City of Protest and Prayer
By Otto Friedrich. Reported by David Aikman and Robert Rosenberg/Jerusalem
Jerusalem is the center of the struggle between Arab and Jew
What can I say that others have not said already . . . told many times over and drawn again and again? . . . What can these places say to you, if in your mind's eye you do not see . . . the fearful day of the death on the Cross within the walls of Jerusalem?
--Nikolai Gogol, Letter on Jerusalem, 1850
The first thing to be said about Jerusalem, even if it has been said before, is that the ancient city is eternally new. In this magical place, sacred to three religions, the slopes outside the Jaffa Gate are ablaze with orange tulips, and rows of golden hyacinths sprout beneath the outstretching arms of the Moses Montefiore windmill. An unusual sight among the orange trees of the Mediterranean? "Ah, yes," a handsome Israeli woman sighs, "the Dutch sent us 100,000 bulbs when they moved away their embassy. So we planted them."
In Gogol's time, three centuries of Ottoman rule had reduced the City of God to a crumbling Levantine village of no more than 15,000 inhabitants (slightly fewer than half of them Jews). "Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless," Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad. "Everything in it is rotting," said Gustave Flaubert, "the dead dogs in the streets, the religions in the churches." Today, after a turbulent sequence of British, Jordanian and Israeli conquests, after years of sporadic bombings and gunfire, this beautiful and richly diverse city is vibrant with growth and prosperity.
Since the Israelis forcibly reunified Jerusalem in 1967, the population has climbed from 275,000 to 407,000, and more than 1.1 million visitors pour in every year. The fortress-like apartment towers clustered on the once bare hills surrounding the city now extend to the very edge of the desert wilderness where Satan tempted Jesus; and though the walled Old City surrounding the holy shrines is still redolent of cinnamon and roasting lamb and hashish and donkey turds, the twisting alleys leading onto the Via Dolorosa (Sorrowful Way) are covered with paving stones rather than mud. Even the cats--Jerusalem has a remarkable quantity of cats--look content.
Yet all this exuberant rebirth is, in a strict sense, illegal. Not a single nation in the world recognizes the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem. And when the Knesset voted in 1980 that a reunited Jerusalem was, in the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, "the eternal capital of our country, our people, our faith, our civilization," the United Nations promptly voted that it was no such thing. Hence the departure, under strong Arab pressure, of the Dutch diplomats.*
Of all the conflicts between Jews and Arabs, that over Jerusalem is the most complex and intractable. It is so deeply rooted in centuries of political and religious strife that each side is passionately determined to have its way. As long as there is no settlement, every terrorist bomb on the West Bank contains the danger of escalation: rioting, warfare, spreading oil cutoffs, a new confrontation of the superpowers. Arab claims on Jerusalem range from demands for Islamic sovereignty over the Muslim holy places to more contentious proposals for a Palestinian Arab capital in the east of the city, and even to wild-eyed cries that all Israelis should be expelled. The Israelis are willing to bargain on many things, but not on Jerusalem.
International controversy tends to imbue not just flowers but everything about Jerusalem with a nervous symbolism. Particularly state visitors. Thus French President Francois Mitterrand ceremonially carried a beribboned sheaf of flowers to the eternal flame at the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vashem last month, but he politely refused to go anywhere in the Arab districts of East Jerusalem. When Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak balked at extending his state visit to Jerusalem out of fear of appearing to condone Israeli control, there was talk for a time of his dashing through the Israeli capital without spending the night, a bizarre compromise that failed to satisfy anyone. Begin finally put off Mubarak's entire tour.
The strangest symbol of such controversy is Anwar Khatib, a suave attorney who maintains a dingy office behind the Herod's Gate post office and proclaims himself to be the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem. And although the last Jordanian forces were driven out of Jerusalem 15 years ago this June, a number of consuls come to pay him Official courtesy calls.
The paradoxical symbolism of Jerusalem flickers all through its commercial life. Just across the street from the Damascus Gate, near the East Jerusalem bus station, which still displays signs announcing the nonexistent express bus to the Jordanian capital of Amman, the British Bank of the Middle East stands apparently abandoned. Its front windows are covered by rusty metal shutters, the shutters covered with Arab handbills. "The Israelis wanted the bank to stay open," says an Arab wise in local charades, "but then it might be closed down in all Arab countries. So the manager remains here to do business, but you must call him at home, and then he comes down here, and there is a back way. Look here." The Arab points to an unmarked entrance on a side street, where an old woman is selling baskets of white and yellow daisies. Behind her is a little door that opens into the bank whenever someone comes to unlock it.
