The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

скачать книгу бесплатно


The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)

On the West Bank

INSIDE THE ISRAELI BORDER SHED the old Haj asked me to fill in his forms. At this crossing between an Arab country and occupied Arab land, there were no Arabic entry cards. All were in Hebrew and English. The old man gave me his and his wife’s Jordanian passports and I wrote their names and addresses on the questionnaire. He was born in 1932. City of birth: Bethlehem. I hesitated at country, wanting not to complicate his entry, before writing what it said in the passport: Palestine. The purpose of their visit was to see their daughter. They thanked me and went ahead to the passport booth, where a young policewoman was polite to them both. The man laughed at something she said and then, taking his wife’s hand and wheeling his smart new suitcase, walked outside to a taxi.

Next at the passport counter came the man in the suit. After presenting his American passport, he answered the policewoman’s questions in an amiable but apprehensive way. Born in the West Bank in 1960, he now worked as a businessman in Jordan. The purpose of his visit was to see business associates in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, his passport had stamps from many trips to Europe. The Israelis took him apart, first the suitcases, then his dignity. Israeli police did not treat American citizens of Arab origin as they did other Americans. They looked on them as security risks. This man would have a hard time. I had done a story the year before about another Arab American, a young man named Anwar Mohammed, from Florida. The police had arrested him as he was leaving via this same border. They took him to the Moscobieh, the security headquarters in Jerusalem known in English as the Russian Compound. He was chained to a chair, interrogated, abused, held for two months and released without charge. He was lucky, saved perhaps by the cockiness that came from his youth, his karate black belt, his belief in his American passport and, just as important, the fact that there was no evidence against him. If he had been a Palestinian with no passport, only a refugee identity card, he might have stayed for years. The American Embassy lodged no protests on his behalf. An American diplomat pointed to a warning on the State Department website that Israel did not necessarily respect the American citizenship of Arabs born in Arab countries, Israel or the occupied territories. The State Department permitted the Israeli police to determine who was and who was not an American citizen.

Outside, in the dark car park, I found an Israeli taxi driver and asked him to take me to Jerusalem. The road from the Allenby – Hussein Bridge cut through the occupied – disputed Jordan Valley, knocking aside all obstacles in its straight path. Jericho, whose walls came tumbling down, sparkled on the dark horizon. ‘That her walls fell at the sound of Joshua’s trumpet,’ the Reverend George Adam Smith wrote in 1894, ‘is a summary of her history.’ No one had ever defended Jericho. Her low-lying position on the frontier between eastern desert and western mountain was indefensible and prey to raiders from both directions. Under the Oslo accords of 1993, Jericho was the first town that Israel allowed the new Palestinian administration to govern for itself, within limits.

As the road had created its way through the plain, it resculpted the hills beyond. On the Jordanian side, it had rambled with the land like the rolling English road’s drunken path of no resistance. Israel’s was an American highway for which mountains and villages and forests made way, a proud, broad road that would have me in Jerusalem for dinner. ‘There is no water,’ Reverend Smith wrote, ‘from Jericho till you reach the roots of the Mount of Olives.’ There was no traffic either. Israeli settlers were afraid to drive at night, and the Israeli army kept the Palestinians confined to their towns.

Daughter of the Final Solution

Lily Galili had asked me to meet her in front of the American Consulate in West Jerusalem at 7.15 in the evening. An Arab taxi took me from the American Colony Hotel across the ‘seam’, as Israelis called the old Green Line between east and west, to the consulate. The car stopped opposite the late-nineteenth-century consular building, and security guards raced out of their post towards the car. I asked the driver to go another hundred yards uphill to avoid an hour’s questioning. I got out and walked towards the consulate. An Israeli security guard asked me what I wanted. I was meeting a friend. What was the friend’s name? What was my name? I ignored him, standing as I was on a public pavement, and walked further down the hill in search of Lily. Another security guard, a young woman, followed and said, ‘Lily said she would wait for you at the corner.’

Lily’s corner was dark, out of range of the consulate’s spotlights, near a passage between two stone houses that led to her friend’s flat. She apologized for choosing the consulate as our rendezvous. She had forgotten about America’s security worries. We talked a bit in the dark, catching up before we went to the dinner. Her voice was like a precocious child’s, whose judgements, criticisms, observations and stories were astute and unexpected. She was leaving soon for Krakow, the city of her birth where she said her spirit was most at home, to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday. Lily looked a good ten years younger than I did, and I was fifty. She was a journalist at Ha’aretz, a Tel Aviv daily that employed more talent – among them Danny Rubinstein, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Daniel Ben Simon – than the top ten Western newspapers combined. Lily and I had met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. My friends Bernard Avishai and Sidra Ezrahi had taken me to a dinner that Lily cooked at her place, and we became friends. She once called me from London on my British cellphone, when I happened to be in a kosher restaurant in Krakow’s old ghetto. Klezmer music played behind me, and she told me about her love affair with Poland’s most beautiful Renaissance city. After the war, her family had returned to Krakow. Her mother brought her to Israel in 1956. She was ten.

Lily was clutching a bottle of wine for our American hostess, who she said had ‘made aliya’. In the protected garden of an Arab house that looked as if it had been built around the same time as the American Consulate, were a group of English-speaking immigrants. They had all ‘made aliya’, that is, immigrated or ‘risen up’ like a wave to live in Israel. There were two South Africans, Benji and Anne Pogrund; a British couple, the Goldmans; and a woman who appeared to be Canadian and did not say much. During the introductions, Anne Pogrund told me that her black eye, which I could not make out in the dark, was not what I thought it was. I didn’t think anything. She said she had really walked into a door. Her husband, a rotund ex-journalist with a bearded, friendly face, did not look like he would hit anyone, especially his wife. Benji Pogrund had been a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail, a brave and honourable opponent of South African apartheid. He and Anne, a painter, had fled Johannesburg for London and then for Israel. Bob Goldman was a videotape editor in the ABC News Jerusalem bureau. Our hostess worked for an Israeli millionaire named Stef Wertheimer.

After a drink in the garden, we went into the flat. It was a redesigned Arab house set on different levels, with a dining table next to the open kitchen. We’d finished our hostess’s first and only bottle of red wine in the garden, and someone opened the one Lily had brought. Our hostess drank white, and there wasn’t much of that. Dinner was à l’américaine, no first course, spaghetti on the boil in the kitchen going limp while she stirred a tomato and onion sauce, green salad with more vinegar than oil. That was all. She put two bowls on the table, and we served ourselves pasta and salad. We sipped Lily’s red wine. We talked. About newspapers. About television. About Israel. About the Middle East. About the massacres in New York and Washington. About Osama bin Laden. Polite. Civilized. The Goldmans’ children had disappointed their parents by leaving Israel. The Pogrund children had done the opposite. They went religious and would never leave. Their mother and father did not dwell on similarities between the race-based society they opposed in South Africa and the one in which they subsequently raised their children. They sounded like people who would have preferred their children to resist military service in the occupied territories or live in the West.

