Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In 1977, thirty years after the bombing of the King David, Menachem Begin and his Likud finally swept aside the Labour party that had ruled since 1948 and came to power with a nationalist–messianic programme for a Greater Israel with Jerusalem as its capital. Yet it was Begin who, on 19 November, welcomed President Sadat on his courageous flight to Jerusalem. Sadat stayed in the King David Hotel, prayed at al-Aqsa, visited Yad Vashem and offered peace to the Knesset. Hopes soared. With the help of Moshe Dayan whom he had appointed foreign minister, Begin restored Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty. Yet, unlike Dayan who soon resigned, Begin knew little of the Arab world, remaining the son of the Polish shtetl, a harsh nationalist with a Manichean view of the Jewish struggle, an emotional attachment to Judaism and a vision of biblical Israel. Negotiating with Sadat under the aegis of President Jimmy Carter, Begin insisted “Jerusalem will remain the eternal united capital of Israel and that is that,” and the Knesset voted a similar formula into Israeli law. Driven by the bulldozer-like energy of his agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, and determined “to secure Jerusalem as permanent capital of the Jewish people,” Begin accelerated the building of what Sharon called “an outer ring of development around the Arab neighbourhoods” to “develop a greater Jerusalem.”

  In April 1982, an Israeli reservist named Alan Goodman shot two Arabs in a rampage across the Temple Mount. The mufti had constantly warned that the Jews wanted to rebuild the Temple on the site of al-Aqsa so now Arabs wondered if there really was such a secret plan. The vast majority of Israelis and Jews utterly reject any such thing and most ultra-Orthodox believe that men should not meddle with God’s work. There are only about a thousand Jewish fundamentalists in groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, who demand the right to pray on the Temple Mount, or the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple, which claims to be training a priestly caste for the Third Temple. Only the tiniest factions within the most extreme cells of fanatics have conspired to destroy the mosques, but so far, Israeli police have foiled all their plots. Such an outrage would be a catastrophe not just for Muslims but for the State of Israel itself.

  In 1982, Begin responded to PLO attacks on Israeli diplomats and civilians by invading Lebanon where Arafat had built up a fiefdom. Arafat and his forces were forced out of Beirut, moving to Tunis. The war, masterminded by defence minister Sharon, became a quagmire which culminated in Christian militias massacring between 300 and 700 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Sharon, bearing indirect responsibility for the atrocity, was forced to resign and Begin’s career ended in depression, resignation and isolation.

  The raised hopes of 1977 were dashed by the intransigence of both sides, the killing of civilians, and the expansion of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1981, the assassination of Sadat, punishment for his flight to Jerusalem, by fundamentalists, was an early sign of a new power rising in Islam. In December 1987 a spontaneous Palestinian revolt—the Intifada, the Uprising—broke out in Gaza and spread to Jerusalem. Israeli police fought protesters in pitched battles on the Temple Mount. The youths in the streets of Jerusalem slinging stones at uniformed Israeli soldiers replaced the murderous hijackers of the PLO as the image of the persecuted but defiant Palestinians.

  The energy of the Intifada created a power vacuum that was filled by new leaders and ideas: the PLO elite was out of touch with the Palestinian street, and fundamentalist Islam was replacing Nasser’s obsolete pan-Arabism. In 1987, Islamicist radicals founded the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was dedicated to the jihad to destroy Israel.

  The Intifada also altered Jewish Jerusalem, admitted Kollek, “in a fundamental way”—it destroyed the dream of a united city. Israelis and Arabs ceased to work together; they no longer walked through each other’s suburbs. The tension spread not only between Muslim and Jew but also among the Jews themselves: the ultra-Orthodox rioted against secular Jews, who began to move out of Jerusalem. The old world of Christian Jerusalem was shrinking fast: by 1995 there were only 14,100 Christians left. Yet the Israeli nationalists did not deviate from their plan to Judaize Jerusalem. Sharon provocatively moved into an apartment in the Muslim Quarter, and, in 1991, religious ultra-nationalists started to settle in Arab Silwan, next to the original City of David. Kollek, who saw his life’s work overwhelmed by aggressive redemptionists, denounced Sharon and these settlers for their “messianism which has always been extremely harmful to us in history.”

  The Intifada led indirectly to the Oslo peace talks. In 1988, Arafat accepted the idea of a two-state solution and renounced the armed struggle to destroy Israel. King Hussein gave up his claim on Jerusalem and the West Bank where Arafat planned to build a Palestinian state with al-Quds as its capital. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister and crushed the Intifada; with his plainspoken toughness, he possessed the only qualities Israelis would trust in a peacemaker. The Americans had presided over abortive talks in Madrid but, unbeknown to most of the major players, there was another, secret process that would bear fruit.