But this Friday is Good Friday--what Gogol called "the fearful day of the death on the Cross within the walls of Jerusalem"--and in Holy Week the city seems to become for a time the center of the world, as it was on the maps of the Middle Ages. As Holy Week starts on Palm Sunday, brown-robed Franciscan monks and white-robed Dominicans march in a long procession of the faithful, each with his own palm frond, along the route that Christ rode on his donkey from the village of Bethany up over the Mount of Olives, past the ancient olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane and through St. Stephen's Gate into the Old City.
Good Friday is more somber. The zigzagging Via Dolorosa, so named only in the 16th century, is packed with pilgrims following in Christ's footsteps to Calvary. "We adore thee, O Christ ... Thou hast redeemed the world," the Franciscan monks chant in Lathi as they lead their flocks through the Arab market, through the 14 stations of the Cross. Past the small Polish chapel that marks the spot where Jesus staggered and fell under the burden of his Cross, past the Armenian church that commemorates his encounter with his mother, past the Greek chapel that honors St. Veronica for wiping his forehead with her kerchief, past the Coptic church where he fell again ... Traditionally, these are simple processions, but last year an American evangelical group re-enacted the original Passion: a barefoot and barebacked young man, sobbing with emotion, carried a cross the length of the Via Dolorosa, while others, playing Roman soldiers, whipped him onward.
Calvary is believed by many to be within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Near the entrance stands the rock of Golgotha, thought to have held the Cross. It is only dimly visible behind a small sheet of plate glass set in the surrounding wall. A few scattered coins lie at its base. The sepulcher where Christ lay is more elaborately bedecked with the trappings of worship. Dozens of thin white candles cast their flickering light over the sacred stone slab and the icons that survey it from the marble walls of the encompassing chapel.
After centuries of conflict and even bloodshed among rival groups of clerics, the ruling Turks in 1757 divided up all rights in this church among six Christian groups--the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians, Syrians, Copts and Ethiopians--and these six still conduct the Easter ceremonies at Christ's tomb, each in its own tune and according to its own ritual. Various Christian churches have disagreed for centuries on when Easter actually occurs, and since the Orthodox date comes a week after the Roman one, the Greek priests lead their Palm Sunday parade in Old Jerusalem at about the same time that the Catholics are celebrating Christ's Resurrection. Only on the following Saturday do the Eastern faiths unite in the climactic ceremony of Holy Fire. The men dance, the women ululate, the church is darkened. The Greek Orthodox patriarch enters the tomb, prays and then thrusts from a porthole to the expectant crowd a lighted torch that symbolizes the Resurrection of the Light of the World.
These traditional Easter ceremonies can prove dismaying to Protestant pilgrims. Since Jerusalem offers all things to all believers, some now worship at a completely different burial site known as the Garden Tomb. It was Charles ("Chinese") Gordon, British conqueror of the Taiping rebels, who in the 1880s popularized the idea that the whole tradition of the Holy Sepulcher might be mistaken, and that Golgotha, which means "the place of the skull," might actually be a skull-shaped cliff about 500 yards to the north, behind what is now the main East Jerusalem bus station. When an empty 1st century tomb was found near by, an Anglican group created around it a tranquil garden where outdoor Communion services and a sunrise service on Easter are now held among the Jerusalem pines.
Controversies over what actually took place where have aroused biblical scholars ever since the 4th century excavations by St. Helena, mother of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, who unearthed what she believed to be the miraculously preserved true Cross in what is now the crypt under the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Modern scholars generally agree, however, that such shrines as the Via Dolorosa and the stone of Golgotha are no more than approximations of what is historically unprovable. They argue, though, that exact geographical details simply do not matter a great deal, that a unique religious event took place in Jerusalem nearly two millenniums ago, and that the whole city commemorates it.
To the large majority of people who actually live in Jerusalem, however, Easter is an essentially alien rite. It is the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat, that closes down West Jerusalem's stores and even stops the buses at sundown every Friday, and this week is Pesach (Passover) of the year 5742. For the past week, schools have been closed so that everyone can prepare for Wednesday night's Seder. The flower shops are bursting with anemones, chrysanthemums, carnations. The housewives have been cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning.