Someone said that an internet website was criticizing the ABC News anchorman, Peter Jennings, for being too favourable to the Arabs. ‘He had an Arab wife,’ Benji Pogrund said, confirming the internet verdict. Jennings had married a beautiful Lebanese woman, Annie Malouf, in 1973. They divorced, and his next two wives were Jewish, including the one he had now. ‘So,’ Benji said, ‘Jewish wives. That’s why he likes Arabs.’ Peter Jennings, whose journalistic integrity made him scrupulously fair, was said to be anti-Israeli by people accustomed to the anti-Arab bias of American television. Later, other journalists told me Benji Pogrund was a ‘good guy’, who invited speakers with divergent points of view to address Israel’s Anglo-Jewish community.

My argument that night was not with Benji, but with his wife, Anne. She was a painter and an interesting woman. She had made paintings from old studio photographs of South African blacks, formal portraits for family occasions; and she was looking for similar family photographs of Arabs in Gaza. When she discussed the September 2001 attacks in the United States, she lost me. We spoke in a polite, civilized way, but we were arguing. Her case was a psychologist’s rationale, that the killers acted out of envy. They wanted what they admired but could not have. America’s democracy and its high standard of living had made it their target. Perhaps, I said, there was another explanation. Holland, Norway and Canada had democracies and high living standards, but no one hated them. Why did they hate the United States? Not because it was richer – per capita there were wealthier lands – or more democratic. Could it be, I asked her, that the Norwegians and Canadians did not install and maintain regimes that robbed their people, did not break open the doors to their markets and did not bomb or invade them? This went on and on, towards no conclusion. There was a widespread belief in the United States that Americans were attacked because of their goodness; as many Israelis were convinced that Arabs attacked them – not because Israel occupied their territory and confiscated their land – but because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitism motivated the Arabs, would they have given their lands and their homes gladly to any other people who came from outside to displace them? Is it likely that they would have moved to make way for Albanians, Basques, gypsies, South Africans or any other group of Gentiles? The discussion went on and on and, like the political conflicts themselves, got no further than the arguments of fifty years before.

I left dinner early to meet Andrew and Emma Gilmour in the Ottoman courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. There, I drank the red wine I’d been deprived of at dinner. We talked about politics, the intifadah and, Andrew’s special interest, negotiations to end the fighting. Andrew worked for United Nations negotiator Terje Roed Larsen, and Emma was a physician. Andrew’s older brothers – David, Oliver and Christopher – were probably my closest friends in Britain. Emma was expecting their fourth child in December. They invited me to stay in their house at Abu Tor, an Arab neighbourhood above the old city. Even with the discount that Pierre Berclaz, the Colony’s Swiss manager, had kindly allowed me on a good room, my advance would run out soon.

Upstairs in the Pasha Room, dance music played. An American was marrying a Ramallah girl. One of the hotel guests complained about the noise, as I did once in 1987 during a wedding reception at the New Omayyad Hotel in Damascus. Then, it annoyed me so much that I left. Now, I loved the noise of a wedding. Perhaps I had improved. The music stopped at one-thirty, when I fell asleep. In Damascus, it had gone on all night.

Daughter of the Revolution

I had my first lunch in Jerusalem with Nadia Sartawi. Her father, Dr Issam Sartawi, was one of the heroes of the Palestinian cause. He acted on behalf of what he believed were his people’s interests – not in line with the cant and slogans of the revolution. Any journalist who reduced him to the status of ‘Yasser Arafat’s special envoy’, as a few did, enraged him. He insisted with pride that he was no diplomat. Along with Sabry Jiryis and Sayed Hammami, Issam pioneered the Palestinian dialogue with the Israelis. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I invited Issam and Israeli general Mattityahu Peled to lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, Fakhreddin, opposite Green Park in London. When I asked Peled if he were a Sabra, meaning someone born in Israel, he nodded and said, ‘Issam’s a Sabra too.’ They were already friends, both born in northern Palestine, each a patriot to his own people, both working to spare the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians more warfare. Issam saw early the futility of the armed struggle for a people as militarily weak – but with a strong moral case – as the Palestinians. He had once headed a small commando organization and knew the effect of raids into Israel: unarmed Israelis killed, world outrage against Palestinian terrorism, more hostility and retaliation by Israel. Arafat never understood. Nor did he understand that no leader could abandon certain principles, like self-determination, and maintain his enemy’s respect.

When I asked Issam why the Palestinians had not produced leaders more capable than Haj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat, he said, ‘We had a good leader once, but we crucified him.’ He accused Syria of doing more harm to the Palestinians than Israel. He called for the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime a threat to world peace and dispatch a force to overthrow it. A few months later, in the spring of 1983, the hired assassins of the Palestinian radical Sabry al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, shot Issam dead in the lobby of a hotel in Portugal during a conference of Europe’s Socialist International. The Syrians, Abu Nidal’s benefactors at the time, may have put him up to it. Abu Nidal had already assassinated the director of the PLO’s London office, Sayed Hammami, in 1977, for the same supposed crime of meeting with Israelis. Issam Sartawi’s criticisms outraged Yasser Arafat, whose security service was secretly cooperating with the CIA and thus indirectly with Israel’s Mossad. In 1982, Arafat evacuated Beirut, claiming victory over the Israeli army. Issam made a public declaration: one more Palestinian victory like Beirut, and the Palestine National Council would hold its next meeting in Fiji. No one said that Arafat had killed Issam, but many Palestinians believed he had ‘withdrawn his protection’, exposing him to Abu Nidal and to Syria. Abu Nidal would himself be murdered by another benefactor, Saddam Hussein, before America invaded Iraq in 2003.

Issam was a gentle, well-dressed man, who had trained as a physician and married another Palestinian doctor. I remember him at our house in London, playing with our children when they were small. Having lunch with his daughter at an Arab restaurant near the American Colony, I listened to a woman young enough to have missed most of her childhood playing with her father. She had grown up in Paris and spoke perfect French. Her English had a French rather than Arabic accent, like many Lebanese women in Beirut. Ahmed Querei, a member of Yasser Arafat’s cabinet and one of the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo, had hired her as special assistant. I asked what her father would make of her working for Abu Ala, the name by which Qurei was known. She ignored the question. Would she introduce me to Nurit Peled, the daughter of Issam’s friend Matti Peled? I knew that, after Issam’s assassination, the two families had become close. A few years after Issam’s assassination, Matti died without having seen the Israeli – Palestinian dialogue that he and Issam pioneered lead anywhere. In 1997, a Palestinian suicide bomber took the life of Nurit’s young daughter, Matti’s granddaughter, in West Jerusalem. Smedar was thirteen. Phil Jacobson, the former Times correspondent, had written a heart-breaking account of the suicide bombing that had killed Smedar and its effect on Nurit and her husband, Rami Elhannan. Nadia said that when the prime minister of the time, Benyamin Netanyahu, offered to pay his respects to the Peled family, Nurit told him not to bother. She blamed him for policies that had led to her daughter’s murder.

