Jerusalem: The Biography

Everybody has two cities, his own and Jerusalem.

Teddy Kollek, interview

Through a historical catastrophe, the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor of Rome – I was born in one of the cities of the Diaspora. But I always deemed myself a child of Jerusalem.

S. Y. Agnon, Nobel Prize acceptance speech 1966

The Jerusalem I was raised to love was the terrestrial gateway to the divine world where Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, men of vision and a sense of humanity, met – if only in the imagination.

Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country

O Jerusalem, fragrant with prophets

The shortest path between heaven and earth …

A beautiful child with burned fingers and downcast eyes …

O Jerusalem, city of sorrow,

A tear lingering in your eye …

Who will wash your bloody walls?

O Jerusalem, my beloved

Tomorrow the lemon-trees will blossom; the olive-trees rejoice; your eyes will dance; and the doves fly back to your sacred towers.

Nizar Qabbani, Jerusalem

The Jewish people were buildingin Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are buildingin Jerusalem today. Jerusalem’s not a settlement. It is our capital.

Binyamin Netanyahu, speech, 2010

Once again the centre of international storms. Neither Athens nor Rome aroused so many passions. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it’s not the first time, it’s a homecoming.

Elie Wiesel, open letter to Barack Obama, 2010

MORNING IN JERUSALEM: FROM THEN UNTIL NOW

The conquest transformed, elevated and complicated Jerusalem in a flash of revelation that was simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic, strategic and nationalistic. And this new vision itself altered Israel, the Palestinians and the Middle East. A decision that had been taken in panic, a conquest that was never planned, a military victory stolen from the edge of catastrophe, changed those who believed, those who believed nothing and those who craved to believe in something.

At the time none of this was clear but, in retrospect, the possession of Jerusalem gradually changed Israel’s ruling spirit, which was traditionally secular, socialist, modern, and if the state had a religion it was as much the historical science of Judaean archaeology as Orthodox Judaism.

The capture of Jerusalem elated even the most secular Jews. The craving for Zion was so deep, so ancient, so ingrained in song, prayer and myth, the exclusion from the Wall so longstanding and so painful, and the aura of holiness so powerful that even the most irreligious Jews, across the world, experienced a sensation of exhilaration that approached a religious experience and in the modern world was as close as they would ever come to one.

For the religious Jews, the heirs of those who for thousands of years, from Babylon to Cordoba and Vilna, had, as we have seen, expected imminent messianic delivery, this was a sign, a deliverance, a redemption and the fulfilment of the biblical prophecies, and the end of the Exile and Return to the gates and courts of the Temple in David’s restored city. For the many Israelis who embraced nationalistic, military Zionism, the heirs of Jabotinsky, this military victory was political and strategic – the singular, God-given chance to secure a Greater Israel with safe borders. Religious and nationalistic Jews alike shared the conviction that they must energetically embrace the exciting mission to rebuild and forever keep the Jewish Jerusalem. During the 1970s, these battalions of the messianic and the maximalist became every bit as dynamic as the majority of Israelis, who remained secular and liberal and whose centre of life was Tel Aviv, not the Holy City. But the nationalist–redemptionist programme was God’s urgent work and this divine imperative would soon alter the physiognomy and bloodstream of Jerusalem.

It was not only Jews who were affected: the much more numerous and powerful Christian evangelicals, especially those of America, also experienced this instant of almost apocalyptic ecstasy. Evangelicals believed that two of the preconditions had been met for Judgement Day: Israel was restored and Jerusalem was Jewish. All that remained was the rebuilding of the Third Temple and seven years of tribulation, followed by the battle of Armageddon when St Michael would appear on the Mount of Olives to fight the Anti-Christ on the Temple Mount. This would culminate in the conversion or destruction of the Jews and the Second Coming and Thousand Year Reign of Jesus Christ.