While the male head of the house retells the story of the Exodus from Egypt, everyone shares in the ritual foods: bitter herbs for the Israelites' slavery, salt water for their tears, unleavened bread (matzo) to represent their haste in flight, a roasted egg for the triumph of life over death. When the ceremony ends, the eating becomes festive: kneidlach (dumplings) in chicken soup, cakes boiled in honey and spiced with ginger, coconut macaroons.
Every Seder for centuries has ended with the words "Next year in Jerusalem" (in Israel, the pledge is: "Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt"). And to honor the ancient injunction, an estimated 200,000 Jews are pouring into Jerusalem for this week's holidays. "Jerusalem," says Israel's Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, "is our brain, our head, our soul."
Apart from all strictly religious questions, many Jews sense a need for the physical reality of Jerusalem. The Talmud exults in its splendor: "Ten measures of beauty descended upon the world. Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world one." The Talmud even prescribed strict rules for maintaining its purity: no balconies or other extensions on houses, no ash pits or potters' ovens, no gardens except rose gardens. The physical attachment of the Jews to Jerusalem helped them to survive the centuries of Diaspora. "I was born in one of the cities of the exile," said S.Y. Agnon, a native of Galicia, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, "but I always regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem."
This Jewish combination of religious and national feeling reaches its epitome in the mystical veneration for Jerusalem's Western Wall, or "Wailing Wall." To an alien eye, the limestone retaining wall looks impressive but hardly sacred. It rises nearly 60 ft. high, 1,580 ft. long, on the western edge of where the Temple stood 2,000 years ago. Some of its boulders are huge, 40 ft. long and weighing 100 tons. There is nothing here but these stones, yet Jews from all over the world flock to the wall to pray, to meditate, to dance, to take photographs, to hold bar mitzvahs or simply to be awed. According to tradition, a prayer said here will pass through the stones into the buried Holy of Holies, and a prayer left in writing between the stones will reach God. According to tradition too, the men must worship segregated from the women, who stand to the right of a barrier at the wall. "This is where the Presence resides," says one white-bearded worshiper in a prayer shawl. "This is where he will always be. Forever."
To the Muslims, who make up more than a quarter of Jerusalem's people, every Friday is holy, this week in the Muslim year 1402 no more or less so than any others, and even as the great bronze bells toll in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the chant of the muezzin in the minaret of the neighboring Mosque of Omar summons all Muslims to prayer. It is customary for both Christians and Jews to acknowledge Islam as Jerusalem's third religion, but also to patronize it as a latecomer. It angers many Jews and puzzles Christians that the Muslim conquerors of the 7th century built their magnificent Dome of the Rock squarely atop the ruins of Solomon's Temple. That Muhammad ascended to heaven there, from the same sacred rock on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, is recounted in guidebooks as a picturesque legend.
But for the Arabs, who shut the gates of the Temple Mount against all infidel intruders before every prayer service at the mosques, five times a day, that Temple Mount is Haram as-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). Jerusalem--known as Al-Quds, or the Holy City--is more sacred to them than any other city except Mecca and Medina, and according to the Hadith, "one act of worship there is like a thousand acts of worship anywhere else." Although Jews are forbidden to worship on the Temple Mount--partly because Moshe Dayan so decreed as a conciliatory gesture after the 1967 takeover, partly because rabbinical law warns that such an intrusion might unwittingly profane the uncertain site of the Temple's Holy of Holies--the Muslims sometimes feel they are under siege. Just last month, a group of Jewish extremists pushed their way onto the Temple Mount, began chanting prayers and stabbed an Arab guard who tried to prevent them. Nor have the Muslims forgotten that the nearby Aqsa Mosque was seriously damaged in 1969 by a fire started by a demented Christian cultist from Australia.
Israeli authorities, who tend to be secular minded, decry all religious zealotry, and they emphasize that free access to all the holy sites is an Israeli innovation (though Muslims from nations technically at war with Israel, like Syria, are routinely barred). That access was guaranteed by the armistice of 1949, but the Jordanians hardly honored the agreement. The Western Wall, where the Jews had been permitted to worship under British and even Turkish rule, was totally forbidden to them. "The Jordanians even desecrated our cemetery over there on the Mount of Olives," recalls one Israeli, whose voice begins to break as he gestures toward the sacred hill. "They used gravestones to make lavatories. We don't forget such things."