In my view, one not shared by everyone, Dr Issam Sartawi would have condemned the agreement that his daughter’s employer had negotiated at Oslo in 1993. Issam had recognized Israel’s ‘right’ to exist, although the ‘right to exist’ is not a concept in international law, years before any other PLO leader. Recognition and dialogue did not mean surrender, and even surrender did not require self-annihilation, the price exacted at Oslo. What the Israelis and the Palestinians got instead of democratic neighbours was the submission of one, weak tribal leadership to the power of the other. It left Israel a permanent military oppressor, with all that implied for Israeli society, and the Palestinians as helots to acquiesce when settlers wanted their land, when settlers needed their water or when the Israeli army confined them to their villages. Nothing in the agreement prevented Israel from expanding old settlements, constructing new ones or building roads between them – activities that required the seizure of what little land the Palestinians had. While Palestinian Authority police protected the demographic shift caused by a doubling of settlers in the West Bank, no one protected Palestinian farmers and householders from having their land taken. Was this intended to establish peace or to extend the occupation? Was it consistent or inconsistent with the old Zionist aim of seizing Palestine ‘goat by goat, dunum by dunum’? Oslo’s terms compelled the weaker tribe to wait until it was strong enough to redress the imbalance or so close to suffocation that they exploded. At the end of September 2000, that explosion came.

It was a year into the explosion when Nadia and I met for lunch. The last time I had seen her was the year before, when the uprising began. Then, she went to her office and hoped the Israelis would propose some compromise that would allow the Palestinians to end the intifadah and resume discussions. In the meantime, the Israeli electorate chose General Ariel Sharon as their prime minister. Now, Nadia said, Israeli checkpoints prevented most of the Palestinian Authority from reaching their offices. She was living – more of the confusion of this area – in an old Arab part of the Jewish, western half of Jerusalem. She was renting an Arab house, whose original residents had either fled or been expelled in 1948, from an Israeli landlord. She was an Arab, but she carried a French passport. The passport allowed her not only to live in a Jewish-owned Arab house, it permitted her to clear the Israeli checkpoints to reach the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah. Other PA staff in Jerusalem could not reach Ramallah, as those in Ramallah could not go to Jerusalem. The only Palestinians moving freely within the occupied territories were those who – through marriage or some other accident – had foreign, non-Arab passports. As natives, they could not go anywhere. Only new visitors to this lunatic asylum noticed that the set-up, both on paper and in reality, was untenable.

Nadia was one of many Western-born or Western-raised Palestinians to return to the homeland after Oslo in 1993, when they imagined they would build a state. You would meet them in the offices of the Palestinian Authority, private companies and charities, all speaking perfect English with British, American or Canadian accents. Many were studying Arabic for the first time. The country had not seen such idealism, hope and talent since young, educated European Jews answered Zionism’s appeal to build the kibbutzim, irrigate the desert and learn Hebrew. Working for Abu Ala, one of the most egregious prototypes of the unpopular Palestinian politician with big bodyguards and bigger cigars, had made Nadia more cynical than I remembered from the year before. Her belief in working within the PA towards statehood was becoming harder to maintain. Israel was dismantling its institutions and the PA’s leaders were stealing from it. My criticisms of the PA annoyed her, and she talked about what help she might offer me. Like a Lebanese aunt, she told me which was the best hotel in Gaza, where to rent a cellphone and how to lease a car for a few months. She also made me write down a dozen useful telephone numbers. Abu Ala must have found her indispensable.

Palestinian Neighbours

Emma Gilmour, pregnant and every inch a natural beauty, was driving me through West Jerusalem with her three children in the back seat. The car was a big Land Rover, white with United Nations number plates. We stopped at a red light near Yemin Moshe, the pretty collection of old stone cottages that Jerusalem’s mayor lent to visiting artists and writers. The driver of a car beside us motioned to me to roll down my window. His knitted kippa covered most of his clipped hair above a short, patchy beard. He pressed a printed sign against his window for us to read: ‘UN UNwelcome No Bodies, Go Home!’ This spontaneous act of bravery seemed to please him. The light changed, and we went our separate ways. Later, I told a friend at another United Nations agency about it. She said the settlers did that all the time: ‘They hate us.’

At six in the evening, the Gilmour children were having tea in the kitchen of their house in Abu Tor. The lights went off. Caitriona, one of the prettiest and most fey three-year-olds I knew, cried. She was not noisy. She was afraid. Emma lit candles so that the children could see their food. Outside, all the streets and houses of Silwan and Abu Tor were in darkness. In the distance, the Jewish quarters of west Jerusalem were in full light. Their power was never off. Ours came on again an hour later, while the children were in a candlelit bath.

From time to time at the Gilmours’, Palestinians neighbours would drop by. One was a young woman, who, like Emma, was about to have a baby. You meet people and don’t think much about them, until someone tells you that this pregnant woman with a bridal veil of dark hair had spent two years in prison. And you look at the young mother, playing with her children, and you ask yourself, as you would in a country where people were free, what she could have done to merit a two-year sentence. Later, Emma told me her story.

After the Israeli security forces shot dead fourteen unarmed young men for throwing stones in the Al Aqsa mosque grounds, Intisar took a knife from her kitchen and went down to Jerusalem to take revenge. Several other Palestinian women – not in concert or with any plan – did the same. They went, each on her own, to the Jewish Quarter of the old city to stab an Israeli settler. Did Intisar stab anyone? No. The soldiers searched her, found the knife, put her under arrest and sent her to the court that passed judgement. Two years later, she went home.

Another woman came to the Gilmour house one evening to babysit the children, so that Emma, Andrew and I could go to Fink’s Bar for dinner. She did not say much. Her dress was black, and her long hair had almost as many white strands as brown. In the car on the way into the city, Andrew and Emma told me that the Israelis had shot and killed her husband at the end of the June 1967 war. She raised five children on her own. Her husband’s family offered her no help, unusual in Arab society in which children are the responsibility of the paternal family. She refused payment for babysitting the Gilmour children. To look after the younger son, Xan, I’d have demanded a year’s salary. In return for the favour of watching her neighbours’ children, the widow expected reciprocal favours: a ride into Jerusalem, help with her shopping, advice. It was an exchange between equals.