The victory of the small Jewish democracy against the Soviet-armed legions of Arab despotism convinced the United States that Israel was its special friend in the most dangerous of neighbourhoods, its ally in the struggle against Communist Russia, Nasserite radicalism and Islamicist fundamentalism. America and Israel shared more than that, for they were countries built on an ideal of freedom touched by the divine: one was the new Zion, the ‘city on a hill’, the other the old Zion restored. American Jews were already avid supporters but now American evangelists believed that Israel had been blessed by Providence. Polls consistently claim that over 40 per cent of Americans sometime expect the Second Coming in Jerusalem. However exaggerated this may be, American Christian Zionists threw their weight behind Jewish Jerusalem, and Israel was grateful even though the role of the Jews in their doomsday scenario was a tragic one.

Israelis from west Jerusalem, from all Israel and the breadth of the Diaspora, crowded into the Old City to touch the Wall and pray there. The possession of the city was so in toxicating that giving her up became henceforth unbearable and unthinkable – and vast resources were now mobilized to make such a thing very difficult indeed. Even the pragmatic Ben-Gurion proposed from his retirement that Israel should give up the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace – but never Jerusalem.

Israel officially united the city’s two halves, expanding the municipal borders to encompass 267,800 citizens – 196,800 Jews and 71,000 Arabs. Jerusalem became larger than it had ever been in its history. Scarcely before the gunbarrels had cooled, the inhabitants of the Maghrebi Quarter, founded by Saladin’s son Afdal, were evacuated to new homes, their houses demolished to open the space before the Wall for the first time. After centuries of cramped, confined, harassed worship in a 9-foot-longalleyway, the airy, light space of the new plaza at the paramount Jewish shrine was itself a liberation; Jews flocked to pray there. The dilapidated Jewish Quarter was restored, its dynamited synagogues rebuilt and resanctified, its ravaged squares and alleys repaved and embellished, Orthodox religious schools – yeshivas – were created or repaired, all in gleaming golden stone.

Science was celebrated too: Israeli archaeologists started to excavate the united city. The long Western Wall was divided between the rabbis, who controlled the praying area to north of the Maghrebi Gate, and the archaeologists, who could dig to the south. Around the Wall, in the Muslim and Jewish Quarters, and in the City of David, they uncovered such astounding treasures – Canaanite fortifications, Judaean seals, Herodian foundations, Maccabean and Byzantine walls, Roman streets, Umayyad palaces, Ayyubid gates, Crusader churches – that their scientific finds seemed to fuse with the political-religious enthusiasm. The stones they uncovered – from the wall of Hezekiah and Herod’s ashlars tossed down by the Roman soldiers to the pavingof Hadrian’s Cardo – became permanent displays in the restored Old City.

Teddy Kollek, the mayor of west Jerusalem who was re-elected to run the united city for twenty-eight years, worked hard to reassure the Arabs, becoming the face of the liberal Israeli instinct to unify the city under Jewish rule but also to respect Arab Jerusalem.^* As under the Mandate, the prosperous Jerusalem attracted Arabs from the West Bank – their population doubled in ten years. Now the conquest encouraged Israelis of all parties, but especially nationalists and redemptionist Zionists, to secure the conquest by creating ‘facts on the ground’; the building of new Jewish suburbs around Arab east Jerusalem began immediately.

At first, Arab opposition was muted; many Palestinians worked in Israel or with Israelis, and, as a young boy visiting Jerusalem, I remember days spent with Palestinian and Israeli friends in their houses in Jerusalem and the West Bank, never realizing that this period of goodwill and mixing would very soon become the exception to the rule. Abroad, things were different. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah took over the PLO in 1969. Fatah intensified its guerrilla attacks on Israel while another faction, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, pioneered the new spectacle of hijacking aeroplanes as well as embracing the more traditional killing of civilians.

