In the wake of “In the Land of Israel: Essays,” by Amos Oz, 1983.

Salman Masalha ||

Longings for Jerusalem

It’s been many a day since first I came to Jerusalem in the 1970s. After all these years I’ve learned that their number can be considered as the blink of an eye in comparison to all the years of the city that falls and rises, falls and rises like a doll whose center of gravity is on the bottom. Jerusalem’s many days are its magic and the curse that has hovered over it ever since its dusts and stones became holy.


I drive to East Jerusalem and I think to myself that this city is so burdened with so much past – how will it find the leisure to think about the future? But it isn’t the city, or the dust or the stones that have made Jerusalem what it is. Only the people who have placed it at the core of their being. And the moment they did so it took control of them. It wrapped itself around them tightly and since then it has given them no rest.

There was a time when I’d walk in the grip of enchantment through the dim alleys of the Old City. I admit that I haven’t done this for quite some time. I go past the Damascus Gate and find that the Border Police who stood at the gate in the 1970s are still standing in the same place. As though the occupation has stood stock still.

After about a dozen years the intifada erupted in East Jerusalem as well and the city that had been joined together by asphalt and concrete, rifle and bayonet, once again went its separate ways, but this time not towards peace. Blood flowed in the streets of Jerusalem, Arabs and Jews lost their lives on the altar of the sanctity of stones and dust, as occupier and as occupied, in the war of tribes fighting over the past.

At one time Ziad Abu Zayyad dreamed about peace and he continues to dream about peace in Jerusalem: “’But first of all the Palestinians should be a liberated people. This is the first thing. That we return to our land. That we return to Jerusalem … Maybe to a distance of 200 meters from the Damascus Gate.’ He says these things to me in the heart of Jerusalem. How strange,” writes Amos Oz of his meeting with Ziad Abu Zayyad in the offices of the newspaper Al Fajr (The Dawn) in East Jerusalem. The newspaper breathed its last and stopped appearing and Abu Zayyad now roams the world with a Palestinian passport in his pocket and flying first class, as an elected member of the Palestinian Council.

The longings for Jerusalem from those days are longings for control of Jerusalem. This is what Ali Al-Khallili, a Palestinian poet and the editor of a literary supplement wrote back then when he dwelt in the ehart of Jerusalem: “In its beginning a cloudy day, / before, and also after, Salah al-Din / like all the people, all of them / again and again we will long / for the Arab Jerusalem / the celestial Jerusalem / the forgotten Jerusalem / and the Jerusalem engraved in every book. / We long and we walk though the magical lanes / Are we here?” (from: “A Cloudy Day,” Jerusalem, 1984).

He walks through the lanes, touches the city’s stones – and continues to long for it. His “Are we here?” is the key to understanding the situation. As long as you don’t control it, you will long eternally for Jerusalem. Every day and every hour, more than it reveals its complexities this Jerusalem reveals the complexes of those who love it, or more precisely – its lovers. When the city responds to them, they turn their backs on it and neglect it. They will always want it unattained, because only thus, when it is part of a fantasy, will they continue to seek it, to plead and pray to it, and to write poems to it.

Some of my best friends are secular Jews. One of them even describes himself as very devoutly secular. A week ago he managed to astound me when he said to me, perhaps seriously and perhaps in jest: “You Palestinians could do a really good deed. Instead of fussing over all kinds of nonsense, go look for the Red Heifer’s hiding place and get rid of her.”

Apparently they want the Arabs to do even this work for them. Of course this is not at all bothersome. I mention his remark as I talk with an ultra-Orthodox Jew on a hill overlooking the Old City. You look to me like someone who pondering a separation from East Jerusalem, I say to him. Why? He asks, puzzled. The Palestinians, I say, are establishing a state and its capital is East Jerusalem. There’s been so much talk of this that in the end it will happen, he replies, without managing to conceal his sadness upon hearing what I say.

He visits the Western Wall, he infrequently passes though the Old City market and he dreams there will be wealthy Jews who will buy a lot of shops in the market. “It’s impossible to do transfer by force,” he says. “It’s necessary to buy houses and do things legally,” he continues. “The country’s leaders are so hapless. Altogether, facts should have been established on the Temple Mount right in 1967, the way they did at the Wall. The Temple Mount is a sore. A very painful sore. All the governments have been wrong since 1967. They have been wrong in that they didn’t establish facts on the ground right after the war. They should have taken control of half the Temple Mount -- this place is the Jews’ Holy of Holies, while for the Arabs it’s of the third rank.”

So what will happen, I asked. Just pray. Pray all the time that the coming explosion catches us in a better position. “The Red Heifer,” he says, “is a sign that we are now very close to the coming of the Messiah. There will be a very strong earthquake, which will destroy everything, and then a Temple, complete and ready, will come down form Heaven.”

Don’t you think you’re crazy? I ask him, and he replies: It’s a matter of faith. And I glance over at the Old City, like a person who wants to get another picture before it collapses under the burden of apocalyptic fantasy. In a region that lives according to myths and sanctifies vanities, the Red Heifer isn’t just another domesticated animal for yielding milk and serving as an attraction for children. A Red Heifer is the pistol that appears in the first act of the horror play. I remember my secular friend’s remark and I think to myself – maybe he has something there.

Everyone seeks his own Jerusalem. The moment he obtains it, he starts to look for it in some other place. A young Palestinian poet, who also returned to Palestine in the wake of the Oslo agreements, had to take himself back to his exile in Sofia in order to write about Jerusalem: “From by balcony / I see Jerusalem at night / paths leading to me. / Prayers in memory of the blood. / Broken longings / silent bells. / Here the soldiers lean / and there is my smell. / Here is the dance floor that was never completed / and there a bird for worry. / From my balcony / I see Jerusalem at night / and I remember my friends / who still dream of return” (Khaled Darwish, from “Scenes” Sofia - Ramallah, 1995).

And today is the first Friday in the month of May, 1997. Fridays in Jerusalem were colored in a wealth of hues as many Palestinians, from town and village, flocked to the city, some to worship at the mosques, some to engage in commerce and some to do both – two birds with one stone. Today, in the wake of the closure policy imposed by the Israeli authorities, the city has effectively been cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Only few are allowed to enter the city and the Palestinian city is fading. Since the intifada the repeated closures most of the institutions have abandoned the city. Only here and there something remains.

Half-way between the place where the Mandelbaum Gate stood and the national headquarters of the Israel Police, on a side street, stands “a stone Arab house,” not far from “the stone Arab house” Amos Oz described. The eucalyptus tree at the entrance rising above the houses of the pastoral neighborhood does not loosen its grip on me. It takes me back many years to the village overlooking the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Hills to the east. I remember reaching out with my hand and touching those hills even before I knew Rachel Blauwstein’s Hebrew poem about doing that—“There are the Golan Hills” – for which Naomi Shemer later wrote a popular melody. There too, in the yard of the elementary school I attended, stood a eucalyptus tree under which strictly kosher Arab teachers pounded the Zionist creed into us concerning the key role played by the eucalyptus in the draining of swamps. In the days of the early “pioneers.” Since then they have dried up a lot of water along the Jordan.

