Before dawn one day early last year, I tagged along with a garbage truck picking up trash around the southern part of Jerusalem. The crew was Jewish and Arab, and so was the trash. (“Everyone eats the same potatoes,” one of the crew chiefs told me.) Spending time on the truck seemed a good way to make a point missed by most observers—that beneath the famous image of a place always on the brink, a kind of cohesion had quietly taken hold.
A few months later came the events of the summer of 2014.
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