Defending the Doomed

At nearly ninety, Mrs Valentine Vester was the grande dame of old Jerusalem. Proprietress of the American Colony Hotel, she was the niece of Gertrude Bell, the English Oriental traveller and linguist who helped to create modern Iraq when Britain occupied the country during the First World War. I had met Val and her husband, Horatio Vester, in 1972. The Colony belonged to his family, descendants of nineteenth-century American religious pilgrims. They also had an ophthalmic hospital in the old city. Horatio, whose urbane demeanour reminded me of Noël Coward, ran the place in those days. Raconteur and bon vivant, Horatio was loved, especially in the bar, by the hotel’s guests and staff. When he died, Val employed a Swiss company to manage what was beyond doubt Jerusalem’s finest hotel. She went on living there and kept an eye on the place, as she always had. With her snowy hair and benevolent smile, she oversaw the Israeli gardeners and the Palestinian receptionists. She had known them for generations.

Perhaps I should not have repeated to Val the joke that Andrew Gilmour told me about her hotel restaurant’s fame for slow service. She had returned the day before from a visit to her son in London. Her hearing was beginning to fail, and I had to shout without letting the head waiter, Ahmed, and the rest of her long-time and loyal employees hear. ‘Do you know how the Jordanian army lost Jerusalem in 1967?’ The Jordanian general staff were having lunch here at the American Colony. When they heard that the Israelis were invading, they asked for their bill. By the time it arrived, the Israelis were in Jericho.

Val laughed. Ahmed watched us from his corner of the garden, and I knew I would wait longer than usual for my club sandwich. Ahmed was just as slow to bring Mrs Vester her rabbit risotto. She didn’t mind the wait, she said. She’s had thirty-eight years to get used to it.

My favourite place to meet people was the courtyard where we had lunch. It may have been the stone walls and the parapets or the oriental arches or the gushing fountain and the scented blossoms. It may also have been the mix of Palestinians, Israelis and sojourners in a setting that predated the British occupation, Zionism, nationalism and uprisings. It was the most tranquil corner of Jerusalem, and there were days when I hated to leave it for the chaos outside.

Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian-American lawyer whose practice was in Jerusalem, came to the courtyard for coffee. I had met him first in the spring of 2000, a few months before the failed negotiations that Bill Clinton had staged between Yasser Arafet and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. I had come to Israel to do a story on torture for American television. The Israeli High Court had just banned certain forms of torture. The court’s decision meant that, in the absence of laws authorizing the mistreatment of detainees, anyone who committed torture could be held to account in the civil courts. The decision had two consequences: it reduced torture, and it prompted Likud Knesset members to introduce legislation to protect torturers from lawsuits.

Jonathan Kuttab, a University of Virginia graduate, had represented hundreds of security detainees during the first intifadah. After the Palestinian Authority was established, it detained Jonathan’s brother, a respected West Bank journalist named Daoud Kuttab, for criticizing Yasser Arafat. Amid Valentine Vester’s flowers, the fountain, and the bougainvillea, Jonathan and I ordered Turkish coffee.

I asked if the High Court ban on torture had expired with the new intifadah.

‘Totally,’ he said.

Jonathan was more than a lawyer. Like all other Palestinians, he was a political analyst. He augmented the basic knowledge that circumstances gave every Palestinian with lessons from the political prisoners he represented, from the Israeli military and civil courts in which he worked and from his American formal education. The last time we had met, before the Camp David failure and the uprising, he told me that disaster was inevitable.

‘The Israeli grand design to have and to expand settlements and contract out security to the Palestinian Authority could not work,’ he said, one year into the new intifadah. ‘In fact, if this intifadah had not been against Israel, it would have been against the PA.’

The question that confronted Palestinians about Yasser Arafat was: is he governing for us or for the Israelis? If for the Palestinians, he should have been moving politically to dismantle the Israeli settlements and give the land back to their owners. If for the Palestinians, he should have made his executive accountable and open to them. If for the Palestinians, he would have made it impossible for his ministers to steal and to help the Israelis construct settlements. But, if he governed for Israel, he would arrest Palestinians who attacked settlements, allow his advisers to grow rich selling cement to the settlements, cooperate with the intelligence agencies of Israel and America to suppress resistance to occupation and demonstrate his contempt for those who criticized him in the Palestinian legislature, media and civil society.

‘Arafat,’ Jonathan said, ‘I think, sensed it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem or the refugees, but Barak’s insistence at Camp David that this was it, the end of the road. There was no possibility you could improve the terms. He couldn’t do it. His people would not have gone along with it. From that day to this, Tenet, Mitchell’ – meaning the missions of the two Georges, the CIA director and the former senator – ‘everything has been an attempt to revive security cooperation. If Arafat hits Hamas, the Israelis will stop hitting him. Nothing else. It’s simply not going to work.’

What will work?

‘A two-state solution.’

To many Israelis that was an unacceptable, maximalist demand. It was, however, the result of an evolution in Palestinian thought born of eighty years of defeat and a compromise of their previous ideal of a ‘secular, democratic state’ in all of Palestine. It had taken generations for them to realize they did not have the strength to win back the part of Palestine – 78 per cent – they lost to Israel in 1948. By the first intifadah in 1987, they were ready for independence in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers and Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Barak told Palestinians they were unreasonable to demand all of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Israel’s 1967 conquest, all of the 22 per cent. At Camp David, where Bill Clinton caused a conflagration with his quixotic pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize to redeem his tarnished presidency, Barak had excluded the largest settlement blocs from discussion and was prepared to consider adjustments only to the rest of the occupied territories. Under Barak’s vague proposals, Israel would have kept about 30 per cent or more of the land, 80 per cent of the water and all of the sky above for its right to fly and use the airwaves. Even a leader as craven as Arafat could not say yes to a mere 15 per cent of all Palestine on which to build his Arab Bantu-stine.

‘Israel holds all the cards,’ Jonathan said, ‘and they know it. They are furious with the Palestinians for failing to recognize that. This is more on the left than on the right.’ Jonathan had discussed this with the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. ‘Peres told me, we are not negotiating with the Palestinians. We are negotiating with ourselves.’ The Israeli leadership regarded its decision on what to ‘give’ the Palestinians as an internal matter rather than as a subject for negotiation with the occupied people.

‘When subcontracting control to the PA failed,’ Jonathan concluded, ‘the left had nothing else.’ Israel turned to Sharon ‘with his policy of hit them and hit them harder’. Sharon had his critics, but Jonathan said they were even further to the right, demanding that the old Arab killer ‘get tougher, expel’. The Palestinians were making the settlers feel insecure on their roads in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Palestinians now have guns and are willing to use them,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Gaza settlers are no longer safe. Period. Palestinians can exact a daily price, which means Israelis don’t hold all the cards.’

In response, he admitted, ‘The Israelis made life absolutely miserable.’ Sharon was, he said ‘absolutely furious. And he’s trying to keep it going. More incursions, more killings.’