This handsome “Arab stone house” has been serving for a number of years as the Al Wasati Gallery where Palestinian artists show their works. This is one of the few cultural institutions established in East Jerusalem in recent years. Suleiman Mansour, a leading Palestinian artist, manages the place. He sits at a desk laden with papers and chain-smokes. He looks a bit worried. I ask him: What’s up? He replies that he has been worried lately about the matter of where he lives. Mansour is a resident of Jerusalem who in recent years found himself living outside the city, like many of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents. The creeping transfer policy is putting its imprint on east Jerusalem. Arab construction is restricted and usually this is private construction that over the years went through mayor Teddy Kollek’s sieve. In recent years it appears that the holes in the sieve of his successor, Ehud Olmert, are becoming blocked. When there is a closure, says Mansour, his mother, who lives a few hundred meters away, can’t visit him because she is outside of Jerusalem.

This is the encounter with the occupier that Ali al-Khalili speaks about. The Jews, says Ali al-Khalili, were soldiers. Those were the first Jews he met. And therefore, when he crossed the Green Line after the 1967 war he discovered children and old people, just like the children and old people in Nablus. Now he lives in Ramallah and is in charge of cultural centers in the Palestinian Authority.

I ask him how his world has changed during the past decade and he replies: First of all, there was the intifada and after that the Palestinian Authority came in. These two things, he says, helped greatly in the formation of a separate Palestinian identity. Had the occupation continued, there would have been a danger of the Palestinian identity getting assimilated inside Israel. Now we’re in the process of building the Palestinian identity and state. I try to challenge him and ask: Even though you can’t get to Jerusalem? And he answers me hesitantly: Yes, even despite that. We will talk about Jerusalem, and it will be the capital of Palestine, just as it is the capital of Israel.

I walk though the exhibitions at Al Wasiti in East Jerusalem, and again find myself facing the gate to the city that was joined together, with the mosques at its center. In the background, the voice of Egyptian singer Abdelwahab continues to croon over the Voice of Palestine: “Our paths crossed again and all our dreams came true.”

Today is Friday, and I am on my way to East Jerusalem. And there is not a single scrap of those clouds in the sky that in Alhallili’s poem presaged a spell of dusty desert heat in the city and on the radio they are warning against burning twigs in the forests and the parks because the fire could spread quickly. Since the fire that raged last year, this reminder is repeated on all the news broadcasts. I tell myself there is no danger a fire will ignite suddenly in Jerusalem, because hardly any twigs are left here. The asphalt and the concrete and the heaps of stones are taking over ad closing the city off from all sides.

And if the fire does spread in Jerusalem, it will come from the flame in the dry bones beneath the surface. One tunnel has already ignited a conflagration, and it was put out only with difficulty. There the eternal flame flickers that is destined to devour the entire Middle East. I push aside these apocalyptic thoughts and cross the line that in the past connected/separated the two parts of the this schizophrenic city’s soul.

“The old Arab stone house” where the editorial offices of the newspaper Al-Fajr were located is still standing. The “dawn” that was supposed to break seems to be tardy. The place, not far from the Damascus Gate, is shrouded in gloom. Only the noise from Highway 1 disturbs the slumber that is occupying East Jerusalem at such an early hour of the evening. As though it were a high-tension line that hums in the heart of the city. And it isn’t that it disturbs the repose, it also cuts in half the city that has been joined together. There, near the traffic lights, every morning men stand offering for hire the strength of their limbs, their “porter’s kit” and the suffering in their eyes. Young boys from the Hebron hills ambush the red light in order to peddle their wars to driver waiting for the green light that in minutes will take them to the very heart of the Green Line, straight into the heart of West Jerusalem. This is a different city, they say – lively until the wee hours of the night.

It isn’t simple in Arab Jerusalem. Everyone has their eyes on it. But the moment they touch it, they leave it to its own devices and head for West Jerusalem. “I hadn’t planned to visit Jerusalem, because I knew that for several months now it hasn’t been easy to get there for anyone who isn’t an Israeli by birth, or holds Israeli citizenship. But my energetic sister, who had visited Ramallah a year earlier, was emphatic that visiting the country without going to Jerusalem would be considered an incomplete visit.” He was walking down Salah a-Din Street. “The last street in Jerusalem, ad I immediately remembered our last street in Fakahani, in Beirut. And it seems we are fated always to be in our last street. However, are we destined to lose our last street another time?” And thus a group of visitors goes to the overlooks to gaze at the Old City. They gaze and they tour, but they don’t go into the Old City. Instead they go over to West Jerusalem with the feeling: “How odd and painful it is to enter Jerusalem, fearful. And after all these years, what kind of feeling is it to know that you are the real owner of this place, and here you are going in like a thief in the night!”

He ends the diary: “And thus I found I had intended one thing and ended up at a different thing. I had intended to visit Al Qatza, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, to walk on the ancient paving stones of the Via Dolorosa, and I found myself roaming the Israeli pedestrian mall. Does this fact have any meaning?” (from: A Diary: Several Hours in Jerusalem,” by Rasmi Abu Ali, a Palestinian writer, published in Al-Hayat, London, December 21, 1996).

And this Jerusalem looks to Palestinians as though it fell from the Oslo airplane in the middle of the Palestinian night. And God alone can save it. And in God’s holy war games, there will be no winners roaming the streets. More than anything it will look like a forbidden city. Only ruins and stones, the lovers of which decided to pile up as a memorial. Lines and lines of tourists, of all nations, will come to gaze at the city that ate its inhabitants, Jews and Arabs.

I walk around in Jerusalem and it increasingly seems to me like a heap of dry twigs. Or a mythological zoo. Burdened beyond recognition with history. Too much past and history are present in this city. Because of so much past it is impossible to see the future. I take a last look at the city and see the smoke rising over its roofs. Yet again the skies of Jerusalem have gone gray. Rain in May is a rare thing in this city. I wipe the drops off my face and suddenly they seemed to me like tears.

--

The article was published in Hebrew the Independence Day Supplement of Yedioth Aharonoth, May 11, 1997
***

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All Clear

Salman Masalha

ALL CLEAR

Amir hadn’t laughed so hard for quite some time, and certainly not upon hearing an announcement from the Home Front Commander. With his forces alert on all fronts he had learnt on his own flesh, the country’s flesh, the meaning of the Jewish experience. The more he tortured her, the more pleasure she felt and burst into yelps of joy that cut through the silence.

When Nurit Tzur phoned Amir to ask how he was doing “in these crazy times,” as she said, there was a somewhat jocular tone to her voice, though it didn’t quite conceal her tremendous anxiety. “Don’t forget to bring your mask,” she reminded him again before she hung up.

He had met Nurit Tzur – Nushnush to her friends – several years earlier. At that time, the time of the popular Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, she was living not far from his rented apartment in downtown Jerusalem.

One day Amir had gone to the neighborhood café where he was a regular, whether to meet friends or just for another anthropological session of observing the clientele. From afar, as he was still walking down the street and as he walked through the gate into the garden of the café, he noticed that a new girl had joined the table. Her laugh could be heard from quite a way off and she looked as though she were sitting with old friends. He pulled a chair away from another table and sat down next to her at a corner of the table that was free.

One of the guys -- Shimon or Nir, he can’t remember now – hastily introduced him to her: “Amir, Nurit,” said his friend and returned heatedly to the topic of the conversation. It wasn’t long before the argument died down and the conversation continued along calmer lines.

