STUDY QUESTIONS  
 
   

Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory (New York, 1995; updated reissue of Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, 1989): 238-251 (chapt. 8)

CHAPTER EIGHT

"The Future of the Past"

The rational mind has always had reservations about Jerusalem. In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote Albert Einstein: "I can muster no sympathy whatever for the misguided piety that makes a national religion from a piece of the wall of Herod, and for its sake challenges the feelings of the local natives." Freud was attached to the Jewish world with ties he knew to be indestructible and had even contemplated, briefly, . . . settling in Palestine. Yet, a few years later he told his friend Arnold Zweig, the novelist, who had just returned from a visit to Jerusalem: "How strange this tragically mad land you have visited must have seemed to you. [It] has never produced anything but religions, sacred frenzies, presumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearances by means of the inner world of wishful thinking.... And we hail from there!"

The early Zionists by and large tended to share Freud's wariness of religion. Theologically, Zionism was the great Jewish heresy of the nineteenth century. The early Zionists were sober men, more realistic than most in their fears of an imminent collapse of civilization in Europe, and eager above all to save lives. Like many national leaders of the liberal European school, they were anticlerical if not outright secular. The idea—even more so, the reality—of Jerusalem frightened or repelled them. The Zionists were, for the most part, future-oriented men and women. Jerusalem incarnated most things they had scorned and rejected: superstition, backwardness, and theocracy.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, envisaged the capital of his proposed state on a new site, the western ridge of Mount Carmel, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. "When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with pleasure," he wrote after a visit in 1898. "The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys.... The amiable dreamer of Nazareth has only contributed to increasing the hatred." Try as he might, at the Wailing Wall no "deeper emotion" came. "What superstition and fanaticism on every side!"

Ahad Ha'am, the leading Zionist thinker of his time, experienced a similar sensation in 1891 after inspecting what he called "the terrible Wall" and the ultra-Orthodox men worshiping it. "These stones bear witness to the ruin of our land, and these men—to the ruin of our people; which is the greater of the two ruins? Which should we deplore more? A ruined country . . . can be rebuilt; but who can help a ruined people?" He would not cry for Jerusalem, he announced, but for the Jewish people. David Ben-Gurion, the future prime minister, who arrived in Palestine as a Zionist pioneer in 1906 and during the next decade thoroughly explored the entire country, from Galilee to the south, mostly on foot, seems to have avoided Jerusalem almost deliberately. In his diaries and letters, so rich in impressions of other sites, there is hardly a word about Jerusalem. Like most pioneers of his generation, Ben-Gurion was more interested in building a new socialist society of free men and women than in national icons and religious relics. The Zionist pioneers, writes Anita Shapira, a leading historian of the period, regarded sentiments for Jerusalem as simply "reactionary." Chaim Nachman Bialik, the great poet of the Hebrew literary revival early in this century, avoided modern Jerusalem as a theme. He felt ill at ease there. None before Bialik or after expressed the Jewish will to live in words and rhymes of such beauty and poetic force. He borrowed a well-used biblical image of Jerusalem—"joy of many generations" (Isa. 60:15)—and applied it to Tel Aviv, the new city on the sea, where, like Ahad Ha'am, he chose to settle. He preferred Tel Aviv, he said, because "our hands have built it from its foundation to the roof. This after all is the purpose of our national renaissance: to cease being indebted to others, to be our own masters, in body and spirit."

On a different, purely political level, it is noteworthy that Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who became Israel's first elected president, was known throughout his life to harbor ambivalent feelings about Jerusalem. He first visited the city in . . . —"not without misgivings," he wrote in his memoirs in 1949. "I remained prejudiced against the city for many years and even now I still feel ill at ease in it, preferring Rehovoth [where he had built his home in 1938] to the capital." In 1937, when the first partition plans were discussed, Weizmann suggested that only parts of the modern city be included in the proposed Jewish state. As for the Old City, "I would not take the Old City [even] as a gift. There are too many complications and difficulties associated with it."

