COLUMN ONE : Jerusalem: A City Still Divided : It is no longer separated by barbed wire, but the psychological barrier is no less real. Fear and distrust permeate the Jewish West and Arab East sectors.

When Israeli paratroopers in 1967 broke through the golden-gray stone walls and conquered the Old City, sacred ground to three great religions, Israeli leaders vowed that Jerusalem would never again be divided.

But the fractious mood among Palestinians and Israelis provoked by the Persian Gulf crisis, piled on top of the nearly three-year-old intifada , the Palestinian uprising against Israeli control of the areas captured in 1967, has cruelly underscored how badly those hopes have been shattered.

While the city is no longer separated by barbed wire and military checkpoints, as it was from 1949 to 1967, it is cleaved by a psychological barrier no less real.

“I sense that the city is more divided than ever,” said a Western diplomat with long service here. “It remains deeply split by religion, culture, language and nationalism.”

Before 1967, the Old City and the rest of East Jerusalem were under Jordanian control. The Israelis quickly annexed the newly captured sectors, reasserting that the reunified city was the capital of the Jewish state. Neither the United States nor the international community accepts that declaration.

“The idea in 1967 was to create a mosaic here with all these different peoples living harmoniously together,” the diplomat said. “That idea has failed. And the gulf crisis has emphasized that East Jerusalem is simply an occupied territory.”

Though there is now no dotted mark on any contemporary map separating Jewish West Jerusalem from Arab East Jerusalem, nearly everyone knows where that “green line” is.

A few years ago, there was a constant flow back and forth of Jews and Arabs between the East and West sectors, and crossing the green line was a daily occurrence for many. On Friday nights, as Jewish businesses in West Jerusalem closed for the Sabbath, nonreligious Israelis would cross to the East to dine in Arab restaurants along Saladin Street, or at non-kosher places such as the Philadelphia, and drink in other bars and discos.

“It used to be great fun,” recalled an Israeli journalist not known for timidity. “But now, I wouldn’t go into Arab Jerusalem except on business during the day. I feel a definite uneasiness because of the mood there.”

And an Arab journalist reports a mirror-image feeling: “I avoid going into West Jerusalem when possible. I’m not exactly frightened--but I would be very nervous if my car broke down over there. It’s a definite concern.”

Both men say that friendships between Arabs and Jews have withered because of the sharply increased feeling of separation.

Former Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti, who worked diligently under Mayor Teddy Kollek to bind the city’s wounds, today is blunt about the now-evident failure of efforts to create Arab-Israeli harmony.

“Of course, the city is divided,” he said in an interview, “more deeply than ever. Actually, it was always divided, but the split was submerged. People didn’t want to see that. We wanted to believe in an illusion, a myth.”

Albert Aghazarian, history professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank city of Ramallah, sipping coffee in a garden, mused about Jerusalem and the current Israeli government, led by the hard-line Likud Party: “There was a delicate balance in this city, and the right-wing Likud has fractured that balance.”

And Amos Alon in his recently published book “Jerusalem: City of Mirrors” writes: “The contest in Jerusalem between Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Israelis, is not merely tribal, not only over territory but over psychological space.”

Aghazarian, Alon, Benvenisti and others say that it took first the intifada and now the Palestinians siding with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to shatter the myth of a united Jerusalem.

Now the two parts of the city even run on different time: Jewish West Jerusalem has shifted back to standard time, but Palestinians in East Jerusalem continue to observe daylight time.

“We are an hour ahead of them,” commented a doctor at the Arab Mokassad Hospital, adding with dark humor, “and 50 years behind.”

It is not hard to see where Jewish areas end and Arab quarters begin: The former are normally neat and tidy, with new houses and apartment buildings and clean streets. Much of Arab Jerusalem has a dilapidated look, with dusty streets, unfinished-looking homes and uncollected garbage.

The Arabs maintain that they have been treated as third-class citizens in their own city, unable easily to build homes or offices and hobbled in their businesses by Israeli regulations.

Hurly-Burly

However, Jerusalem city officials such as Bonnie Boxer, spokeswoman for Mayor Kollek, argue that since Arabs refuse to vote in municipal elections or serve in local government, they must expect to be left behind in the hurly-burly of democratic competition for shares of a hard-pressed city budget.

While she does not admit that Jerusalem is divided, Boxer agrees that there “is much less flow between the two parts” these days.