Unaware of the trap into which she was stepping, Nurit turned to him and asked: “I understand that you’re Amir. Amir who?”
Shimon, whose ear was always finely attuned to what was happening around him, was quick to tell her: Amir Cousin,” as everyone laughed. Shimon always had wisecracks of this sort upon hearing questions about “the northerner,” as he defined Amir, who had come from far away and settled in the holy city.
“Cousin?” Nurit wondered aloud, pursing her lips a bit?

“Not Cousin. A cousin, one of our Semite cousins,” Itzik corrected, eradicating with a single stroke the misunderstanding that Shimon had perpetrated.

“Ah, now I get it,” chortled Nurit, her laughter rolling form ear to ear.

Later, when everyone was lingering on the sidewalk before dispersing, Nurit related that apparently she too was going against the flow in that she too had left the Tel Aviv area and come to live in Jerusalem. “Jerusalem’s provinciality – I think it suits me better,” said Nurit, explaining her move from the trendy metropolis to the capital.

“Provinciality is a relative thing,” said Amir, as though he knew a thing or two about the provincial.

“There. Over there, on the other side of the neighborhood, that’s where I live now,” said Nurit, pointing, as they said goodbye, and her hand seemed to be caressing the treetops that moved in the gentle Jerusalem breeze.

***

In those days the word intifada had already begun to be naturalized into the Hebrew language. Initially, the media talked about disturbances, and as they weren’t ending and it didn’t look as though quiet would once again prevail in the occupied territories, the news people started using the term uprising. However, the sentries of the Hebrew language hastened to deplore the use of the Hebrew term, which is derived from the same root as the fancier and more right-wing of the two terms used for their war of independence, as well as the term for the Hebrew resistance and revival, and so as not to corrupt the youth. Thus, gradually the Arabic word infiltrated and dwelt secure in the tent of the Hebrew language.

A certain commentator on Arab affairs, versed in the Arabist tradition that is usually cut off from actual Arab experience, went one step further. He took the trouble to rummage in dictionaries and with a sarcastic grin smeared from ear to ear all across the screen, he brought his ridiculous merchandise to the viewers. Looking straight into the camera he opened his mouth and burst into an Arabist exegesis as though he had come upon a great treasure: “The original meaning of the word intifada in Arabic is: a camel’s orgasm,” explained the hyperactive commentator.

A few days later, at the usual table at the café, Nir turned to him and asked his opinion of the commentator’s linguistic “scoop.” Amir, however, with a typical wave of his hand, dismissed both the commentator and his discovery as utter folly, adding that he doubted that there is an Arab alive on this earth who knows this information, or takes it seriously. “The Arabs of today,” declared Amir, “barely know how to read those dictionaries that are no more than fallow land where rookie Arabists graze.”

During the course of the gales of laughter that ensued from the juicy discussion that had at long last descended from the meaning of life and other weighty matters to animal orgasms, Amir learned something about the orgasms of sea turtles in the Galapagos. Indeed, Nir had just recently returned all excited and enthusiastic about what he had seen on the distant islands.

“That’s where they should have established the Jewish state,” said Nir, trying to pour some oil on the flames of the argument that had died down.

“And who is going to do the construction work on the buildings there, who is going to till the land?” Itzik demanded.

“We’ll bring over Arabs like Amir and his friends,” said Nir, adding: “We really can’t live without Arabs.” After a brief pause, he continued: “And then, presumably everything will start all over again,” summing up the Zionist experience. More than anything else, Nir was impressed in the Galapagos by the cries of the coupling turtles that fill the primeval landscape. Nir likes to talk about sex a lot and about orgasms. He always said, half-seriously: “Politics is something people engage in and sex is something they talk about.”

“And how do you tell the difference between a he-turtle and a she-turtle?” Amir inquired of Nir.

“Search me,” answered Nir, adding in a challenging tone: “And what does our peasant and nature boy have to say on this issue?”
Amir couldn’t bear the condescension in Nir’s voice and riposted, to the laughter of the other people around the table: “Go to the turtle, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”
Nurit, who had also begun to sit at the table with the regulars, addressed herself to this issue that was heating up and added a new dimension when she asked with a smile: “Do she-turtles fake orgasms?”

***

The years go by quickly, apparently from the force of habit, thought Amir as he sipped his coffee, exhaling the cigarette smoke that made its way from his lungs back into the open air. Quiet had not returned to prevail in the land, because truth to tell it had never existed. And to all this was now added another threat, signs of which could be seen everywhere you looked. The packs and purses hanging over the backs of chairs had been joined by another accessory, a cardboard box dangling from a black plastic strap.

The fear of what might come was different now than it had been in other periods. Saddam Hussein’s threats to destroy half of Israel if his country were attacked hovered in the air. No one knew what surprises were up the sleeve of that man from Baghdad who had killed thousands of his countrymen with poison gases. In Israel they had already taken the precaution of distributing ABC – atomic, biological, chemical – masks to the all the inhabitants and had advised them to purchase masking tape to seal off the windows in advance of the trouble he might be sending their way.

Amir was uncomfortable with the hysteria all around but he was compelled, under not very moderate pressure from his friends, to report to the mask distribution center and take one. With a fair amount of misgiving he went to the distribution center, received a short explanation about its use from a young girl soldier and accepted a cardboard carton with a black plastic strap. When he got home he put the carton in the closet and did not even try to open it to see what was inside.

As the tension grew and the Iraqi attack seemed closer than ever, people were asked to take the cardboard boxes with them wherever they went. People were seen walking about town with a cardboard box dangling from their shoulder. People were seen crowding at the bus stops carrying the masks with them on their way to work or on their way home. Some people tried to conceal the masks inside plastic bags from the grocery store and some, mostly young girls, went so far as to paint their boxes bright colors or draw flowers on them.

***

Like a night borrowed from the stories, night fell on Jerusalem. The war was raging in far-off Iraq and missiles were striking in various places in Israel. “Why am I thinking about Shimon now, right at this moment?” Amir asked himself and he did not have a satisfactory answer. As the years passed, he found himself sinking ever more deeply into his isolation. He often felt as though a wave of a magic wand had detached him from the here and now and sent him floating in other worlds. Disturbing thoughts would come to him, erasing the here and now along their way.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Nurit, in an attempt to get him talking and elicit some irresistible charm from him in this situation in which she had found herself.

“Nothing,” he whispered into her ear, in a desperate attempt to not to reveal emotions that could cast a pall on the moment, and then he added a few worlds of encouragement: “I’m thinking about you, about us.”

“And maybe I want to avenge that liberated Palestinian girl who couldn’t bring Shimon to his knees, who couldn’t get past his Zionist guilt feelings about fucking the Palestinians on the one hand, and on the other crying about how they can’t fuck Palestinian girls” – this thought kept buzzing in his mind. Shimon had once confessed to him, during the first war in Lebanon, that he had not been able to respond to the flirtatious overtures of Souad, the daughter of a Palestinian public figure. “When the IDF is fucking Palestinians in Lebanon, I can’t fuck another Palestinian woman,” he had confided into Amir’s astonished ear.

