Anyway it is a tradition I like to maintain and whenever working abroad I always seek out the ambassador or consul and pop into the embassy or consulate for a briefing; which with a bit of luck usually means popping out to lunch for a briefing. I had been told at a reception for a UN cultural delegation - not UNESCO, another one whose acronym escapes me - at the British Embassy in Damascus about the unusual diplomatic arrangements in Israel: while all the Israeli government departments are in Jerusalem, the British embassy, like all the other embassies, is in Tel Aviv and we have a consulate-general in Jerusalem. Why so? Well, as the UN woman rather gleefully pointed out, there is a raft of UN decrees refusing to recognize Jerusalem as the capital, and as all UN members have chosen to comply, all the embassies are still in Tel Aviv. And so why the consulate-general in Jerusalem? Because as Palestine is not yet a state but is clearly blinking brightly on every diplomatic radar screen the British need a presence there, and so the consulate-general in Jerusalem is effectively the British Embassy in Palestine.
That was over a month ago and today I’m meeting Our Man in Jerusalem, the British consul-general Richard Makepeace. Over a fine lunch at the American Colony Hotel - also the HQ for the Quartet’s Middle East diplomatic mission and occasional residence of former prime minister and envoy Tony Blair - we compare notes. I ask Richard where he had been before Jerusalem.
“I was Ambassador to Sudan, then Abu Dhabi, before that number two in Cairo.”
“All heavy with British diplomatic baggage,” I suggest.
“Quite so,” he replies, “but none heavier than here. Sometimes I think wistfully how easy it must be for an ambassador from an obscure northern European country which has had no say in the world.” Rather like, I think wistfully to myself, Britain is on its way to becoming.
I tell him the rather startling news that I have become so fed up with rabid Zionists bending my ear about being British that if I think my interlocutrix is so inclined I tell them I’m Australian.
“I don’t think I could get away with that!” he replies, “but how come?”
“If they know my name they will start with, “Now you are a lord, you must realize that the British Mandate... and off they go on a long tirade about how we did them down and sided with the Arabs before and during independence.
At first I fought back, reminding them that the second half of the Balfour Declaration... ”
“Ah, the dreaded Balfour Declaration!” Richard sighs.
It’s worth spending a short while revisiting this source of all woes. In 1917, when Britain and France ran the diplomatic world, an idea whose time had come - that finally the Jewish Diaspora should have their own land – had gathered enough momentum for it to be discussed by heads of state. Leading the charge in Britain were Lord Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann, later to be the first president of Israel. The British foreign secretary was Arthur James Balfour, later the first Earl of Balfour. They all shared the dream of a homeland for the long scattered Jews; Rothschild and Weizmann for obvious reasons, Balfour because, like his prime minister Lloyd George and slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce, he was a Protestant Evangelical who believed the messiah would be more likely to pop back if the Jewish race converted to Christianity and were ready and waiting for this messiah in Israel.
Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild that
His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The Zionists seized on this letter, promoted it to a Declaration, and in an early example of Middle East selective memory syndrome promptly ignored the second half - about not upsetting the indigenous Arabs - and have done so, visibly done so, ever since.
Back to lunch. “Then the Israelis say that the point of the British Mandate from 1922 was to implement the Balfour Declaration,” I continue. “I politely point out to them that ‘No it wasn’t’ and that anyway if it had been they can rest assured we would have stuck to all of it and not just the half of it that they have chosen to remember.”
“And anyway any feelings of being let down are nothing compared to how the Arabs must feel after how we deceived them. You know about the McMahon letters?” asks Richard.
I do. In 1915 the Ottoman Turks had sided with the Germans in the First World War and as a diversion the British urgently needed to stir up trouble elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The obvious solution was to encourage Arab nationalism in its southern provinces. McMahon was the British governor general in Cairo and through him the British made specific written promises for post-Ottoman Arab independence after the war, promises it had no intention of keeping. Quite, in fact, the reverse.
“If we hadn’t made all these promises the world would be a far happier place,” says Richard. “It’s easier for them - and us - to blame the sins of our forefathers.”
“Well actually my grandfather sat at the same Cabinet as Balfour. He was responsible for Ireland but that, as they say, is another story.”
“The anti-British sentiment is something that’s turned on and off. Mainly comes from the older Israelis. There’s a lot of rewriting of history from younger writers, more objective from a distance, more favorable to us,” Richard says.
“Well if you are a last word merchant, you can always remind them that if it wasn’t for the British Eighth Army stopping Rommel and the Nazis round the corner in North Africa there wouldn’t be an Israel anyway. That normally shuts them up.”
“You have been in the wars,” he quips. Off record we gossip and background through the menu; Richard’s good work will continue when he joins the Prince of Wales at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies.