The Temple Mount, as Dayan had understood, brought with it an awesome responsibility. On 21 August 1969, an Australian Christian, David Rohan, who seems to have suffered from the Jerusalem Syndrome,^* set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque to accelerate the Second Coming. The blaze destroyed Nur al-Din’s minbar placed there by Saladin, and kindled rumours of a Jewish conspiracy to seize the Temple Mount, which in turn unleashed Arab riots.

In ‘Black September’ 1970, King Hussein defeated and expelled Arafat and the PLO, who had challenged his control of Jordan. Arafat moved his headquarters to Lebanon and Fatah embarked on an international campaign of hijacking and killing of civilians to bring the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world – this was carnage as political theatre. In 1972, Fatah gunmen, using ‘Black September’ as a front, murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In response, Mossad, Israel’s secret service, hunted down the perpetrators across Europe.

On the Day of Atonement in October 1973, Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, launched a successful surprise attack, in collusion with Syria, against an overconfident Israel. The Arabs scored early successes, discreditingdefence minister Moshe Dayan who almost lost his nerve after two days of reverses. However, the Israelis, supplied by an American airlift, rallied and the war made the name of General Ariel Sharon who led the Israeli counter-attack across the Suez Canal. Soon afterwards, the Arab League persuaded King Hussein to recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.

In 1977, thirty years after the bombing of the King David, Menachem Begin and his Likud finally swept aside the Labour party that had ruled since 1948 and came to power with a nationalist–messianic programme for a Greater Israel with Jerusalem as its capital. Yet it was Begin who, on 19 November, welcomed President Sadat on his courageous flight to Jerusalem. Sadat stayed in the King David Hotel, prayed at al-Aqsa, visited Yad Vashem and offered peace to the Knesset. Hopes soared. With the help of Moshe Dayan whom he had appointed foreign minister, Begin restored Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty. Yet, unlike Dayan who soon resigned, Begin knew little of the Arab world, remaining the son of the Polish shtetl, a harsh nationalist with a Manichean view of the Jewish struggle, an emotional attachment to Judaism and a vision of biblical Israel. Negotiating with Sadat under the aegis of President Jimmy Carter, Begin insisted ‘Jerusalem will remain the eternal united capital of Israel and that is that’, and the Knesset voted a similar formula into Israeli law. Driven by the bulldozer-like energy of his agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, and determined ‘to secure Jerusalem as permanent capital of the Jewish people’, Begin accelerated the building of what Sharon called ‘an outer ring of development around the Arab neighbourhoods’ to ‘develop a greater Jerusalem’.

In April 1982, an Israeli reservist named Alan Goodman shot two Arabs in a rampage across the Temple Mount. The mufti had constantly warned that the Jews wanted to rebuild the Temple on the site of al-Aqsa so now Arabs wondered if there really was such a secret plan. The vast majority of Israelis and Jews utterly reject any such thing and most ultra-Orthodox believe that men should not meddle with God’s work. There are only about a thousand Jewish fundamentalists in groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, who demand the right to pray on the Temple Mount, or the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple, which claims to be training a priestly caste for the Third Temple. Only the tiniest factions within the most extreme cells of fanatics have conspired to destroy the mosques, but so far, Israeli police have foiled all their plots. Such an outrage would be a catastrophe not just for Muslims but for the State of Israel itself.

In 1982, Begin responded to PLO attacks on Israeli diplomats and civilians by invadingLebanon where Arafat had built up a fiefdom. Arafat and his forces were forced out of Beirut, moving to Tunis. The war, masterminded by defence minister Sharon, became a quagmire which culminated in Christian militias massacring between 300 and 700 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Sharon, bearing in-direct responsibility for the atrocity, was forced to resign and Begin’s career ended in depression, resignation and isolation.

