Jerusalem: The Biography (83 page)

It is certainly the first time Jews have been able to worship freely there since AD 70. Under Christian rule, Jews were forbidden even to approach the city. During the Islamic centuries, Christians and Jews were tolerated as
dhimmi
but frequently repressed. The Jews, who lacked the protection of the European powers enjoyed by the Christians, were often treated badly – though never as badly as they were treated in Christian Europe at its worst. Jews could be killed for approaching the Islamic or Christian holy places – but anyone could drive a donkey through the passageway next to the Wall, which technically they could only attend with a permit. Even in the twentieth century, Jewish access to the Wall was severely restricted by the British and totally banned by the Jordanians. However, thanks to what Israelis called ‘the Situation’, Wiesel’s claim about freedom of worship is scarcely true for non-Jews who endure a multitude of bureaucratic harassments such as a regime of obstructive residence permits. Israeli police are constantly tightening their control of the gates of the Temple Mount while the security wall makes it harder for West Bank Palestinians to reach Jerusalem to pray at the Church or Aqsa.

When they are not in conflict, Jews, Muslims and Christians return to the ancient Jerusalem tradition of ostrichism – burying their heads in the sand and pretending The Others do not exist. In September 2008, the overlapping of Jewish Holy Days and Ramadan created a ‘monotheistic traffic jam’ in the alleyways as Jews and Arabs came to pray at Sanctuary and Wall but ‘it would be wrongto call these
tense encounters
because there are essentially no encounters at all,’ reported Ethan Bronner in the
New York Times
. ‘Words are not exchanged; [they] look past one another. Like parallel universes with different names for every place and monument they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.’

By the bile-spattered standards of Jerusalem, this ostrichism is a sign of normality – particularly since the city has never been so globally important. Today Jerusalem is the cockpit of the Middle East, the battlefield of Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism, not to speak of the struggle between Israel and Palestine. New Yorkers, Londoners and Parisians feel they live in an atheistic, secular world in which organized religion, and its believers, are at best gently mocked, yet the numbers of fundamentalist millenarian Abrahamic believers – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – are increasing.

Jerusalem’s apocalyptic and political roles become ever more fraught. America’s exuberant democracy is raucously diverse and secular yet it is simultaneously the last and the probably the greatest ever Christian power – and its evangelicals continue to look to the End Days in Jerusalem, just as US governments see a calm Jerusalem as key to any Middle Eastern peace and strategically vital for relations with their Arab allies. Meanwhile Israel’s rule over al-Quds has intensified Muslim reverence: on Iran’s annual Jerusalem Day, inaugurated by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the city is presented as more than an Islamic shrine and Palestinian capital. In Tehran’s bid for regional hegemony backed by nuclear weapons, and its cold war with America, Jerusalem is a cause that conveniently unites Iranian Shiites with Sunni Arabs sceptical of the ambitions of the Islamic Republic. Whether for Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon or Sunni Hamas in Gaza, the city now serves as the rallying totem of anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and Iranian leadership. ‘The Occupation Regime over Jerusalem,’ says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ‘should vanish from the page of history.’ And Ahmadinejad too is a millenarian who believes that the imminent return of the ‘righteous, perfect human Al-Madhi the Chosen’, the ‘occulted’ Twelth Imam, will liberate Jerusalem, the setting for what the Koran calls ‘The Hour’.

This eschatological–political intensity places twenty-first-century Jerusalem, Chosen City of the three faiths, in the crosshairs of all these conflicts and visions. Jerusalem’s apocalyptic role may be exaggerated but this unique combination of power, faith and fashion, all played out under the hothouse glare of twenty-four-hour TV news, heaps the pressure on to the delicate stones of the Universal City, again, in some ways, the centre of the world.

