Jerusalem: The Biography

Israel faces two paths – the Jerusalemite, religious-nationalist state versus a liberal, westernized Tel Aviv which is nicknamed ‘the Bubble’. There is a danger that the nationalistic project in Jerusalem, and the obsessive settlement-building on the West Bank, may so distort Israel’s own interests that they do more harm to Israel itself than any benefit they may bring to Jewish Jerusalem.^* They certainly undermine Israel’s role, uniquely impressive by historical standards, as guardian of a Jerusalem for all faiths. ‘Today for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines,’ the writer Elie Wiesel wrote in an open letter to US President Obama in 2010 and, under Israel’s democracy, this is theoretically true.

It is certainly the first time Jews have been able to worship freely there since AD 70. Under Christian rule, Jews were forbidden even to approach the city. During the Islamic centuries, Christians and Jews were tolerated as dhimmi but frequently repressed. The Jews, who lacked the protection of the European powers enjoyed by the Christians, were often treated badly – though never as badly as they were treated in Christian Europe at its worst. Jews could be killed for approaching the Islamic or Christian holy places – but anyone could drive a donkey through the passageway next to the Wall, which technically they could only attend with a permit. Even in the twentieth century, Jewish access to the Wall was severely restricted by the British and totally banned by the Jordanians. However, thanks to what Israelis called ‘the Situation’, Wiesel’s claim about freedom of worship is scarcely true for non-Jews who endure a multitude of bureaucratic harassments such as a regime of obstructive residence permits. Israeli police are constantly tightening their control of the gates of the Temple Mount while the security wall makes it harder for West Bank Palestinians to reach Jerusalem to pray at the Church or Aqsa.

When they are not in conflict, Jews, Muslims and Christians return to the ancient Jerusalem tradition of ostrichism – burying their heads in the sand and pretending The Others do not exist. In September 2008, the overlapping of Jewish Holy Days and Ramadan created a ‘monotheistic traffic jam’ in the alleyways as Jews and Arabs came to pray at Sanctuary and Wall but ‘it would be wrongto call these tense encounters because there are essentially no encounters at all,’ reported Ethan Bronner in the New York Times. ‘Words are not exchanged; [they] look past one another. Like parallel universes with different names for every place and monument they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.’

By the bile-spattered standards of Jerusalem, this ostrichism is a sign of normality – particularly since the city has never been so globally important. Today Jerusalem is the cockpit of the Middle East, the battlefield of Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism, not to speak of the struggle between Israel and Palestine. New Yorkers, Londoners and Parisians feel they live in an atheistic, secular world in which organized religion, and its believers, are at best gently mocked, yet the numbers of fundamentalist millenarian Abrahamic believers – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – are increasing.

Jerusalem’s apocalyptic and political roles become ever more fraught. America’s exuberant democracy is raucously diverse and secular yet it is simultaneously the last and the probably the greatest ever Christian power – and its evangelicals continue to look to the End Days in Jerusalem, just as US governments see a calm Jerusalem as key to any Middle Eastern peace and strategically vital for relations with their Arab allies. Meanwhile Israel’s rule over al-Quds has intensified Muslim reverence: on Iran’s annual Jerusalem Day, inaugurated by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the city is presented as more than an Islamic shrine and Palestinian capital. In Tehran’s bid for regional hegemony backed by nuclear weapons, and its cold war with America, Jerusalem is a cause that conveniently unites Iranian Shiites with Sunni Arabs sceptical of the ambitions of the Islamic Republic. Whether for Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon or Sunni Hamas in Gaza, the city now serves as the rallying totem of anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and Iranian leadership. ‘The Occupation Regime over Jerusalem,’ says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ‘should vanish from the page of history.’ And Ahmadinejad too is a millenarian who believes that the imminent return of the ‘righteous, perfect human Al-Madhi the Chosen’, the ‘occulted’ Twelth Imam, will liberate Jerusalem, the setting for what the Koran calls ‘The Hour’.