Such sentiments look preposterous today in most Israeli eyes. At the time of the establishment of Israel in 1948, they were still quite common. A few months before, in the fall of 1947, most Jewish leaders were ready to abandon all of Jerusalem if they could have an independent Jewish state elsewhere in the country. Internationalization of the city seemed a fair compromise. The 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state stipulated the establishment of Jerusalem as a third, internationally administered, separate political body. The resolution was enthusiastically endorsed by the Jewish leaders. The loss of Jerusalem, in Ben-Gurion's words, was the inevitable "price we have to pay" to obtain a Jewish state elsewhere in the country. Had Israel been born in peace, had the Arabs accepted the 1947 partition resolution, the question of Jerusalem might have been resolved; as an international enclave it might have thrived as never before or since.

But the Arabs never accepted the UN partition resolution; they declared open war on it. Israel's birth came in two stages. The first was a civil war between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, nowhere as brutal as in Jerusalem. The second was an even bloodier struggle with the regular armies of four neighboring Arab states, which invaded the Jewish-held territory on the day Israel declared its independence (May 15, 1948). The Jordanian attempt to take West Jerusalem failed after two weeks of heavy house-to-house fighting. By the following month, June, Jerusalem was a city divided, seemingly for all time.

The defense of West Jerusalem was seen by most Israelis as perhaps the most heroic feat during the war. It was popularly talked about in near-mythic terms. Nevertheless, West Jerusalem was not at this early stage accorded any special role within the new Israeli state. The new provisional government officiated in Tel Aviv. Zeev Sherf, the first cabinet secretary, later remembered that during the first nineteen months of the new state, he never met anybody who thought that West Jerusalem should be Israel's capital: "The subject was never raised." Other capital sites were proposed: Kurnub in the Negev (by Ben-Gurion) and Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea (by Golda Meir). The majority seemed to favor Tel Aviv. From time to time, voices were raised abroad in favor of the aborted UN resolution on internationalization. But since both Israel and Jordan were now opposed to this and in effective control of their sectors within the divided city, such voices were not taken very seriously. The first elected Israeli parliament held a festive opening session in Jerusalem and then moved to permanent quarters in Tel Aviv. At most, Jerusalem was accorded the role of an educational or cultural center, the seat of the supreme court. The legislature and the executive established themselves in Tel Aviv.

There things stood at the end of 1949, and there they might have remained had not a new solemn resolution calling for the internationalization of Jerusalem achieved an unexpected majority in the United Nations. It was proposed by Australia, Lebanon, and the Soviet Union. A Swedish-Belgian compromise proposal calling for UN supervision over the holy places only was rejected. Shocked by the sudden prospect of having to face pressure to give up emotion-laden territory over which so much blood had been spilled during the recent war (and by the apparent callousness of an international organization that had done nothing to prevent that war or punish those who had unleashed it), the Israeli cabinet met on the next day and resolved for the first time that Jerusalem was "an inseparable part of the State of Israel and its eternal capital."

The decision at this stage to transfer the capital to West Jerusalem was reflexive rather than premeditated. The Catholic world was held responsible for the new initiative to internationalize the City. The fact that the Vatican had not protested the occupation of East Jerusalem by Jordan gave rise to suspicion that the Catholic church, reconciled to Moslem rule in Jerusalem from the Middle Ages, found it difficult, for theological reasons, to adjust to Jewish rule there. Had it not, since at least the third century, regarded the banishment of the Jews from Jerusalem as just penalty for the murder, or at least for the rejection, of Christ? And had not a succession of modern popes expressed concern that the holy tomb might fall under Jewish rule? Monsignor MacMahon of the Vatican told Ben-Gurion in 1949 that had the Catholic countries of Latin America, whose vote in the United Nations had been decisive earlier that year, known of Israel's decision to move its capital to West Jerusalem, Israel would never have been established. Ben-Gurion shot back: "I don't understand you. Jerusalem was Israel's capital a thousand years before the birth of Christianity." Nevertheless, the decision to transfer the capital to west Jerusalem was carried out very slowly. A decade later, it was not yet concluded. But in the testy atmosphere of pressure, counterpressure, and heavy theological argument after a costly war, a new, defiant mood was growing in Israel, along with a strong resolve concerning Jerusalem. For Israelis, it all came to a head during the Six-Day War —and for Palestinians, as well.