In his pink Ralph Lauren shirt with preppy button-down collar, Jonathan Kuttab was as much American as Palestinian. But he misjudged the United States, as parts of the world did when the attack on Afghanistan was beginning. ‘America needs the Arab world,’ he said. ‘It cannot invade Afghanistan without neutralizing this place. Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the rest will not go along with this crusade unless the Americans do something about the Palestinians.’ He was wrong. The United States let Sharon deal with the Palestinian problem as if its only dimension were security, as if Israel provided the model for the US to deal with Osama bin Laden and the tribes of Afghanistan. It did not seek or obtain Arab support. ‘The only basis for optimists,’ Jonathan said, ‘is that you cannot ignore one billion Muslims for ever.’ Jonathan, a Christian, may have been wrong about that as well.

We went back to the local conflict that was emblematic of the larger dispute between an all-powerful America and a helpless, supine Arab world. And we were back where we began more than a year before: that total weakness of the man in the torture chamber. ‘It’s not pure sadism,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the first intifadah, the problem was that ordinary soldiers were doing the interrogation. That’s sadism. They beat them up. But it was not effective. They have to force them to give information and to sign confessions. And they need professionals to do that. When you physically weaken someone, humiliate him, you can force him to do what you want. They use sleep deprivation and violent shaking. They are more effective. They study this. They are scientific and methodical. There are time limits, when people are vulnerable. If they have not broken down by the fiftieth day, they let them go.’ Did he know anyone who had taken it longer than fifty days? ‘I had a client who did. They released him on the fifty-fifth day. He had a few teeth broken. He was tired, weak, but in very good shape.’

The ones who survived the best were those who neither confessed nor implicated their comrades. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experience of French repression in Algeria, had observed the same phenomenon. Those who cracked, who named names, left prison ashamed and broken. Those who held out – despite being tortured longer – recovered. One of Fanon’s other observations was that those most in need of psychiatric treatment were the torturers. He told of a French policeman who came to Fanon begging for help. He wanted to stop beating his wife and children but to continue torturing Arabs. A journalist at Ha’aretz told me of an Israeli psychiatrist who specialized in torturers, some of whom found their only remedy was to quit.

What had the Palestinians achieved with their suffering? In my lifetime, the Vietnamese had driven out the French and the Americans. The Algerians had expelled the French. The Belgians, the British, the French and the Portuguese had left Africa, the Dutch abandoned the East Indies. The whites of South Africa had surrendered power to the majority. Yet the Palestinians were left behind, ignored by the great powers, betrayed and used by the Arab states, beaten down by the Israelis. Young Palestinians emerged from the Russian Compound to repair their damaged spirit and flesh, then grew old to watch their sons relive the experience.

‘Let me tell you something,’ Jonathan said. His elbows were on the table. His black hair and moustache made him look like a sombre Charlie Chaplin. I leaned forward to listen. ‘I never defended anyone accused of possessing, manufacturing or buying communications equipment. Give me a break. I’ve defended thousands of security defendants. How come no one is trying to listen to the Israelis? This is so embarrassing. In terms of armed struggle, we Palestinians are not serious.’ It wasn’t the coffee or Valentine Vester’s young blossoms that filled the morning air of the courtyard just then. It was despair. Jonathan, who for most of his professional life had attempted to defend Palestinians in the military courts, said that he had switched to business law.

Hidden Treasure

Papa Andrea’s restaurant was empty. I liked the place, not for the food, but for its open roof in the Christian Quarter. Most of the old city’s landmarks were nearby, all Jerusalem’s domes and spires and rain troughs and polished stone roofs. Just below were the souvenir shops, whose owners had set tables and chairs to play cards with one another outside. The largest shop, Yasser Barakat’s, was shuttered and padlocked. Two years earlier, in preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit, the shopkeepers had no time for cards. The streets were crammed with pilgrims and tourists along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, the large fountain where five streets met was dry. Flies swarmed over discarded cans of Coke and Pepsi where clear water should have collected. At street level, the cobbled walkways, the deserted businesses and the broken fountain made the old city a forlorn setting. Between the street and the roofs were the windows of the settlers’ flats. Each window sprouted a flag and blue metal mesh shutter. Tiny T-shirts and large underwear dripped in the sunlight. In one window, children pressed against the grille to watch the Arabs at their card tables. Their parents had settled there with the express purpose of forcing the Arabs out, as they had forced other Arabs out of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh and, more recently, much of the West Bank.

Would those young faces one day rebel against their parents’ radical hatred and learn Arabic and play cards in the street with their neighbours? Or would they, like their mothers and fathers, find some subterfuge to seize another flat and evict its Arab residents?

A middle-aged settler – her hair bundled under a scarf and her legs hidden inside a long skirt, like so many modest Muslim women – limped past the card players. Dragging her groceries in a bag from the Jewish Quarter, she did not look at the men. They did not glance up from their cards. Neither existed for the other, the Arabs living in their pre-Israelite past, the settler in some Arab-free future.

The Armenians dwelled, like ghosts, between the two. ‘There are two thousand Armenians in the old city now,’ George Hultunian, community historian, said. ‘Their children have no future.’ Armenia was the first kingdom in history to embrace Christ, and its priests were among the earliest to establish hostels for pilgrims visiting the scene of their Saviour’s execution and resurrection. Most of the two thousand lived within the walls and gates of St James’s Convent. The Armenian Quarter had no shops apart from a few groceries, Vic Lepejian’s ceramics factory, the Armenian Tavern and a photo shop.

Benjamin Disraeli, who came to Jerusalem in 1830 and 1831, later compared its Jews and Armenians in his novel Tancred. Eva ‘the Jewess’ noted the similarities between her people and the Armenians:

Go to Armenia and you will not find an Armenian. They too are an expropriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: ‘In every city of the East I find a home.’ They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races and little degenerated; with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced Gods and prophets and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles [St Gregory the Illuminator] and who never knew his great master.

The resemblance turned to tragedy in the twentieth century when both peoples were subjected to genocide.

The Armenians of Jerusalem were cut into factions and sects and categories as if they had been a million. By faith, they were Gregorian (Orthodox), Catholic and Protestant. By Armenian politics, they were Hanshak or Tashnak, dating from the pro- and anti-communist fights of the Russian Revolution and its Soviet conquest of non-Turkish Armenia. They were also, like the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, either local families or descendants of refugees from massacres. Many were Palestinian nationalists while others just wanted to get by, no matter who governed Jerusalem. George was from a native Jerusalem family, a Gregorian and a Palestinian nationalist. His friend Albert Agazarian, he said, was a refugee from northern Syria, a Catholic and also a Palestinian nationalist. Neither he nor Albert had strong views on Armenian politics, having made their stand as Palestinians. Eight Armenians languished in Israeli prisons for resisting occupation, and one Armenian, Artin Gouzelian, had given his life for Palestine.

