The grim logic of Jerusalem

He told me the story with resignation and not a word of hatred. His eyes only teared up when he explained how he had to pull his kids from school and tell them they could no longer play with their friends. Two years later, he wept again, holding my hand, when his brother's house was demolished, the standard punishment for adding floors without a municipal permit. Such permits are almost never granted. Wholesale demolition is a fate no Jewish house, for departing from a building code, will ever suffer.

I am telling this story because Abed did not wake up last week and start killing Jews -- not like Hussam Duwayaat, who went on a rampage with a Caterpillar construction vehicle, killing three and injuring many others. Nor did 249,000 other Arabs in East Jerusalem kill anybody, though they are not happy about what's been happening in the city of their birth.

The government speaks of walling terrorism out. Clearly, however, it is walling in grievance -- and, at times, blind rage. What should be a five-minute trip east to Al Quds University, or a sister's dinner table in Hizma, is now an hour's drive through northern checkpoints, past Abed's house and the birds.

When, moreover, people speak anxiously about Jerusalem as the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is all too easy to assume that Jews and Arabs sort out into their respective national organisms; that every act of cruelty committed by any Arab or Jew is somehow expressing the DNA of the national organism as a whole; that atrocities like that committed by the Caterpillar driver July 2 would just not happen if Arabs simply condemned violence collectively enough, or if they didn't secretly want atrocities to happen. (Presumably, that suicidal driver was revealing Abed's real dream palace -- a Jerusalem without Jews.)

This is, for God's sake, no way to think about human beings. We do not need more fancy theories about the collective mind of Palestinians. We need to understand the grim logic of Jerusalem since 1967. We need to understand bell curves: the probable distribution of sociopathic outbursts within an angry population. An Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement will not put an immediate end to attacks like the one last week. But as Abed once told me, blessing God, what, if not peace, eventually will?