Nearly a quarter of a century has since passed. The Catholic world no longer presses for internationalization. The Vatican and Israel recognized one another in 1994 and now maintain normal diplomatic relations. Young Palestinians, born after the reunification of 1967, are generally more radical than their parents and even less inclined to accept the unilateral annexation of Arab Jerusalem by the Israeli state. Among Israelis, there is little readiness to meet Palestinian aspirations in Jerusalem halfway; the slightest expression of Palestinian nationalism in East Jerusalem is seen as subversive. The anger remains, the hatreds and resentments reach out of antiquity into the modern age, recasting ancient prejudice in modern words, dislodging old defenses and assembling them anew.

Palestinians today make every effort to remember Jerusalem—as the Jews have, for generations—in their customs, their songs, their prayers. Stylized views of the city hang on the walls of countless homes all over the Near East. Moslem religious leaders in Iran habitually call the faithful to prepare for the coming march on Jerusalem to free her sacred mosques from the hand of the infidels. There is a "Jerusalem quarter" today in every Palestinian refugee camp. In Algiers, in 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization proclaimed the establishment of a Palestinian state "in the name of Allah, with its capital Holy Jerusalem, al-Quds aSharif."

The declaration was dismissed by the Israeli government as a worthless piece of paper that would soon be forgotten. It was not. In the Oslo Agreement of 1993, in which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization finally recognized one another and pledged to put an end to a hundred-year civil war, the two sides agreed on Palestinian "autonomy" in the West Bank and in Gaza, but characteristically failed to reach an agreement on the future status of Jerusalem. The Palestinians demanded the repartition of Jerusalem. Israel was resolved to hold on to all of Jerusalem and to a large part of the periphery. There was an unexpected irony in the fact that Jews, who owed their present prominence in Jerusalem to their extraordinary memory of their own past, were now counting on the Arabs to forget theirs. That the Arabs would do so was very unlikely. Massive Israeli settlement after 1967 in the Old City and in other parts of the eastern city made the repartition of Jerusalem along the old demarcation lines impractical, if not, in Israeli eyes, politically impossible. Nor was the growth among Palestinians of Islamic fundamentalism, which is opposed to all compromise with Israel in the name of religious principle, conducive to produce more Israeli empathy. Without agreement—that is to say, compromise—on Jerusalem, Islamic fundamentalism was likely to grow further and perhaps become dominant. In Jerusalem itself, the gulf between Palestinians and Israelis was deeper than at any time since 1967. Palestinians from East Jerusalem continued to work in West Jerusalem in the service industries or in construction, and a few Israelis still went to East Jerusalem—on days when there were no riots or strikes—to sightsee or shop. Otherwise the two communities lived apart.

The Hebrew University on Mount Scopus was one of the few places in town where the lethal barriers between communities and faiths were still sometimes broken down. Few modern universities have been enjoined by their founders to fulfill a nobler or more difficult task than the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Established in 1925, its task was to resurrect Hebrew culture and at the same time, in the words of its first president, Dr. Judah Magnes, to "reconcile Arab and Jew, East and West." On the staff of the Hebrew University in recent years were a Dominican professor of philosophy and a Moslem lecturer in sociology; Arabs were studying Hebrew and Jews were studying Arabic literature. In 1988, there were about a thousand Arab students (6 percent of the total). All were Israeli Arabs, mostly from Galilee; not a single Palestinian student from East Jerusalem was attending the university.

Parts of the ugly strip of no-man's-land that divided the city before 1967 were still bare in 1995, as though in the deeper recesses of their unconscious, builders and developers recognized the continuing cleavage. Elsewhere, in and around the reunited city, Israeli and Palestinian builders were continuing the 1967 war by other means. Many buildings projects were politically motivated and at least partly financed from abroad. Both sides were eager to establish facts and counterfacts on the ground. The hillsides in and around Jerusalem's historic core were being covered with the resulting houses. Both sides exhausted every possible resource of law and memory. The city was overendowed with symbolisms. Each side interpreted the other's building projects, or growing birth rate, as a form of belligerence. Even archaeological excavations were controversial. In Israeli eyes, they symbolized belongingness; in Palestinian eyes, they were threatening symbols of power and aggression.

