Dig nearly anywhere in this city and you hit the remains of an earlier civilization. One of the latest such finds is a narrow strip of antiquity that runs down the middle of a main road through what is now Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. Soon it will be covered by tracks for a light railway, part of a new mass transit system for the city. Both the history being unearthed and the planning under way are filled with the kind of controversy that seems to be a Jerusalem specialty.
Coins found at the site reveal that the urban community being uncovered existed for about 60 years, from 70AD to 130AD, the period between two anti-Roman Jewish revolts.
"It's an archeological feast," said Rachel Bar-Nathan, the Israel Antiquities Authority director of the dig.
One surprise is that the nameless community appears to have housed a mixed population of Romans and Jews. Several of the excavated private dwellings contained a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath.
If the dig has shed light on a piece of Jerusalem's past, the path of the railway poses beguiling questions about its future. It touches on one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the ownership of the city that both the Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.
Forty years ago this week, in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel conquered the eastern, Arab-populated half of Jerusalem from Jordan and declared that the city would remain united for eternity. The government expanded the city limits to take in outlying Palestinian villages such as Shuafat, and annexed them. The Palestinians were offered Israeli citizenship, but as they considered the area illegally occupied, most refused, choosing permanent residency instead.
Huge Jewish neighborhoods were built on the captured high ground adjacent to existing Arab ones, weaving an undulating patchwork that was meant to protect the heart of the city from enemy attack -- and to ensure that Jerusalem could never be divided again. One of these, Pisgat Ze'ev, was established in 1982 to the east of Shuafat. With a population of more than 40,000, it is the fastest-growing neighborhood in the city.
Palestinians and most of the world do not recognize the annexation of East Jerusalem and other areas occupied in the 1967 war. Many consider neighborhoods like Pisgat Ze'ev to be illegal Jewish settlements.
Despite unification, the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods have remained largely estranged, with separate school systems, transportation and unequal services. The Palestinians complain of years of discrimination and neglect by the Jerusalem municipality to which they pay taxes, but whose elections they boycott.
It is widely believed that any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on the two-state solution will involve dividing sovereignty over Jerusalem. But the first light rail line, which will run almost 15km from Mount Herzl in the south of Jewish Jerusalem, to Pisgat Ze'ev, via Shuafat, in the north, seems designed for two populations that will remained conjoined.
"To me, the light rail system is something of an enigma," said Daniel Seidemann, a Jewish lawyer who promotes Palestinian rights in Jerusalem.
He describes the route of the railway as "ideological," adding: "It serves the mantra of the undivided eternal capital that few believe in today. Given the reality of life here, and the glass walls between the neighborhoods, it goes against the grain of how the city works."
To Palestinian political activists, the light railway is less a mystery than an affront.
"Wherever you dig in Palestine you find remains of one side or the other," said Abdelqader Husseini, son of the late Jerusalem leader Faisal Husseini and a resident of Shuafat.
"I don't have any problem with the finds. The problem is that Israel is occupying the place illegally, and continues building unilateral facts on the ground," he said.
If Israel really had the interests of the Palestinians and their mobility at heart, Husseini said, it should have negotiated with them about the train's route.
Shmuel Elgrabli, the spokesman for Jerusalem's light rail project, says that the route was chosen for mundane reasons of service and profitability, citing research showing that in Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians use public transport most.
Shuafat, a bustling neighborhood of some 35,000 Palestinian residents, straddles the old Jerusalem-Ramallah road about 4.82km north of the Old City. Like most of Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, it suffers from overcrowding, roads with potholes and an absence of municipal planning.
By contrast, the ancient ruins reveal a sophisticated community impeccably planned by the Roman authorities, with orderly rows of houses and two fine public bathhouses to the north. The community was suddenly abandoned about two years before one of the anti-Roman Jewish rebellions, known as the Bar Kochba revolt.
According to Bar-Nathan, a number of residents carefully buried their coins and sealed up their doorways with stones. Others fled in haste, leaving pots containing animal bones on the fire.
"They knew a disaster was approaching," Bar-Nathan said, though the cause of the flight remains unknown.
Nowadays, because of the poor conditions in the Arab neighborhoods, some Palestinian residents are relocating as well, a few to Pisgat Ze'ev, which offers more spacious housing and better services at preferential rates. Jewish contractors are actively marketing some real estate projects to Palestinians, said Husseini -- especially those with a view of the nearby Shuafat refugee camp, which is not so popular with Jewish buyers, he remarked.
Neither Seidemann nor Elgrabli believes that two metal tracks and an overhead wire will prejudice the chances of a political solution for Jerusalem in the end. But Husseini warns that the construction of infrastructure meant to permanently connect post-1967 settlements with Israel may soon render the two-state solution "impossible."
The alternative, he says, will be to live not separately, but together, side by side.
"Then maybe at some point we'll launch a civil rights revolution, like Nelson Mandela," he said.
In Jerusalem, at current trends, the Palestinian population could equal the Jewish one by 2035, a study by the independent Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies has found. To a small extent, the mingling process has already started in Pisgat Ze'ev. In that one aspect, the Roman-Jewish settlement, now being wrapped in white sheets and preserved for future generations under a layer of soft concrete, may one day be seen as having been 2,000 years ahead of its time.
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