“And maybe I have Shimon on my mind now because I find myself in Nurit Tzur’s bed, and she’s the daughter of Michael Tzur, a top Israeli officer?” This thought continued to distract him as his hand slid down her shoulder, gliding slowly down the slope landing on a moving hip, like someone trying to outline dunes that stretch to the horizon. like someone trying to outline dunes that stretch to the horizon. “And what about my guilt feelings?” Amir continued to torture himself.

He surveys her soft body as his hand rests on her breasts and a warm nipple tickles his palm. He sees the whites of her eyes and recalls pure white patches of snow resting on the mountain peaks of the north. He greedily suckles the water of life from her mouth as though it were the Sea of Galilee and lowers the level of tension that is hovering over the land. His hand slides down the slopes of her back as though it were a bird circling and soaring on the updrafts of warm air rising from the green fields, then landing on the country’s narrow hips in the approach to a narrow plain that gathered at her navel. Far, far away at the edge of the bed her heel stretched taut like a spring that had coiled the moment his body reported the penetration of a force in the area of the sink holes of the Dead Sea.

Here the whole land was spread before him, thought Amir to himself. He just had to stretch out his hand to touch it, to fondle it as much as he wanted, to occupy it, to free it inch by inch with no resistance. Here she is, so close he could see the blue of her eyes, the gold tumbling on her shoulders, and now all her gates are open to him. Here she is, so close and yet so far.

***

Wondrous are the ways of this land, muses Amir. Such thoughts could surface even for no particular reason on another long night with Nurit Tzur, in whose bed he now found himself stretched out, exposed to her, and she exposed to him. Rather than slaking his thirst in her springs, satisfying his hunger on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that grows in her breasts, he finds himself redeeming the land inch by inch, and it seems as though he could go on knowing her forever.

Silence reigned outside. Quiet sheltered the house in the pastoral neighborhood and only regular breathing and groans with new notes rose from the bedroom she had turned into a sealed room, following the precise instructions of the Home Front Command. And as Amir was immersed in his war of liberation, suddenly the rising and falling wail of the siren was heard, rising and falling, rising and falling.

Nurit’s fears of this war were so compelling that upon hearing the siren she quickly pushed him away before he could perform the final act of liberation and bring about an all clear. She leapt from the bed and rushed to put on her ABC mask, urging him to put on his. As an act of sharing his fate with hers, he too donned the mask.

The mask changes the man, thought Amir,his eyes following Nurit as she walked over to turn on the television. Suddenly the both of them looked like creatures from outer space who had landed on a strange planet, on a stricken planet.

Not many minutes went by before the all-clear signal was sounded and they both hastened to take off the masks and breathe easy. However, despite the all-clear siren, Amir could still see the anxiety on her face.

“If heaven forbid something terrible happens in this country, will you keep me safe?“ Nurit asked in a somewhat jokey way that revealed her huge fear.

“Keep you safe from what? From whom?” Amir answered her with a question.

“Nuuuu – you know. You’re just pretending not to understand,” she pleaded as though he had the answer.
In a desperate attempt to divert the conversation to other matters, so as not to create conflict at a moment of togetherness, he blurted as though casually: “The Sabbath will keep you safe, Nushnush.”
She didn’t laugh and said, affronted: “Excuse me? What’s that you say?”

“I was just joking,” answered Amir, as they sat there embracing and staring at the television screen, watching the live broadcast.

“There has been a hit in the Central Area. There are no injuries,” reported the Central Command Spokesman, live. Upon hearing the reassuring words, the two looked at each other and suddenly burst into laughter until their eyes were filled with tears and strange and varied smells of rubber filled their noses.

***

Translated by Vivian Eden
______

The Hebrew was published in Maariv, May 7, 2008

***

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Tribal Tribulations

Salman Masalha

Tribal Tribulations

On May 2nd, 1860, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Jewish boy was born to Jacob and Jannet in the city of Pest, which later joined Buda to form Budapest. They called him Theodor. Young Theodor wandered in many places and settled in Vienna where he studied law, a profession in which he never worked.

This young Jewish intellectual quickly became aware of the “Jewish question”, and started working within the Jewish community, making great efforts to find a suitable answer to the question. He drew up a program that could provide an answer to the Jewish problem, and put his ideas in writing. The term “Jewish question”, used by the founder of the Zionist movement, required an answer that had to be Jewish as well. His awareness of the Jewish fate led him in 1896 to write “The Jewish State” (Juden Staat), in which he drew the lines for his solution to the Jewish problem, a dream that came true five decades later.

Theodor Herzl did not trouble his mind with the “Jewish question” as an intellectual game only. The question came up because of the hostile attitude toward the Jews in all the places they had settled in Europe. Anti-Semitism, as he stated, surely will be found wherever the Jews go and settle no matter what they do: “No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted... Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable... The nations in whose midst Jews live are all either covertly or openly anti-Semitic.” (The Jewish State, Chapter II).

Thus, as Herzl saw it, the solution for the Jewish question should be part of the interests of all governments in the countries that have Jewish subjects and face tension on an anti-Semitic background. Therefore, he added, there is a need to find a place where the Jews can live together far from those hostile feelings and animosities. He stressed that such a solution should be brought about in collaboration with the super-powers of those times.

On one hand, it is amazing to see how the Jewish boy from Pest thought through all the details needed for building a state for the Jews. To accomplish this, he proposed forming two organizations: the Jewish Society and the Jewish Company. The former would be responsible for ideology and political arrangements with governments, and the latter would deal with the whole process that is needed to make the dream come true on the ground. He thought about the way settlements should be run, he thought about shopping malls, and about paving roads and about the hours that employees are supposed to spend in work, and about ways of bringing the Jews to the Holy Land. He did not forget to remind the Sultan in Istanbul that the Jews would even think of paying the debts and loans of Turkey, if His Highness, Abdul Hamid II, would collaborate with the idea.

On the other hand, there was just one “small” thing that Herzl did not think about when he was writing his program for the Jewish state. He didn’t think of the people living in Palestine.

At that time, towards the end of the 19th century, my late grandmother was born in the Arab town of al-Maghar, a small village in those days, which lies 10 kilometers northwest of the Sea of Galilee. The people of this village, in the Land of Galilee at the end of the 19th century, were not aware at all of the “Jewish question” that troubled the mind of the Jewish advocate. In fact, why should they have been aware of such a question at all? They lived in a small community under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and their efforts were directed mostly towards making their living from their lands.

Some questions come to mind when thinking of what happened in the last century. What makes a young Jew at the end of the 19th century dream of the idea that may be summed up in the famous phrase: “A people without land to a land without people”? What made him dream of such an idea, while at the same moment my Arab family was living and cultivating the land of the Galilee that is said to be, according to him, without people? The absence of my existence, since the very beginning of the Zionist movement, is a major factor in the on-going conflict to this very day. Herzl died in Europe and did not live in Palestine.

