Growing up as a Jew in Jerusalem before 1967, Noa Baum had two dreams.
As a youngster living outside the walls of the old city, she dreamed of sneaking out at night, past the barbed wire and the signs that screamed, “Caution!” and “Mines!” and “No Man’s Land!” Carrying a cake, she dressed up as an Arab and skipped through the landmines and hopped over the wall into old Jerusalem. The Arabs took her into their circles thinking she was one of them. She gave them the cake as a present, watched as they ate it, and was overjoyed as they all fell over dead. The cake had been poisoned. In the dream, the little Baum feels like a hero.
But later on, Baum had a second dream. Again, she dressed up as an Arab, crossed the dead zone and climbed over the old wall with a cake. She again presented the cake to the Arabs, and again they accepted her. But after eating the cake this time, they smiled and laughed and told her how delicious it was. When she revealed herself as a Jew, they were so surprised that they asked if there was any way to repay her. She said that she wanted peace to the land. Again, the little Baum felt like a hero. She had saved her country and brought peace to Israel.
Baum, a member of the National Storytelling Network, spoke before a full Cat in the Cream audience last Saturday. In a collage of Jewish and Arab experiences, her hour-long presentation, titled “The Land Twice Promised,” combined personal anecdotes and family stories with those of a Palestinian friend named “Jumana.” Baum and Jumana met in Davis, California, after Baum migrated from Tel-Aviv, Israel to the U.S.
The Israeli and Arab experiences of living in a torn Jerusalem intermingled vividly in Baum’s recollections. She and her friend remembered historical events — such as the 1967 war in which the Israelis took vast amounts of land including the old city — in radically different terms.
Of the six accounts Baum presented Saturday afternoon, two of them contrasted perspectives of the 1967 conflict (which both lived through in Jerusalem), while another pair portrayed the 1948 conflict (handed down in stories from the women’s mothers). A third set provided brief snapshots of the opposite lives the two women led as children in the close quarters of the historic capital.
“My mother would say I am a [Palestanian-sympathesizing] extremist,” Baum began the script, in an effort to reassure the audience that her stories did not have a Zionist slant. She later affirmed she was not attempting to represent the Israeli or Palestinian side. “I’m here to tell the stories of our families,” she said.
Jumana, an engineer, had told Baum bluntly from day one that acting out the script was all up to her though Baum had originally intended it to be a two-person show.

One Side of the Conflict
The first wartime anecdote Baum told was a story of Jumana’s. The Arab woman, through Baum, recalled her experience of being arrested as a protester after riots broke out around Jerusalem University where she was studying engineering.
She was on a bus that was driving through throngs of protesters and police when an Israeli guard boarded the vehicle and arrested everybody present. In fact, all he had to do was take the I.D. cards of the Arabs on board. Without identification, they had no choice but to drive themselves to the prison under their own power.
“Without I.D.s, we would be arrested at the first roadblock,” explained Jerminyah’s character through Baum. “The soldiers knew that when they let us go.”
In the next story, Jumana described her experience during the first day of the Six-Day War.
A sixth-grader, she was in recess one day when the streets around the Christian school where she was enrolled erupted in violent skirmishes between civilians and Israeli soldiers.
She was accustomed to the fighting and knew exactly what to do. With her little sister in tow, she ran down back alleys and side streets in the cramped capital to a tourist shop where the owner gave them refuge.
At the end of the first day of fighting, Jumana and her sister made their way to the Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of town. At the barbed wire, a curious event took place. After letting Jerminyah past, the soldier picked up her baby sister and lifted her over the barbed wire, with an expression “like he was apologizing for being there,” Jerminyah recounted.
Yet, as Jumana watched, the soldier arrested the next Arab who tried to pass—a middle-aged man accused of being a protester.
Watching the unknown man being loaded onto a jeep and taken away made an impression on the young Jerminyah and is a memory she has kept with her to this day.

Together in America
Decades after the war, Jumana and Baum wound up as neighbors in the same California town. Their children played “superheroes” together on a daily basis. The two women related to one another the way that mothers do when their children want to go over to each other’s house but have homework to do and have to be home by dinnertime. One mother was Israeli, the other Palestinian.
Though their sons were childhood friends, Baum stated that it took years for real trust to blossom between her and Jumana. By the time the women set out to write a script for the show, their sons had moved on to different schools and different circles.
“We watched our children grow up [in America] without fear,” Baum said. “But though it was never spoken, we knew: In Jerusalem, my son would have grown up to be drafted by the army to stand a roadblocks, while her son would have come to the roadblock to present papers and throw stones.”
Their relationship was always cordial, but could not be defined as close—that is, until 2000.
It was then that Baum, who has been a storyteller since 1982, decided it was time to face the issues of her troubled native country, to explore her own experiences, but most of all—to promote the hope for peace.
With a renewed resolve, Baum prepared a script of her childhood experiences in Jerusalem. She and Jumana spent four days in the summer of 2000 hashing it over in a secluded house in California. They took the product and showed it to several writers, who helped refine it into coherent stories. This is Baum’s eleventh performance of the finished product.
“I hope I help to put a human face on the news,” she said. “I think it would be really presumptious to think I’ve changed somebody’s opinion, but if I have, that’s fantastic.
“Right now the conflict is so complicated, it is hard to hope for peace,” she added.

An Alternate Perspective
After recounting Jumana’s story, Baum launched into her own childhood memories, which provided a starkly different account of the Six Day War.
Going to school outside the walls of the old city, a third-grader at the time, Baum was trained to prepare for what many Israelis felt was an imminent attack by Arabs from in and outside the newly formed state.
The day before the fighting began, Baum was called to help clean out the school’s furnace room, which would house the entire neighborhood during an anticipated bombing campaign by Iraq, Syria and other Arab nations.
The way Israelis framed the tumultuous ordeal to their children, according to Baum, was in the terms of a game.
“In the furnace room, there was a faucet without any sink,” the third-grader Baum recalled. The children were instructed to turn it on, triggering a gushing stream of water to burst out of the pipe, washing all of the debris out of the musty room.
Baum said she and the children, at the sight of the water pouring down from above, began dancing around and screaming in delight because, unlike most of America, “it never rains in Jerusalem,” she said.
In her story, Baum underscored how successful the Israelis were at making their youth regard the war as little more than a farce: “The war effort was cool,” Baum’s explained in her childhood persona.
The next day when the fighting began, hundreds of Israelis fled their homes into the basement shelter. As the bombs whistled down and the building shook from its very foundations, the children were given activities to keep the overall spirit high. While the adults sat around a radio with furrowed brows listening intently for news, the children cut figures out of construction paper and watched a “Mickey Mouse” movie.
After a few short days, the fighting died down, and the news came in: the Israeli forces had scored a significant victory, securing control of old Jerusalem as well as significant territory that had formerly been Palestine.
With the war all but over and the Israelis in the shelter returning to the streets and to their homes, one child was ecstatic: “That wasn’t so bad!” he exclaimed. “I hope we can have war more often!” Baum, in her youth, initially agreed with her classmate’s cheerful sentiments.
But one of the older boys, already a veteran of the bloodshed, silenced them. “Yeah, war’s great,” he admonished forcefully, “if it wasn’t for all of our boys who get killed.”
Baum was immediately ashamed. His words struck her young mind, and became almost larger than life. From that point on, she never again let herself forget the men and women who fought and died to form and preserve the Israeli state.