But for all the antiquity of its three religions, Jerusalem was there before any of them. Jews like to say that its name derives from ir shalom, meaning city of peace, but its more probable origin is yara salem, meaning founded by Salem. He was one of the local deities of Jerusalem's pre-Israelite era. The antiquity of Jerusalem almost defies comprehension. When David first conquered the city from the Jebusites about 1000 B.C., the founders of "eternal Rome" had not yet been suckled by the legendary she-wolf. But Jerusalem was already 1,000 years old. And bloodshed has remained the city's motif through its four millenniums. It has been conquered 37 times, according to one reckoning. The Babylonians destroyed King Solomon's Temple of cedar wood and gold in 587 B.C. and carried the Jews off into exile ("By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion... If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning ..."). The Romans not only destroyed the Second Temple, built by Herod, but tore the city to the ground in A.D. 135. They renamed it Aelia Capitolina and banished all Jews forever. (Not until two centuries later were exiles permitted to return just once a year to pray and mourn at the Western Wall outside what had once been their temple.) Where are the imperial Romans now? Where is Babylon?
The very stones of Jerusalem still echo the names of its many conquerors. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built by the Crusaders, who stormed Jerusalem in 1099 and killed all the Muslims and Jews they could find in the city. Salah el-Din (Saladin) Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of East Jerusalem, commemorates the Muslim warrior who expelled the Crusaders in 1187. The mighty walls that still gird the Old City are the creation of Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th century Turkish Sultan. Even the brief reign of the British under a League of Nations mandate still has its monuments in King George V Street and Allenby Square, named for the general who entered the Old City on foot in 1917 because he would not ride where Jesus had walked.
Today's Jerusalem was born in the violence of Israel's creation. The British had promised Palestine to both Jews and Arabs, then clung to power through World War II. Hitler's Holocaust made the need for a Jewish homeland inescapable. But after the U.N. voted in 1947 to partition the mandated territory into Jewish and Arab states, with an autonomous.
Jerusalem under international supervision, the violence worsened. British patrols proved unable or unwilling to prevent Arab guerrillas from ambushing trucks supplying Jerusalem. Food and even water had to be rationed as the city underwent a two-month siege.
May 14,1948. The British depart. Israel is proclaimed. Five Arab nations attack. The Israelis beat them back. Jordan's British-trained Arab Legion seizes Jerusalem's Old City, and Jordanian mortars wreck much of the Jewish Quarter...
The armistice left Jerusalem divided as brutally as Berlin. Concrete barriers and barbed wire and land mines extended from the Cathedral of St. George to the hospice of Notre Dame and south to the tomb of David. The Israeli city hall was hit periodically by sniper fire from the New Gate, across the street (bullet holes still ornament the fagade). Jordanian troops not only barred Jews from the Old City but opened fire on virtually anyone trying to reach the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital in the encircled Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus. And so passed nearly two decades.
June 5, 1967. At the demand of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the U.N. withdraws its peace-keeping forces from the Sinai frontier. Nasser mobilizes his troops, declares he will blockade Israeli access to the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel strikes first by bombing Nasser's air force...
The Israelis claimed that they had no designs on Jerusalem and even told Jordan's King Hussein that they wanted no two-front war. The Jordanians responded by shelling West Jerusalem, hitting the Knesset, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's house and several hospitals. The very afternoon of the first Monday's fighting, a mechanized brigade of Israeli reservists launched a counterattack. They were joined by paratroopers who encircled the strongly defended Old City. Then, on Wednesday morning, from a halftrack in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel atop the Mount of Olives, the paratroop commander, Mordechai Gur, ordered the final assault: "For two thousand years our people have prayed for this moment. Let us go forward."
Colonel Gur could not wait. He raced his halftrack down the mountain at top speed, hurtling past the burned-out hulks of tanks and the sprawling bodies of slain paratroopers, then dodged by a flaming truck partly blocking St. Stephen's Gate and burst right into the Old City. White flags were beginning to appear on all sides. While his paratroopers roared in behind him, the colonel turned left, crashed through another gate and then sent back his message to GHQ: "The Temple Mount is ours. Repeat: The Temple Mount is ours." And despite the crackle of continuing sniper fire, the first paratroopers rushed to the Western Wall, touched and kissed the sacred stones, then burst into tears at their triumph.
