Photo Zion Square off the Jaffa road, where the tour ‘‘Seven Ways to Dissolve Boundaries’’ ended. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Muna, a Palestinian bookseller in East Jerusalem, does not mince words when it comes to his views on Israeli control over his part of the city, and his opinions can be difficult for Israelis to hear.
At least, he presumes they are. Mr. Muna rarely engages in conversation with the Israeli Jews who live across the Green Line. Like most of the 800,000 citizens uncomfortably sharing real estate in Israel’s contested capital, where Arabs and Jews are staked out on opposite sides and communities are often divided between the religious and the secular, everyday travel for Mr. Muna is circumscribed by lines real and invisible.
But on a cool summer evening this month, Mr. Muna helped a group of cultural tourists cross one of those lines. His store in the historic American Colony Hotel became a stop on “Seven Ways to Dissolve Boundaries,” city tours billed as “doco-theatrical journeys into alternative realities” that promise to take participants out of their comfort zone and into parts of Jerusalem they might never go.
The four-hour tours, which run through September with seven different variations (hence the name), were created by Mekudeshet, a three-week citywide arts festival. Itineraries are kept secret, with participants informed only of an initial meeting point.
The recent evening tour centered on the Jerusalem light rail — a smooth, modern train system that traverses East and West Jerusalem and is seen by many Palestinians as a symbol of Israeli occupation in the city.
The 40 people on the tour were given audio systems and invited to travel the train’s entire route. Along the way, Karen Brunwasser, the deputy director of Jerusalem Season of Culture, an organization in West Jerusalem that is presenting Mekudeshet, gave a live, deeply personal monologue, spliced with music and excerpts of poetry, to describe the landmarks flashing by the windows and her own connection to the city.
Photo A tour group mingled with the crowd on board a train in Jerusalem as it rode through the cultural divide. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
After leaving the train in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood whose light rail stop was the site of fierce riots in July 2014, participants were guided across the tracks and invited to retrace their journey, this time stopping to meet a series of “boundary dissolvers” along the way.
Each of the seven tours has its own cast of characters, among them Eran Tzidkiyahu, the Arabic-speaking son of Jewish market vendors who works as a tour guide taking Israelis into East Jerusalem; Nadim Shiban, the director of the Museum of Islamic Art in West Jerusalem; and Chaya Gilboa, a former ultra-Orthodox Jew who is one of the leading voices for pluralism and women’s rights in Jerusalem.
Sunday’s tour began with a presentation by Yehuda Greenfield, whose architecture firm, SAYA, has been commissioned, as part of the Geneva Accords, to design the physical border — roads, transportation junctions and even the pedestrian crossings of the shared Old City — that would be part of a final-status agreement dividing East and West Jerusalem.
“The concept of using borders, and being involved in borders, is very natural to a Jerusalemite,” Mr. Greenfield said.
It ended at Zion Square, a major transit point, with a chat with Sarah Weil, a lesbian who became an activist after the death of Shira Banki, a 16-year-old girl stabbed to death at last year’s Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade by an ultra-Orthodox man. Ms. Weil spends Thursday nights on the square, encouraging strangers of different backgrounds to share a moment together.
“My job is to get those people who are passing by each other to stop and look at each other,” she told the group.
The discussion at Mr. Muna’s bookshop, on the seam of East and West Jerusalem, came in the middle of the tour.
Photo Mahmoud Muna, the owner of the American Colony Bookstore, talking to tour participants. Credit Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
“You’ve been promised a chance to listen to someone who is working on some sort of a change in Jerusalem, so I wanted to tell you how I spend my afternoons,” Mr. Muna told the group, which was made up almost entirely of Israelis and Jewish tourists.
He went on to detail his volunteer work as a cultural coordinator in East Jerusalem, creating art, theater and dance events — work that is required, he says, because the Israeli government has dismantled the cultural institutions in Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods.
For 25 minutes, the group sipped coffee and listened as Mr. Muna laid bare his thoughts on what he described as Israel’s muzzling of cultural and religious leaders (“It’s created an incredible amount of contradiction in our society”); how he harnesses culture to create more political discourse (“We are politicizing culture because it’s the only venue available to us”); and even the spate of Palestinian knife attacks in the city (“Israeli soldiers may be your friends or loved ones, but to us they are a symbol of the occupation, and a legitimate target”).
Yiscah Smith, an American-born transgender activist on the tour who lives in Nachlaot, a West Jerusalem neighborhood, left the American Colony shaken by Mr. Muna’s words.
“It really disturbed me, and that’s good — that’s the reason I came,” she said. (Ms. Smith will tell her own story as part of a different “Dissolving Boundaries” tour this month.) “We need to hear these things. We need to not be afraid of it.”
Ms. Brunwasser, a Philadelphia native who has lived in Jerusalem for 11 years, said the Jerusalem Season of Culture — which is staffed almost exclusively by Israeli Jews — understood its limitations in designing the tour.
“We want to blur boundaries in the city, but we also don’t pretend we aren’t who we are and the situation in Jerusalem isn’t the situation,” she said. “The reality on the ground is that the majority of our audiences are still Israeli. And we knew that for our audiences, just stopping and getting off the train in Beit Hanina would be something that most of them had never done.”
Correction: September 15, 2016
An earlier version of this article described Jewish communities in Jerusalem incorrectly. Though Israel has separate school systems for secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox students, and there are some ultra-Orthodox enclaves, communities are not strictly “segregated”between the religious and the secular.”
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