A Beloved Path Bereft of Strollers

For years, the Haas Promenade offered a rare public refuge from the seething tensions of this riven city. Built on a ridge straddling the onetime divide between East and West Jerusalem, the walkway boasts breathtaking panoramas of the walled Old City and the stark Judean desert beyond.

Both Israelis and Palestinians brought their children to fly kites and play soccer on the lawns of the tayelet, as the promenade is called in Hebrew. Tourists visited by the busload.

Now, the grass is strewn with garbage and nearly empty of people, save for the occasional patrol of grim-faced soldiers.

Today, Israelis will observe Jerusalem Day, celebrating their capture of the city’s mostly Arab east side from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. The day is meant to highlight what Israelis consider the city’s reunification.

But the sad state of the tayelet is testimony to how more than 19 months of fighting have left even the open space of this sacred city soaked in blood and hatred, and how far Jerusalem is from being a truly unified city.

As the casualties on each side have mounted, Jerusalemites have pulled apart, retreating to their homes, abandoning their public spaces, turning away from anything that might once have made them feel citizens of the same city.

The municipality tried to battle the pervading sense of gloom in the run-up to Jerusalem Day. It bedecked streets with Israeli flags and scattered dozens of gaily painted sculptures of lions--the city’s symbol--on street corners.

But with tourists and Israelis who live outside the city too frightened to visit, this year’s crowds are expected to be thin. And even residents are reluctant to gather in public areas, including the promenade that both Arabs and Jews treasure.

Two Jews have been attacked here since the Palestinian revolt erupted in September 2000. One was a young woman who was stabbed to death by a gang of Palestinian youths as she strolled with her boyfriend, the other a 63-year-old man who was stabbed while jogging along the promenade but survived.

The assaults unnerved both Arabs and Jews. Now the promenade’s broad stone walkways and terraced, lushly landscaped hillsides spilling down toward the Kidron Valley have become another in a growing list of no-go zones.

“We came because I feel that it is important to come, because if we don’t come here, they [the Arabs] will,” said Rivka Medan, 24, as she and her boyfriend, Ariel Imber, 23, sat on a lawn beneath the promenade one afternoon. The couple--and two heavily armed soldiers--were the only people enjoying the view.

“Coming here now is a form of idealism,” Medan said. “Because this is Jerusalem, so we should be here.”

Close by, the glass-walled restaurant where Arabs and Jews used to watch the sunset as they sipped coffee and ate watermelon stands empty, closed because of lack of business. It is a trash-strewn shell, a jumbled mess of upended tables and chairs. A coffee shop built farther down the hillside was torched by, police believe, Palestinian militants.

“You don’t feel safe there anymore,” said Intissar Qaq, who lives in Jebel Mukaber, a Palestinian village that clings to the hillside a few dozen feet from the eastern edge of the promenade. “It used to be a place that was good for our children, with wonderful views. But not anymore.”

The villagers always regarded the promenade with mixed emotions, Qaq said. Much of Jebel Mukaber was zoned as a “green area” by Israeli authorities after the semicircular ridge was declared a scenic overlook. The designation meant that few residents were allowed to build homes or even add to old ones. The Qaqs, she said, have grown over the years to six families of 10 people each who live crammed inside half a dozen tiny homes they long to expand.

They look across the valley to the western side of the promenade and see luxury apartment towers rising along Caspi Street. There, she notes, Israelis are free to build spacious homes with magnificent views on one of Jerusalem’s most prestigious thoroughfares.

‘It Was Lovely’

“So there has always been two sides to this tayelet for us,” Qaq said. “But friends would come here and we would take them there to have coffee in the restaurant and it was lovely.” Whatever the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she said, “it should be something that allows both Israelis and Palestinians to share the tayelet.”

Built with funds donated by the Haas family, owners of San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co., and expanded by other donors from Israel and abroad, the promenade became the favorite launch point for visitors here as soon as its first segment opened in 1987.