George said that an organization to which he belonged had sent 350 Bibles in Arabic to Christian political prisoners in Israeli custody. Christians, including the Armenians, were leaving the country. Muslims, particularly since the new intifadah began, were leaving as well. Christians went to the West, whose countries gave them visas. Muslims, more than 100,000 in the previous year, went over the bridge searching for work in Jordan. Natalie Zarour, one of the managers at the American Colony Hotel, was emigrating with her family to Canada in a few weeks. Christians from Bethlehem, the Zarours were tired of the violence, the restrictions, the settlers who treated Arabs as sub-humans. I had known Natalie for years and would miss her beautiful face behind the Colony’s reception desk.

George took me upstairs to the refectory of the Armenian Convent. Among long tables of stone and marble, under vaulted ceilings, I imagined the monks eating in silence and awaiting an unwelcome visit from the city’s Turkish governors. A bridge, under which I had often walked and driven, formed part of the refectory. George indicated a hidden door. ‘If the Turks came,’ he explained, ‘the monks would disappear through here.’ It was an Armenian Bridge of Sighs, along which the monks would, like Casanova, escape. It was built in AD 1370. Until 1830, he said, the Ottomans did not collect fixed taxes. Instead, they demanded money when they needed it. ‘The Turks raided the monasteries. They were a good source of income, because of the pilgrims.’ The monks would clamber through the priest’s hole, across the covered bridge and onto a roof. After that, they hid or dispersed in the gardens on the other side of the city wall.

As we stepped onto the convent roof, guarded by a sixth-century gable, George explained the economics of Jerusalem life before the British occupied the city in 1917. ‘Three or four hundred people lived in the convent,’ he said. ‘It had about eight hundred rooms. They filled with pilgrims at Easter. In fact, at the times of pilgrimage, the whole city’s population grew about ten times. This convent could take in eight to ten thousand people.’ After the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the convent filled with refugee families. Some of them, like Albert Agazarian’s, were still there.

‘In 1917,’ George said, ‘three days before they left Jerusalem, the Turks demanded the Treasury.’ The convent’s treasure of gold, silver and jewels lay hidden behind another secret door within the church. George opened it, but swore me to keep the secret of its location until I died. ‘The Armenian patriarch filled wagons with the treasure in sealed boxes. He covered the boxes in coal.’ Horses pulled the Armenian community’s wealth to safety outside the city until the Turks withdrew. It seemed strange that no Turkish sentry would question a load of coal leaving the city in winter. George referred me to Sir Ronald Storrs’ Orientations, where the tale is recounted as he told it.

The Cathedral of St James, beyond a small plaza near the iron-door entrance to the monastery, was more beautiful to my eye that any other church in Jerusalem. ‘In sharp contrast to the sombre weariness of the Holy Sepulchre,’ Fr Jerome Murphy-O’Connor wrote in The Holy Land, ‘this church mirrors the life and vigour of a colourful and unified people.’ I was not sure about the unity, but the ceilings and walls let loose tributes of colour and vigour. In terms of icons per square foot, St James’s could hold its own with any Greek church. It also contained one of the holiest relics, the head of St James the Less. Herod the Great’s feeble son, Herod Antipas, had done with the apostle’s head what his father had to John the Baptist’s, in AD 44. George, with great patience for a man who must have shown the church to hundreds of ignorant visitors, told me the story of every panel, every painting, every door.

Three hundred and fifty candle-bearing lamps, all lit and suspended from ropes, could be lowered and raised via small pulleys. Each bore the inscription of its Armenian donor community. Much of the church’s beauty was the gift, George said, of an eighteenth-century patriarch called Gregory the Chain-bearer. In Gregory’s time, Armenians elsewhere were neglecting their church in Jerusalem. He went to Constantinople to shame them. ‘He put a chain around his neck and sat in front of the churches to raise money,’ George said. Gregory’s takings paid for the grand plaza, or porch, at the church door and for much of the restoration within. The cathedral was a warren of hidden doors and secret passages. Some led to chapels, others to refuges from tax collectors – the world’s first tax shelters.

George and I wandered through the convent grounds. They comprised about a sixth of the old city and almost the entire Armenian Quarter. At the Convent of the Olive Tree, there was indeed one olive tree. ‘This is, of course, a very young tree,’ George said, ‘but they say it is Ananias’s tree.’ By very young, George meant a few hundred years. Ananias had been a high priest two thousand years ago, when, legend claimed, Christ had been tied to the tree and whipped. Interestingly, both a non-Armenian church and a mosque stood within the grounds of the Armenian Quarter. St Mark’s, believed to have been the house of St Mark’s mother, Mary, was a Syrian Orthodox church. And the tiny Yaqubieh, or Jacob, Mosque had once been the chapel of the martyr St James of Persia. He was known as St James the Cut-Up, because the martyr’s singular form of execution was to be chopped to pieces.

The entire Armenian Quarter was clad in the smoothest stone I had ever seen, as slick as a seal’s back. The roofs, the courtyards and the plazas all had surfaces you could run your hands over or run barefoot across without taking a scratch. The rooftops and walkways formed an intricate system of water collection. Every massive stone was set to point the water towards a channel, and every channel made its way to a reservoir. ‘Under every church,’ George said, ‘there is a cistern. Before the rainy season, people spend weeks cleaning the roofs.’ Like the Nabataeans of the desert, the people of Jerusalem saved every drop the sky gave them. To waste water was a sin. To run dry was death.

The Armenians, like the Arab Christians of Palestine, were running out of people. We walked by the yard of the Armenian school, where a few boys played basketball. ‘The children have no future,’ lamented George, himself unmarried and childless. ‘Our generation didn’t care about the future. Albert and I, for example, have no possessions. We are a proud generation. We lived under Arab sovereignty and dignity. We were treated as normal citizens.’ He looked at the children, all born long after Israel conquered the old city in 1967. ‘They have known only occupation. They have had only humiliation. They challenge it in the intifadah, but that is superficial.’

The Armenians had survived genocide by Turkey. They would survive the Israelis, I said. Jerusalem, he reminded me, was a long way from the massacres in Anatolia, northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Jerusalem, in the last years of the Ottomans’ chaotic empire, was a refuge. ‘The Turks,’ he said of those who ruled the old city, ‘wanted money. These people want the land.’ The monks hid their money or begged for more. Land cannot be concealed or replaced.

George, a bespectacled and subdued man in a grey cardigan, hated the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the indignity meted out to both Arabs and Armenians. He told me that the only way he had found to endure was, like the monks of old, to seek a refuge. His refuge, he said, was the nineteenth century.