‘Jerusalem is a tinderbox that could go off at any time,’ warned King Abdullah II of Jordan, great-grandson of Abdullah the Hasty, in 2010. ‘All roads in our part of the world, all the conflicts, lead to Jerusalem.’ This is the reason that American presidents need to bring the sides together even at the most inauspicious moments. The peace-party in Israeli democracy is in eclipse, its fragile governments dominated by overmighty religious-nationalist parties while there is no single Palestinian entity, no stable, democratic interlocutor. If Fatah’s West Bank is increasingly prosperous, the most dynamic Palestinian organization is the fundamentalist Hamas, which rules Gaza and remains dedicated to Israel’s annihilation. It embraces suicide bombings as its weapon of choice and periodically fires missiles onto southern Israel, provoking Israeli incursions. Europeans and Americans regard it as a terrorist organization and so far conciliatory signals of a willingness to support a settlement based on 1967 borders have been mixed.

The history of the negotiations since 1993, and the difference in spirit between noble words and distrustful, violent acts, suggest unwillingness on both sides to make the necessary compromises to share Jerusalem permanently. At the best of times, the reconciliation of the celestial, national and emotional in Jerusalem is a labyrinthine puzzle: during the twentieth century, there were over forty plans for Jerusalem which all failed, and today there are at least thirteen different models just for sharing the Temple Mount.

In 2010, President Obama forced Netanyahu, back in power in coalition with Barak, to freeze Jerusalem settlement-building temporarily. At the cost of the bitterest moment in US–Israeli relations, Obama at least got the two sides to talk again, though progress was glacial and short-lived.

Israel has often been diplomatically rigid and risked its own security and reputation by building settlements, but the latter are negotiable. The problem on the other side seems equally fundamental. Under Rabin, Barak and Olmert, Israel offered to share Jerusalem, including the Old City. Despite exasperating negotiations during two decades of peace talks up to 2010, the Palestinians have never yet agreed to share the city.

Jerusalem may continue for decades in its present state, but whenever, if ever, a peace is signed, there will be two states, which is essential for the survival of Israel and justice for the Palestinians. The shape of a Palestinian state and a shared Jerusalem is known to both sides. ‘Jerusalem will be the capital for both states, Arab suburbs will be Palestinian, Jewish suburbs will be Israeli,’ said Israeli President Shimon Peres, architect of the Oslo Accords, who knows the picture as well as anyone. The Israelis will get their twelve or so settlements in eastern Jerusalem, following the parameters set by Clinton, but the Palestinians will be compensated with Israeli land elsewhere, and Israeli settlements will be removed from most of the West Bank. So far so simple, ‘but the challenge,’ explains Peres, ‘is the Old City. We must distinguish between sovereignty and religion. Everyone would control their own shrines but one can hardly slice the Old City into pieces.’

The Old City would be a demilitarized Vatican, policed by joint Arab-Israeli patrols or an international trustee, perhaps even a Jerusalemite version of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. The Arabs might not accept America, the Israelis distrust the UN and the EU, so perhaps the job could be done by NATO with Russia, which is once again keen to play a role in Jerusalem.
^*
It is hard to internationalize the Temple Mount itself because no Israeli politician could totally surrender any claim to the Foundation Stone of the Temple and live to tell the tale, while no Islamic potentate could acknowledge full Israeli sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary and survive. Besides, international or free cities, from Danzigto Trieste, have usually ended badly.

The Temple Mount is hard to divide. The Haram and the Kotel, the Dome, the Aqsa and the Wall are all part of the same structure: ‘no one can monopolize holiness,’ added Peres. ‘Jerusalem is more a flame than a city and no one can divide a flame.’ Flame or not, someone has to hold the sovereignty, so the various plans give the surface to the Muslims and the tunnels and cisterns beneath (and therefore the Foundation Stone) to Israel. The minute complexities of the twilight world of subterranean caverns, pipes and waterways there are breathtaking, if peculiarly Jerusalemite: who owns the earth, who owns the land, who owns the heavens?

