Downtown is dirty, traffic's a nightmare and the streets are clogged with tourists.
Plus, she was sick of the smoldering social tensions. And they don't intend to let it happen. The flight of yuppies like Maman, coupled with the high birth rate of Palestinians, is contributing to a demographic tilt in Jerusalem so gradual that it might go unremarked in any other city. But in Jerusalem, whose borders were redrawn three decades ago to pad the Jewish population and exclude Palestinians, demography is politics, and almost no shift is inconsequential. The tilt is taking place despite decades of Israeli efforts to limit the growth of Jerusalem's Palestinian population by legal and administrative impediments.