At the time none of this was clear but, in retrospect, the possession of Jerusalem gradually changed Israel’s ruling spirit, which was traditionally secular, socialist, modern, and if the state had a religion it was as much the historical science of Judaean archaeology as Orthodox Judaism.
The capture of Jerusalem elated even the most secular Jews. The craving for Zion was so deep, so ancient, so ingrained in song, prayer and myth, the exclusion from the Wall so longstanding and so painful, and the aura of holiness so powerful that even the most irreligious Jews, across the world, experienced a sensation of exhilaration that approached a religious experience and in the modern world was as close as they would ever come to one.
For the religious Jews, the heirs of those who for thousands of years, from Babylon to Cordoba and Vilna, had, as we have seen, expected imminent messianic delivery, this was a sign, a deliverance, a redemption and the fulfilment of the biblical prophecies, and the end of the Exile and Return to the gates and courts of the Temple in David’s restored city. For the many Israelis who embraced nationalistic, military Zionism, the heirs of Jabotinsky, this military victory was political and strategic – the singular, God-given chance to secure a Greater Israel with safe borders. Religious and nationalistic Jews alike shared the conviction that they must energetically embrace the exciting mission to rebuild and forever keep the Jewish Jerusalem. During the 1970s, these battalions of the messianic and the maximalist became every bit as dynamic as the majority of Israelis, who remained secular and liberal and whose centre of life was Tel Aviv, not the Holy City. But the nationalist–redemptionist programme was God’s urgent work and this divine imperative would soon alter the physiognomy and bloodstream of Jerusalem.
It was not only Jews who were affected: the much more numerous and powerful Christian evangelicals, especially those of America, also experienced this instant of almost apocalyptic ecstasy. Evangelicals believed that two of the preconditions had been met for Judgement Day: Israel was restored and Jerusalem was Jewish. All that remained was the rebuilding of the Third Temple and seven years of tribulation, followed by the battle of Armageddon when St Michael would appear on the Mount of Olives to fight the Anti-Christ on the Temple Mount. This would culminate in the conversion or destruction of the Jews and the Second Coming and Thousand Year Reign of Jesus Christ.
The victory of the small Jewish democracy against the Soviet-armed legions of Arab despotism convinced the United States that Israel was its special friend in the most dangerous of neighbourhoods, its ally in the struggle against Communist Russia, Nasserite radicalism and Islamicist fundamentalism. America and Israel shared more than that, for they were countries built on an ideal of freedom touched by the divine: one was the new Zion, the ‘city on a hill’, the other the old Zion restored. American Jews were already avid supporters but now American evangelists believed that Israel had been blessed by Providence. Polls consistently claim that over 40 per cent of Americans sometime expect the Second Coming in Jerusalem. However exaggerated this may be, American Christian Zionists threw their weight behind Jewish Jerusalem, and Israel was grateful even though the role of the Jews in their doomsday scenario was a tragic one.
Israelis from west Jerusalem, from all Israel and the breadth of the Diaspora, crowded into the Old City to touch the Wall and pray there. The possession of the city was so in toxicating that giving her up became henceforth unbearable and unthinkable – and vast resources were now mobilized to make such a thing very difficult indeed. Even the pragmatic Ben-Gurion proposed from his retirement that Israel should give up the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace – but never Jerusalem.
Israel officially united the city’s two halves, expanding the municipal borders to encompass 267,800 citizens – 196,800 Jews and 71,000 Arabs. Jerusalem became larger than it had ever been in its history. Scarcely before the gunbarrels had cooled, the inhabitants of the Maghrebi Quarter, founded by Saladin’s son Afdal, were evacuated to new homes, their houses demolished to open the space before the Wall for the first time. After centuries of cramped, confined, harassed worship in a 9-foot-longalleyway, the airy, light space of the new plaza at the paramount Jewish shrine was itself a liberation; Jews flocked to pray there. The dilapidated Jewish Quarter was restored, its dynamited synagogues rebuilt and resanctified, its ravaged squares and alleys repaved and embellished, Orthodox religious schools – yeshivas – were created or repaired, all in gleaming golden stone.
Science was celebrated too: Israeli archaeologists started to excavate the united city. The long Western Wall was divided between the rabbis, who controlled the praying area to north of the Maghrebi Gate, and the archaeologists, who could dig to the south. Around the Wall, in the Muslim and Jewish Quarters, and in the City of David, they uncovered such astounding treasures – Canaanite fortifications, Judaean seals, Herodian foundations, Maccabean and Byzantine walls, Roman streets, Umayyad palaces, Ayyubid gates, Crusader churches – that their scientific finds seemed to fuse with the political-religious enthusiasm. The stones they uncovered – from the wall of Hezekiah and Herod’s ashlars tossed down by the Roman soldiers to the pavingof Hadrian’s Cardo – became permanent displays in the restored Old City.
Teddy Kollek, the mayor of west Jerusalem who was re-elected to run the united city for twenty-eight years, worked hard to reassure the Arabs, becoming the face of the liberal Israeli instinct to unify the city under Jewish rule but also to respect Arab Jerusalem.* As under the Mandate, the prosperous Jerusalem attracted Arabs from the West Bank – their population doubled in ten years. Now the conquest encouraged Israelis of all parties, but especially nationalists and redemptionist Zionists, to secure the conquest by creating ‘facts on the ground’; the building of new Jewish suburbs around Arab east Jerusalem began immediately.
At first, Arab opposition was muted; many Palestinians worked in Israel or with Israelis, and, as a young boy visiting Jerusalem, I remember days spent with Palestinian and Israeli friends in their houses in Jerusalem and the West Bank, never realizing that this period of goodwill and mixing would very soon become the exception to the rule. Abroad, things were different. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah took over the PLO in 1969. Fatah intensified its guerrilla attacks on Israel while another faction, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, pioneered the new spectacle of hijacking aeroplanes as well as embracing the more traditional killing of civilians.
The Temple Mount, as Dayan had understood, brought with it an awesome responsibility. On 21 August 1969, an Australian Christian, David Rohan, who seems to have suffered from the Jerusalem Syndrome,* set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque to accelerate the Second Coming. The blaze destroyed Nur al-Din’s minbar placed there by Saladin, and kindled rumours of a Jewish conspiracy to seize the Temple Mount, which in turn unleashed Arab riots.
In ‘Black September’ 1970, King Hussein defeated and expelled Arafat and the PLO, who had challenged his control of Jordan. Arafat moved his headquarters to Lebanon and Fatah embarked on an international campaign of hijacking and killing of civilians to bring the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world – this was carnage as political theatre. In 1972, Fatah gunmen, using ‘Black September’ as a front, murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In response, Mossad, Israel’s secret service, hunted down the perpetrators across Europe.