Time passed and the Ottoman Empire passed away and into the Land of Galilee a new ruler walked –the British. During the course of the World War I, British policy became committed to the idea of establishing a Jewish home in Palestine. After some consultations with Zionist leaders, a decision was taken and on November 2nd, 1917, Lord Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, in which the British government recognized the Zionist aims, and expressing: “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and views “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

My late father was born in the first decade of the 20th century. It was about the same year when David Ben-Gurion, who later became the first prime minister of Israel, went to Sejara, in the Galilee, and spent some time working on a farm. Ben-Gurion never met my father, and unlike Ben-Gurion who came from Poland, my father grew up in his land during the Ottoman Empire, then saw the British Mandate and died few years ago in the State of Israel. My father never left the village, and never traveled far away. He spent his whole life as a farmer, and had a very intimate relation with soil, trees and animals as well as people. Although he was illiterate, he knew the all names of the different kinds of clouds, the stars, the winds, plants, flowers, animals, soils, water springs and the like.

Unlike Herzl, who dreamed of a “land without people”, Ben-Gurion did in fact see reality as it is on the ground. About two decades after publishing Herzl’s program, and a year after the Balfour Declaration, Ben-Gurion wrote: “The Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) is not empty of population... In the western part of Jordan alone there are three quarters of a million inhabitants. It is forbidden by any means and under any circumstances to violate the rights of these inhabitants”. But, in the same article Ben-Gurion mentioned a very important idea that may reveal the fundamental basis for the tension in this part of the world. There is a difference between the interests of the two communities, Ben-Gurion stated. “The “non-Jewish” (bilti-Yihudim) interests are preservative. The Jewish interests are revolutionary. The former are devoted to maintaining the existing order; the latter to creating the new, to changing values, to repair and building.” (David Ben-Gurion, Talks with Arab Leaders, Am Oved, Tel-Aviv 1975).

These remarks of Ben-Gurion’s are of great importance, because they uncover the deep roots of the conflict in Palestine. They reveal the original sin that created the tension between Zionism and the Palestinian Arab’s aspirations in Palestine. If we deal with these remarks from an objective point of view, we can state the confrontation thus: revolution versus tradition. This may have many progressive aspects when it occurs in a homogeneous society, within a single society that is struggling for the best of its future. But, in our case. this revolution that may have positive aspects from a Jewish point of view, shows its dirty aspects when it goes along with confrontations with the “natives” who live in their own homeland. This homeland happened to have been the place in which the Zionist revolution intended to take place.

Furthermore, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 in the place that is deeply rooted in the Jewish religion did not aim only at finding a place where the Jews could live among themselves. It also, and perhaps primarily, aimed at building a new society, or at least it tried to melt together Jews from many different cultures into one entity through transferring them from vastly different countries into the Holy Land, ignoring the existence of the people living in their homeland.

From the Zionist point of view, this is a process of transforming a merchant and wandering society, especially from the European countries, into an agricultural and industrial society that is based on land that is not empty. In principle and objectively speaking, such a process is, by its nature, a very revolutionary one and to some extent is aggressive. It resembles other cases that have occurred in the course of history of mankind. However, the interests of the “non-Jews”, i.e., the Arab people of Palestine, are preservative in nature. In a time prior to national local patriotism, the Palestinians were not crystallized as a distinct nation, and their main aim was to keep their land and culture in a homeland that was part of a larger entity. In our context the Zionist ideology, by its very nature, creates tension with the Palestinians who lived peacefully in their homeland and devoted their efforts to preserving their lands and hopes.

To this day, things have not changed much. There is a separation between different types of citizens in Israel. For example, formally I am a citizen of the state of Israel who was born in Israel and who holds an Israeli passport. But, like all Arabs in Israel, I am still considered “non-Jewish” in the Israeli media and official Israeli policy. This term implies that I can be at the same level as a Chinese, a Russian, an African, a European, or a foreign worker in Israel -- but not a Palestinian Arab who lives in his own homeland. This terminology did not come about by accident, as this term was the term used by Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister. From a Zionist point of view, using a national category to describe me and the “natives” in Palestine leads to a confrontation with the basic principle of the Zionist ideology. This attitude reveals the deep-rooted tribal-national system which stands behind the term “Jewish state” to describe Israel. This may also explain why it took so long to reach the point of mutual recognition with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and why we are still living the conflict.

Furthermore, there is another point that is worth dealing with, as it plays a great role in the socio-political arena in Israel. Unlike other cases, there is no separation between religion and nation in Judaism. At least, that is how the Jewish people see things, and I am not going to argue with them about this issue. But, at the same time, it is a part of the conflict we have been facing for many decades.

On my birthday, November 4, 1995, in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, three bullets were fired by a young Israeli at Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, with the aim of changing the course of history as it had been evolving in the country and in the Middle East after the signing of the Oslo accords. In order to understand the process that led to Rabin’s assassination, there is a need to look at some of the terminology used by the Israeli public, and by both right-wing and mainstream parties since the 1967 War, when Israel occupied Sinai, the Golan Heights and above all, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Examining the terminology used in the context of the Holy Land can provide us with some explanation of what has happened during the last decades, and what may happen in the future if the use of such terminology continues.

Note all the feminine and even sensual imagery used for the homeland and the country. The image of the homeland as mother is quite a common thing. The feminine image gathers sensual momentum when we encounter an image like “Israel’s narrow waist” and so on. Rabin, in the eyes of a Jewish fanatic, abandoned parts of the matriarch Sarah or Rachel or Rachab, or any other familiar woman one may choose, to Arafat and the Arabs. To do this he did not even hesitate to get help from Arab Knesset members. Didn’t all the fanatics of the Jewish tribe accuse him of not having a Jewish majority? Is it not the case that arguments of this sort are still often raised today, several years after the assassination? In a tribal society, and religious-fanatic Jewish society is no different in this respect from the other fanatical monotheistic religions in the world, the individual has no value as such, even if the individual happens to be a prime minister. The value of an individual in such a society is measured only by the extent of his integration and his behavior according to the rules of tribal morality. Any deviation from these strict rules leads to an extreme reaction, even to the point of premeditated murder. A murder of this sort is always planned in advance in great detail, and there is always an attempt to blur the evidence.

This is even more true when what are involved are sexual animal instincts that suddenly rise to the surface. Therefore, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is not at all different from the murder of a girl in Arab society for having desecrated the family’s honor. True, this was a political assassination, but it is called political only because the murder victim filled a political role. The murder of Yitzhak Rabin goes far deeper than an extreme reaction to a political disagreement. Thus: The truth of the matter is that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered for reasons of sexual jealousy. In other words, for reasons of “desecrating the honor” of the family or the tribe. Only in this context is it possible to understand the assassination. No other explanation gets to the heart of the matter. Rabin, as far as the assassination is concerned, is comparable to the Arab girl who tries to grasp a bit of modern thinking and modern behavior, while turning her back on benighted ideas from the collective tribal culture of the past.

Rabin preferred Israeliness, that is modernity, over incurable and insular Judaism. And thus, in the eyes of the tribal fanatics, he crossed the red lines of tribal morality. In other words, instead of being “one of us” he began to keep company with “them”. Instead of protecting mother and Sarah and Rachel and Rachab, he let Arafat feel them up and touch the “narrow waist” of mother homeland. To all this can be added the cult of the patriarch, or more precisely the cult of the tombs of the patriarchs and the matriarch that are so common in this country among broad strata of the Jewish tribe. Thus Rabin crossed the red lines of Jewish tribal morality. And in a political act for which he took the responsibility, backed by the Israeli majority in the Knesset, there was a sort of separation of religion and state. To the fanatics this act looked like the red cape dangled before the fierce bull of a Jewish state. It was not by chance that the tribal elders gathered and resurrected from the pages of ancient Jewish law concepts that sanction vengeance against “pursuers” or individuals who hand a fellow Jew over to hostile authorities and so on. And when things reached this point, only a minor question remained: Who would carry out the judgment of the tribal elders?

