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 probably the greatest ever Christian power—and its evangelicals continue to look to the End Days in Jerusalem, just as U.S. 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 as change sweeps the Arab world, this unique combination of power, faith and fashion, all played out under the hothouse glare of twenty-four-hour TV news, heaps the pressure onto 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 influenced by overmighty religious-nationalist parties while the fractious Palestinian factions, encouraged by the Arab Spring, try to reconcile their very different programmes—that of Fatah, conciliatory and secular; that of Hamas, militant and Islamicist—to form a united Palestinian government. 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. While at some point, elections will hopefully choose a democratic Palestinian government, it is unclear whether the two factions can work together to provide a stable interlocutor with Israel and whether Hamas can become a trusted partner in a peace process with Israel. At some point in the negotiations, Hamas will need to renounce violence and recognize the Jewish State. Furthermore, as always in her history, Jerusalem will be affected by the turbulent destinies of Egypt, Syria and the other revolutions that began to remould the Middle East in the Arab Spring of 2011.
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 puzzle within a labyrinth: 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 U.S.–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 the almost two decades since 1993, the Palestinians have never formally agreed to share the city, though there is hope: they did so secretly and informally in 2007/8. Yet when each made their most flexible offer and their positions were very close, it was the wrong time for the other. And the revelation in leaked documents of such a Palestinian offer provoked furious accusations of betrayal on the Arab side.
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 as a state and as a democracy, and justice and respect 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 run by an international committee, 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.h 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 Danzig to Trieste, have usually ended badly.
The Temple Mount is difficult 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 bu
t 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. As late as 2010, only the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh 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 of a Palestinian state. On the other hand, Hamas’s frequent firing of missiles into Israel from Gaza is an act of war. In its way, the Palestinian denial of the ancient Jewish heritage and the Jewishness of the modern state are 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.
Shortly before 4 a.m., just as Rabbi Rabinowitz is rising in the Jewish Quarter, a pebble skims across the window of Wajeeh al-Nusseibeh in Sheikh Jarrah. When he opens his door, Aded al-Judeh, aged eighty, hands Nusseibeh a heavy, medieval 12-inch key. Nusseibeh, now sixty, scion of one of the grandest Jerusalem Families,i already dressed in suit and tie, sets off briskly through the Damascus Gate, down to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Nusseibeh, who has been the Custodian of the Holy Sepulchre for more than twenty-five years, arrives at 4:00 a.m. precisely and knocks on the towering ancient doors set in Melisende’s Romanesque façade. Inside the Church, which he locked at 8 p.m. the night before, the sextons of the Greeks, Latins and Armenians have already negotiated who is to open the doors that particular day. The priests of the three reigning sects have spent the night in jovial companionship and ritual prayer. At 2 a.m. the dominant Orthodox, who are first in all things, start their Mass, with eight priests chanting in Greek, around the Tomb, before they hand over to the Armenians, for their badarak service in Armenian which is just starting as the gates are opened; the Catholics get their chance at about 6 a.m. Meanwhile all the sects are singing their Matins services. Only one Copt is allowed to stay the night but he prays alone in ancient Coptic Egyptian.
As the gate opens, the Ethiopians, in their rooftop monastery and St. Michael’s Chapel, its entrance just to the right of the main portal, start to chant in Amharic, their services so long that they lean on the shepherd’s crooks that are piled up in their churches ready to support their weary worshippers. By night, the Church resounds to a euphonic hum of many languages and chants like a stone forest in which many species of bird are singing their own choruses. This is Jerusalem and Nusseibeh never knows what is going to happen: “I know thousands depend on me and I worry if the key won’t open or something goes wrong. I first opened it when I was fifteen and thought it was fun but now I realize it’s a serious matter.” Whether there is war or peace, he must open the door and says his father often slept in the lobby of the Church just to be sure.
Yet Nusseibeh knows there is likely to be a priestly brawl several times a year. Even in the twenty-first century, the priests veer between accidental courtesy, born of good manners and the tedium of long sepulchral nights, and visceral historical resentment that can explode any time but usually at Easter. The Greeks, who control most of the Church and are the most numerous, fight the Catholics and Armenians and usually win the battles. The Copts and Ethiopians, despite their shared Monophysitism, are especially venomous: after the Six Day War, the Israelis in a rare intervention gave the Coptic St. Michael’s Chapel to the Ethiopians, to punish Nasser’s Egypt and support Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. In peace negotiations, support for the Copts usually features in Egyptian demands. The Israeli High Court decided that St. Michael’s belongs to the Copts though it remains in the possession of the Ethiopians, a very Jerusalemite situation. In July 2002, when a Coptic priest s
unned himself near the Ethiopians’ dilapidated rooftop eyrie, he was beaten with iron bars as punishment for the Copts’ mean treatment of their African brethren. The Copts rushed to their priest’s aid: four Copts and seven Ethiopians (who seem to lose every brawl here) were hospitalized.
In September 2004, at the Feast of the Holy Cross, the Greek patriarch Ireneos asked the Franciscans to close the door of the Chapel of the Apparition. When they refused, he led his bodyguards and priests against the Latins. The Israeli police intervened but were attacked by the priests who as adversaries are often just as tough as Palestinian stone throwers. At the Holy Fire in 2005, there was a punch-up when the Armenian superior almost emerged with the flame instead of the Greeks.j The pugilistic patriarch Ireneos was finally deposed for selling the Imperial Hotel at the Jaffa Gate to Israeli settlers. Nusseibeh shrugs wearily: “Well, as brothers, they have their upsets and I help settle them. We’re neutral like the United Nations keeping the peace in this holy place.” Nusseibeh and Judeh play complex roles at each Christian festival. At the feverish and crowded Holy Fire, Nusseibeh is the official witness.
Now the sexton opens a small hatch in the right-hand door and hands through a ladder. Nusseibeh takes the ladder and leans it against the left-hand door. He unlocks the lower lock of the right door with his giant key before climbing the ladder and unlocking the top one. When he has climbed down, the priests swing open the immense door before they open the left leaf themselves. Inside, Nusseibeh greets the priests: “Peace!”
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