Jerusalem Stories

From his home Phil Reeves has a view over the Jewish west and occupied Arab east of the Holy City. But the most frightening place is his own back yard...

A few decades ago, the land on which our apartment is built was used as a look-out for the Israeli army. It is on a hillside, just south of Jerusalem's Old City, on the unmarked border between Jewish west Jerusalem and the occupied Arab east.

A few decades ago, the land on which our apartment is built was used as a look-out for the Israeli army. It is on a hillside, just south of Jerusalem's Old City, on the unmarked border between Jewish west Jerusalem and the occupied Arab east.

Those who lived here before Israel seized control of the whole city in June 1967 remember seeing burly soldiers peering down through binoculars at the Jordanian troops and at the Arab villages scattered on the hills running out towards the desert and the Dead Sea. It was considered advisable for visitors to look, but not point; the Jordanians would assume an outstretched arm was a gun and open fire.

Since the start of the intifada last year, the house has again become a look-out. Jerusalem is a noisy city, full of the cacophony of conflict. When my family hears a boom or the wail of sirens – and barely an hour passes without one or the other – we gather solemnly at the front window, looking for the plume of black smoke that will confirm that it was a bomb, and not an Israeli fighter jet breaking the sound barrier.

My wife's phone begins ringing at once as friends call in to find out what she can see – especially if the bang has occurred around the time the kids are being picked up from school.

There has already been one nasty incident, when a suicide bomber detonated himself not far from the gates of the two main schools in Jerusalem for expatriates, sending his severed head arcing over the wall of one of them just as children were arriving for the day.

But even on quiet days, the front window provides a fine vantage from which to watch the uneasy interaction between the city's western half (high-rise buildings, grassy water-guzzling parks, hotels, villas) and its Arab east (tumbledown homes, narrow lanes, garbage, desert). It overlooks a lane that runs through a gulley between our hillside and the Old City – crowned by the golden Dome of the Rock – towards the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, purported site of the ancient city of King David. Almost every day you can see Israeli border police interrogating Arab motorists, turning some back.

These days, though, we increasingly feel we are looking in the wrong direction. The neighbourhood has been calm during the 14-month conflict – even on the many nights when we could hear the Israeli tanks and Apache helicopters firing into Bethlehem or Ramallah, as we lay in our beds.

Now the stresses are beginning to surface in the streets – but at the back of our house, just outside our bedroom. The window is barred, and overlooks the yard wall. So we have been unable to see who has been pushing our pot plants off the yard wall to smash on the ground, or who peeled off the taped "TV" signs on our car – essential for journalists travelling into the occupied territories with Israeli numberplates.

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We have decided to keep the back window open at night, in the hope of catching our pot plant vandals. Except there is one thing even more annoying – and noisier – than the intifada in Jerusalem, and that is the Holy City's enormous population of cats.

In an average night, we can expect five or six feral cats to pop through the window, hoping to devour the remnants of the food left by our own, infinitely more civilised household feline, Mrs Brown. These visits would be tolerable were it not for the fact that they also fight, yowl, squirt on the furniture and show no sign whatever of fear, even when confronted with a large man in a dressing gown waving a broom.

They seemed to suffer a setback the other day when the rubbish skips outside our house – a general doss-house cum restaurant for scores of local cats – mysteriously caught fire, and were burnt to a cinder. But the Jerusalem city authorities replaced them immediately – with fireproof metal bins.