Assignment # 3 - Ripped from the Headlines
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: April 16, 2006
JERUSALEM is a city built on struggle and rivalry — among gods and tribes and those who misuse them.
Peace is much spoken of here. But at times, as I race along the narrow moral precipice, running between a military checkpoint and a suicide bombing, I think of the old Russian proverb: "We shall struggle for peace so hard that not a tree will be left standing."
There's enough to see in the Holy City to confirm any prejudice. But when I explore the city where I have lived for nearly two years now, I try to see Jerusalem as a place where both armies and souls contend, as they contended even before monotheism came, dusty and sunburned, out of the desert to vanquish first the Jebusites, and then the Romans.
And I try to see it through various lenses, to be moved both by the Western Wall, with its weight of tragedy and redemption, and by the modern cement one, part of Israel's separation barrier, with its dual messages of protection and occupation.
Even in the most visited places, like the Temple Mount, the holy site known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, there is an abiding sense of struggle, as tribes and religions fight over the narrative of Jerusalem and the custody of its milky tea-colored stones, touched with fire at dawn and sunset.
I first came to Jerusalem in 1983, when Israeli troops were outside Beirut, and I visited frequently with variously optimistic American officials in the Clinton era. Then I spent a month here during the last real war between the Israelis and Palestinians, in the spring of 2002, when suicide bombings were at their peak and Israeli troops reinvaded the West Bank, where they remain. As I rushed from the siege of Bethlehem to a suicide bombing near Tel Aviv, I thought, "these people are nuts," and I wondered if I would ever return.
But in 2004 Yasir Arafat was on his last legs, and Ariel Sharon intended a unilateral pullout from Gaza, and I returned as bureau chief for this newspaper.
Today, after a long truce with most Palestinian militants, Jerusalem is calmer. Events this year have been dramatic — Ariel Sharon's stroke, the formation of a Palestinian government by Hamas, the election of an Israeli government committed to a new West Bank pullout.
But the level of violence is down: tourists are returning, restaurants are opening and taxi drivers and tour guides are happier in both sides of the city — the mostly Jewish West and the mostly Arab East.
Jerusalem is at peace, but not with itself. There is anxiety on the streets; every ring on the cellphone thrums with alarm. When I travel between West and East, especially on a Saturday, the city feels fragile, its anxieties cloistered by the wall that surrounds most of the city and cuts through part of it.
For many travelers, that fragility is a compelling reason to visit Jerusalem now to experience an extraordinary city at an extraordinary time, and to see it as a modern city of contention, not just as a Biblical Disneyland.
An Overview
With its dry climate and high hills, Jerusalem offers some sweeping vistas that reveal millenniums of change.
One of my favorites is the Goldman Promenade in the city's south. Open for 18 months, it runs close to the Hill of Evil Counsel, once the seat of British governors, now of the United Nations.
The view on a recent morning was revelatory. To the left was the Kidron Valley, where the Jebusite city that King David seized for his capital perches on a small hill. Above it rises the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, with its golden Dome of the Rock, perfectly aligned with the domes of Al Aksa mosque.
To the west is the Old City in its quadrants, constructed by the Romans after they razed the Jewish one, the extended city walls, and the reach of modern Jerusalem, Israel's largest city and one of its poorest. In the center is the sprawl of East Jerusalem and the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, where some once thought a Palestinian state might have its capital, and where I once visited the eerie shell of an unfinished parliament building, full of spiders.
Off to the right, toward Jordan, there is a stark view of Israel's separation barrier, with sections of road, electronic fencing and concrete wall, nine yards high, hugging the hills as it divides Jerusalem from the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Beit Jala. You can follow its route quite a long way — not perhaps what the sponsors of the promenade had in mind. But it's a good metaphor for where we are: good walls may make good neighbors, but not if they take too much of the neighbor's land.
In the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo, which lies to the southwest within an expanded, annexed, post-1967 Jerusalem, there is a concrete wall on Ahlama Street, painted by Russian immigrants to show the landscape now hidden. The wall was erected to protect a kindergarten from gunfire from Beit Jala, which rises above Gilo on the other side of the valley.
Avi Ben Hur, the American-turned-Israeli-turned-guide who accompanied me here, pointed out another panorama, from nearby Haanafa Street. On a hill above a scraggly olive grove, belonging to Palestinians but cut off from Beit Jala by the barrier, is the Israeli neighborhood of Har Homa, resembling a gigantic stone fortress. Built by Israel after the 1993 Oslo accords on land partly expropriated from Palestinians, this neighborhood once prompted riots and international protests.
Har Homa, too, was outside Jerusalem before 1967. Now, with its winding streets and shops, it looks like a suburb. It's what Israelis like to call one of the "facts on the ground."