The city was held together by force. "Take away Israel's coercive power and the city splits on the ethnic fault line," Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of the reunited city, wrote in 1988. "The Arabs, one third of the population, are unable and will never be able, to acquiesce to the regime imposed upon them. Violence courts violence in a perpetual magic circle. Exotic growths —chauvinistic, fundamentalist—blossom on the rotting soil of atavistic urges," he observed. "And at its heart, a time bomb with a destructive force of apocalyptic dimensions is ticking, in the form of the Temple Mount."

This was ethnic tension, but not, as was sometimes claimed, of the kind that today bedevils other heterogeneous cities and many great metropolitan centers. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem were not pressing for equal rights and opportunities or for a bigger slice of the common cake. They wished to secede; better still, they wanted the Jews to evacuate the entire city or, at the very least, the Arab sector formerly held by Jordan. Let them go back to whence they, or their ancestors, had come. Jews and Moslems continued to present historical and literary evidence proving the "centrality" of Jerusalem in their respective religious and national consciousnesses.

The evidence was, almost as a rule, mutually exclusive. From time to time, there were also Israelis and Palestinians who raked their minds in attempts to square the vicious circle. The most farreaching proposals envisaged Arabs and Israelis sharing sovereign rights within a united city, open to all, or, alternatively, two separate sovereignties and a jointly run Old City. Several other schemes had been mooted in the past. One stipulated continuing Israeli sovereignty over the entire city but accorded special privileges to national and religious groups. Another envisioned a capital district under Israeli rule, providing extraterritorial status to specific Christian and Moslem sites and residents. A third suggested the establishment of a sovereign Moslem enclave on the Temple Mount, like the Vatican in Rome; it might have its own extraterritorial access route from Jericho, in the form of an elevated highway or tunnel. Yet another proposal stipulated several ethnic and religious boroughs under a revolving lord mayor.

Nothing had ever come of any of these schemes. All had been stillborn—cast aside for offering too little or too much, too early or too late. To the hard-liners of both sides, the very idea of compromise was repellent. Whenever an Arab had been ready to serve on a joint municipal council, he was threatened with death and promptly withdrew. When the first "borough plan" (drafted by a commission of government and city officials) was leaked to the press in 1971, a political storm of such magnitude broke loose it convinced most Israeli politicians to stop raising such hypotheses or risk the abrupt end of their public careers. That plan, which the mayor had asked a former supreme-court justice to draft a constitution for, was shelved. Its author, Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti, was lambasted. The graffiti smeared on the walls of West Jerusalem read "Death to the Traitor" and "Let's cut up Benvenisti, not Jerusalem." Needless to say, his proposal was as unacceptable to the Arabs.

On both sides, religious fundamentalism has since grown considerably. The rise of fundamentalism seems to reflect a growing disillusionment with politics. The new fundamentalisms will make a peaceful resolution of the conflict over Jerusalem even more difficult. Both reject any separation between the synagogue/mosque and the state. Among fundamentalist Moslems, as among fundamentalist Jews, religion is the state. In Islam, the prophet is sovereign; he commands armies and dispenses justice. In every Arab country today, without exception, Islam is the state religion. Orthodox Judaism, which evolved after the Jewish state ceased to exist, also postulates the synagogue militant and sovereign as a theoretical possibility for the future. Now that the Jewish state has been reestablished, with Jerusalem as its capital, it is still not certain whether it will succumb to Orthodox pressure or develop along western lines by adopting separation of synagogue and state. The disorientations generated by continuing wars militate in favor of the former alternative.

The cleavage in the city is deep, and it is made still deeper and more dangerous by the fusion, on both sides, of nationalist and religious metaphors. The futile and often obnoxious debate about who loves Jerusalem more is occasionally tinged with an element of male chauvinism: love or desire is seen to legitimize possession. Many Palestinians maintain the illusion that if they are only steadfast enough, the Israelis will one day vanish into thin air. Many Israelis cling to a parallel misapprehension that if economic conditions among Arabs of Jerusalem improve, they will, in the end, prefer freedom of speech and freedom of religious worship under a relatively benevolent Israeli regime over the rigid, repressive authoritarianism common today in Arab societies.

