I personally had no desire to burn anything, nor did I fancy myself Sarah, or Esther, or Mary, but I did itch to see, be in, and feel holy sites as often and obsessively as a sex-starved Saudi let loose in Amsterdam’s red-light district. In truth, I didn’t even care about the religious ownership of the place (after all, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all sprang from the same origin: here, anyway). I prayed in the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock, the famous golden-domed building that has become the symbol of the city and is the third holiest place in Islam, visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, and the Nativity where he was born—I’m even one of the few Muslims I’ve ever seen at the Western Wall. I would even go so far as to say my fascination, my own form of “Jerusalem Syndrome” was behind my attraction to the places that really began to draw me in with each passing week: the places that were off-limits, guarded, forgotten, or somehow forbidden.
Admittedly, part of my urge to go off-limits has to do with a natural attraction to the mysterious. I would wager that this urge is a part of many people’s attraction to ghost hunting, a yearning for that which reminds the soul that there may well be other dimensions—a search for confirmation that God really exists. And although there are plenty sites with legends, and accounts of the miraculous in and around the Holy Land, there are some that are considered so holy that they are a point of jealous contention among the people who live there. From secret tunnels, to underground chambers, and streets that once ran with blood up to the knees of Crusader horses—these places are closed not only to tourists, but to locals as well. Maybe it was my own quirky manifestation of Jerusalem Syndrome, but when I learned of these places, I desperately wanted in.
Although I couldn’t completely explain what really motivated my attraction to some of these places—I knew that it was something more than mere curiosity. Most likely, it was a mixture of my old urge to be accepted (after all, I would have to prove myself somehow to the authorities in charge of the closed sites) as well as the urge to somehow push my limits during the limited time I had there on my own. Whatever the reason, something smacking of obsession began to grow in my heart. And now that I was here without my husband, without a man, without a friend or companion, it was an urge that I could actually try to satisfy completely on my own merits.
By now, it was fewer than five months into our stay and I’d visited several places that neither my husband nor anyone in the family had ever seen. This was no small thing given that the territories of Palestine and Israel, combined, equal less than ten thousand square miles (slightly larger than the state of New Jersey), and was the nomadic home turf of the family for at least ten generations. Yet the truth was, I couldn’t have seen most of them with my husband even if he wanted to, either because he wouldn’t be allowed to go as a Palestinian, because many of the sites were “inappropriate” by his family’s standards, or because going to see them was just plain risky, and I would feel responsible if anything happened to him—or anyone else I dragged along.
On and off through the centuries, and certainly for the last sixty-four years, the Holy Land has been as divided as Southern California gang territory. Opposing factions don’t visit each other’s turf unless armed with a gun and backed up by an army unit. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza (especially men) are not allowed to visit Israeli areas (except sometimes as laborers), and Israeli Jews would never enter a Palestinian village except by (sometimes fatal) mistake, or as part of an armed military operation. In fact, large red signs printed in English and Hebrew are posted outside literally every Palestinian city, town, and village throughout the occupied territories, warning Israeli drivers against making any wrong turns.
One of the things I was happy to discover, however, was that the head scarf and conservative dress I always wore meant that I could pretty well pass as in Arab in Palestinian areas (until I opened my mouth), and be virtually ignored as a (relatively) harmless woman in most Jewish areas. Also, as a visa-holding American, I could and often did pull the clueless tourist card—which certainly wasn’t a stretch—and pretend to be lost. This blending-in afforded me a great opportunity to see the places I’d always wanted to, and since my husband wasn’t around, I didn’t have to tell anyone where I was going. Sure, it might be a little dangerous sometimes—if anything happened to me in those places, nobody would even know where to begin looking for me! However, I decided that for the time being, the risk didn’t bother me as much as provoking the ire of my in-laws or my husband.
With that in mind, one afternoon I decided to give it a try. I called home and made sure that the babysitter was comfortably in charge of Karim (by then the older ones spent almost all of their waking hours outside roaming the village with their cousins), and I drove to Jerusalem after work, passing through the tunnels into the Gilo neighborhood. The Gilo Road is simply the fastest way to Jerusalem, if you are an Israeli or a “tourist” like me. It was also infamous because it was one of the most impressive roadways in terms of scale and money spent, and the most blatantly unfair to the Palestinians, who were forbidden from using it, even though it was constructed on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. In fact, it was this stretch of highway that really brought the whole issue of “apartheid roads” to the world’s attention. These roads and highways connected the more than two hundred Israeli settlements inside the West Bank to the rest of Israel. Even former President Jimmy Carter, the architect of the historic Camp David Peace Accord, described the roads like the Gilo tunnels as “spider webs,” noting that not only were the Palestinians restricted from using the roads, but in many cases, even from crossing them.
