A Tale of Love and Darkness

IN THE winter between 1948 and 1949 the war ended. Israel signed an armistice agreement with the neighboring countries, first with Egypt, then with Trans-Jordan, and finally with Syria and Lebanon. Iraq withdrew its expeditionary force without signing any document. Despite all these agreements, all the Arab countries continued to proclaim that one day they would embark on a "second round" of the war so as to put an end to a state that they refused to recognize; they declared that its very existence was an act of continuing aggression, and they called it the "artificial state," "ad-dawla al-maz'uma."

In Jerusalem the Trans-Jordanian commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Abdullah al-Tall, and the Israeli commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, met several times to draw a demarcation line between the two parts of the city and to reach an agreement about the passage of convoys to the university campus on Mount Scopus, which remained as an isolated Israeli enclave within the area under the control of the Trans-Jordanian army. High concrete walls were erected along the line, to block streets that were half in Israeli Jerusalem and half in Arab Jerusalem. Here and there corrugated iron barriers were put up to conceal passersby in West Jerusalem from the view of the snipers on the rooftops of the eastern part of the city. A fortified strip of barbed wire, minefields, firing positions, and observation posts crossed the whole city, enclosing the Israeli section to the north, east, and south.