It is still sometimes said, hopefully, that the city is a "mosaic." In a mosaic, the divergent parts at least combine to make up a design; in Jerusalem, they do not. There is not even a common theme. Sensitivities and prejudices run so deep that when the ultramodern Hadassah Medical Center in West Jerusalem started performing heart transplant operations in 1987, the hospital's director general had to reassure the public that Jewish hearts would not be transplanted into Arab bodies, and vice versa. The city is sometimes compared to Brussels or Montreal. But the problems in those cities are simpler than the problems of Jerusalem. In Brussels or Montreal, the main issue lies in the realm of language and cultural domination. In Jerusalem, the main issue is religious and political. As in Belfast, national and religious loyalties are interwoven; they overshadow and complicate everything else. The Palestinian minority—roughly 28 percent of the population of the united city—repudiates the legitimacy of the existing government. As a minimum, it claims the right to secede and establish in East Jerusalem the capital of an independent Palestinian state. This is anathema to most Israelis, who persist in a related fantasy that the present situation is capable of continuing indefinitely.

On both sides, people have been governed after 1967 not by the strength of their imagination but by the poverty of it. On both sides, people continue to pray earnestly for "the peace of Jerusalem," but, as Benvenisti wrote in 1981, they might have peace or they might have Jerusalem—not both. The former deputy mayor has been warning for years that the conflict will not go away by itself and that its cost will go up in both human and material terms. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem beween 1963 and 1994, was a mite less flamboyant than Benvenisti but no less persistent. He repeatedly urged the Israeli government to come up with new constitutional ideas for Jerusalem—only to be rebuffed again and again. Kollek's influence never extended beyond the municipality into national politics. (The mayor of Jerusalem cannot move a bus stop from one corner to the next without authorization from the national ministries of the interior and of transport.)

Kollek had been complaining for years that there had not been enough consideration and respect for Arab sensibilities. He had asked the government to supply public housing not only to Israelis but to Palestinians, too. When the Jewish quarter in the Old City was being lavishly rebuilt with government funds, Kollek demanded that the adjacent Moslem quarter, one of the worst slums in town, be restored as well. The central government refused to allocate the necessary funds. Kollek was a secular Jew and a dove in a city that was becoming increasingly Orthodox and hawkish. He was not a political theorist but a man of sound instincts and a humane temperament—a practical man in search of practical answers to practical questions. He never himself managed to work out the specific constitutional proposals he was asking the government to formulate. But he was always more attuned than most Israeli politicians to the complexities of Jerusalem—to the way the symbolic is intertwined with the real and endowed with a unique power of its own.

Few men tried harder than Kollek to break the walls of hatred and suspicion that divide Jews and Moslems, Israelis and Palestinians, in Jerusalem. He realized early on that as mayor he could not solve the big political and religious conflicts. He tried to help Jerusalemites in a nonpolitical way to coexist and persevere until a political solution can be found. But in Jerusalem, everything ultimately becomes political — that is to say, adversarial. An American columnist once asked Kollek if he did not sometimes fear that his efforts might be futile. Kollek answered that he felt like an ant that builds and builds: at any moment someone might poke a stick into the heap and destroy it; but he would build it again and again, as beautiful and as well as he knew how. And to Benvenisti, who asked Kollek whether he thought he was being "used" to provide good public relations for what in fact were government policies with which he disagreed, Kollek replied that yes, he did sometimes feel he was being used—"but what else can I do? It serves Jerusalem."

Kollek often has been attacked by right-wingers who characterize him as "an Arab lover." On one occasion, he was physically assaulted by ultra-Orthodox fanatics and left lying on a Jerusalem street. But for his fairness and humanity, the civil uprising that rocked East Jerusalem in 1987 might have been worse or might have broken out much earlier. He has always been wary of the conventional Israeli view of Jerusalem as an exclusively Jewish icon and has warned Israelis not to forget that Jerusalem is a focus of other aspirations as well. In a 1985 speech, he said that "in order to preserve peace and justice in Jerusalem, we must go beyond the conventional formulas of national sovereignty, beyond the fears and prejudices that drive nations into wars, and search for new forms of freedom and of political organization." If he knew what these new formulas of sovereignty were, he did not reveal them. His administration proved that conflicts stemming from religious or national differences are rarely, if ever, relieved only by fair or good government, nor by economic advantage accruing from it. In the elections of 1993 Kollek was roundly defeated by a coalition of ultraorthodox and right-wing politicians. He was in his eighty-second year, a tired old man, embittered by what he described as the ruin of his life's work.