The raised hopes of 1977 were dashed by the intransigence of both sides, the killing of civilians, and the expansion of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1981, the assassination of Sadat, punishment for his flight to Jerusalem, by fundamentalists, was an early sign of a new power rising in Islam. In December 1987 a spontaneous Palestinian revolt – the Intifada, the Uprising – broke out in Gaza and spread to Jerusalem. Israeli police fought protesters in pitched battles on the Temple Mount. The youths in the streets of Jerusalem slinging stones at uniformed Israeli soldiers replaced the murderous hijackers of the PLO as the image of the persecuted but defiant Palestinians.

The energy of the Intifada created a power vacuum that was filled by new leaders and ideas: the PLO elite was out of touch with the Palestinian street, and fundamentalist Islam was replacing Nasser’s obsolete pan-Arabism. In 1988, Islamicist radicals founded the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was dedicated to the jihad to destroy Israel.

The Intifada also altered Jewish Jerusalem, admitted Kollek, ‘in a fundamental way’ – it destroyed the dream of a united city. Israelis and Arabs ceased to work together; they no longer walked through each other’s suburbs. The tension spread not only between Muslim and Jew but also amongthe Jews themselves: the ultra-Orthodox rioted against secular Jews, who began to move out of Jerusalem. The old world of Christian Jerusalem was shrinking fast: by 1995 there were only 14,100 Christians left. Yet the Israeli nationalists did not deviate from their plan to Judaize Jerusalem. Sharon provocatively moved into an apartment in the Muslim Quarter and in 1991, religious ultra-nationalists started to settle in Arab Silwan, next to the original City of David. Kollek, who saw his life’s work overwhelmed by aggressive redemptionists, denounced Sharon and these settlers for their ‘messianism which has always been extremely harmful to us in history’.

The Intifada led indirectly to the Oslo peace talks. In 1988, Arafat accepted the idea of a two-state solution and renounced the armed struggle to destroy Israel. King Hussein gave up his claim on Jerusalem and the West Bank where Arafat planned to build a Palestinian state with al-Quds as its capital. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister and crushed the Intifada; with his plainspoken toughness, he possessed the only qualities Israelis would trust in a peacemaker. The Americans had presided over abortive talks in Madrid but, unbeknown to most of the major players, there was another, secret process that would bear fruit.

This began with informal talks between Israeli and Palestinian academics. There were meetings at the American Colony which was regarded as neutral territory, in London and then in Oslo. The talks were initially run without Rabin’s knowledge by the foreign minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin. It was only in 1993 that they informed Rabin, who backed the talks. On 13 September, Rabin and Peres signed the treaty with Arafat at the White House, genially supervised by President Clinton. The West Bank and Gaza were partly handed over to a Palestinian Authority which took over the old Husseini mansion, Orient House, as its Jerusalem headquarters, run by the most respected Palestinian in the city, Faisal al-Husseini, son of the hero of 1948.^* Rabin signed a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan and confirmed his special Hashemite role as custodian of the Islamic Sanctuary in Jerusalem which continues today. Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists negotiated their own academic version of the peace and enthusiastically started to work together for the first time.

The conundrum of Jerusalem was set aside until later in the negotiations and Rabin intensified the buildingof settlements in Jerusalem before any agreement. Beilin and Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud Abbas negotiated to divide Jerusalem between Arab and Jewish areas under a united municipality and to give the Old City a ‘special status,’ almost like a Middle Eastern Vatican City – but nothing was signed.

The Oslo Accords perhaps left too much detail undecided and were violently opposed on both sides. Mayor Kollek, aged eighty-two, was defeated in elections by the more hardline Ehud Olmert, backed by nationalists and ultra-Orthodox. On 4 November, 1995, just four days after Beilin and Abbas had come to an informal understandingon Jerusalem, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic. Born in Jerusalem, Rabin returned there to be buried on Mount Herzl. King Hussein delivered a eulogy; the American president and two of his predecessors attended. President Mubarak of Egypt visited for the first time, and the Prince of Wales made the only formal royal visit to Jerusalem since the foundation of Israel.