The battle for Jerusalem lasted just three days, the whole war just six, but after 2,000 years of saying "Next year in Jerusalem," the victors had no real plan of what to do with their recaptured capital. "I wanted the unity of Jerusalem to be given full practical expression, and I wanted it done quickly," Moshe Dayan later wrote, but it took almost three weeks for the Knesset to declare the city united, and only then, at dawn on June 29, did the army start blowing up the walls that had divided the city for nearly 20 years. The army had already evacuated and bulldozed the slum hovels of the Moroccan quarter, which obstructed most of the Western Wall, thus making possible the vast plaza that faces it today.
Some wanted to go still further. David Ben-Gurion, who had been Israel's first Prime Minister, proposed to tear down the 38-ft.-high Turkish-built walls that ran for about 2 1/2 miles around the Old City. "Let it all be open," Ben-Gurion is reported to have said. "Make one city, no walls." Other proposals, characteristic of the reckless city builders of the 1960s, were almost equally ominous. One was to straighten out all the curves in the Jaffa Road, the main route from downtown Jerusalem west toward the coast. Another was to speckle the area around the Old City with high-rise hotels.
Jerusalem's mayor, Teddy Kollek, a rotund Viennese, now 70, is an assertive politician but also a shrewd and humane one (see box). To help keep the developers within bounds, he organized an international Jerusalem Committee of prestigious figures such as Buckminster Fuller, Isamu Noguchi and Pablo Casals. With their backing, he blocked all superhighways within the city and put a limit of eight stories on buildings. He re-enforced the British regulation that all new buildings be faced with Jerusalem stone, the soft dolomite limestone that gives the city its unique rosy, peachy, golden color. Kollek also began the complex process of creating a flower-filled greenbelt around both the Old City and Jerusalem as a whole. Just last month he turned busy Ben Yehuda Street into a pedestrian mall. And all along the scarred no man's land that once divided the city, Kollek has erected theaters, concert halls and other stone symbols of reunification. Says Moshe Safdie, 43, the celebrated architect who is building a complex of modern apartment houses in the revived Jewish Quarter of the Old City: "Jerusalem before 1967 was a village ... a dead end for both Jews and Arabs. It had lost its original purpose for existence. Since 1967, it has become a city again."
Jerusalem remains, of course, a city of wildly diverse communities. There are not just Jewish Jerusalem and Arab Jerusalem but official Jerusalem of the Knesset and the monolithic government ministries, commercial Jerusalem of the Bank Leumi le-Israel, and intellectual Jerusalem of the 15,000-student Hebrew University and the renowned Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The city's Jews come from some 70 nations (70% of them from Muslim lands), and every nationality has its own neighborhood. The wealthy Reha-via section, where all Prime Ministers live, was settled largely by early refugees from Nazism, and German can still be heard there. In the Nahlaot district, one little synagogue is for Kurdish Jews from Iran, and another little synagogue standing right next to it is for Kurdish Jews from Iraq. In the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim Quarter, one of the first to be built by settlers emerging from the walled city in 1860, the streets have to be shut down with police barricades every Sabbath. Otherwise, passing drivers may be stoned by teen-agers wearing long side-curls, who view such traffic as a violation of religious laws. Many women here ritually shave their heads and wear wigs, and posters proclaim that Israel can have no ruler but the Messiah.
Christian communities are no less diverse. The White Russians congregate in the bulb-domed convent church of St. Mary Magdalene, near the Garden of Gethsemane, but there is also a Soviet-run order of Russian Orthodox monks, which is reputed to include the KGB agent for Jerusalem. The entire southwest corner of the Old City belongs to the black-frocked Armenian clerics, who live behind high stone walls and lock all their doors to the world at 10 p.m.
To preside over such a conglomeration requires lots of money, and like most mayors, Kollek does not have enough.
Indeed, Jerusalem's finances would make a less visionary mayor start cutting back. Local taxes, the highest in the country, raise only one- third of the municipal budget of $150 million; the rest has to be wheedled out of the national government. But Kollek is a master fund raiser in Europe and America (his Jerusalem Foundation has dispensed $50 million), and he has been known to scoff at a half-million-dollar check as "not enough."
Kollek's efforts also require constant negotiation. Before 1967, many houses in the Old City had no sewers or running water, for example, but to install new plumbing means rooting around amid buried archaeological treasures. Every official innovation tends to be regarded with dire suspicion not only by Arabs but by ultra-Orthodox Jews.