In the City of David
I come to the City of David not only to feel the beginnings of this place, but to remind myself about how even archaeology is used as a weapon in the struggle over the land.
This is ur-Jerusalem, the tiny, Jebusite city where David decided to place his new capital in about 1000 B.C. to unite the 12 tribes of Israel; it's completely outside the current walls of the so-called Old City. The stepped stone structure of the original walls protected the city above the Kidron Valley (much deeper then) and guarded the Gihon Spring, the water source that made a city possible.
Here, where the Israelites conquered the Jebusites, in annexed East Jerusalem, there is a battle going on over history. The Jewish foundation that runs this site supports Jews moving into East Jerusalem, which enrages the Palestinians who live here. It also helps sponsor a compelling, archaeological dig for more than a year now that may show that King David wasn't just another tribal chieftain on a dusty hilltop.
The dig is part of the broader political battle over Jerusalem, an effort to make more explicit the roots of Judaism here and buttress the justice of creating a Jewish state here after World War II. It's also part of an archeological fight — whether the Bible is any accurate guide to history, or a tale embroidered for political ends. Eilat Mazar, an archaeologist, believes she may have found King David's palace, and explained to me why. "When the Philistines came to fight, the Bible said that David went down from his house to the fortress," she said. "Maybe it meant something, maybe not. But I wondered, down from where? Presumably from where he lived, his palace. So I said, maybe there's something here."
Other archaeologists believe she may have found the Fortress of Zion that David conquered, or something else. But all agree she made a major find: a large public building dating from around the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon.
I watch Ms. Mazar and her team work at real archaeology as I walk over a metal-grid platform and stare down at the wide walls, over seven feet thick, that they've uncovered.
Farther down the hill, you can also see evidence of the extensive dam and tunnel system dug by King Hezekiah in 700 B.C. to ensure that water from the Gihon Spring could be brought inside the walls of the city when the Assyrians besieged it, and to hide the spring itself from enemy eyes. The huge cistern appears to be Caananite, and it is oddly moving to hear the water rushing as it did two millenniums ago. I note the irony of the Palestinian workers, who see themselves as descendants of the Caananites, laboring for the Israeli Antiquities Authority in a tourist area controlled by a foundation that wants to implant more Jews in their neighborhood, Silwan.
Silwan is a corruption of the name of the original Siloam pool, where the 580-yard tunnel leads. Built by Herod and only recently discovered, the pool is where the blind man was told to come by Jesus to wash his eyes and see (John 9). Looking at these stones that for 2,000 years had never seen sunlight, and at a delicate, three-leaf drain cover for rainwater, I imagine the beauty of the city before the Romans razed it after the great revolt in A.D. 70.
I left the site, near the Siloam pool, and walked onto the dusty Palestinian street, with kids playing soccer in the hot March sun. As I walked toward a kiosk for some water, I spotted a roughly built cage of metal fencing, chest high, that looked like the exit of a garbage-strewn sewer. In fact it's an outlet from the Gihon Spring, originally built to bring water to the fields of the Kidron Valley.
Battle for the Holy Sepulcher
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is both a holy and a crazy place, with its mishmash of architectural styles and furious intra-Christian battles over turf, procession times and even maintenance. To alter the position of the ratty wooden ladder under the window above the entrance would cause a furor because it would change the 1852 "status quo" agreement, made by the churches at a time when the area was under Ottoman rule. Every Orthodox Easter, the Armenians and the Greeks battle over the Holy Fire ceremony on the spot where Jesus's tomb is believed to have been, and Israeli police sometimes intervene to separate the tussling clerics.
Victoria Clark's book about the church, "Holy Fire: The Battle for Christ's Tomb" (Macmillan 2005), details the spats — the war of the doormat, the battling over chairs. If an Egyptian Copt can place a chair in the Ethiopian courtyard, all could be lost in the struggle for the rooftop.
But this is also the place where the pagan Romans tried and failed to wipe out the rebel Jews and the new Christian sect. The Romans, like Americans, says Avner Goren, an archeologist and guide, had their vision of how best to organize human communities — in cities of a certain design, with sanitation and walls and straight streets. "They brought their one truth to this place of many truths and faiths," he says, pointing to the site of the new Roman city they built, now the "Old City." The Roman effort to eradicate the early Christians lasted about 250 years. Eventually, Constantine decided to take the religion of what had become the majority of his subjects, and his mother, Helena, and he built a new church where Jesus had been crucified, where Hadrian had put a temple to Aphrodite.
"All that's left of the Romans here," says Mr. Goren, "is the pattern of the roads."
The Temple Mount
The struggles over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif — where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where the Jewish temples stood and where Muhammad ascended to heaven — are fundamental, with fanatics of both faiths wanting to expunge the other.
Yet this is one of my favorite places in Jerusalem — grassy, shaded by trees and deceptively calm.