The View from the Convent

Jerusalem had always been a real estate scam, Albert Agazarian told me. George had left me at Albert’s house inside the convent. Albert lived there with his wife, son and two daughters. At home in his Syrian stone house, where every room opened on the courtyard as in old Damascus and Seville, Albert was a pasha. Madeleine, whom he had married when they were still in their twenties, brought coffee, tea, tobacco and sweets without his asking whenever anyone dropped by. He often had a guest – a journalist, a diplomat or an instructor from Bir Zeit University where he worked and his children studied. He usually received them in his library, a cluttered, domed room, with overstuffed sofas, shoe-sized ashtrays and books in no discernible order that he pulled down to quote some passage or other. There was no point in making an appointment to see Albert. He and Madeleine rarely bothered to answer their telephone.

God, could Albert talk. ‘You went to the leather tannery?’ he asked me. The ‘leather tannery’ was Dabbagha Square, just below Papa Andrea’s rooftop restaurant. ‘Up until 1860, that place stank like hell. After the Crimean War, the Russian pilgrims started coming. There was a wedding here between Russian piety and generosity on the one hand and Byzantine cunning on the other. It was Eftimos, the Orthodox treasurer, who got rid of the tannery and the smell from those dead cows and rotting hides.’ He said it as if the aroma had just cleared his nostrils. ‘Eftimos built the first well and the first hotel in the old city. It was not a khan.’ A khan, or caravanserai, was common in the Levant of the nineteenth century. Travellers stopped for shelter, but brought their own blankets and food. A hotel that provided beds, linen and meals was an innovation. ‘This hotel was the Hospice of St John, the first modern hotel in Jerusalem. This is where the settlers have been since April 1990.’ Those were the blue-grilled windows with Israeli flags that I had seen at lunch.

Madeleine, supporting a tray of coffee and cakes, pushed through the door and cleared space among the papers on the coffee table. Albert got up, opened a drawer and searched for something. Whatever it was, he did not find it. Madeleine poured the coffee and started for the door. I asked why she did not stay. Friends were waiting for her in the kitchen, and their conversation was more interesting.

‘The hotel was successful,’ Albert continued. ‘Its success instigated the Greek Orthodox to open the Grand Hotel and Grand New Hotel.’ The two hotels, built of Jerusalem stone in the high splendour of late Victorian and Habsburg design, dominated the western portal of the old city at the Jaffa Gate. ‘The Grand changed its name to the Imperial when Kaiser Wilhelm visited in 1898.’

The period from the Egyptian invasion of 1830 to Kaiser Wilhelm’s pilgrimage in 1898 made modern Jerusalem. The Christian powers – Russia, England, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy – erected churches and hospices in the Christian Quarter, on sites they bought in the Muslim Quarter and on hills outside the walls. German Christians erected the Augusta Victoria Hospital on a summit where the Kaiser was said to have had his first view of the Holy City. Prior to that, Imperial Russia staked its claim to Jerusalem with the construction of the Ascension Church, all onion domes and multicoloured like St Basil’s in Moscow, in 1870. Most of the modern Christian Quarter was built with foreign Christian donations in the late nineteenth century. England and Prussia opened the first Protestant church in the Holy Land, Christ Church, near the Jaffa Gate in 1849. It was a time when ideas born in Europe invaded the near Orient, Jerusalem in particular: imperialism, la mission civilitrice, the romantic Christian Zionism of Lords Shaftesbury and Palmerston (who suggested in 1840 that Europe’s Jews should be removed to Palestine and originated the phrase ‘land without a people for a people without a land’), nationalism, the forced opening of Ottoman markets to European trade with all its dislocating effects, the political Zionism of Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl and the first purchases with Rothschild money of Arab land for Zionist settlement. The Kaiser’s well-publicized procession through the Holy Land attracted Herzl from Vienna. Herzl paid homage to Kaiser Wilhelm and requested German sponsorship for the colonization of Palestine. At the Herzl Museum in West Jerusalem a photomontage in badly focused sepia depicted the elegantly dressed, bearded Father of Zionism on foot and doffing a white pith helmet to the mounted Kaiser. The Kaiser did not sponsor the Zionist project, whose architects wisely turned to Britain.

‘Before 1831,’ Albert said, ‘the population of Jerusalem was never more than 10,000. There were 4000 Muslims, 3000 Christians and 2000 Jews. The gates of the city were locked at night.’ From 1840, with the European Christian building programme and the missionary attempts, mostly failed, to convert Muslims and Jews to Christ, the modern age began. Britain in 1917 accepted the status quo in the old city, freezing the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim land holdings where they were. Israel, after 1967, was more flexible. This took Albert back to Jerusalem’s first hotel, the St John Hospice, where I had watched settler children staring through wire mesh at the Arab world below them. ‘The settlers got in through the protected tenant,’ he said, ‘who unfortunately was an Armenian.’

He dropped his pipe in an ashtray and jumped up to find a book. Then another. He handed them to me. One was Robert Friedman’s Zealots for Zion and the other Dilip Hiro’s Sharing the Promised Land. ‘Look on page ninety-nine,’ he said, pointing at the Friedman book. There it said that an Armenian named Martyros Matossian had received $3.5 million to assign his family’s protected tenancy in the hospice to a group of Israeli settlers. The Hiro book, on page twenty-two, made the same allegation, but said Matossian, who then fled the country, received $5 million.

Albert explained that most of the property in the Christian Quarter belonged to the churches – with the Greek Orthodox owning most. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘my mother has leased her house from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate since 1932. The leases are with local tenants, and tens of people in a family could have shares in the same house. The settlers find the one who needs money. They ask him to sell his room in the house. Then they elbow their way in.’ Albert knew families who had settlers in one cramped bedroom of their house. ‘If there is an explosion,’ he said, meaning a Palestinian bomb targeting Israelis anywhere, ‘the settlers will get angry and beat everyone in the house. They go on the rooftop and pee in the water tank.’

The old city settlers were, for the most part, extremely religious. ‘Traditionally, the Jewish religious establishment opposed Zionism,’ Albert said. ‘Ben-Gurion told them, we have a state and it must be based on the rule of law. We have conscription. We have state education. We have public transport on Saturday. The money we receive is for all the Jewish people. You must reach an accord with us. And they did. It was the new status quo.’ The religious establishment, who believed Jewish nationalism contradicted the centrality of Jewish faith, arrived at a mode of co-existing with the state. The religious were exempt from military service. They sent their children to religious, rather than secular state, schools. Public transport did not trespass in their neighbourhoods on the Sabbath. They took a share of government expenditure to disburse among their own as they saw fit.