"Look at those TV antennas!" cries one of Kollek's aides, standing near the top of the Damascus Gate, next to a sign that points out the slots for boiling oil to be poured on attacking knights. She gestures across the medieval rooftops, where aerials grow like greenbrier. Kollek is trying to persuade the inhabitants to take down their antennas and hook up to a central aerial. But this would cost about $200 a set, and tax money cannot be used for such a purpose. Special funds have to be raised. "The Arabs are still suspicious," the aide says. "They think we're trying to control what they can see on TV."
The most controversial aspect of the rebuilding of Jerusalem derives from the Israeli government's decision to establish Jewish housing projects in the Arab East. In 1968, the year after their victory, the Israelis began confiscating land, and in 1969 the first 200 Jewish families moved into the new suburb of Ramat Eshkol. The Arabs protested, the U.N. voted censure, all to no avail. When the U.S. State Department joined in the protests, the Jerusalem city council responded by adding two more stories to the buildings being planned. Today there are 15,000 Jewish families in ten suburban projects from Neve Yaakov in the north to Gilo in the south, and the number is still growing. In 1967 the population in the 28 sq. mi. of East Jerusalem was 65,000 Arabs and no Jews; today the figures are 115,000 Arabs and 70,000 Jews. By 1990 the Israelis hope the populations will be about equal. As an added touch, Prime Minister Begin has indicated that he may move his office to East Jerusalem.
The new projects are almost defiantly ugly--great Bronxlike blockhouses on what had been bare hills. "The idea always used to be that there would be no suburban sprawl," grumbles Architect Art Kutcher. "That has been destroyed." Says Jerusalem City Planner Joseph Schweid: "We wanted low density for Ramot, for instance, but the Ministry of Housing said, 'We don't build villas.' " Adds one Israeli: "The purpose of this whole program is to make Israeli possession of the united city irreversible."
A few idealists see hope in the social integration of Jews and Arabs, but most people are skeptical. "I have Arab friends," says Architect Kutcher, "but we don't invite each other to our homes. We just live side by side." Kollek's aides admit as much, and one spokesman talks of Jerusalem as being "a mosaic rather than a melting pot." Though Arab and Israeli children now learn each other's languages in Jerusalem classrooms, they still go to separate schools. Officials like to boast not only that many new classrooms have been built (152 last year) but that Arab schools are just as good as Jewish ones (and much better than what the Arabs had in the past). Separate but equal is what that doctrine used to be called in the U.S., and the Supreme Court condemned it forever by ruling that separate schools are inherently unequal.
No Israeli reforms, however, will ever satisfy the Arabs. To accept any benefits of Israeli rule implies an acceptance of Israeli rule itself--an implication the Arabs emotionally resist. They see Israel, in Kollek's words, as "an occupier, maybe the best possible occupier, but an occupier." Like any benign occupier, Kollek leans over backward to be sympathetic to his Arab constituents. Before every election, he courteously asks some prominent Arabs to join his ticket; they respectfully but unfailingly decline. When the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, they offered Arab residents the choice of becoming Israeli citizens or remaining Jordanian. About 99% remained Jordanian. All Arab nationalist political movements are banned. Though Arabs are allowed to vote in Israeli elections, only about 10% do so.
Like all peoples in occupied lands, the Arabs claim to see slights and denigrations everywhere. Sometimes this feeling is justified, sometimes paranoiac, sometimes both. The Hadassah Hospital, for example, now provides Arab patients with better service than any Arab hospital, but many Arab patients are dismayed that the doctors address them in Hebrew and that the food is Jewish. Such resentments are aggravated by class differences: the Arabs of East Jerusalem increasingly serve as the maids, waiters and construction workers of the Jewish West. "The Israelis are more capable at running a city," concedes a garage owner in East Jerusalem, "so the roads are better, the traffic, the sewage system, but there is no joy any more. We don't enjoy our lives." Adds his son: "It is impossible to deal with an Israeli, because his point of view is impossible. They believe it is their land, and that is that."