Boxer said Jerusalem’s 1989 population was 504,600, of whom 361,300 were Jews. The non-Jewish population was 143,300--Muslim except for about 15,000 Christians, half of whom are Christian Arabs. This amounts to growth of 89% from the city’s 1967 population of 267,000.

The city’s area is now 26,000 acres, up from 9,390 acres before the Israeli annexation. Part of that growth is due to careful expansion designed by the Israel authorities to ensure that Jews remain a majority in Jerusalem. New Jewish neighborhoods have been built to surround Arab areas, a fact that incenses many Palestinians.

Kollek, 79, who has been mayor since 1965, is the city’s firmest and best-known advocate of unity. He has prepared, one after another, “master plans” for the city that would give the Arab population new housing. But those plans have been invariably rejected by the national government.

Boxer readily admits that Arabs have a valid complaint that their housing needs have been systematically ignored by the government. When Kollek argued that the Old City’s Muslim Quarter should be rebuilt, as was the Jewish Quarter, the national right-wing government refused to provide the funds.

“The mayor can’t change a stop sign or bus stop without approval of the national Transport Ministry,” she said as an illustration of the power that the national government has over city affairs.

Fractious History

Jerusalem has never been an easy town to govern; it has a long and fractious history. Over the centuries, control shifted from Philistines to Jews to Babylonians to Persians to Romans.

In AD 70, after a Jewish rebellion against the Romans and a long siege of the city, the Roman general Titus, who later become emperor, sacked the city and destroyed the Second Temple, leaving only the Western Wall. While Jews remained in Jerusalem, the city became a focus of Christianity as the place where Jesus had been condemned and executed.

Then, Jerusalem was conquered by the Muslims sweeping out of the Arabian desert in the 7th Century. According to Islamic beliefs, the Prophet Mohammed visited the city, ascending into heaven from the Temple Mount, making the city sacred to Muslims.

In the intervening centuries, Jerusalem and the Holy Land were dominated by Muslim dynasties--the Fatimids, the Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks--except for the 12th Century when the Christian Crusaders, having established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled from the city for almost a century.

Turkish control was ended when British troops fighting the Turks in World War I entered Jerusalem in 1917. The British administered the city until the 1948-49 Israeli War for Independence, which left it divided, with the western part soon to become the new capital of Israel and the east, including the Old City, left in Jordanian hands.

Under Jordanian rule, the Western Wall was allowed to deteriorate, the street at its foot was used as an animal run and Jews who remained in their quarter of the Old City were repressed.

But on June 7, 1967, the Old City was taken by Israeli forces. The paratroop commander, Col. Motta Gur, radioed ecstatically: “The Temple Mount is in our hands. Repeat, the Temple Mount is in our hands.” The world saw pictures of paratroopers weeping for joy at the Western Wall as the chief military rabbi blew the shofar, or ceremonial ram’s horn.

The soldiers sang the song: “Jerusalem of Gold,” and the politicians vowed that the city would be “eternally” united. Within weeks, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem.

Whatever accommodation the Jewish and Arab communities reached with one another in the years that followed have been all but submerged by renewed hostilities.

Rancor between the communities has increased to the point that physical evidence of the divisions are reappearing. Barbed wire has been erected by Israelis in the northern neighborhood of Neve Yacouv, where there have been incidents of stone-throwing with Arabs in the abutting neighborhood of Dahiet al Bariyed. The Arabs say they are victims of Israeli violence, targets of regular rock-tossing forays at the edge of their community.

Division Is Clear

The division between the two peoples in the Old City itself is clear at the Damascus Gate in the massive limestone wall, the main entryway into the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. There are no Israelis, who tend to enter through the western Jaffa Gate.

In a gun port in the wall from which, centuries ago, defenders rained arrows and hot oil on attackers, an Israeli soldier slouches, rifle at the ready.

Below, in the mornings before shops close, all is noise, bustle, and color: Arabic music, pushcarts piled high with figs and aubergines, a dozen aromatic spices and varieties of nuts and olives.

“To us, this is the real city, where the Jews don’t come,” said a Palestinian guide. “The Israelis can’t understand why we like the flavor of this scene. They want us to be more orderly. It’s a clash of cultures.”

Down busy, narrow Al Wad street, a 30-year-old storekeeper named Farid Hassan, who sells carved wood figurines and brassware, shows a visitor his mother-of-pearl money box. It is empty.