Therefore, it was not the lone individual who was the assassin, but rather the entire conceptual world behind the murder. As long as such concepts are not rooted out and as long as religion is not separated from the state, there will be murders in this context. And there will be great tension between the Jewish tribe and the Arab tribe.

The prime minister of Israel was murdered on the tense border between the Jewish and the Israeli. He was murdered by the emissaries of the Jewish tribe because he had the courage to try to expand the grazing lands of the Israeli tribe, which may include the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, at the expense of the pure Jewish tribe. Thus the Golem took revenge on its creator. It is also important to note that it is not by chance that in the national anthem there is no hint of “Israeli-ness.” On the contrary, the emphasis in “Hatikva”, the Israeli anthem, is on the deepest religious connection to time (history) and place (the Land of Zion): “The Jewish soul yearning ... the eye gazing towards Zion ... the Land of Zion, Jerusalem." The combination of the two, the soul and the place, cannot but be mytho-religious. The Israeli national anthem is a Jewish religious prayer and not a statement about being Israeli. Therefore Israel is a religious Jewish legal entity and not a secular state. And when the leaders of the state were not wise enough, or were unable to, or perhaps did not want to break this link between religion and state, they sinned the primal sin of Zionism.

Two decades later came the June, 1967 war and brought the Jewish tribe into physical contact with the places that are so laden with mythological times and values. The noose grew tighter. To the primal sin was added another sin. In every nuance, Israel has never succeeded in adopting a value discourse that has self-confidence in facing the religious discourse. On the contrary, Israeli secularism has been taken over by feelings of inferiority facing fundamentalist religious discourse. For this reason Israeli secularism has not attributed importance to written words and to words spoken in the public arena. The right, of all hues, religious and non-religious, has known how to exploit to the fullest the words that are laden with sanctity. And this is the great breaking-point.

Thus, again and again mythological figures have cropped up from the past -- Amalek, Pharoah, Haman and even figures from the recent past like Hitler. The right, which is nurtured on religious texts and claims family and tribal values, has eyes in the back of its head like someone in the clutches of constant paranoia. It also sees the future with magic spectacles that are always showing it pictures from the monstrous past. The right wing tries to infect everyone with this paranoia. Such a view does not grow up in a vacuum. Its source is in part in the fact that deep down the right is aware that it has done a terrible injustice to the other, and the other in this case is the Palestinian.

The Israeli right, in its very essence, is imprisoned in this trap. Part of the left, not all of it, is trying to get out of it with as few casualties as possible. Yitzhak Rabin, although it was a bit later, did understand the grave danger that lies in this trap. He was aware that he as Chief of General Staff had got Israel into it. When he saw how things were, he had the courage to begin to seek ways to get out. But, being a general, he wanted the retreat to take place with the minimum of casualties. This is also the reason for his hesitancy and suspicion.

To get out of the trap Rabin was prepared to take great steps forward. He was prepared to tip the balance in favor of Israeli tribalism rather than Jewish tribalism. The right’s reaction was to come to him with the racist demand for “a Jewish majority.” This demand even managed to seep into his own party, the Labor Party. In a desperate attempt he tried to unravel the tangle and began to talk in different language. Terms like racism and apartheid, of which he accused the right, came out of his mouth in despairing tones, and this is how they were described by the government broadcasting channel just a few days before the assassination.

This poison potion of tribalism and religion is the place where the ideology grows that sprouts not weeds but base murderers, even if the victim is a Jewish prime minister. The shock and astonishment expressed by many people at the fact that “a Jew had done this” is indicative of hypocrisy and stupidity. This is the battle between human law and the law of the tribe and God, who knows only vengeance. This is also, in part, the reason for the rejoicing that was heard among small parts of the Jewish public in Israel and elsewhere.

On November 4, 1953, five years after the establishment of the State of Israel in collaboration with the super-powers and the United Nations, I was born in al-Maghar, a village that lies west of the Sea of Galilee. As a little boy in the 1950s I was not aware of what had happened in the region only few years earlier, in 1948. As a little boy in the 1950s I was not aware of what had happened in the land of Galilee. As a little boy, I was not supposed to know or understand wars and struggles between nations and super-powers. I grew up and gradually began to hear stories. I heard for example that I could have been born as a refugee, as during the war of 1948 my family fled out of fear to a nearby village in which with other families stayed for several days. But the closeness to the land and to the olive trees quickly brought them back on foot to al-Maghar. They had in mind one thing only: Either we live in our homeland or if we are fated to die, let us die in our homeland in the Galilee. At that time they did not think of Palestine as a national entity with historical borders. Homeland in their view at that time, and in my opinion, now, is still like that, a narrow idea. Homeland in an Arab peasant culture is the few square kilometers of the village where you were born. Moving a few kilometers to another village, which rarely occurs, sounds to them like immigrating to a new country.

Many times, when going to visit al-Maghar, I have faced the question: When are you coming back? When I ask what is wrong with living in Jerusalem, their answer would be sentimental and could be summed up in one word: Homeland. For them that means a few square kilometers in the area of al-Maghar. Is their answer a part of the conflict in the Middle East? My reply is categorically, YES. This answer is connected to the main problem that lies behind the conflict in the Middle East, and I mean the refugee problem. Some may think in political terms in dealing with the conflict, and tend to think that it can be solved within the frame of establishing a Palestinian state. In fact, those who think so ignore the basic essence of the Palestinian social structure.

In order to make this point clearer, I may refer to a new survey that was conducted by Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI) among 1948 and 1967 refugees. The survey shows that the vast majority the refugees, 99.8 percent of the overall refugee population, believes that return must be to their original villages and towns within the borders of Israel. The survey shows that only 1.5 percent of the refugees believe that the PLO has the right to waive the right of return in their name.

Now, the time is August 2001 and both of us, the same Jewish boy from Pest and myself, stay in Jerusalem, the city that at the moment occupies the news headlines in almost all the international media. The Jewish boy rests on a small hill named after him, Mount Herzl. I, myself, don’t have the courage to think even of having a street named after me in my homeland in the state that was born before me and is said to be the Jewish State. The term, from its very beginning, brought tension to the country. The evacuation, by force or under the circumstances of war which may be characterized now in terms of ethnic cleansing, of nearly 70 percent of the Arab population, “non-Jews” as they are characterized in Zionist terminology, who lived in their land, has not brought about a solution to the “Jewish question”, as the early founders of Zionism thought initially.

I would like to end with a new quotation from a column written by an Israeli poet, Chava Pinchas-Cohen, that was published in the Hebrew daily newspaper Ma’ariv, on August 27, 2001: “We came back home and found that there were new tenants”. This image reveals the deep roots of the unfinished conflict. The ideology that lies behind the use of the phrase “coming home” means: It’s our home and we came back to settle in it. The others, as they appear the second part of the quotation are “new tenants”. This means that the people to which I belong is nothing but a new tenant, that is to say not the owner of the house. This is exactly the ideology that has not changed for almost a century. And this is the ideology that will keep on bringing disasters to this troubled place, that has not gone beyond religious and tribal morals.