Long lunch - and longer siesta - over, it’s time to catch up with Mark Twain again. There is no denying the sense of excitement - and after the long hot ride through the desolation, the sense of relief too - that he felt as he entered the old walled city: “Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets, by the ancient and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for several hours I have been trying to comprehend that I am actually in the illustrious old city where Solomon dwelt, where Abraham held converse with the Deity, and where walls still stand that witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion.”
The Damascus Gate is still the main entrance to the Old City from the north. Dating in its present construct from Roman times and rebuilt along similar lines after every subsequent sacking and conquest - and the Old City has had fifty such visits of one kind or another - it has a classic city defenders’ entrance. On entering under the arch one is forced to turn sharp left, then sharp right, the idea being to block the flow of any attack and to disadvantage the usually right-handed spear throwing attackers and advantage usually right- handed sword waving defenders. One would have thought at some stage over the centuries a general would recruit a platoon of left-handers and send them in first, but apparently not.
The old drawbridge leading up to the Gate is now a footbridge, thronged on either side by hawkers whose families have held their pitches for generations. Instantly one sees the character of Jerusalem today as people rush by: satin-coated rabbis and beige-robed imams, crocodiles of gawky tourists, Lonely Planet-ed backpackers, earnest Christian pilgrims, children selling cigarettes and chewing gum, black-turbaned Shia mullahs, old Arab women sweeping the streets, younger Arab women in full black abayas patiently heaving bags of shopping, Coptic monks topped by black zucchettos, subcontinental Muslims topped by white taqiyahs, booted and suited ultraorthodox Jews - white heads and black hats down against the world, Jordanian men in keffiyehs and igals, Greek Orthodox priests in a hurry of swirling black cloaks, older Israelis weari
ng kippahs, Franciscan friars swaying along otherworldly, money changers waving banknotes, barrow boys shouting a clear passage, taxi drivers touting for rides, Israeli border guards in green and semi-automatics, Israeli police in blue and semi-automatics, black-hooded Armenian priests, Sudanese women in jellabiyas, Iranian women in chadors, young Palestinian women in tight jeans and tee-shirts excused by elaborate hijabs, Australian teenage girls unaware in hot-pants and Cistercian nuns sporting white coifs.
Mark Twain does not mention his hotel in The Innocents Abroad, but does so in his notes: “Loafed all the afternoon at the Mediterranean Hotel.”
In an era when hotels were as scarce as tourists, the Mediterranean Hotel was a Jerusalem institution. It actually moved location three times in the nineteenth century and the Excursionists stayed in the middle version, the one on El Wad Street just in from the Damascus Gate. In the twentieth century it moved for the third time and was incorporated into the New Imperial Hotel and later spun off into the Petra Hostel. The latter now claims that Mark Twain stayed there; he did not.
Due to detective work done by the excellent London-based Palestine Exploration Fund we know that in 1867 the hotel was in the swankiest part of a not very swanky city, next to the consulates of the British and Austrian empires and the Turkish pasha’s residence. If there were any rich locals they lived nearby.
The hotel had 23 rooms. The main building had two stories: a courtyard level, which had guest rooms for the lower orders along one side opposite the kitchen and lounge, plus a second floor where the smarter guests, the effendi, stayed. It is not known if our man, a mere hack rather than a well-heeled pilgrim, stayed with the lower orders down below or with the effendi up above. I expect the former which is why we didn’t hear about it.
The Excursionists’ hotel has had an interesting recent history. Early in the twentieth century it became a private, unmarked synagogue. After the Israeli take-over it became a series of apartments and the main one, in what had been the reception area, was taken by Ariel Sharon in the mid-1980s. Nothing remarkable in that perhaps, but the house is right in the middle of the Muslim quarter, and provocative as ever, Sharon had Stars of David carved into the lintels, surrounded the windows frames with razor-wire and hoisted a gigantic Israeli flag on the roof. This was just a Sharon Jerusalem forerunner: he is widely acknowledged as firing the spark that lit the second intifada when against all advice, commonsense and plain good manners he and his disciples swaggered around the Temple Mount in 2000. If you are ever short of a way to make a Muslim laugh, just remind them that George W. Bush called him “a man of peace”. Best not to point out to the laughing Muslim the equal absurdity of Sharon’s lifelong adversary, embezzler Yasser Arafat, winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
After his stroke in 2006 Sharon’s wife Lily gave the apartment to Ateret Cohanim, a political Zionist property company with an agenda to buy the Arabs and Christians out of the Old City. Funded largely from the United States via its office in New Jersey it is indulging in what the liberal Israeli press call a self-inflicted virtuous circle, whereby the inflated prices with which it tempts non-Jewish owners to sell ensure house price inflation for the benefit of existing American-Jewish investors.
