Then came the gauntlet of questions. They all peppered me with vaguely personal inquiries about my conversion, marital status, and, when they found out where I was living, about my life in Safa and the recent troubles there. It was all very friendly and good natured—not at all like the atmosphere in the English Department, thank God.
I pointed out that I was a teacher at Hebron University. After all, if I had to put up with comments like, “You can call me any time…my wife is used to girls calling me,” from Dean Ladies Man, I could use my position to gain some extra cred. It was only fair.
I smiled, they smiled, and the Sheikh ruled that the Waqf’s chief archeologist on the site, Dr. Yusuf Natshe, would be “happy” to help me—only I would have to wait until the following week, as he was currently “tied up with the Pope.”
I could respect that, and one week later, I was actually early when I arrived for the meeting with Yusuf. After finding the entrance to his offices through a small passageway and up a narrow flight of stairs, I saw that Yusuf hadn’t yet arrived. He had an assistant, however, who invited me into his small side office to wait, and as I chatted with the soft-spoken man, I realized that I recognized him from one of the many times I’d been called out as a possible foreigner during my early trips to the Mount.
That day I’d used bad judgment and chosen one of the smaller, northern gates that saw almost no foot traffic. It featured a long, echoing tunnel that led up to the gate’s open door, giving the Israeli police, stationed just outside the entrance, clear reception of my kids’ loud English as they skipped through the gate’s open door and out into the Mount’s northeastern courtyard.
Wagif! “Stop,” said one of the two policemen, addressing me in Arabic. I assumed from his accent and his dark complexion that he was Druze or Bedouin—either of which could be trouble.
“Where are you from?” he continued, taking my passport and flipping to its photo. “You are not Muslim,” he said. “You can’t go inside.”
“I am a Muslim,” I said, “Look at me. I’m speaking to you in Arabic; I’m telling you that I’m a Muslim. What more do you want?”
“You are not a Muslim,” he insisted, as if I’d come to this forgotten, obscure portal with a gaggle of Muslim children simply to pull something over on him.
Unwilling to engage in the debate with him, but too proud to call back my kids, who were already playing in the inner courtyard, I insisted that he just call over a Waqf guard, the standard operating procedure I’d been through dozens of times, who could then (as Muslims, themselves) question me on some routine matter of faith, confirm my knowledge, and let me in.
For some reason, though, this guy wanted the pleasure of smoking me out as an imposter, or showing off his Arabic. I wasn’t sure which.
“No, you say the Fatiha to me,” he said, referring to what is known as the “Opening Chapter” of the Quran, a portion that every Muslim knows because it is said at the beginning of every one of the five prescribed daily prayers in Islam.
Still, there was something about performing in front this guy—and that’s what it felt like—that just pissed me off; he was flexing his muscles as if I were a trained dog doing tricks to satisfy his macho ego. It was my Achilles heel.
His voice rose, and mine did, too.
“Like I said, just call over the Waqf guy, and he will confirm.”
“Just say eet!” By now the officer had switched to English, presumably for the benefit of his partner, a blond, short-haired Ashkenazi, or Israeli of European origin, who, perhaps seeing that the moment offered more entertainment than his cell-phone conversation, hung up and walked over to assess the situation.
“What’s the problem?” asked Blondie.
I replied testily, “The problem? The problem is this guy doesn’t want to let me go because I haven’t kissed his ass enough.” I was shouting and pointing my finger at his chest.
Bad idea.
At this, Mr. Arabic flew into a spitting, eye-popping, tomato-faced rage. Luckily for me, however, just then the Waqf guard happened over to see what all the commotion was about.
“You! You can’t say that to me!” the officer screamed, “This is a holy place! You don’t know. I could be a Muslim!”
The truth was he was partly right. I shouldn’t have said it; it was a holy place, but there was just something about pushy men that drove my good sense and reason to distant lands. At that bizarre moment, all I wanted to do was yell back, just as loud as he had, and I did, shouting, “Well, then we have a bigger problem than I thought!”
“What?” He turned to his partner, switching languages again to Hebrew, “What did she say?!!”
At this, I turned my back on the officer, dismissing him as so many soldiers had done to me and the kids over the months, knowing full well that I would probably be arrested or at least kicked out of the city for my impertinence. Now, I addressed the silent Waqf guard, who obviously couldn’t understand the language of the exchange, but could certainly understand the tone (and was perhaps wondering why they hadn’t kicked me out already).
“If a Muslim says he’s a Muslim, then he’s a Muslim, right?” I said, referring to the Shehada or declaration of faith that every new Muslim says to convert. “It’s a single sentence: ‘I testify that there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.’ That’s the rule of our religion, right?”
“Well, yes” he answered.
“Then I don’t have to say the Fatiha to prove that I’m a Muslim, right?” I said, glaring at the officer, determined not to jump through the hoop he had set for me.
“Yes…that’s right.”
“Fine, I answered, “Ashadu La ilah illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah.” I said, simply, and without a word turned my back on them all, joined my kids in the courtyard and walked away toward the Dome of the Rock, leaving the Bedouin officer to yell after me, in Arabic, “Crazy! She’s CRAZY!”
