Jerusalem: The Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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