The peace began to fall apart. The Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas launched a campaign of suicide bombings that wrought random carnage on Israeli civilians: an Arab suicide bomber killed twenty-five people on a Jerusalem bus. A week later another suicide bomber killed eighteen on the same bus route. Israeli voters punished Prime Minister Peres for the Palestinian violence, instead electing Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, on the slogan: ‘Peres will divide Jerusalem.’ Netanyahu questioned the principle of land-for-peace, opposed any division of Jerusalem and commissioned more settlements.
In September 1996, Netanyahu opened a tunnel that ran from the Wall alongside the Temple Mount to emerge in the Muslim Quarter.† When some Israeli radicals tried to excavate upwards towards the Temple Mount, the Islamic authorities of the Waqf quickly cemented up the hole. Rumours spread that the tunnels were an attempt to undermine the Islamic Sanctuary and seventy-five were killed and 1,500 wounded in riots that proved that archaeology is worth dying for in Jerusalem. It was not only the Israelis who politicized their archaeology: history was paramount. The PLO banned Palestinian historians from admitting there had ever been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem – and this order came from Arafat himself: he was a secular guerrilla leader but as with the Israelis, even the secular national narrative was underpinned by the religious one. In 1948, Arafat had fought with the Muslim Brotherhood – their forces were called the Al-Jihad al-Muqadas, Jerusalem Holy War – and he embraced the Islamic significance of the city: he called Fatah’s armed wing the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Arafat’s aides admitted Jerusalem was his ‘personal obsession’. He identified himself with Saladin and Omar the Great, and denied any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. ‘The greater the Jewish pressure on the Temple Mount,’ says Palestinian historian Dr Nazmi Jubeh, ‘the greater the denial of the First and Second Temples.’
In the tense days after the Tunnel riots and amid rumours of plans to open a synagogue in the Stables of Solomon, the Israelis allowed the Waqf to clear the ancient halls under al-Aqsa and then use bulldozers to diga stairway and build a new, capacious subterranean mosque, the Marwan, in the hallways of Herod. The debris was simply thrown away. Israeli archaeologists were aghast at the crude bulldozing of the most delicate site on earth: archaeology was the loser in the battle of religions and politics.*
Israelis had not quite lost their faith in peace. At the presidential retreat of Camp David, Clinton brought together the new prime minister Ehud Barak and Arafat in July 2000. Barak boldly offered a ‘final’ deaclass="underline" 91 per cent of the West Bank with the Palestinian capital in Abu Dis and all the Arab suburbs of east Jerusalem. The Old City would remain under Israeli sovereignty but the Muslim and Christian Quarters and the Temple Mount would be under Palestinian ‘sovereign custodianship’. The earth and tunnels beneath the Sanctuary – above all the Foundation Stone of the Temple – would remain Israeli and for the first time, Jews would be allowed to pray in limited numbers somewhere on the Temple Mount. The Old City would be jointly patrolled but demilitarized and open to all. Already offered half the Old City’s quarters, Arafat demanded the Armenian Quarter. Israel agreed, effectively offering three-quarters of the Old City. Despite Saudi pressure to accept, Arafat felt he could neither negotiate a final settlement of the Palestinians’ right of return nor approve Israeli sovereignty over the Dome which belonged to all Islam.
‘Do you want to attend my funeral?’ he exclaimed to Clinton. ‘I won’t relinquish Jerusalem and the Holy Places.’ But his rejection was much more fundamentaclass="underline" during the talks, Arafat shocked the Americans and Israelis when he insisted that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple, which had in fact existed only on the Samaritan Mount Gerizim. The city’s holiness for Jews was a modern invention. In talks later that year in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency, Israel offered full sovereignty on the Temple Mount keeping only a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies beneath, but Arafat rejected this.
On 28 September 2000, Sharon, leader of the Likud opposition, added to Barak’s problems by swaggering on to the Temple Mount, guarded by phalanxes of Israeli police, with a ‘message of peace’ that clearly menaced Islam’s beloved Aqsa and Dome. The resulting riots escalated into the Aqsa Intifada, partly another stone-throwing insurgency and partly a pre-planned campaign of suicide bombings aimed by Fatah and Hamas at Israeli civilians. If the first Intifada had helped the Palestinians, this one destroyed Israeli trust in the peace process, led to the election of Sharon, and fatally split the Palestinians themselves.
Sharon suppressed the Intifada by smashing the Palestinian Authority, besieging and humiliating Arafat. He died in 2004 and the Israelis refused to allow his burial on the Temple Mount. His successor Abbas lost the 2006 elections to Hamas. After a short conflict, Hamas seized Gaza while Abbas’s Fatah continued to rule the West Bank. Sharon built a security wall through Jerusalem, a depressing concrete eyesore which did, however, succeed in stopping the suicide bombings.
The seeds of peace not only fell on stony ground but poisoned it too; the peace discredited its makers. Jerusalem today lives in a state of schizophrenic anxiety. Jews and Arabs dare not venture into each other’s neighbourhoods; secular Jews avoid ultra-Orthodox who stone them for not resting on the Sabbath or for wearing disrespectful clothing; messianic Jews test police resolve and tease Muslim anxiety by attempting to pray on the Temple Mount; and the Christian sects keep brawling. The faces of Jerusalemites are tense, their voices are angry and one feels that everyone, even those of all three faiths who are convinced that they are fulfilling a divine plan, is unsure of what tomorrow will bring.
TOMORROW
Here, more than anywhere else on earth, we crave, we hope and we search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possesiveness. It is not always easy to find. In 2010, Jerusalem has not been so large, so embellished, nor has she been so overwhelmingly Jewish for two millennia. Yet she is also the most populous Palestinian city.* Sometimes her very Jewishness is presented as somehow synthetic and against the grain of Jerusalem, but this is a distortion of the city’s past and present.
Jerusalem’s history is a chronicle of settlers, colonists and pilgrims, who have included Arabs, Jews and many others, in a place that has grown and contracted many times. During more than a millennium of Islamic rule, Jerusalem was repeatedly colonized by Islamic settlers, scholars, Sufis and pilgrims who were Arabs, Turks, Indians, Sudanese, Iranians, Kurds, Iraqis and Maghrebis, as well as Christian Armenians Serbs, Georgians and Russians – not so different from the Sephardic and Russian Jews who later settled there for similar reasons. It was this character that convinced Lawrence of Arabia that Jerusalem was more a Levantine city than an Arab one, and this is utterly intrinsic to the city’s character.
It is often forgotten that all the suburbs of Jerusalem outside the walls were new settlements built between 1860 and 1948 by Arabs as well as Jews and Europeans. The Arab areas, such as Sheikh Jarrah, are no older than the Jewish ones, and no more, or less, legitimate.
Both Muslims and Jews have unimpeachable historical claims. Jews have the same right to live in, and settle around, an equitable Jerusalem as Arabs do. There are times when even the most harmless Jewish restoration is presented as illegitimate: in 2010, the Israelis finally consecrated the restored Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, which had been demolished by the Jordanians in 1948, yet this provoked European media criticism and minor riots in eastern Jerusalem.