A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum Page A

for cultivation are to be planted with Eucalyptus trees, starting this winter.” 29
    As Israel put it, this was environmental activism at its best. Israeli officials described the tree planting as a citywide beautification effort meant to eventually encircle then-divided Jerusalem in a green belt. To Jordan, it was a blatant act of aggression. These weren’t just trees;Jordan viewed the saplings as another way for Israelis to steal contested property from Arab owners who were powerless to stop the land grab.
    The fight had quietly begun earlier that summer when Israeli workers, protected by soldiers, entered No Man’s Land to begin planting. Tractors and bulldozers uprooted dozens of olive trees to make way for the Israeli reforestation effort. 30 Jordanian soldiers watched from afar as the project grew. Day after day more workers came. So did the soldiers. They began plowing fields, carving out new roads, building barbed wire fences and installing what appeared to be new mortar positions. 31 On July 24, Lt. Col. M. M. Izhaq, the senior member of the Jordanian team at the MAC, fired off a detailed demand to the United Nations for an emergency meeting.
    â€œStatement of Facts,” his complaint began. “On 21 July 1957 Israeli labourers escorted by Israeli security forces entered the No Man’s Land between the lines at approximately MR 1724 1288 and MR 17240 12893 and started digging.” This, Col. Izhaq wrote, was a “flagrant violation of the status quo.” An emergency meeting had to be called to force Israel to stop the work. Immediately. 32
    The head of the MAC unsuccessfully sought to defuse the situation by asking the Israelis to halt the tree-planting project. Israeli officials said no. They refused to take part in an emergency meeting to discuss it. They were going to keep digging.
    The fight over the trees brought No Man’s Land back to center stage. In this case, the battle took on special importance because the two sides were fighting over land near the UN headquarters in Jerusalem. Built in the early 1930s, the UN Government House served as home and headquarters for the British High Commissioner while England ruled Palestine. The locals called it the Government Palace. It was where the British elite hosted parties in elegant halls with high ceilings and chandeliers.
    When Dayan and Tell sat down to draw their map in November 1948, they drew wide lines around the Government House, creating a fat No Man’s Bulge over the sparsely populated valley. As in Abu Tor, Israel and Jordan agreed that a fixed number of civilians already living in the area “between the lines” would be allowed to stay. Around the UN compound, Israel and Jordan both agreed to limit that number to 200 apiece. The area became a wide demilitarized zone.
    Dayan repeatedly tried to convince Jordan to divide No Man’s Land. In Jerusalem, Dayan persuaded one of his Jordanian counterparts to accept division of the area by creating an informal “civilian line” through the middle, but the idea was rejected in Amman, where Arab leaders weren’t prepared to willingly cede any part ofJerusalem to Israel. Although the two sides never officially agreed to divide the No Man’s Land, they sometimes acted as if they had, creating a de facto split that was tacitly accepted—as long as neither side complained.
    While Israel portrayed the program run by the Jewish National Fund as a beautification project, Jordanian officials knew that tree planting was a political act in Jerusalem, one that could be used to establish the digger’s rights to the land. Israel knew it too, and the government approved the move into No Man’s Land to demonstrate its claims to the area.
    With Israel refusing to stop, Jordan took its case to New York. UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish diplomat who’d just helped avert a 1956 war in the Middle East by creating a new UN peacekeeping