The peace began to fall apart. The Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas launched a campaign of suicide bombings that wrought random carnage on Israeli civilians: an Arab suicide bomber killed twenty-five people on a Jerusalem bus. A week later another suicide bomber killed eighteen on the same bus route. Israeli voters punished Prime Minister Peres for the Palestinian violence, instead electing Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, on the slogan: ‘Peres will divide Jerusalem.’ Netanyahu questioned the principle of land-for-peace, opposed any division of Jerusalem and commissioned more settlements.

In September 1996, Netanyahu opened a tunnel that ran from the Wall alongside the Temple Mount to emerge in the Muslim Quarter.^† When some Israeli radicals tried to excavate upwards towards the Temple Mount, the Islamic authorities of the Waqf quickly cemented up the hole. Rumours spread that the tunnels were an attempt to undermine the Islamic Sanctuary and seventy-five were killed and 1,500 wounded in riots that proved that archaeology is worth dying for in Jerusalem. It was not only the Israelis who politicized their archaeology: history was paramount. The PLO banned Palestinian historians from admitting there had ever been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem – and this order came from Arafat himself: he was a secular guerrilla leader but as with the Israelis, even the secular national narrative was underpinned by the religious one. In 1948, Arafat had fought with the Muslim Brotherhood – their forces were called the Al-Jihad al-Muqadas, Jerusalem Holy War – and he embraced the Islamic significance of the city: he called Fatah’s armed wing the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Arafat’s aides admitted Jerusalem was his ‘personal obsession’. He identified himself with Saladin and Omar the Great, and denied any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. ‘The greater the Jewish pressure on the Temple Mount,’ says Palestinian historian Dr Nazmi Jubeh, ‘the greater the denial of the First and Second Temples.’

In the tense days after the Tunnel riots and amid rumours of plans to open a synagogue in the Stables of Solomon, the Israelis allowed the Waqf to clear the ancient halls under al-Aqsa and then use bulldozers to diga stairway and build a new, capacious subterranean mosque, the Marwan, in the hallways of Herod. The debris was simply thrown away. Israeli archaeologists were aghast at the crude bulldozing of the most delicate site on earth: archaeology was the loser in the battle of religions and politics.^*

Israelis had not quite lost their faith in peace. At the presidential retreat of Camp David, Clinton brought together the new prime minister Ehud Barak and Arafat in July 2000. Barak boldly offered a ‘final’ deal: 91 per cent of the West Bank with the Palestinian capital in Abu Dis and all the Arab suburbs of east Jerusalem. The Old City would remain under Israeli sovereignty but the Muslim and Christian Quarters and the Temple Mount would be under Palestinian ‘sovereign custodianship’. The earth and tunnels beneath the Sanctuary – above all the Foundation Stone of the Temple – would remain Israeli and for the first time, Jews would be allowed to pray in limited numbers somewhere on the Temple Mount. The Old City would be jointly patrolled but demilitarized and open to all. Already offered half the Old City’s quarters, Arafat demanded the Armenian Quarter. Israel agreed, effectively offering three-quarters of the Old City. Despite Saudi pressure to accept, Arafat felt he could neither negotiate a final settlement of the Palestinians’ right of return nor approve Israeli sovereignty over the Dome which belonged to all Islam.

‘Do you want to attend my funeral?’ he exclaimed to Clinton. ‘I won’t relinquish Jerusalem and the Holy Places.’ But his rejection was much more fundamental: during the talks, Arafat shocked the Americans and Israelis when he insisted that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple, which had in fact existed only on the Samaritan Mount Gerizim. The city’s holiness for Jews was a modern invention. In talks later that year in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency, Israel offered full sovereignty on the Temple Mount keeping only a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies beneath, but Arafat rejected this.