Sharon’s flag still flies on the roof, but the entrance to the building is now sinister and secretive in its anonymity: unpainted wooden doors, CCTV cameras, swipe card readers and video buzzers. I want to have a quick look around, to say hello to the old Mediterranean Hotel and sit in the lounge where Mark Twain smoked his narghile. To that end I am part of this wonderful circular telephone conversation:
Woman: “Shalom.”
Ian: “Ateret Cohanim?”
Woman: “Ken.” (Yes)
Ian: “May we speak English?”
Woman: “No way.”
Ian: “Is there someone there who speaks English?”
Woman: “No.”
Ian: “Will there be someone there later who speaks English?”
Woman: “You have to contact us first in writing.”
Ian: “Ah, you seem to speak English. It’s a very quick question.”
Woman: “No way.” Click.
Back then, the next morning, Tuesday 24 September 1867, the New Pilgrims started their tour of the Old City. It is not clear if they used one of the caravanserai dragomen, Abraham or Mohammed, or hired a specific Ferguson better versed in the subtexts of Jerusalem. I borrowed the British consulate-general’s excellent guide, a Palestinian Christian (it’s important in Jerusalem to establish race and religion early as it affects every moment), Saed Mrebe, to be our Ferguson for the next few days.
***
The complexities of race and religion here are even more baffling now than they were in Mark Twain’s day. He wrote: “The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.”
The Turks were generally tolerant of non-Muslims and always recognized Jerusalem’s significance to the other monotheist religions. The Turkish view was you were free to worship but worship wasn’t free. The British were even more open to all comers and didn’t tax them either, but after 1948 the newly installed Jordanians behaved disgracefully, sacking the synagogues and using the Orthodox churches as stables and sheds. (The only synagogue to survive was the above-mentioned Mediterranean Hotel building where the private, unmarked synagogue escaped the Jordanian bulldozers.) Jerusalem today has an almost Lebanese layer cake of sects and sub-sects of the three monotheist religions, and as man invents new ones to add to those he has already invented no doubt they will find their way here too. There’s nothing like a one-and- only-god to encourage countless splinters groups and nowhere like Jerusalem to attract them as pilgrims, including, of course, our own New Pilgrims. There’s even a well-known psychiatric condition known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, when ordinary pilgrims, a long way from home and sated with Jerusalem’s religious connotations, somehow convince themselves that they are the reincarnated38 Jesus or the next Christ or Messiah or Prophet39.
Twain was less impressed with the local government: “Rags, wretched- ness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently - the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda.”
***
Since the 1967 Israeli victory in the Six Day War, the Old City, along with all of East Jerusalem, has joined West Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction. All of Twain’s complaints have been addressed: the streets are amazingly swept and the rubbish amazingly collected considering the souk and alley character of the Old City. All of the street lights work. The electric cables and water pipes are all safely tucked away and color coded. There are no beggars of any description. And it’s completely safe, with no fear of mugging or even pick-pocketing. The safety comes at the price of “security”: armed policemen and CCTV cameras are everywhere - disconcerting, but unavoidable in the circumstances of what is happening on the other side of the Wall/Fence a few miles away. As the liberal Israeli press likes to say about living in this quasi- warzone, paraphrasing Bill Clinton, “it’s the Occupation, stupid.”
***
Mark Twain started his tour of
Jerusalem, as do most tourists today, with a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - ”the place of the Crucifixion, and, in fact, every other place intimately connected with that tremendous event, are ingeniously massed together and covered by one roof - the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
“Entering the building, through the midst of the usual assemblage of beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards - for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place, if allowed to do it.” Later, in the same vein, he added: “All sects of Christians have chapels here, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another’s ground. It has been proven conclusively that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the World in peace.”
It’s a shame that no one told Twain about the Status Quo of 1853 as he would have loved the story. As he said, “different sects will not only quarrel, but fight”, and even when Salah al-Din was sultan there were so many fights between the Christian sects that he gave one Muslim family the keys to the church and put another Muslim family in charge of the door. These families still are key- and door-holders to this day. By 1853, just before the Excursionists’ visit, the Turks had had enough of the endless squabbling, rounded up all the sects and laid down the Status Quo. This gave each sect specific, unique, times to perform their liturgies and maintain the common areas - each being responsible for a part of the church. The Turks introduced a two-tier sect system with the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Orthodox sects in the premier league and the Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Coptic sects and their splinter groups in the lower league. Where Twain noted that “one sees on his left a few Turkish guards”, one now sees on his left a few Israeli policemen. Brawls break out every year; the latest one was one Palm Sunday when an Armenian cleric was late in clearing space for the Greeks. When the Israeli police arrived to separate the brawlers, the brawlers united and started brawling with the police - who under a separate agreement are not allowed to enter unless invited by one of the top three sects.
Innocence and War Page 22