“There’s no business,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m forced to close in the afternoon because of the intifada. Many tourists don’t want to come this far into the Old City, certainly not Jews. The situation is very, very bad. The Israelis don’t recognize that we want Jerusalem to be our Palestinian capital, too.”

A few doors south toward the Via Dolorosa, with its Stations of the Cross, sits the house, over a tunneled archway, that was bought by Housing Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon, a former general and a hard-liner opposed to bargaining away any of the territory seized in the 1967 war, created the chief point of contention in the Muslim Quarter when he first moved into the house in December, 1987, days after the intifada began.

Residents of the Muslim Quarter view his presence as a provocative intrusion. Militant Israelis see it as an assertion of millennial Jewish rights, arguing that Jews have the right to live anywhere they choose west of the Jordan River, including the Muslim Quarter in the Old City. Theirs is a deeply held attitude that is bitterly disputed by Palestinians.

Outside the Sharon house, three border policemen in green berets guard the door and chat among themselves in Hebrew.

Across from his portal is a bakery shop, whose vendor, a young man named Sami abu Subieh, sells tasty pastries and candied doughnuts. Subieh reports that business has plummeted since Sharon’s arrival.

“I’ve lost about 70% of my business since he came,” said Abu Subieh, 20. “People don’t feel comfortable with the soldiers. They might get harassed. It’s easier to shop elsewhere.”

When Sharon actually shows up to spend a night in the house, which is decorated with a menorah and Israeli flags--once every three or four months, according to Abu Subieh--the guard increases to about 100 men.

Near the Via Dolorosa is a weathered three-story building that houses a yeshiva run by the group called Ateret Cohanim, with about 150 young Jewish students, of whom about 95 live nearby.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a bearded man with glasses who is dean of the religious school and came to Israel 20 years ago from Paris, said: “All this land is our land. Israel belongs to the Jewish people. We were thrown out by the Romans into exile, but we came back. So we have a special reason to be here.”

The rabbi said he hopes to boost the percentage of Jews in the Old City, which currently has about 4,000. Most live in the Jewish Quarter and are Orthodox Jews, many of them originally from the United States.

Aviner said the school and its students have good relations with their Muslim neighbors, including a Palestinian family that lives downstairs. But the 62-year-old grandmother of that family, Insaf Najib, sees the relationship somewhat differently.

“Whenever they clean up, they let the water wash down on us, never thinking of us below,” she said. “Otherwise, they don’t bother us. But we don’t talk to them. Our door is closed to them. Their door is closed. We don’t speak each other’s language.”

“Our whole country is under occupation,” added her daughter Ibtihat, “so what does it matter about a school upstairs?”

Anger Over Lease

Over in the Christian Quarter, residents are upset about the purchase of a lease to the venerable St. John’s Hospice by militant Jewish groups who have taken the place over for permanent residence. They moved in just before Easter and placed the Star of David over the original Christian insignia sculpted in the stone facade.

After a bitter confrontation, the matter was taken to the courts for a still-pending adjudication on whether the seller of the lease had proper title to it.

“The Arabs will never acquiesce to the regime imposed upon them,” said a pessimistic Meron Benvenisti. “Violence courts violence. At Jerusalem’s heart, a time bomb with a destructive force of apocalyptic dimensions is ticking in the form of the Temple Mount.”

Temple Mount to Jews--and Haram Al Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims--is the site of the destroyed First Temple completed by King Solomon in the 10th Century BC and the Second Temple finished by King Herod the Great in the 1st Century BC. Now it is also one of Islam’s holiest places, site of Mohammed’s ascension to Heaven, a superlative 7th Century architectural ensemble crowned by the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque.

Some militant Jewish sects advocate destroying these Muslim shrines in order to prepare for a Third Temple.

Not surprisingly, clashes among religious militants have been frequent around this lovely precinct.

In such a harmonious surrounding--exquisite ceramic facades shimmering in the sun, golden and silver domes, graceful arches, splashing fountains, a breeze ruffling the cypress and pines, set between the Mount of Olives to the east and the Western Wall to the west--the troubled words of author Amos Alon seem incongruous yet so accurate:

“Jerusalem is once again what she has been so often in her history: a city at war with herself. If anything, Jerusalem is a city loved too well, yet never quite wisely.”