On 28 September 2000, Sharon, leader of the Likud opposition, added to Barak’s problems by swaggering on to the Temple Mount, guarded by phalanxes of Israeli police, with a ‘message of peace’ that clearly menaced Islam’s beloved Aqsa and Dome. The resulting riots escalated into the Aqsa Intifada, partly another stone-throwing insurgency and partly a pre-planned campaign of suicide bombings aimed by Fatah and Hamas at Israeli civilians. If the first Intifada had helped the Palestinians, this one destroyed Israeli trust in the peace process, led to the election of Sharon, and fatally split the Palestinians themselves.

Sharon suppressed the Intifada by smashing the Palestinian Authority, besieging and humiliating Arafat. He died in 2004 and the Israelis refused to allow his burial on the Temple Mount. His successor Abbas lost the 2006 elections to Hamas. After a short conflict, Hamas seized Gaza while Abbas’s Fatah continued to rule the West Bank. Sharon built a security wall through Jerusalem, a depressing concrete eyesore which did, however, succeed in stopping the suicide bombings.

The seeds of peace not only fell on stony ground but poisoned it too; the peace discredited its makers. Jerusalem today lives in a state of schizophrenic anxiety. Jews and Arabs dare not venture into each other’s neighbourhoods; secular Jews avoid ultra-Orthodox who stone them for not resting on the Sabbath or for wearing disrespectful clothing; messianic Jews test police resolve and tease Muslim anxiety by attempting to pray on the Temple Mount; and the Christian sects keep brawling. The faces of Jerusalemites are tense, their voices are angry and one feels that everyone, even those of all three faiths who are convinced that they are fulfilling a divine plan, is unsure of what tomorrow will bring.

TOMORROW

Here, more than anywhere else on earth, we crave, we hope and we search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possesiveness. It is not always easy to find. In 2010, Jerusalem has not been so large, so embellished, nor has she been so overwhelmingly Jewish for two millennia. Yet she is also the most populous Palestinian city.^* Sometimes her very Jewishness is presented as somehow synthetic and against the grain of Jerusalem, but this is a distortion of the city’s past and present.

Jerusalem’s history is a chronicle of settlers, colonists and pilgrims, who have included Arabs, Jews and many others, in a place that has grown and contracted many times. During more than a millennium of Islamic rule, Jerusalem was repeatedly colonized by Islamic settlers, scholars, Sufis and pilgrims who were Arabs, Turks, Indians, Sudanese, Iranians, Kurds, Iraqis and Maghrebis, as well as Christian Armenians Serbs, Georgians and Russians – not so different from the Sephardic and Russian Jews who later settled there for similar reasons. It was this character that convinced Lawrence of Arabia that Jerusalem was more a Levantine city than an Arab one, and this is utterly intrinsic to the city’s character.

It is often forgotten that all the suburbs of Jerusalem outside the walls were new settlements built between 1860 and 1948 by Arabs as well as Jews and Europeans. The Arab areas, such as Sheikh Jarrah, are no older than the Jewish ones, and no more, or less, legitimate.

Both Muslims and Jews have unimpeachable historical claims. Jews have the same right to live in, and settle around, an equitable Jerusalem as Arabs do. There are times when even the most harmless Jewish restoration is presented as illegitimate: in 2010, the Israelis finally consecrated the restored Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, which had been demolished by the Jordanians in 1948, yet this provoked European media criticism and minor riots in eastern Jerusalem.

However, it is a very different matter when the existing Arab inhabitants find themselves removed, coerced and harassed, their property expropriated with dubious legal rulings to make way for new Jewish settlements, backed by the full power of state and mayoralty, and fiercely promoted by people with the urgent determination of those on a divine mission. The aggressive building of settlements, designed to colonize Arab neighbourhoods and sabotage any peace deal to share the city, and the systematic neglect of services and new housing in Arab areas, have given even the most innocent Jewish projects a bad name.