Jerusalem today is once again what she has been so often in her history: a city at war with herself. The strife in her streets is widely, almost daily, broadcast nationally and internationally on television. The situation invites easy generalizations. History making in the age of television is often encumbered by the manufacture of images. In the case of Jerusalem—her name inevitably evokes stereotypes —this is not surprising. The city is variously said to be poisoned by her past, possessed by it, haunted by demons of irrationality and superstition—the religion of feeble minds—and riveted by fear, envy, and tribalism. But there are simpler explanations. The twin roots of the renewed strife in her streets are nationalism and faith. It is difficult to say which of these two forces is the more powerful. They certainly complement and reinforce each other. Each offers the believer an identity and a plan of salvation; each also holds out a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events.

The proverbial peace of Jerusalem invoked in Psalm 122 depends, paradoxically, on a waning of religion or of nationalism, if not on the waning of both. As this book goes to print, there is little, if any, indication of the waning of either. Peace remains a remote prospect. (Notwithstanding the well-known stereotype, it seems that even in the days of the psalmist there could not have been much tranquillity in Jerusalem, or he would not have been so persistent in his injunction—endlessly repeated today on municipal billboards all over the city—"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall have quietness that love thee.")

If anything, Jerusalem is a city loved too well yet never quite wisely. Israelis are repeatedly urged to cede territory in return for peace; but the growing Islamization of the conflict on the Arab side makes it likely that even if territory is given up, the violence, especially in Jerusalem, will remain.

At the meeting point of so many cultures, creeds, images, and counter-images, of saints and of hucksters, the city continues to embody a glorious idea and at the same time a dream found vain, wanting, and destructive. The past seems to have lost little if any of its power to inspire, animate, and provoke. Where there is so much destructive memory, a little forgetfulness may be in order. Unfortunately, as these words are being written, there is little inclination for that on either side of the great national and religious divide. On the contrary, almost everywhere you turn, dark chords of memory swell the chorus of nationalism and of faith. A little forgetfulness—or compromise—seems unlikely under these circumstances.

Compromise in Jerusalem means more than merely moving a border here or there a little bit. For most Israelis, the struggle in the city is not over a part, but over the whole. Primarily, it is over the historic core, within the ancient walls, that includes the three major holy places. One "reasonable" compromise could be the blurring of hard sovereign lines by recognizing two national rights within a united, jointly run municipal area. Even if the protagonists could mutually agree to such a plan (which remains doubtful), it must be noted that nowhere until now have two national capitals coexisted within the same city. There is reason to doubt that two nationalisms as raw as the Palestinian and the Israeli would be the first in known history to do so successfully. Another reasonable compromise might be the establishment of new captials elsewhere by the two nationalities, within their respective sovereign territories. This seems equally unlikely in view of the strong religious component that shapes political attitudes toward Jerusalem.

The issue of Jerusalem was so emotionally charged that none of several would-be peacemakers and mediators in recent years has even dared to talk about it. Many diplomats believed that raising the sensitive issue even tentatively during attempts to initiate Middle East peace talks is sure to wreck the negotiations before they start. The subject might perhaps be tackled—very delicately—after successful accommodation has been reached on all other outstanding points, but anyone who broaches it sooner will be suspected of trying to undermine the entire process.

I was watching the sightseers one summer evening in 1967 as they streamed through the narrow gate of David's Citadel—the hills nearby were turning the color of unglazed pottery—when the idea of writing a book about this tragically mad city first occurred to me. The citadel, in the words of one of the guidebooks, "encapsulates" the city's history: saints and scoundrels, Hebrews, Hasmonaean kings, Jewish zealots, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks—not to mention England and modern Israel—have all left their mark on it. No one can enter that gate without experiencing poignant emotion. The citadel's attraction overwhelms even those who try to resist it. Surely, I thought, watching the sightseers, surely this city has raised far more vexed ghosts of history than can safely be stomached locally. In the high noon of the ghosts, the human dimension is lost.

On the steps by that same gate, Yehuda Amichai, the great poet of the modern city, once sat with two loaded baskets of fruit and overheard a tourist guide saying: "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there is an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head."

"I said to myself," Amichai writes, "redemption will come only if their guide tells them: 'You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important; but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family.'