Jerusalem, August 2001

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Firstly published in German (2001)

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The Cat, the Cross and the Cream

Salman Masalha

THE CAT, THE CROSS AND THE CREAM

Is the Israeli cat trying to guard the cream? Or are we going to get lost in Nazareth? And what is the connection between all this and the people that is vanishing as the end of the millennium approaches? Are you confused? This is a sign that you are on the right track.

Once upon a time in the land of the Galilee, in the time before the state of Israel, there was a village where the children of Ismail, Christians and Muslims, lived side by side, or, as we like to say here - in peace and tranquillity. The years passed, each man under his vine and his fig tree, until one day someone in the Christian neighborhood began to excavate foundations for an additional house for his growing family. He dug and dug, until he suddenly found that he had exposed an ancient mosaic decorated with a cross and depictions of figures from the New Testament. The entire Christian neighborhood came out to see this discovery. The heads of the community decided that instead of building a house on the site, they would keep on digging until the whole archeological site was uncovered. Thus they unearthed another cross and another Virgin, and the celebrations got underway in the Christian neighborhood. Sheep were slaughtered in honor of the discoveries, and the sounds of rejoicing reached the homes of the Muslims, whose neighborhood was at the other end of the village.

When the Muslims heard the sounds of rejoicing coming from the direction of the Christian quarter, they decided to send duly appointed representatives -- the mukhtar and other notables -- to find out the reason for the sudden jubilation. The delegation set out, and when they came to the gates of the Christian quarter, they were greeted by distinguished representatives of the Christians. The latter conducted the delegation to the site and explained to the Muslims that the cause of the rejoicing was the discovery that the village had been a Christian site since ancient times, and as proof of this they displayed the antiquities that had been uncovered. The Muslims looked, and were awe-struck, yet gradually a veil of unhappiness descended on their faces. After feasting with their Christian friends, they returned to the Muslim neighborhood, where they related what they had beheld. After some discussion, a decision was taken in the Muslim quarter that the following morning they too would begin to excavate in their neighborhood. They dug and dug but they found nothing. For seven days the excavations continued, and then they dug for another month or more and still they found nothing. Despair began to trickle into their hearts. But, as they were trying to decide what to do next, all of a sudden everything changed. One of the diggers came running to the mukhtar and told him that they had found proof that the village belongs to the Muslims. Everyone rushed to the site and they were overwhelmed with joy. That night, the festivities began. They slaughtered sheep. Sounds of singing filled the air and their echo was heard in the Christian neighborhood on the other side of the village.

From a distance, the Christians heard the joyful noise coming from the Muslim neighborhood and decided to send representatives to find out what was happening. The priest and a number of other people volunteered to set out as a delegation. They went to the Muslims, who greeted them smiling from ear to ear and invited the Christians to partake of the slaughtered sheep, as the customs of hospitality require. After the feast was over, the Christian delegation inquired as to the cause of the rejoicing. The Muslims did not want to answer in words because they knew that what the eye sees is far more telling than what the ear hears. They conducted the Christian delegation to the site, where the mukhtar stood and announced to the Christian delegation: Here we have discovered that the village has always been a Muslim village. When the priest asked: And what have you found? The mukhtar, without blinking, said: Behold. Here we have found Muhammad's cross.

Is there any connection between Nazareth and Islam? And will the millennium bring bloodshed? At the beginning of the century that is about to end, a French scholar named Casanova published a study of the beginnings of Islam. His book was entitled Muhammed et la Fin du Monde. Among other things, Casanova noted that Muhammad's new religion, Islam, which was born in the Arabian Peninsula, came into the world under Christian influences. Muhammad, according to Casanova, had a very strong sense that the end of days was imminent, and therefore preparations must be made.

I myself have vague memories of the city of Nazareth. At the end of the 1950s I got lost in its lanes. In the mind of a little boy who had come from the village, the visit to the developing city of Nazareth was an unforgettable urban experience. I and a friend, another little boy of about my age, walked hand in hand through the maze of the market, when suddenly my family disappeared from view. Thus we found ourselves lost among the crowd that filled the market on weekends. Many years have gone by since then, and even today I sometimes feel like I am still looking for something in Nazareth, but it seems that I have not yet found myself there. In the Nazareth of today, on the brink of the millennium, the people of Nazareth are looking for something else there. In the Nazareth of today, they are looking for their bones, not for themselves.

Now, we are but a footstep away from metabolism of the toxic spiritual materials of the end of the millennium. And Casanova, whom I have recently recalled, is also the name of a street in Nazareth. Not far from there, on the road that leads up to the market of Nazareth, stands the Christian Church of the Annunciation from which the streets branch out that lead to the market where I got lost. There, in the open space in front of the church, Muslim activists have taken possession of a piece of land. There, a large tent stood that became an improvised mosque on the grounds that exactly on this spot is the grave of Shihab al Din, a soldier who served in Salah al Din's army, which liberated the holy places from the Crusader conquest. This site has become a source of friction between Christians and Muslims in the city on the brink of the millennium.

To paraphrase the previous story: Have the Muslims at the end of the millennium in Nazareth also found Muhammad's cross? Or is this another sword that is destined to rip the city to shreds and not leave any bit of it standing? The Israeli government, of course, is trying to mediate between the Muslims and the Christians! And in this state of affairs, I cannot be sanguine. Peace in Nazareth is already in the process of being slowly digested in the gut of the Israeli cat that is guarding the cream in Nazareth.

Jerusalem, Autumn 1999

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French: "Le chat, la croix et le pot crème", Qantara: magazine des cultures arabe et méditerranéenne, Nº 34, 1999‑2000

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Salman Masalha

The City of the Walking Flower

Here, on the watershed of the winds, between reality and imagination, between the utopia of the celestial spheres and the doom of the underworld, stands Jerusalem. The city is a pile of stones that separates sea from sea, tomorrow from yesterday, the green from the desert, and, above all, the sacred from the profane. It is like a broad cosmic-political terminal, the starting line for the competitions in which participants race to other places, other times. Here in Jerusalem, and in the four corners of the earth, the descendants of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad jostle one another on the track, taking part in an Olympics of the evil spirit that knows no rest. They are all poised, crouching to the ground in awe of the holy, waiting for the starting gun in order to defeat gravity.

When I was a child, Jerusalem was inextricably linked in my imagination to the apocalyptic day of the great dash forward, from which there is no return. The scenario, including the instructions issued by the official sitting on a raised platform in the dome of the sky, was determined in advance and minutely detailed. In the play of the End of Days, mortal actors have no freedom to improvise. They must play the roles determined for them, with complete faith and no reservations or questions, such as what if, maybe, nevertheless. According to the scenario, the Jews are destined to destroy the Muslim mosques in Jerusalem. Because of the support the primarily Christian West gives the Jews and the Jewish state, the Muslims will retaliate by rising up and destroying the Christian churches. The West’s reaction will be swift: it will gather its armies to conquer the K’aba. And thus, in an uncontrollable chain reaction, a great world war will break out: the Apocalypse. Eventually, the Messiah will come and bring a new world order, entirely different from the one we have now. As a child, I never imagined fate would call me to rub shoulders with the inhabitants of this city, nor did I conceive of the possibility of living in what was destined to be the eye of the storm at the End of Days.