While I sit on a stone wall and look at the intricate tiles of the Dome of the Rock, some Jews are plotting to destroy it and Al Aksa mosque and build a third temple. Some evangelical Christians hope they'll do it, thinking that only then will Jesus return. Some Muslims are convinced that the Jews are burrowing underground to create a new synagogue. Jews are upset that the Muslims dug into the hill at the site of Solomon's Stables in 1996 to create a new underground mosque, the Marwani. It's here, on the ground revered by both Judaism and Islam, where Jerusalem is most divided — and most volatile.
And it's here that Mr. Sharon made a controversial visit in September 2000, which many Muslims say set off the second (Al Aksa) intifada. Since then, non-Muslims may not enter the mosques on the Haram al-Sharif without permission.
Only an eighth of the Western Wall is visible on the plaza where worshippers gather. To see more, and in a more private way, I like to go through the Wall Tunnel, again by appointment, which cuts underground, along a 2,000-year-old street alongside the wall, and exits on the Via Dolorosa.
When Israel opened the tunnel in 1996 without informing the Islamic authorities, there were riots and nearly 100 deaths. As the tunnel comes closest to the site of the Holy of Holies, many people pray at the massive Herodian stones in the near dark.
But I like to go to another spot to see the wall, less well-known and less crowded, near the Iron Gate. It's known as the Hakotel Hakatan, with a sign only in Hebrew. Here, men and women are not segregated, and many ultra-Orthodox come to pray. I watch them, as the wall rises high above me, and Arab homes surround us on three sides.
The Separation Barrier
Jerusalem's other wall, which Israelis call the security fence and the Palestinians the apartheid wall, should also be seen at close hand. In fact, of the 450 miles of the unfinished barrier, only 5 percent is concrete wall, but much of that is in and around Jerusalem.
I try to see the barrier from both the Palestinian and the Israeli points of view. But whatever its utility, it's an ugly scar on the mental and physical landscape of the city, and beyond. Israel insists one minute that it's temporary, and the next that it's a prospective border. Palestinians excoriate it for annexing land they consider theirs, but many Jerusalemites, Palestinians who have lived here for generations, hate it for cutting some of their neighborhoods from the central city, forcing them to use checkpoints.
I often take visitors north, along the road built on top of the pre-1967 border between Israeli West Jerusalem and Jordanian East Jerusalem, past the old Mandelbaum Gate and the American Colony Hotel, toward Ramallah. Soon the wall divides the street, and the shops get ramshackle, and then there's the massive checkpoint of Qalandiya. Sometimes I don't even go through the checkpoint. I just get out and look at the people trudging through the dust or the mud, putting up with the questions and the searches that, however humiliating, sometimes prevent a terrorist from attaining his aim.
It's the most telling glimpse I can offer of this modern city of struggle. Travel, after all, is about encounter.
Visitor Information
As of April 3, the cost of flying from Kennedy Airport to Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv started at under $1,000 round trip on Continental or El Al, booked a month in advance. You can travel to Jerusalem, 31 miles away, by taxi, which costs about 200 to 220 shekels (about $44 to $49, at 4.5 shekels to the dollar). A sherut, a shared taxi-minibus costs about $10. Prices are often quoted in dollars or euros instead of shekels.
WHERE TO STAY
The two obvious choices are the King David Hotel in West Jerusalem (9722-620-8888; http://www.danhotels.com/) and the American Colony Hotel on Nablus Road in East Jerusalem (9722-627-9777; http://www.americancolony.com/). Both are elegant, with food that is just above mediocre. The King David, where doubles range from $298 to $444, has one of the most pleasant balconies in the city; the American Colony, with doubles starting at $255, has the city's most charming courtyard.
Cheaper alternatives include the YMCA Three Arches (9722-569-2692; http://www.ymca3arch.co.il/), across from the King David; the Ambassador, Nablus Road, Sheikh Jarrah (9722-541-2222, http://www.jerusalemambassador.com/, and the Austrian Hospice, 37 Via Dolorosa, 9722-626-5800, www.austrianhospice.com.
WHAT TO SEE
The City of David (9722-626-2341, http://www.cityofdavid.org.il/) costs 23 shekels to explore alone, 50 shekels for a group tour or 260 for a private tour. At the Jerusalem Architectural Park (Davidson Center, 627-7550; http://www.archpark.org.il/) near the Dung Gate, admission is 30 shekels. Church of the Holy Sepulcher, on Helena Street in the Christian quarter, is open 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tours must be reserved at the Western Wall Tunnel (9722-627-1333; http://www.thekotel.org/). Some women's groups tour after midnight. The cost is 18 shekels.
The Qalandiya checkpoint is open 24/7.
Steven Erlanger is chief of the Jerusalem bureau of The Times.
posted by Marc Rosenberg at 2:00 PM
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