Jerusalem: The Biography

The Israelis built a modern capital in Western Jerusalem,^* which was an uneasy blend of secular and religious. ‘Israel was socialist and secular,’ recalls George Weidenfeld, ‘high society was in Tel Aviv but Jerusalem revolved around the old Jerusalem of the rabbis, the German intellectuals of Rehavia who discussed art and politics after dinner in the kitchen and the Israeli elite of senior civil servants and generals like Moshe Dayan.’ While the Haredim lived their separate lives, secular Jews like Weidenfeld dined out at the smartest restaurant in Jerusalem – Fink’s, with its non-kosher goulash and sausages. Amos Oz felt uneasy in this kaleidoscopic city, with its peculiar mix of restored antiquities and modern ruins. ‘Can one ever feel at home in Jerusalem, I wonder, even if one lives here for a century?’ he asked in his novel My Michael. ‘If you turn your head you can see in the midst of all this building a rocky field. Olive trees. A barren wilderness. Herds grazing around the newly built prime minister’s office.’ Oz left Jerusalem, but Sari Nusseibeh stayed.

On 23 May 1961, Ben-Gurion summoned one of his young aides, Yitzhak Yaacovy, into his office. The prime minister looked up at Yaacovy: ‘Do you know who Adolf Eichmann is?’

‘No,’ replied Yaacovy.

‘He is the man who organized the Holocaust, killed your family and deported you to Auschwitz,’ replied Ben-Gurion, who knew that Yaacovy, child of Orthodox Hungarian parents, had been sent to the death-camp by SS-Obersturmbannführer Eichmann in 1944. There he had survived the selection of those allowed to live as slave labourers and those to be gassed at once by SS Dr Josef Mengele himself, perhaps because of his blond hair and blue eyes. Afterwards he emigrated to Israel, fought and was wounded in the War of Independence and settled in Jerusalem where he worked in the prime minister’s office.

‘Today,’ Ben-Gurion went on, ‘you will take a car to the Knesset and you will sit as my guest and watch me announce that we have brought Eichmann to stand trial in Jerusalem.’

The Israeli secret service Mossad had kidnapped Eichmann from his hiding-place in Argentina, and in April his trial started in a courthouse in downtown Jerusalem. He was hanged in Ramla prison.

On the other side of the border, King Hussein called the city his ‘second capital’, but his regime was too precarious to risk moving the real capital from Amman. The Holy City was effectively demoted to a ‘provincial town with barbed-wire in the centre’. Nonetheless, Hash-emite Jerusalem regained some of its old charm. The king’s brother, Prince Muhammad, governed the West Bank. He had just married the beautiful sixteen-year-old Palestinian: Firyal al-Rashid, ‘We spent six months of the year in Jerusalem,’ remembers Princess Firyal, ‘in the most delightful small villa that had belonged to the Dajanis, but my husband spent most of his time negotiating with the Christians, trying to make peace between the warring Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians!’

King Hussein appointed Anwar Nusseibeh as governor and custodian of the Sanctuaries. The Nusseibehs were more prominent than they had been for many centuries: Anwar at times served as Jordanian defence minister, his brother Hazem as foreign minister. All of the Families had lost their money and their olive groves, but many continued to live in their villas in Sheikh Jarrah. Anwar Nusseibeh now lived opposite the American Colony in an old-style villa with ‘Persian carpets, gold-embossed academic degrees, crystal decanters for after-dinner drinks and dozens of tennis trophies’. Nusseibeh had to practise ‘a tolerant ecumenicalism’, praying at al-Aqsa every Friday and every Easter leading his whole family to join ‘the high clergy in robes holding golden crosses to circle the Holy Sepulchre three times’, as his son Sari recalled. ‘My brothers and I liked this [Easter celebration] the most because the Christian girls were the prettiest in town.’ But the Temple Mount itself was quiet. ‘There were few Muslim visitors to the Haram,’ noticed Oleg Grabar, the pre-eminent scholar of Jerusalem, who started to explore the city during those years.