Of course, since I had my yellow-plated car and my tourist visa, I was usually allowed onto the road (although sometimes individual soldiers would turn me away). Still, that didn’t mean that I could just drive on through the large checkpoint in front of the tunnels like the settlers and other Israelis (although dark-skinned Jews without typical settler garb might have to slow down to show their IDs, which, in Israel, indicate religion). This was because whether Israeli citizens or not, all Palestinians, Christian or Muslim, as well as many Israelis of Middle Eastern heritage, always had to pull over in a designated side lane to be inspected, while their Jewish cousins sped by with nary a break-tap. Because my head scarf made me “look Arab” to the soldiers manning the lanes, that meant me, too.
It was here that I regularly got a good lesson on just how insulated many young Israelis were (and at the Gilo checkpoint, they were almost always the youngest soldiers, right out of high school), especially about Muslims. For many, if not all of the soldiers, I was the first non-Arab Muslim they’d ever seen. And in spite of the fact that the majority of Muslims in the world aren’t Arabs, I could just not get them to grasp what “kind of person” I was, even after I showed them my American passport. That was until I learned to say the magic line, “I’m an American-American, you know…American?”
For some crazy reason that would usually explain it all.
Beseder…ah, it’s all good. Go ahead.
And I (courtesy of American-American) was off.
As you emerge from the Gilo tunnels and approach Jerusalem from the south, you pass a large “Entering Jerusalem” sign that, at first glance, looks just like any other highway sign in the world, except that it it’s trilingual. “Welcome to Jerusalem,” it proclaims in English, then Hebrew, and finally Arabic. Seems egalitarian as heck as long as you can’t actually read it.
Thus, it read, on the final line, “Ahlan Wa Sahlan fi Yerushalyim”—all Arabic right up to the name of the city, where its Hebrew name is then rendered in bold, oddly connected Arabic script. Strange, given the Arabic word for the city is Al Quds, and has been for thousands of years. That the English version got to keep its “Jerusalem,” and the Hebrew its “Yerushalyim” while the Arabic version had its traditional name replaced said a lot, and was designed to be a virtual slap to the face of every Palestinian who could read it. Of course, if y
ou were one of the many tourists passing by, it looked innocent enough, but the locals on both sides knew the score in the Holy Land—where even something as innocuous as a highway sign becomes a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—there for all to see in stark, reflective paint.
Although I told the family that I was planning to pray in the Dome of the Rock and do some clothes shopping (oddly, the clothes shopping was by far the better-received itinerary explanation), I was actually planning to visit two places—both pools—before nightfall, and because it was winter I didn’t have much time. Still, before I could park my car and head for the first pool in the Old City, I had to make a pit-stop to buy some pepper spray in the New City’s Ben Yehuda market, where I had spotted some in a shop a few weeks before.
Ben Yehuda market, located in downtown Jerusalem, is an odd place—a mishmash of artsy Judaica shops, cheap clothes, gelato and—what else—army surplus stores, all selling cheap “IDF” T-shirts and used flak jackets, some still sporting the word “PRESS” spelled out in black permanent marker on sports tape. They also sold pepper spray, and I needed it for some of the places I was planning to go.
With newly purchased spray in hand, I drove again through the time warp that separates West Jerusalem from her eastern side, and dropped abruptly from the modern, busy thoroughfare onto the narrow roads that snaked through the neighborhoods next to the Old City walls. It was here that the city offered the best view…the one that could really take your breath away. Otherwise, the road was very distracting, with its construction, dirt, traffic, and darting pedestrians, The Old City and its Golden Dome seem to appear to have sprung up from the dank earth like some fantastical scene in a pop-up book.
At the end of the road I finally parked in the tiny asphalt parking lot outside of the Damascus Gate, known in Arabic as Bah al Amud, or the “Gate of the Column.” It was named after the Roman victory column that stood there until the second century CE. Today, the column is long gone, but if you look up at the fortified, castle-like structure, you can usually see its modern equivalent—an Israeli soldier lounging in the large, stone rampart window above the gate, gun against the wall, one knee up, like a pirate in a Captain Morgan commercial.
Just inside, too, waited omnipresent blue-uniformed policemen, scanning the crowd for young men who might be there without the “tasreeh,” the permission they needed to be in Jerusalem. But even here, the Jerusalem of the imagination asserted its age-old grip on the place—and you couldn’t help but feel that once you’d passed through the gate’s massive, rotting door you had passed back into history. You might be accompanied, however, by a mob pushing through the bottleneck that the gate was designed to create (a remnant of the centuries the wall served as protection during war or siege). Many of them looked just as they might have a hundred years ago—from Haredi Jews, priests and nuns of every Christian denomination, Muslim women, and old-time Palestinian men who looked as if they’d just stepped out of the pages of Lawrence of Arabia. Then, just when you thought you were smack dab in a genuine, Jerusalem moment, you’d pass through the arch on the other side and back into the sun, suddenly faced with a vista of shops, kiosks, and tables displaying scarves, plastic toys and—what else—crotchless body suits.
