Divided we stand.

He was more than ninety years old when I met him, and that was nine' teen years ago. He lived alone in a little apartment somewhere in Jerusalem. All I remember is that he had the seamed and spotted skin of the very old, but his eyes were bright. He was more sturdy than frail. I don't even remember his name.

I rented a room from his daughter Zipporah, a strikingly beautiful woman of fifty or so, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and the carriage of a dancer. "Go and see my father," she told me once. "He'll have interesting things to tell you."

Indeed, he did. After the 1948 war, when the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus, east of Jerusalem, had been cut off from the rest of the city, this man had driven an armored bus loaded with sup plies through Arab Jerusalem to the isolated Jewish doctors and nurses. This took bravery and steadiness of a remark able kind. He was shot at often. A large convoy on the same mission in April 1948 had been bombed and attacked, resulting in over seventy five people being killed. This man did the run himself.

We talked about the future of Jerusalem. This was in 1978, after the earth quake election of 1977 had for the first time put the right wing Likud in power. I did not know where I stood on things. I had once belonged to a Labor Zionist Youth Movement, but I did not utterly abjure the right--at least not then. I thought they had a point of view worth hearing. Leftist friends of mine who favored a Palestinian state made me uncomfortable.

I was certain of only one thing. "Jerusalem must never be divided," I told the old man, rather piously. "It's ours; it's got to stay ours."

"Why?" he asked.

"What?" I stared into his bright, al most mocking eyes. "What?"

I don't remember what he said next, exactly. I only remember feeling as if someone reached a hand into my mind and started to shift the furnishings.

"Why does it have to be ours alone? Why can't we share it? Why don't the Arabs have the right to control the part of the city they live in?" he asked me.

This, I thought, this from you--a man who had risked his life driving supplies through a divided city?

No one had ever spoken to me about sharing Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a Jewish city. It could not be ruled jointly; it could not be divided. Left and right, Labor and Likud, everyone took this as solid ground: Jerusalem, a three thou sand year old agony, a slaughterhouse of multitudes, where Crusaders had waded up to their horses' fetlocks in Muslim and Jewish blood; Old Jerusalem, so painfully lost in 1948, when for the first time since the Crusader Kingdom fell in 1187 the Jews were driven from its gates; Old Jerusalem, so painfully won in 1967, its flag stones once more slick with blood. We have grown up on these images and the sight of Uzi Narkiss and his tough Jewish soldiers praying and weeping once more before the Western Wall.

How can we divide Jerusalem again?

The fact that the old man forced me to face one day nineteen years ago has still not penetrated most people's consciousness. Jerusalem is divided; whether we like it or not, it is divided now. You couldn't see this so clearly in 1978 when I wandered freely in the twisting, odorous back lanes of the old city and befriended an Arab shopkeeper who owned a shop where I sat often to talk and drink tea. But in 1988, when I returned to Israel, a friend who was active in the peace movement, with close ties to a number of Palestinian activists, for bade me to go back to the Old City; it was simply too dangerous. The lines had been drawn again. The Israeli soldiers still muscled their way about the bazaars, of course, but I could not go.

In December 1996, a Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved a proposal to build housing for 132 Jewish families in the Palestinian neighborhood of Ras-al Amud in East Jerusalem. Does the government expect this will be taken quietly? Just this past fall, because the present Israeli government decided that an ancient tunnel at the foot of the Western Wall--closed for 1800 years--had to open on both ends to permit free tourist access, the flagstones of Jerusalem ran red once more. What will happen now?

After all this time, we still cannot face the fact that Jerusalem, city of anguish, doesn't belong to one group alone--not spiritually, not physically. East Jerusalem is still Arab; so is much of the Old City; so is Silwan beyond the city walls. The stony streets, the shops, the homes, the very air belongs to Arabs.

That old man must be dead now. No one can hear his voice, and mine is a poor substitute. I never made the run to Mount Scopus in an armored bus. I don't even live in Jerusalem and haven't set foot in it for eight years. So don't listen to me. Listen in my words for the echo of his words. Listen to him.

Wendy Orent is an anthropologist and free lance writer, contributing frequently to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other publications.