He was only half wrong.
If Yusuf’s assistant recognized me as the crazy lady today, he gave no indication of it, but maybe he was too polite to bring it up. Soon, though, Yusuf arrived, poking his head in the office and telling him to follow me to his office next door.
Yusuf Natshe was nothing like I expected him to be. Middle-aged, clean shaven and a little jumpy, as if he maybe suffered from the same kind of coffee habit I did. He looked for all the world like Mel Brooks.
“You were early,” he said.
“Yes, I know, I…”
“I don’t know why they always send all the foreigners to me…like I don’t have enough work.”
Uh oh. This might not be good.
“I know why. It’s because I’m the one who can speak English around here,” he interrupted, not so much talking to me as thinking aloud. Then, as if resigning himself to his fate, he inhaled, laced his fingers together on his stomach, and leaned back. “Well, anyway. Welcome, Jennifer. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I’d like to know about you and what you do here, for one thing.”
“Ah, well, that will take some time to explain. But what can I say for now? I am an archaeologist, a writer, a Palestinian. I like to go long-distance bike riding. But I have to deal with so many requests from people who want my time. Just look at this email from someone representing this person—what’s his name, yes, Alex Trebek, from a game show. They want to film here for a game? A game. Can I allow that? And then, there are always people who say they are someone other than who they really are. You have to be careful and consider the emails and phone calls very carefully. This is a sensitive place.”
The guy was no dummy. In fact, I started to realize that his bluntness was probably an essential part of the job, a kind of warning—don’t mess with me, I’ll find you out. If he didn’t even trust Alex Trebek, what was he going to think of me when I finally worked up the nerve to make my request? Rattled, I continue asking random, vapid questions about his work and the work of the Waqf in general, which he answered willingly enough. But afraid of an i
nstant and easy “no,” I put off being direct for so long I ran out of time. Yusuf suddenly announced that he had to run to another appointment.
Frustrated with myself for wasting the meeting, I left feeling I’d blown it. When I finally contacted Yusuf to ask for another appointment, however, he was out of the country on business, and with no firm indication of when he might be back. With my time in the country dwindling, I decided it was probably best to forget the whole silly idea of getting into the off-limits places on the Mount. Who did I think I was, anyway? It actually felt good to give up.
Finally done with my classes, I focused on taking the kids on a long-deserved tour of the country, where we swam in virtually every body of relatively clean water we could find. We went to the Golan Heights near the Syrian border and swam in the muddy Jordan River, and then hiked to a deserted swimming hole set in perfectly hexagonal shaped volcanic rocks. We returned to the Mediterranean, floated in the Dead Sea, and drove back over to the ancient seaport of Acca, capped with its beautiful green-domed mosque, and surrounded by blue water, crashing against crusader walls.
We even fit in a few more of the kids’ favorite places that somehow kept calling them back—Solomon’s Pools, Lower Herod’s fortress (an ancient bath complex riddled with abandoned cisterns, tunnels, and crumbling mosaics—always deserted, aching for intrepid little explorers to walk its once opulent grounds), and the kids’ favorite, the caverns under the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
We were having a great time, but I still had to adjust to thoughts of going home. I was happy that I would be able to see my husband and family, stop being a single parent—and let the kids get to know their dad again. At the same time, though, I knew that the huge loss of daily freedom, as well as the loss of the close family relationships that the kids had developed and clearly now cherished, might make their reentry into their old, rather lonely American existence a difficult one. And then there was the knowledge in the back of my mind that I hadn’t been able to pull off all I’d personally set out to do. I hadn’t been able to morph my mishmash of an identity into enough of an asset to get into the Mercy Gate or had a chance to get a glimpse of the “Great Sea” that so intrigued me as a subject in Simpson’s painting. But I’d done all I could. I’d just have to chalk it up to fate…
I was ready to go home—except for all that.
CHAPTER 34
Dog Days
Every problem contains the seeds of its own solution.
-STANLEY ARNOLD
I started closing things down in the house, the power, phone, covering the furniture with plastic, and began our goodbyes to the friends and students I’d met over the year. I even started to feel depressed about leaving my husband’s family! After all, I liked them and I suspect they probably liked me, perhaps even more now that our days in the village were dwindling.
One morning, in the midst of our preparations for our coming departure, I finally received an email from Yusuf, saying that he would meet me again. I was surprised and determined not to waste another minute this time beating around the bush. So, I decided to respond to the email referencing exactly what I wanted. After all, with the days quickly dwindling, I didn’t have much chance of success anyway (I nervously reassured myself).
Quickly, and before I lost my nerve I wrote out in black and white just why I wanted his help—then I hit send and hoped for the best.
Unfortunately, the next day I received a scathing response from Yusuf, saying that although he would meet me again, it was not the time for “adventurous discoveries,” because whatever is found, reported on, or photographed has and continues to be used for nationalistic aims. My desire to go inside the Gate and see the underground structures, he said, could be misconstrued by opposing groups and those small but vocal and powerful segments of Israeli society that were pushing for the restoration of the Temple, right now. Then, summing up, he added that he’d never heard of the Great Sea.