No deal can be agreed nor will it endure without something else. Political sovereignty can be drawn on a map, expressed in legal agreements, enforced with M-16s but it will be futile and meaningless without the historic, mystical and emotional. ‘Two thirds of the Arab–Israeli conflict is psychology,’ said Sadat. The real conditions for peace are not just the details of which Herodian cistern will be Palestinian or Israeli but the heartfelt intangibles of mutual trust and respect. On both sides, some elements deny the history of the Other. If this book has any mission, I passionately hope that it might encourage each side to recognize and respect the ancient heritage of the Other: Arafat’s denial of Jewish history in Jerusalem was regarded as absurd by his own historians (who all happily accept that history in private), but none would risk contradicting him. Even in 2010, only the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh has had the courage to admit that the Haram al-Sharif was the site of the Jewish Temple. Israeli settlement-building undermines Arab confidence and the practicality a Palestinian state. Yet Palestinian denial of the ancient Jewish claim is just as disastrous to peace-making. And this is before we reach an even greater challenge: each must recognize the Other’s sacred modern narratives of tragedy and heroism. This is a lot to ask since both of these stories stars the Other as arch-villain – yet this too is possible.

This being Jerusalem, one could easily imagine the unthinkable: will Jerusalem even exist five or forty years on? There is always the possibility that extremists could destroy the Temple Mount at any moment, break the heart of the world and convince fundamentalists of every persuasion that Judgement Day is nigh and the war of Christ and Anti-Christ is beginning.

Amos Oz, the Jerusalemite writer who now lives in the Negev, offers this droll solution: ‘We should remove every stone of the Holy Sites and transport them to Scandinavia for a hundred years and not return them until everyone has learned to live together in Jerusalem.’ Sadly this is slightly impractical.

For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer. Their nationalistic histories tell a rigid story of inevitable progressions to heroic triumphs and abrupt disasters, but in this history I have tried to show that nothing was inevitable, there were always choices. The fates and identities of Jerusalemites were rarely clear cut. Life in Herodian, Crusader, or British Jerusalem was always just as complex and nuanced as life is for us today.

There were quiet evolutions as well as dramatic revolutions. Sometimes it was dynamite, steel and blood that changed Jerusalem, sometimes it was more the slow descent of generations, of songs sung and passed down, stories told, poems recited, sculptures carved, and the blurred half-conscious routines of families over many centuries taking small steps down winding stairways, quick leaps over Neighbouring thresholds and the smoothing of rough stones until they shone.
¹

Jerusalem, so loveable in many ways, so hate-filled in others, always bristling with the hallowed and the brash, the preposterously vulgar and the aesthetically exquisite, seems to live more intensely than anywhere else; everything stays the same yet nothing stays still. At dawn each day, the three shrines of the three faiths come to life in their own way.

THIS MORNING

At 4.30 a.m., Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites, wakes up to begin his daily ritual of prayer, reading the Torah. He walks through the Jewish Quarter to the Wall which never closes, its colossal layers of Herodian ashlar stones glowing in the darkness. Jews pray there all day and all night.

The rabbi, forty years old and descended from Russian immigrants who arrived in Jerusalem seven generations ago, comes from families in the Gerer and Lubavitcher courts. The father of seven children, bespectacled, bearded and blue-eyed, in black suit and skullcap, proceeds down through the Jewish Quarter, whether it is cold or hot, raining or snowing, until he sees Herod the Great’s Wall rising up before him. Each time ‘his heart skips a beat’ as he gets closer to ‘the biggest synagogue in the world. There’s no earthly way to describe the personal connection to these stones. That is spiritual.’

High above Herod’s stones is the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque on what Jews call the Mountain of the House of God, but ‘there is room for all of us,’ says the rabbi who firmly rejects any encroachment on the Temple Mount. ‘One day God may rebuild the Temple – but it is not for men to interfere. This is only a matter for God.’

As rabbi, he is in charge of keeping the Wall clean: the cracks between the stones are filled with notes written by worshippers. Twice a year – before Passover and Rosh Hashanah – the notes are cleared out; they are considered so sacred, he buries them on the Mount of Olives.

When he reaches the Wall, the sun is rising and there are already around 700 Jews praying there, but he always finds the same prayer group –
minyan –
who stand at the same spot beside the Wall: ‘It’s important to have a ritual so that one can concentrate on the prayers.’ But he does not greet this
minyan
, he may nod but there is no talking – ‘the first words will be for God’ – while he wraps the
tefillin
around his arm. He recites the morning prayers, the
shacharit
, which finish: ‘God bless the nation with peace.’ Only then does he greet his friends properly. The day at the Wall has started.