Jerusalem: The Biography

President Nasser resigned temporarily but never relinquished power and even forgave his friend Field Marshal Amer. But the latter planned a coup d’état and, after his arrest, died mysteriously in prison. Nasser insisted that ‘Al-Quds can never be relinquished,’ but he never recovered from the defeat, dying of a heart attack three years later. King Hussein later admitted that 5–10 June ‘were the worst days of my life’. He had lost half his territory – and the prize of Jerusalem. Privately, he wept for al-Quds: ‘I cannot accept that Jerusalem is lost in my time.’²⁹

EPILOGUE

Everybody has two cities, his own and Jerusalem.

Teddy Kollek, interview

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

S. Y. Agnon, Nobel Prize acceptance speech 1966

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

Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country

O Jerusalem, fragrant with prophets

The shortest path between heaven and earth …

A beautiful child with burned fingers and downcast eyes …

O Jerusalem, city of sorrow,

A tear lingering in your eye …

Who will wash your bloody walls?

O Jerusalem, my beloved

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

Nizar Qabbani, Jerusalem

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

Binyamin Netanyahu, speech, 2010

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

Elie Wiesel, open letter to Barack Obama, 2010

MORNING IN JERUSALEM: FROM THEN UNTIL NOW

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

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

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

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