And this was where all of the fun was. For here, innocuous-looking smooth stone pushcart ramps were one of the few ways forward into the two alleyways snaking into the old quarters of the city, and unless you’d already learned that it was better to take the narrow, irregular stairs alongside, you could easily learn the hard way just how slippery those ramps could be. Later, this would become one of my favorite parts of the city, where I could sit back and watch the show with a nice, cold Pepsi in hand. It was literally a demolition derby of pushcarts, tractors, old ladies, and hapless tourists.
In fact, if you were really lucky, there might be a load of some messy fruit involved—say, watermelon—(Oh yes, it happened, and it was mwaah, a magnificent sight). Still, in those early days of my Jerusalem wanderings, I remained far too entranced by the otherworldliness of the place to take sick pleasure in the sight of overturned carts of watermelon bowling down pedestrians. It was a magical scene of stone and battlements, and sounds of ancient languages. Even the smell was heavenly: a combination of smoky, roasting, garlicky meat from the sandwich shop at the head of the two alleys, and fragrant piles of bright-green mint and sage, warming under the Jerusalem sun.
All of this was a siren song of the Old City, saying, “Come on in, dearie” as it pulled the faithful down into its darkened arteries and into the heart of its world.
CHAPTER 16
Troubled Waters
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading; it vexes me to choose another guide.
-EMILY BRONTE
The road to Bethesda, part of the Via Delarosa, or the path that many Christians believe Jesus walked to his crucifixion, is bare compared to the rest of the Old City. One of the few roads wide enough to allow a car to pass, its swath of open sky makes it seem lighter. In addition, because the road is surrounded mainly by churches and homes hidden behind the road’s high stone walls, it lacks the commercial feel and the mess of the rest of the Old City, somehow keeping itself a quiet haven, pretty in its cobblestones and arches.
Bethesda itself has been known since pagan times for its miraculous waters. I’d always wanted to see it, and I knew it was touristy enough to be a comfortable first step into what was fast resembling some kind of pilgrim’s “to do” list pulling me forward. Plus, when you looked up the place online, it was beautiful.
An immense, walled complex deep in the Muslim Quarter north of the Temple Mount, Bethesda is essentially a huge garden. A miracle in its own right in this arid city, it must have been peerlessly breathtaking in its day. Graced by the beautiful Church of St. Anne, a twelfth century Crusader church commemorating the birthplace of the Mother of Mary, sacred to Christians, Jews, and pagans before them, believers have come here for centuries to be relieved of their afflictions, believing that the water in the Bethesda Pool could cure them. According to the Bible:
…Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had…
- John 5:1-9
Today there are no throngs of the wretched lining its pools and colonnades—although it is said that some of their spirits remain (no matter, you’d never catch me hanging around the place at night). But there are lots of hushed, orderly tourists wearing matching sun visors emblazoned with their tour group’s logo.
Darting between them, I stepped through the old fortified door frame and was surprised, despite having seen its picture, by its openness: the beautiful courtyard, field of pools, arched cisterns and ruins spread out under the watchful shadow of the church.
Although I longed to be ignored enough to just wander around and soak up the atmosphere of the place, one look around told me that I was too out-of-place for that to fly. Worse, the Christian crowds were thinning out, making me stick out even more like a sore thumb in my Islamic dress. And that’s when Luigi spotted me.
Luigi—that was the name that instantly came to mind when I saw him coming my way—was all confused expression, pudgy belly, and blue denim overalls. He turned out to be the Palestinian caretaker/tour guide/gardener of the place, and he was clearly befuddled when I told him I wasn’t lost, as he initially supposed.
“But, do you need help with something?” he pressed in Arabic, unable to understand what an Palestinian-Muslim woman would be doing alone in Christian Bethesda.
“No,” I responded, “I just want to look around.”
“Sure, welcome!” he said, a little too enthusiastically. “Actually, wait over there and I’ll sh
ow you everything.”
I sat down on a wide, stone bench on the broad, tree-lined lane in front of the church and watched Luigi sell tickets to a small group of European-looking tourists before he sneaked me in for a behind-the-scenes tour. We even went down into a dark, dank cistern, where he joked about the crazy foreigners and their habit of throwing money into the water in hopes of a blessing. Jerking his head to indicate the tourists walking around above us, he continued, “They throw in money. Even paper bills! The water goes up and down in here, and it used to more, before…but as soon as the tourists leave, the local boys come in and swim through that dirty water to take the money. They’re poor, and the money helps them, right? Who’s to say it’s wrong?”
When we finished the tour of the site and its impressive gardens, Luigi (by then, he’d told me his name was Majid, but I somehow couldn’t make the mental switch) seemed like an okay guy after all. He was simply a hospitable man, taking time out of his busy day to show around a foreign “sister” like me. In fact, he even insisted on making tea, which he served on a large, plastic table pulled into the middle of the garden.
As Luigi sat across from me, he waxed poetic about the place, its beauty and history. After that, there was the typical conversation—the standard diatribe against the Israeli occupation, the fact that he, as a Palestinian man, could not find satisfactory work, and the assertion that the Fathers at Bethesda treated him better than did his Muslim co-faithful.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 7