Israel faces two paths – the Jerusalemite, religious-nationalist state versus a liberal, westernized Tel Aviv which is nicknamed ‘the Bubble’. There is a danger that the nationalistic project in Jerusalem, and the obsessive settlement-building on the West Bank, may so distort Israel’s own interests that they do more harm to Israel itself than any benefit they may bring to Jewish Jerusalem.^* They certainly undermine Israel’s role, uniquely impressive by historical standards, as guardian of a Jerusalem for all faiths. ‘Today for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines,’ the writer Elie Wiesel wrote in an open letter to US President Obama in 2010 and, under Israel’s democracy, this is theoretically true.

It is certainly the first time Jews have been able to worship freely there since AD 70. Under Christian rule, Jews were forbidden even to approach the city. During the Islamic centuries, Christians and Jews were tolerated as dhimmi but frequently repressed. The Jews, who lacked the protection of the European powers enjoyed by the Christians, were often treated badly – though never as badly as they were treated in Christian Europe at its worst. Jews could be killed for approaching the Islamic or Christian holy places – but anyone could drive a donkey through the passageway next to the Wall, which technically they could only attend with a permit. Even in the twentieth century, Jewish access to the Wall was severely restricted by the British and totally banned by the Jordanians. However, thanks to what Israelis called ‘the Situation’, Wiesel’s claim about freedom of worship is scarcely true for non-Jews who endure a multitude of bureaucratic harassments such as a regime of obstructive residence permits. Israeli police are constantly tightening their control of the gates of the Temple Mount while the security wall makes it harder for West Bank Palestinians to reach Jerusalem to pray at the Church or Aqsa.

When they are not in conflict, Jews, Muslims and Christians return to the ancient Jerusalem tradition of ostrichism – burying their heads in the sand and pretending The Others do not exist. In September 2008, the overlapping of Jewish Holy Days and Ramadan created a ‘monotheistic traffic jam’ in the alleyways as Jews and Arabs came to pray at Sanctuary and Wall but ‘it would be wrongto call these tense encounters because there are essentially no encounters at all,’ reported Ethan Bronner in the New York Times. ‘Words are not exchanged; [they] look past one another. Like parallel universes with different names for every place and monument they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.’

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 the probably the greatest ever Christian power – and its evangelicals continue to look to the End Days in Jerusalem, just as US 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 this unique combination of power, faith and fashion, all played out under the hothouse glare of twenty-four-hour TV news, heaps the pressure on to 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 dominated by overmighty religious-nationalist parties while there is no single Palestinian entity, no stable, democratic interlocutor. 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.

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 labyrinthine puzzle: 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 US–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 two decades of peace talks up to 2010, the Palestinians have never yet agreed to share the city.

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 and justice 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, 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.^* 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 Danzigto Trieste, have usually ended badly.

The Temple Mount is hard 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 but 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. Even in 2010, only the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh has 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 a Palestinian state. Yet Palestinian denial of the ancient Jewish claim is 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,^* 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 longthat 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 sunned 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.^* 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!’

‘Peace!’ they reply optimistically. The Nusseibehs and Judehs have been opening the Sepulchre doors at least since 1192 when Saladin appointed the Judehs as ‘Custodian of the Key’ and the Nusseibehs as ‘Custodian and Doorkeeper of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre’ (as specified on Wajeeh’s business-card). The Nusseibehs, who were also appointed hereditary cleaners of the Sakhra (the Rock) in the Dome, claim that Saladin was simply restoring them to a position they had been granted by Caliph Omar in 638. Until the Albanian conquest in the 1830s, they were extremely rich but now they earn a scanty living as tour guides.

Yet the two families exist in vigilant rivalry. ‘The Nusseibehs have nothing to do with us,’ says the octogenarian Judeh, who has held the key for twenty-two years, ‘they are merely, just doorkeepers!’ Nusseibeh insists ‘the Judehs aren’t allowed to touch the door or the lock,’ suggesting that Islamic rivalries are just as vivid as those among the Christians. Wajeeh’s son, Obadah, a personal trainer, is his heir.