In the year 1690 there also lived someone who thought the End of Days was happening before his lightless eyes. No one knows his name, and chances are no one ever will. A man from Aleppo, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, arrived that year in Jerusalem. He prayed there, strolled through its markets, met its people, and as is the habit of many pilgrims, put his impressions down in writing. One day he went out to a hill west of the city walls. The hill served as a Muslim cemetery, and the graveyard still exists in the center of Jerusalem in the Mamilla quarter. His guides related that here, at the edge of the cemetery, someone once dug a grave and, within the grave, found a Muslim man sitting and reading the Quran. The man from the grave addressed him and asked what had happened, whether the Hour, the End of Days, had come. The digger, frightened by what he saw, fled for his life. However, after a while he returned to the place, accompanied by other people, and found no trace of digging or the man in the grave.

Nearly two centuries later, someone else thought the End of Days was near. In 1874 a Dutch woman came to Jerusalem; the citizens called her the Dutch Princess. She decided that it was not enough to dream. She wanted to anticipate the practical needs of the Redemption and the End of Days. Therefore, she embarked upon the construction of a building that was to serve as a huge hostel meant to accommodate the 140,000 Children of Israel who would remain alive at the End of Days. The place she selected was none other than that same plot west of the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla. The man from the grave in the previous story is of the Children of Ishmael, but had his luck been with him, he might have been able to lodge in a five-star hotel as the “Shabbes goy” (a Gentile who performs household tasks prohibited to Jews on the Sabbath) for the surviving Children of Israel. The Dutch Princess ran out of money and never completed her project, which shows that even in the business of the End of Days, the earthly marketplace reigns.

Independence Park now stands on that site. Like many of the gardens in the Holy Land, it represents the Garden of Eden and, by extension, the expulsion. So, throughout the years, the people of Jerusalem, the living and the dead, dwell there in expectation of the Day of Judgment. Jerusalem is slowly borne above the earth’s surface, as if the stone of the city were not the same stone, as if the wind were not the same wind, and as if the people were not the same people.

Jerusalem is unlike other cities. It has laws of its own. For example, the laws of physics do not apply here. The city of Jerusalem is borne above the earth’s surface by supreme metaphysical forces, and any attempt to descend with it to the firm ground of reality—to the street, the café, the noise of the buses, the municipal garbage—leads to the crashing of dreams soaked in the holiness of the End of Days and fantasies sprinkled by divinity. Therefore, the city is famous for its syndrome, the Jerusalem Syndrome. Anyone who strolls through the streets is likely to encounter people whose dreams have all shattered on the ground of reality in this strange city. Where else in the world is there a city with a syndrome all its own?

Jerusalem is best kept in the cellars of the imagination. It is recommended, and perhaps desirable, to write about it, especially poetry. The city does right by poets. It provides them with an abundance of color, images, and metaphors. However, it is not a good idea, perhaps it’s even dangerous, to break it down into small details. Reality could hit you in the face, and dealing with this will be difficult. All of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are strangers, yet she does not welcome strangers. Here, strangeness has a hierarchy. I, too, am a stranger in Jerusalem, and it does not welcome me either. But what am I, a mere mortal, compared to the many days through which so many mortals have passed?

During the 1870s, about a hundred years before I came to Jerusalem, a man from Damascus named Nu’man al-Qasatili came to the city gates seeking progress and openness. The Damascus of those days looked to him like the epitome of backwardness, so he set out for what he imagined to be the city of lights. He did not find the city of lights, of course, but he immortalized his impressions in a chronicle of his journeys through the provinces of Greater Syria. He noted that there were about forty thousand inhabitants in the city at the time. The natives were a minority in Jerusalem. The rest were a motley of strangers: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The majority of the city’s inhabitants had arrived there from distant places, beyond the sea and desert. Today the population of Jerusalem is more than four hundred thousand souls. The inhabitants of today are new strangers, or the descendants of yesterday’s strangers. The strangers of today are the fathers of the strangers who will be born here. Gradually, it becomes clear that strangeness is an inseparable part of the city. The strangers who have settled in the city enjoy when strangers come to visit. They wait expectantly for the visitors because they provide a significant part of their income, as al-Qasatili says. Those who have already settled in Jerusalem do not love the other strangers who have already settled here, but all of them want the strangers’ money, that is to say the tourists, because that is how they earn their living.

Who builds whom? Does man build a city in his image, or is it the city that builds the man? This question may seem simple, but with respect to Jerusalem, it is not. Cities built along the coast take their character from the sea. They face the sea and draw serenity from it. The cycle of the waves beating endlessly on their shores pervades them with a sense of life without end. In Jerusalem, too, there is a cycle, but it is the cycle of a volcano, and you never know when it will explode. There is also a sea near Jerusalem. But in this Jerusalem sea, you always lie on your back with your eyes looking up toward heaven. You needn’t lift a finger in order to float because Jerusalem’s sea always pushes you upward. You can sink only into hallucinations of other places and other times. Any attempt to stand with your feet on the ground, to be in reality, demands a supreme effort, and in many cases it demands a lot of tears, and not always because of the salt of the Dead Sea.

As I told you, I was not born in Jerusalem. I came there in the seventh decade of the twentieth century to join the congregation of strangers that inhabit it. Jerusalem is ultimately a city of eternal strangers. The connection to the city is not a connection to place, but rather a connection to time. The connection is not to stone, object, or anything earthly, but rather to moments, feelings, experiences. And Jerusalem, as opposed to many cities, has too much time, too many moments, and too much past. And with so much past in Jerusalem, it is hard to see the future, because the future of Jerusalem always pulls toward the past. The people of Jerusalem walk through it with their eyes stuck in the backs of their heads and their faces eyeless. This is perhaps another reason why the people of Jerusalem frequently fall down in the street. Every movement in it, even the smallest, leads to a wound. Every stone you turn over in this city could be hiding a scorpion because, as the tradition has it, Jerusalem is a golden chalice full of scorpions. The Jerusalem of yesterday, today, and presumably tomorrow sits on the watershed of the winds, between the desert and the mountain. It is a mixture of Hebron and Warsaw. Two seas battle for it, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and the Dead Sea to the east. A sea of life and a sea of death, exactly like its history. Though it seems, more and more, that it is turning its back to the West and not dwelling in the East. It pulls towards the past, to Creation. Too much past has passed in Jerusalem, and in a place where the past is so dense, it is hard to see the future.

And at that very place in Mamilla, al-Nabulsi writes, he saw something wonderful. He noticed a plant the size of a finger, green in color and with a flower. The plant had two arms, four legs, and a small red head with a white tuft on top. It also had a reddish-pink tail with vertebrae, and this plant was alive and walked on its legs. Hope hides in al-Nabulsi’s legend. The day will come when not only the Torah will go forth, but the flowers of Jerusalem will begin to walk freely on its earth. I have been living in Jerusalem for a number of years now, and I pass by this place often. Every time, I examine the ground, hoping to see that walking flower. However, in the meantime, I make do with other walking flowers, which I have been seeing for years. They have arms and legs, but not their own. These are the arms and legs of the girl who makes the rounds at night, selling flowers in the bars of Jerusalem.

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WLT

 

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