  This began with informal talks between Israeli and Palestinian academics. There were meetings at the American Colony which was regarded as neutral territory, in London and then in Oslo. The talks were initially run without Rabin’s knowledge by the foreign minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin. It was only in 1993 that they informed Rabin, who backed the talks. On 13 September, Rabin and Peres signed the treaty with Arafat at the White House, genially supervised by President Clinton. The West Bank and Gaza were partly handed over to a Palestinian Authority which took over the old Husseini mansion, Orient House, as its Jerusalem headquarters, run by the most respected Palestinian in the city, Faisal al-Husseini, son of the hero of 1948.c Rabin signed a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan and confirmed his special Hashemite role as custodian of the Islamic Sanctuary in Jerusalem which continues today. Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists negotiated their own academic version of the peace and enthusiastically started to work together for the first time.

  The conundrum of Jerusalem was set aside until later in the negotiations and Rabin intensified the building of settlements in Jerusalem before any agreement. Beilin and Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud Abbas negotiated to divide Jerusalem between Arab and Jewish areas under a united municipality and to give the Old City a “special status,” almost like a Middle Eastern Vatican City—but nothing was signed.

  The Oslo Accords perhaps left too much detail undecided and were violently opposed on both sides. Mayor Kollek, aged eighty-two, was defeated in elections by the more hardline Ehud Olmert, backed by nationalists and ultra-Orthodox. On 4 November 1995, just four days after Beilin and Abbas had come to an informal understanding on Jerusalem, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic. Born in Jerusalem, Rabin returned there to be buried on Mount Herzl. King Hussein delivered a eulogy; the American president and two of his predecessors attended. President Mubarak of Egypt visited for the first time, and the Prince of Wales made the only formal royal visit to Jerusalem since the foundation of Israel.

  The peace began to fall apart. The Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas launched a campaign of suicide bombings that wrought random carnage on Israeli civilians: an Arab suicide bomber killed twenty-five people on a Jerusalem bus. A week later another suicide bomber killed eighteen on the same bus route. Israeli voters punished Prime Minister Peres for the Palestinian violence, instead electing Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, on the slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Netanyahu questioned the principle of land-for-peace, opposed any division of Jerusalem and commissioned more settlements.

  In September 1996, Netanyahu opened a tunnel that ran from the Wall alongside the Temple Mount to emerge in the Muslim Quarter.d When some Israeli radicals tried to excavate upwards towards the Temple Mount, the Islamic authorities of the Waqf quickly cemented up the hole. Rumours spread that the tunnels were an attempt to undermine the Islamic Sanctuary and seventy-five we
re killed and 1,500 wounded in riots that proved that archaeology is worth dying for in Jerusalem. It was not only the Israelis who politicized their archaeology: history was paramount. The PLO banned Palestinian historians from admitting there had ever been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem—and this order came from Arafat himself: he was a secular guerrilla leader but as with the Israelis, even the secular national narrative was underpinned by the religious one. In 1948, Arafat had fought with the Muslim Brotherhood—their forces were called the Al-Jihad al-Muqadas, Jerusalem Holy War—and he embraced the Islamic significance of the city: he called Fatah’s armed wing the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Arafat’s aides admitted Jerusalem was his “personal obsession.” He identified himself with Saladin and Omar the Great, and denied any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. “The greater the Jewish pressure on the Temple Mount,” says Palestinian historian Dr. Nazmi Jubeh, “the greater the denial of the First and Second Temples.”

  In the tense days after the Tunnel riots and amid rumours of plans to open a synagogue in the Stables of Solomon, the Israelis allowed the Waqf to clear the ancient halls under al-Aqsa and then use bulldozers to dig a stairway and build a new, capacious subterranean mosque, the Marwan, in the hallways of Herod. The debris was simply thrown away. Israeli archaeologists were aghast at the crude bulldozing of the most delicate site on earth: archaeology was the loser in the battle of religions and politics.e

  Israelis had not quite lost their faith in peace. At the presidential retreat of Camp David, Clinton brought together the new prime minister Ehud Barak and Arafat in July 2000. Barak boldly offered a “final” deal: 91 percent of the West Bank with the Palestinian capital in Abu Dis and all the Arab suburbs of east Jerusalem. The Old City would remain under Israeli sovereignty but the Muslim and Christian Quarters and the Temple Mount would be under Palestinian “sovereign custodianship.” The earth and tunnels beneath the Sanctuary—above all the Foundation Stone of the Temple—would remain Israeli and for the first time, Jews would be allowed to pray in limited numbers somewhere on the Temple Mount. The Old City would be jointly patrolled but demilitarized and open to all. Already offered half the Old City’s quarters, Arafat demanded the Armenian Quarter. Israel agreed, effectively offering three-quarters of the Old City. Despite Saudi pressure to accept, Arafat felt he could neither negotiate a final settlement of the Palestinians’ right of return nor approve Israeli sovereignty over the Dome which belonged to all Islam.

  “Do you want to attend my funeral?” he exclaimed to Clinton. “I won’t relinquish Jerusalem and the Holy Places.” But his rejection was much more fundamental: during the talks, Arafat shocked the Americans and Israelis when he insisted that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple, which had in fact existed only on the Samaritan Mount Gerizim. The city’s holiness for Jews was a modern invention. In talks later that year in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency, Israel offered full sovereignty on the Temple Mount keeping only a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies beneath, but Arafat rejected this.

