Israeli company to come and install the air conditioner, but they wouldn’t come to East Jerusalem. I told them that I thought East Jerusalem was part of the undivided eternal capital of the state of Israel, and they said: “Yes, but we don’t go there.” So we had to find a Palestinian air conditioning engineer. I live in West Jerusalem, where we get a lot more municipal services than people in East Jerusalem. If you compare the services that Zakaria Al-Qaq (my co-director who lives in Silwan in Abu Tur) gets, you find it totally different. It’s two different worlds. Even though we both pay taxes to the city, the city treats us differently.

Even taxi drivers won’t take passengers to every part of the city.

Which is illegal. According to Israeli law, once you enter a taxi, it has to take you anywhere you want to go - as long as it is legal to go there. It’s illegal to take passengers to Bethlehem, but the taxi driver has a legal obligation to take you anywhere in Jerusalem.

Are there no shared places for Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem?

Very few. There used to be more, but over the last two and a half years, since the Intifada, it has become more difficult for the Palestinians to enter Jerusalem. Today, in Israeli hospitals you can find both Israelis and Palestinians – I’m thinking mainly of Hadassah Hospital - because in terms of the human body, it doesn’t matter if you’re Israeli or Palestinian. Everybody gets sick, and everybody needs medical care, and Hadassah Hospital treats everybody. Again it’s more difficult for Palestinians because of health insurance, so the only Palestinians that go there are the ones who can pay the bills, but still, if you go to the hospital you can find Israeli doctors and nurses, Palestinian doctors and nurses, and Israeli and Palestinian patients.

Another place where you can find both is the zoo, because I guess that at the zoo the people go to look at animals, and as there are no Israeli or Palestinian animals, the zoo is common territory. The other place is the shopping mall in Malha, which I call the Americanisation of Jerusalem; before the Intifada, you’d walk through the doors of the shopping mall and you’d find yourself in any American mall, no longer in Israel. Israelis and Palestinians could go there, they could go to the cinema in the mall, they could go shopping, and they could eat fast food together. It was more frequented before the Intifada, because today there are guards all over the mall, soldiers all around it.

Other than that, the city is divided. If you go on Saturday to Liberty Bill Park, you find a lot of Palestinians, but when there are a lot of Palestinians in the park, the Israelis leave. Then there’s the community centre in Abu Tur, a divided neighbourhood, with a line drawn through it dividing the Palestinian and Israeli parts. The community centre, Beit Nachemia, tries to have both Palestinian kids and Israeli kids, and sometimes they play basketball – not together; separately, but on the same court.

Can you tell us more about IPCRI here in Tantur?

IPCRI is an organisation in which Israelis and Palestinians work together for peace. Tantur, where our office is located, is one of these neutral places like the Noterdam, which is Vatican property. It’s neutral, but not indifferent; they care about the conflict, they want to help and to offer their space to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. If you ask the average Israeli, even people living over here in Gilo, about Tantur, most of them are not even aware it exists. They drive by it, but they don’t know that it’s here, it’s part of an invisible geography. When I tell Israelis to come and meet us here in Tantur and I give them the directions, they say that they have seen this place above the hill, and always wondered what was there, but they never came in. There’s a sign on the front saying that this is a private property, business only, with a wall and a gate, so it’s not very welcoming on the outside. Every Palestinian knows it, because they use it to cross over from Bethlehem or from the south of the West Bank into Jerusalem. So the border police and the Israeli police know it, but most Israeli Jerusalemites don’t know it. Before the Intifada, up until March 2001, our office was in Bethlehem; but we can’t go, at least the Israelis can’t go, to the office anymore. It became too dangerous, and then illegal.

What do you think are the borders of Jerusalem?

That’s a political question, and I think the borders have to be negotiated and agreed on. There are different kinds of borders. Some people say the old city is the heart of Jerusalem, and the borders of Jerusalem are the walls of the old city, and anything else outside the old city is not Jerusalem. But for me, Jerusalem is a state of mind; I have my own consciousness of the city, I have “my” Jerusalem. First of all, the borders have to be negotiated. Today, there are still no agreed borders of Jerusalem. There is the border that existed prior to 1967, there is the border that Israeli annexed after 1967, and there are areas that have grown up in the periphery outside the municipal borders. If you go up towards Ramallah on the road to Sho’fat and Beit Hanina, Al-Ram and Dahait Al-Barid, and there are places where one side of the street is Jerusalem and the other side of the street is not Jerusalem. In my mind, if one part of the street is Jerusalem, the other part is also Jerusalem.

Jerusalem could be the capital of two countries. I think that we could have borders for Palestinian Jerusalem and Israeli Jerusalem, and a part of the city that is shared Jerusalem. There are all kinds of possibilities that have to be negotiated and agreed on.

What about the wall? 

The wall is a tragedy. I started talking about this wall when it was being built in the minds of the Israelis a few years ago. I saw it coming and I have been warning people how tragic this wall will be, and how difficult it will make life for many people, mostly Palestinians, and how it will make peace impossible. I’m looking forward to the day when we destroy the wall from both sides, because I can’t see anything good coming from it.

The wall is an unfortunate reality that Israelis need, because they need to prevent suicide bombers from coming in; fortunately or unfortunately, they have the example of the fence around Gaza, which worked, in that there hasn’t been a single suicide bomber who’s come out of Gaza over the last two and a half years.

The wall is going to make Jerusalem a more difficult place to live in than it is today. And I think Jerusalem is already a very difficult city to live in. We keep destroying Jerusalem by fighting for it; we claim how much we love it, but we are strangling Jerusalem. And now we’re making it even worse by adding this physical wall that is separating people from their lives, land, and homes. It’s making movement nearly impossible, and creating more ghettos within this city that we all claim to love so much.

How do you see the future of Jerusalem?

I hope that once Israelis and Palestinians have arrived at a peace agreement, and have managed to implement it, then Jerusalem will be the city that symbolises the peace between the two peoples. We have a tremendous amount in common in our cultures, heritages and histories, in our religions, language, food, dances and music. So, there are a lot of similarities, and Jerusalem could be the celebration of our peace; or it could be as it is today, an orgy of of war and hatred. I hope that we can turn Jerusalem into a celebration of peace, an open city where people have freedom to move and work. Jerusalem could be a cultural masterpiece, but only if there is peace. As long as the conflict makes more divisions, as long as we claim we love Jerusalem yet treat this city with hatred, we make it a terrible place to live in - but it has the potential to be something entirely different.