Well that pretty much says it all, I thought, sitting at the kitchen table and feeling a little stupid. Actually, I wanted to crawl under the table, as if I’d been slapped on the hand like a silly child. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t agree with his core premise that opening the closed sites must necessarily be dangerous to the status quo on the Mount. It certainly never stopped Israelis from opening disputed sites, complete with artfully placed flood-lighting, placards and pre-recorded storylines to support their exclusive historical narrative of the place—often as a means to excuse confiscation of areas owned and inhabited by Palestinians for hundreds of years.
It was a prominent Israeli Archeologist who first explained the issue to me a few months before when I met him on a tour of the so called “City of David Visitor’s Center,” located just south of the Old City’s walls.
Yoni Mizrahi was well known in Jerusalem as a kind of crusader for the scientific integrity of archaeology in the Holy Land. Formerly of the Israeli Antiquities Department, Yoni joined an organization of concerned Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists to run alternative tours in the City of David because, as he explained, he “objected to the science of archaeology being used for political, or even religious claims.” He explained that some politically motivated Israelis—like those at the City of David—misuse digs as a way to “claim territory” instead of truly studying the history of a particular site. This, according to Yoni, is what happened at the visitor’s center—run by a notorious right-wing private organization called Elad, which publish guides for its close to 400,000 mostly Israeli visitors touting the place as the bedrock of an exclusive Jewish claim to East Jerusalem.
. Unfortunately, the site is also located smack-dab in the middle of the ancient Palestinian village of Silwan, an area Elad and settler groups desperately want for their own.
Problem is, many of Elad’s archeological claims are highly controversial. According to Yoni and others, including prominent archaeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University, while there are extensive ruins on the site that date back to the ninth century BCE, there isn’t a smidgen of evidence that refers to David or his palace. As Yoni explained, “You’d think from all the signs and brochures Elad gives out to the center’s visitors, they’d come across an engraving that said, ‘Welcome to David’s Palace!’ But they haven’t. They just dig and claim.” It was as Raphael Greenberg, another Tel Aviv lecturer pointed out in a 2010 interview for the Time magazine article, “Digging up Trouble,” “Their attitude seems to be that if you believe in the Bible, you don’t need proof…You’re supposed to dig for six weeks and then report on what you find. In the City of David, they’ve been digging nonstop for two years without a satisfactory report.” The reason? According to scientists like Yoni and Greenberg, the right wing uses archaeology as a way to “throw out the Palestinians living in the area and turn it into a Jewish place.”
Thus, it was this problem that was on Yusuf’s mind when I mentioned the closed sites. Not only did he worry that allowing me access to places the Israeli authorities on the Mount deemed “off limits,” might spook them into thinking that the Waqf was up to something that might strengthen their claim on the site, but that my poking around and taking pictures might give people and organizations like Elad incentives to interpret whatever I (or more likely, other potential visitors) photographed or described as “evidence” that the site should be theirs. For organizations like Elad, there simply wasn’t a concept of accepting history in all of its layers as evidence that the place in essence belongs to all who call it holy. In Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country, history’s remains are just another kind of ammunition in the fight for ownership, and people like Yusuf were justifiably worried that a similar, and exclusionary “City of David” could easily happen on the Temple Mount—and that, my friends, would amount to a new and terrible war that would outstrip any that had come before.
I understood Yusuf’s point, but at the same time I felt that the Waqf was missing an important opportunity to do exactly t
he opposite of Elad’s agenda; that by opening up and exploring each and every layer of history that they could (without prompting the Israeli government intervention), they could do much to underscore the fact that Pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims all have long histories on the Mount. I believed, like Yoni, that true history is rich and inclusive instead of exclusive. But I also understood that the Waqf, and even Yusuf, himself were representatives of the weaker party, and as such felt as compelled to protect access to each shrinking square inch that they still managed to control, lest they lose access to it all, forever.
Such were my thoughts as I fought to regain my composure after Yusuf’s email, but whereas before I—the perpetually clueless convert—might have slunk away like a chastised puppy if someone with Yusuf’s knowledge and stature thought I was wrong, this time I decided to say what I thought and see if it made any difference.
I drank a bracing cup of black, Arabic coffee and sent Yusuf an email detailing exactly how I felt—that by bowing to the (albeit, real) pressure to keep places like the Gate and the underground closed to everyone, it would make their position weaker in the end, as if they were disinterested caretakers of arguably one of the greatest archeological sites in the world. I knew it wasn’t true, and that each and every Waqf employee loved and cared for the Mount, but that wasn’t the image they were projecting. I felt that they should make it as open as possible, thereby entering into the modern world of public relations that organizations like Elad were so effective at exploiting…that if they, in contrast, did it the right way, it could actually improve the situation on the Mount.
And as for “discoveries,” I doubted that there was anything particularly groundbreaking to discover in either the Mercy Gate, or the underground. After all, Warren and Wilson had wandered around down there looking for proof of the Temple treasure, the Ark or whatever else they could find…in their case to buoy their Christian beliefs, and they even took measurements. I doubted anything I could do on an afternoon visit could cause much of an uproar.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 19