‘From 1948 to 1967,’ Albert recalled, ‘the father of Avraham Burg, the speaker of the Knesset … his father, Yossef Burg, was the longest-serving Knesset member. As head of the National Religious Party, he served in all of Israel’s governments. He did not get involved in Israeli politics. Instead, he represented religious interests. It created a strange relationship. He used your money to attack you, the government. After 1967, a completely new relationship emerged.’ The religious colleges, the Yeshivas, developed a new theology and, with it, a new politics. ‘Their interpretation was original. For the first time, they said, we now have Hebron. We have Jerusalem. This means we are living in Messianic times. Our mission is to redeem the land. This line of reasoning surfaced in 1972 in Hebron when the Gush Emunim grabbed its first settlement.’

Gush Emunim, Bloc of the Faithful, settled in a Hebron hotel. To persuade them to leave the centre of the Arab city, the Labour government allowed them to establish Kiryat Arba on a hill it confiscated above Hebron. ‘After Kiryat Arba, the religious settlements began to proliferate, like amoebae, under different names: Ne’vot David at St John’s, El Ad and the rest. These are now the people who are holding the government by the balls.’ The settlers had also returned to Hebron, where they regularly abused and attacked the Arab inhabitants. One of them, Baruch Goldstein, had shot and killed twenty-nine men in the Grand Mosque.

Albert showed me one of the settlers’ slogans, in English, on that most American of political advertising media, the bumper sticker: ‘G*d is a religious Zionist.’ He laid some of their literature, booklets and pamphlets on the table. There were biblical passages from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua on ridding the land of Canaanites and Philistines. ‘I predict,’ Albert said, as if sermonizing from a pulpit, ‘that within ten years, the religious will take over the army.’ The army, in Albert’s view, was already leading the country. Sharon remained more soldier than politician. His tanks and helicopters swarmed all over the West Bank and Gaza, but he did not know how to pass a budget. ‘This is a government that serves the army,’ he said. ‘How far can this go?’

From time to time during my stay in Jerusalem I would stop by Madeleine’s kitchen. It was no accident that my visits often coincided with lunch. She cooked well, and her food was the closest to Lebanese in Jerusalem. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis were great cooks, but the Lebanese and Armenians were. Among the Armenians, Madeleine Agazarian was one of the best. I understood why Albert and the children lunched at home almost every day. It was rare that I was the only guest. Sometimes, George Hultunian was there in a tattered cardigan. Often, women of the Armenian Quarter or further afield appeared. There were occasional academics and journalists, but I never saw a priest.

During one lunch, the women were talking about ‘the settler’. There were so many settlers in old Jerusalem that I did not know why they singled out this particular man. Madeleine and one of her friends had seen wives of the Arab labourers who had worked for him restoring his old house. They were standing outside his door, begging for their husbands’ unpaid wages. One of them had a small baby. ‘Haram,’ one of the Armenian women said. Pity. I asked what was going on, and Albert said it was not important. I pressed the women, and they told me the story.

‘The settler’ was an American, who had taken a house on Ararat Street next to St Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Church. It was at the edge of the Armenian Quarter, not far from Habad Street in the Jewish Quarter. The house he took needed work, and he hired Arabs to do it. When the time came to pay them, he replaced them with other workers. The labourers demanded their wages, and he ignored them. They were afraid to tell the police. Arabs from the occupied territories could not approach the authorities without being arrested themselves for working without permits. Their wives went to the settler’s house to shame him. But, the women said, he refused to give them any money. It was the scandal of the Armenian Quarter, and no one had the power to make the settler pay.

In the evening, I walked from Armenian Patriarchate Road into St James’s Road, a footpath too narrow for cars. At the Ararat Grocery, I asked the way to St Mark’s. ‘That’s my church,’ the young man behind the counter said, not without pride. There were a few hundred Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem, and he was one. He took me outside, and under the feeble lamps of the ancient city carefully pointed the way. Passing under the arches, the vaults and sky, I found the Church, no larger than a small chapel, of St Mark. Behind it, extending in a graceful curve over the lane, was the house of the American settler. I recognized it by the new, unfinished cement steps built by the unpaid workers. A ramp, with two-by-fours nailed to it, led to the front door. This was where the neighbours said the workmen’s wives had stood crying and begging for the money their husbands had earned. I went to the door, but no one was home. What was I going to say? Would I tell him, American to American, to pay the men? Or would I ask him for his side of the story? Taking a man’s labour without paying him was slavery, and we had fought a civil war over that.

The Room Down

Next door in St Mark’s Church I met the remarkable Sister Yostina al-Banna. An orthodox nun from Nineveh, which she called ‘the great city of Jonah’, she had three brothers who were priests. One of the three, George Yusuf al-Banna, taught geology at a university in Portland, Oregon. The second lived in Jordan, and the third was still in Nineveh. Sister Yostina had left Iraq, homeland of most Syrian Orthodox, little more than a year before.

‘This is the first church in Christianity,’ she said, making it one of the many first churches I have seen. The early Christians had no churches. They gathered in synagogues and, when uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted to their communities, in one another’s houses. They gave themselves the name Christian at Antioch, where I visited a cave in 1987 that also claimed the distinction of first church. The Turks had turned it into a museum. St Mark’s was still a church.

Sister Yostina said St Mark’s, built in AD 37, had been destroyed three times. ‘The first time was in 71, when the King Titus come to this city and destroy Jerusalem. Everything high, he cut it. The twelfth century was the last time.’ The nun, like the church itself, was old and small. But, also like the church, warm and welcoming. She showed me an Aramaic inscription that she said had been discovered in 1940. Aramaic, or Syriac, was the language of Palestine, spoken by Jews as well as Gentiles, at the time of Christ. The Syrian Orthodox still used it for their liturgy, as Lebanon’s Catholic Maronites did until Vatican II instructed them to use the vernacular. She said of the inscription, ‘It’s old, fifteen hundred years old. It is written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, from right to left.’ Then she translated it: ‘This is the house of St Mark’s mother, who was chosen of Christ from the Apostles.’

St Mark’s mother, Mary, lived in the house below the church. That was the legend. If true, it was where St Peter took refuge when the angel helped him out of prison. The church was a museum of Christian legends. ‘In the upper room of the house down [down meant the levels below the church itself], Jesus made the Last Supper,’ she told me, adding another astonishing detail, ‘and, also, the washing of the feet.’ The Virgin Mary, she believed, was baptized here; although the New Testament did not mention her baptism. There were more stories, not all of which I understood.

Sister Yostina said, ‘Jesus sent St Peter and St John. He told them, “You shall enter the city Jerusalem, and you shall see a man carrying a jar.” In those days, only women carry jar. This was the miracle from God. St Mark went and stand and carry a jar. And they follow Him until He reach the house of his mother. So, they prepare for Him the upper room of the house down.’ That was not all. ‘After the cross, the Apostles with the Virgin Mary were afraid. They don’t know where they can go. They are strange in this city, so they turn back to the house of St Mark’s mother. They remain three days, until Jesus appear to them, after He be in this life, after three days.’