  On 28 September 2000, Sharon, leader of the Likud opposition, added to Barak’s problems by swaggering onto the Temple Mount, guarded by phalanxes of Israeli police, with a “message of peace” that clearly menaced Islam’s beloved Aqsa and Dome. The resulting riots escalated into the Aqsa Intifada, partly another stone-throwing insurgency and partly a pre-planned campaign of suicide bombings aimed by Fatah and Hamas at Israeli civilians. If the first Intifada had helped the Palestinians, this one destroyed Israeli trust in the peace process, led to the election of Sharon, and fatally split the Palestinians themselves.

  Sharon suppressed the Intifada by smashing the Palestinian Authority, besieging and humiliating Arafat. He died in 2004 and the Israelis refused to allow his burial on the Temple Mount. His successor Abbas lost the 2006 elections to Hamas. After a short conflict, Hamas seized Gaza while Abbas’ Fatah continued to rule the West Bank. Sharon built a security wall through Jerusalem, a depressing concrete eyesore which did, however, succeed in stopping the suicide bombings.

  The seeds of peace not only fell on stony ground but poisoned it too; the peace discredited its makers. Jerusalem today lives in a state of schizophrenic anxiety. Jews and Arabs dare not venture into each other’s neighbourhoods; secular Jews avoid ultra-Orthodox who stone them for not resting on the Sabbath or for wearing disrespectful clothing; messianic Jews test police resolve and tease Muslim anxiety by attempting to pray on the Temple Mount; and the Christian sects keep brawling. The faces of Jerusalemites are tense, their voices are angry and one feels that everyone, even those of all three faiths who are convinced that they are fulfilling a divine plan, is unsure of what tomorrow will bring.

  TOMORROW

  Here, more than anywhere else on earth, we crave, we hope and we search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possesiveness. It is not always easy to find. Today, Jerusalem has not been so large, so embellished, nor has she been so overwhelmingly Jewish for two millennia. Yet she is also the most populous Palestinian city.f Sometimes her very Jewishness is presented as somehow synthetic and against the grain of Jerusalem, but this is a distortion of the city’s past and present.

  Jerusalem’s history is a chronicle of settlers, colonists and pilgrims, who have included Arabs, Jews and many others, in a place that has grown and contracted many times. During more than a millennium of Islamic rule, Jerusalem was repeatedly colonized by Islamic settlers, scholars, Sufis and pilgrims who were Arabs, Turks, Indians, Sudanese, Iranians, Kurds, Iraqis and Maghrebis, as well as Christian Armenians Serbs, Georgians and Russians—not so different from the Sephardic and Russian Jews who later settled there for similar reasons. It was this universal character that convinced Lawrence of Arabia that Jerusalem was more a Levantine city than an Arab one, and this is utterly intrinsic to the city’s character.

  It is often forgotten that all the suburbs of Jerusalem outside the walls were new settlements built between 1860 and 1948 by Arabs as well as Jews and Europeans. The Arab areas, such as Sheikh Jarrah, are no older than the Jewish ones, and no more, or less, legitimate.

  Both Muslims and Jews have unimpeachable historical claims. Jews have inhabited, and revered, this city for 3,000 years, and have the same right to live in, and settle around, an equitable Jerusalem as Arabs do. Yet there are times when even the most harmless Jewish restoration is presented as illegitimate: in 2010, the Israelis finally consecrated the restored Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, which had been demolished by the Jordanians in 1948, yet this provoked European media criticism and minor riots in eastern Jerusalem.

  However, it is a very different matter when the existing Arab inhabitants find themselves removed, coerced and harassed, their property expropriated with dubious legal rulings to make way for new Jewish settlements, backed by the full power of state and mayoralty, and fiercely promoted by people with the urgent determination of those on a divine mission. The aggressive building of settlements, designed to colonize Arab neighbourhoods and sabotage any peace deal to share the city, and the systematic neglect of services and new housing in Arab areas, have given even the most innocent Jewish projects a bad name.

  Israel faces two paths—the Jerusalemite, religious-nationalist state versus a liberal, Westernized Tel Aviv which is nicknamed “the Bubble.” There is a danger that the nationalistic project in Jerusalem, and the obsessive settlement-building on the West Bank, may so distort Israel’s own interests that they do more harm to Israel itself than any benefit they may bring to Jewish Jerusalem.g However the tides of opinion ebb and flow, Israel has the same right to security and prosperity as any other country—though Jerusalem is not just any capital. Some of the settlements undermine Israel’s record, which is uniquely impressive by historical standards, as guardian of a Jerusalem for all faiths. “Today for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines,” the writer Elie Wiesel wrote in a
n open letter to U.S. President Obama in 2010 and, under Israel’s democracy, this is for the most part true.

  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 not always true for Palestinians who endure a multitude of bureaucratic harassments, while the security wall makes it harder for West Bank inhabitants 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 wrong to 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 moment they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.”