It is a site steeped in the history of the land. The ridge was known in biblical times as the Hill of Evil Counsel. Christians believe that the home of Caiaphas, the high priest of the Jews, stood on the heights and that it was there that Judas Iscariot closed his deal to betray Jesus to the Romans.

Today, hidden by a pine grove on the site stands Government House. Headquarters of the British authorities before Israeli independence in 1948, it serves as the local United Nations headquarters.

It was on this spot that the Jordanian army breached the cease-fire lines at the start of the 1967 war, triggering the Israeli counterattack that led to Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.

“Before the war, we would get as close to the ridge as we could, because it was one of the few places where we could see the Old City,” recalled Ruth Cheshin, president of the Jerusalem Foundation, which helped build the promenade. “That was the place you went to think and to dream about Jerusalem, the place of the poetic view.”

Visitors to the promenade today stand with Government House on their right, Jewish West Jerusalem on their left and a view before them that stretches from the Garden of Gethsemane to Mt. Zion.

The golden Dome of the Rock glitters above the burnished rock walls of the Old City, and at certain hours both church bells and the call of the muezzin ring out across the Valley of Hinnom.

Peace Forest Below

Terraces covered with flowering rosemary bushes, cedars, olive trees and almond trees awash with white blossoms meander down the hillside to the Peace Forest, built by the Jewish National Fund after 1967 as a symbol of the city’s reunification under Israeli rule.

“There are not many vantage points from where you can see the whole of Jerusalem,” said Shlomo Aronson, the promenade’s designer. “From the tayelet, you get the whole story of the city. You see the Jerusalem of David and of Jesus. It gives you the archeological, historical and religious aspects of the city in a way no other view does.”

Aronson, one of Israel’s foremost landscape architects, said he designed the promenade as a place where Arabs and Jews would feel comfortable together. He has watched with sadness as that vision has collapsed.

Unlike many other spots in the city, Aronson said, this one was nearly devoid of sacred sites.

“My own theory is that because a fault line runs through the ridge, in ancient times the fear of earthquakes kept people from building on it,” he said. “We were lucky to have a big piece of land that doesn’t have holy relics on it--we got the land without the past that can be such a burden in Jerusalem.”

Determined to preserve that luck when he designed the promenade with San Francisco landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, Aronson said, “I deliberately steered clear of religious symbols and chose plants--olives, rosemary and wheat--that are beloved by both peoples.”

Though known in its entirety as the Haas Promenade, over the years the walkway has been extended to include a section called the Gabriel Sherover Promenade, built on the western side of the ridge, and the only recently added Goldman Promenade, extending east. Each segment of the 3-mile-long path offers a different feel and different vistas to visitors, from the grandeur of the Haas segment to the intimacy and rural atmosphere of the Goldman stretch.

For months after the current Palestinian revolt erupted, the promenade seemed to stay above the fray, Aronson said. Arab and Jewish families kept coming.

“They didn’t mingle, but they coexisted, and that was enough,” he said. But the attacks on the path proved too much for the delicate balance.

That the walkway was built at all was a triumph for Teddy Kollek, then Jerusalem’s mayor, over developers who wanted to line the ridge with high-rise hotels. Today, environmentalists are fighting plans to build at least four hotels nearby along with a tower more than 400 feet tall crowned with a revolving restaurant.

Uri Sheetrit, Jerusalem’s chief engineer, is hoping to lure residents back with art exhibits, open-air concerts and other events.

“The tayelet is a grand gesture of the city to its people and its visitors,” Sheetrit said. “The site suggests all the beauty and the complexity of Jerusalem. You travel there from west to east--from grandeur to wild, untamed nature.”

In a city as troubled as Jerusalem, Sheetrit said, “you cannot hold the position I am in unless you are optimistic, unless you squeeze out of this very harsh life hope.” His hope is that the violence will end and the promenade will be reborn as a gathering place.

“When I see insanity, it really frustrates me,” he said. “But I cannot afford to yield to those frustrations. My job is to look forward, many, many years forward. I have no doubt that people will one day regain sanity.”