This half-suppressed Arab anger over Israeli rule periodically erupts in violence, as in the rock throwing on the West Bank this past month. The worst such outburst in Jerusalem was a bomb that exploded inside an abandoned refrigerator in Zion Square in 1975; 15 people were killed and 62 wounded. The most recent bombing occurred at the New Gate last August, killing two Italian pilgrims and wounding 27. "The P.L.O. doesn't like me being here, so we have a lot of problems," says Shraga Rozenzweig, 38, who has been bombed six times since he opened the prosperous Dolphin Restaurant in East Jerusalem in 1967. Two troopers with automatic rifles are stationed outside the restaurant's door.
Actual terrorism in Jerusalem is not very widespread. Perhaps because of intense police work, the total number of "incidents" since January 1981 is only 25 (the number of casualties: five dead and 35 injured). But bomb scares remain part of the city's everyday life. Signs warn of "suspicious objects," and handbags are searched at the Western Wall and at the great mosques. Phone calls to the police frequently bring a blue-and-white bomb-squad truck to investigate a dropped briefcase or a child's broken doll lying on the sidewalk. The rifle-carrying Israeli soldiers are all over downtown Jerusalem, usually in groups of two or three, lounging on street corners, sauntering watchfully through the Arab markets. The Jerusalem police force, which is about 10% Arab, boasts a number of Jewish-Arab teams, like Sasson Ovadia, a Kurdistan Jew, and Khalil Doube, a Jerusalem Arab. Says Khalil: "Policemen are a different breed. We let others deal with the politics. We don't make laws, we enforce them."
Such an attitude helps keep alive the idea that there must be some "solution" to the question of Jerusalem, some peaceable kingdom in which the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. Blueprints for settlement come easily. One expert has counted 45 plans during the period of the British mandate alone. But in the strenuous negotiations at Camp David that brought a compromise on other Arab-Israeli disputes in 1978, the only agreement that could be reached on Jerusalem was an agreement to omit all mention of the subject. Says a Western diplomat in Israel: "There are no solutions for Jerusalem. There are just next steps, new frameworks."
Most Arabs and Israelis agree on a few basic points: that the city should never again be partitioned, that there should be free access to the holy places, and that these shrines should be administered by the religious groups. U.S. officials support all these points, always adding that the overall question of sovereignty remains to be negotiated. But those who have tried to negotiate have never come closer than Moses wandering in the wilderness in search of the Promised Land just beyond the horizon. Aside from the alternative absolutes of total Israeli or Arab control, the main proposals include: 1) let Israelis and Arabs somehow share or rotate power (an idea urged by Egypt's Anwar Sadat); 2) make Jerusalem, or perhaps just the walled section, an international free city (an idea long advocated by the Vatican); 3) put the U.N. in charge of all holy places; 4) put the Jordanians, the Saudis or some other Islamic authority in charge of the Muslim holy places; 5) create a Palestinian state on the West Bank and grant Jerusalem Arabs citizenship in that.
All these schemes are in varying degrees unrealistic, since all require substantial concessions. Mayor Kollek, as usual, has some plans of his own, which would concentrate on making the city function better. Specifically, he wants to provide the diverse neighborhoods with greater autonomy. The plan originally aroused fears that the city would once again be divided, but Kollek has gradually started a series of experiments. In five neighborhoods (four Jewish and one Arab), authorities appointed activists to local councils in 1981 and asked them what they needed most.
At A-Tur, a Muslim village, the council wanted new sewage lines so badly that it solicited contributions and even organized citizens to volunteer for digging. At Gilo, which had more children than the Education Ministry had expected, the council wanted temporary classrooms. "These may sound like picayune things," says a ranking city official, "but they are the start of something important."
They may also be the beginning of the only solution that has any realistic prospect of being fulfilled. It is not a solution that will satisfy the rival demands of international power politics or of sectarian ideology, but it may hold out the best prospects for the citizens involved.
Listen for a moment to an Arab who was supervising a construction gang at work in Ben Yehuda Street last month. "Right after the war, I didn't want the walls taken down," he said, "but then I went out with my children to walk around Jewish Jerusalem, and I saw that even though the people weren't like us, they had worked hard to make the city beautiful. These men here, they would rather be working for an Arab city. But they aren't, so I tell them, 'We have to do what we can.' This isn't the Jews city or the Arabs' city. It's our city."
To which, in Holy Week, Amen.
-- By Otto Friedrich. Reported by David Aikman and Robert Rosenberg/Jerusalem
* A11 twelve other embassies in Jerusalem, all from Latin America, also went to Tel Aviv.
With reporting by David Aikman and Robert Rosenberg/Jerusalem
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