Nusseibeh and Judeh spend some of the day sitting in the lobby as their ancestors have for eight centuries – but they are never there at the same time. ‘I know every stone here, it’s like home,’ muses Nusseibeh. He reveres the Church: ‘We Muslims believe Muhammad, Jesus and Moses are prophets and Mary is very holy so this is a special place for us too.’ If he wishes to pray, he can pop next door to the neighbouring mosque, built to overawe the Christians, or walk the five minutes to al-Aqsa.

At precisely the same time as the Rabbi of the Wall is waking up and Custodian Nusseibeh hears the pebble on the window announcing the delivery of the Sepulchre key, Adeb al-Ansari, forty-two years old, a father of five in a black leather jacket, is coming out of his Mamluk house, owned by his family waqf, in the Muslim Quarter and starting the five-minute walk down the street, up to the north-eastern Bab al-Ghawanmeh. He passes through the checkpoint of blue-clad Israeli police, ironically often Druze or Galilean Arabs charged with keeping out Jews, to enter the Haram al-Sharif.

The sacred esplanade is already electrically illuminated but it used to take his father two hours to light all the lanterns. Ansari greets the Haram security and begins to open the four main gates of the Dome of the Rock and the ten gates of al-Aqsa. This takes an hour.

The Ansaris, who trace their family back to the Ansaris who emigrated with Muhammad to Medina, claim that they were appointed Custodians of the Haram by Omar but they were certainly confirmed in the post by Saladin. (The black sheep of the family was the Sheikh of the Haram, bribed by Monty Parker.)

The mosque is open one hour before the dawn prayer. Ansari does not open the gates every dawn – he has a team now – but before he succeeded as hereditary Custodian, he fulfilled this duty every morning and with pride: ‘It’s firstly just a job, then it’s a family profession, and an enormous responsibility, but above all, it’s noble and sacred work. But it is not paid well. I also work on the front desk of a hotel on the Mount of Olives.’

The hereditary posts are gradually disappearing on the Haram. The Shihabis, another one of the Families, descended from Lebanese princes, who live in their own family waqf close to the Little Wall, used to be Custodians of the Prophet’s Beard. The beard and job have disappeared yet the pull of this place is magnetic: the Shihabis still work on the Haram.

Just as the rabbi walks down to the Wall, just as Nusseibeh is tapping on the doors of the Church, just as Ansari opens the gates of the Haram, Naji Qazaz is leaving the house on Bab al-Hadid Street that his family have owned for 225 years, to walk the few yards alongthe old Mamluk streets up the steps through the Iron Gate and on to the Haram. He proceeds directly into al-Aqsa, where he enters a small room equipped with a microphone and bottles of mineral water. Until 1960, the Qazaz family used the minaret but now they use this room to prepare like athletes for the call. For twenty minutes, Qazaz sits and stretches, an athlete of holiness, he then breathes and gargles the water. He checks that the microphone is on and when the clock on the wall shows it is time, he faces the qibla and starts to chant the adhan that reverberates across the Old City.

The Qazaz have been the muezzins at al-Aqsa for 500 years since the reign of Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay. Naji, who has been muezzin for thirty years, shares his duties with his son Firaz and two cousins.

It is now one hour before dawn on a day in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock is open: Muslims are praying. The Wall is always open: the Jews are praying. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is open: the Christians are praying in several languages. The sun is rising over Jerusalem, its rays making the light Herodian stones of the Wall almost snowy – just as Josephus described it two thousand years ago – and then catching the glorious gold of the Dome of the Rock that glints back at the sun. The divine esplanade where Heaven and Earth meet, where God meets man, is still in a realm beyond human cartography. Only the rays of the sun can do it and finally the light falls on the most exquisite and mysterious edifice in Jerusalem. Bathing and glowing in the sunlight, it earns its auric name. But The Golden Gate remains locked, until the coming of the Last Days.²