Grand Tour
October 19th, 2007The final entry in my correspondent’s diary of reporting from two weeks ago. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week in Washington, getting some takes on the upcoming Annapolis summit. I’ll be posting some thoughts on that at the beginning of next week.
Three millennia, one neighbourhood at a time
TODAY is a Jewish holiday, the Rejoicing of the Law, and West Jerusalem is as quiet and bucolic as an English village on a Sunday afternoon. It seems a good morning for a bike ride.
I zoom down the hill towards Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of the Old City. Its builder, a Jewish philanthropist in the late 19th century, set the style for the new city by covering everything—the houses, the streets and the staircases that run down the hillside—in rough-faced, yellow-white Jerusalem stone. He put a windmill there too, only to discover, so legend goes, that there wasn’t enough wind.
I swing past the shuttered old railway station with murals of 1930s Palestine, past the Sultan’s Pool, a rocky valley where cattle and horses took water in the days of the Ottoman rulers, and climb the road that winds around the Old City’s southern walls. Below me snakes a dusty ravine studded with old olive trees. This is the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna—the Bible’s word for hell, possibly because the refuse burned and the corpses dumped there in ancient times released a stink not of this world.
I enter the Old City at the Zion Gate (in Hebrew), David’s Gate in Arabic, passing the alleged site of both King David’s tomb and the Last Supper. Both claims are dubious, but myth often has more power here than scholarship. I rattle over cobbles and down a hill to the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Since my lycra cycling shorts undeniably constitute immodest dress, I remain outside the security gates, watching a group of American Jewish teenagers doing a festive circle dance.
Out of the Old City through the Dung Gate and down a hill so steep my wheels skid, I head into Silwan. This Palestinian neighbourhood has the misfortune to lie atop Jerusalem’s ancient precursor, the City of (King) David. Right-wing Israelis have stealthily bought up a few houses near the site of the archaeological dig, each of which is now a mini-settlement with barbed wire, electric gates and a threadbare Israeli flag.
On to a dusty track along the Kidron Valley, where I am distracted by a bizarre set of Greco-Egyptian monuments hewn from the rock. A passing tour guide tells me they are the tombs of David’s son Absalom and of “the Pharaoh’s Daughter”. I look them up later. Absalom’s tomb has previously been ascribed to Jehoshapat and to Hezekiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter’s tomb (if indeed it’s her in there) is somewhere else, and what he said was her tomb is actually called the Grotto of St James, and actually contains the mortal remains of a Jewish priestly family. Clearly, Israelis and Palestinians weren’t the first to argue over who owned what here.
I ride past the garden of Gethsemane, where Judas betrayed Jesus. Christian pilgrims cheer me on as I struggle, but eventually walk, up the steep hill towards the Mount of Olives cemetery. By Jewish tradition this is the world’s best place to be dead, for when the Messiah comes, those buried here will be the first to rise and follow him.
I recall a cold November night when I came here with the scion of an illustrious rabbinical family and we stumbled around tombs looking for his ancestors, stopping spellbound as the unearthly dawn call of the first muezzins echoed off the Old City walls below us.
Puffing, I ride along the ridge at the top of the Mount of Olives and stop to look over the Judean desert to the east. On these barren slopes Israel plans to build 3,500 homes to connect the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—on a hilltop in the distance in front of me—to Jerusalem, thus taking a large bite out of the West Bank. To Palestinians it has come to symbolise Israel’s refusal to take peace seriously.
I carry on to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, which was a Jewish enclave in Jordanian territory between Israel’s birth in 1948 and its capture of the West Bank in 1967. The dividing line between the slightly ramshackle Palestinian neighbourhood and the neat, aloof university precinct is as sharp as the day the border fence came down.
Back into town, past the elegant, orientalist American Colony hotel where I and other journalists meet aid workers and diplomats to share overpriced meals and cynical stories. Past St George’s cathedral, where Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli convicted of treason for leaking his country’s nuclear secrets to the press in 1986, often hangs out—stateless, forlorn and, say those who know him, now slightly unhinged.
I cross the former border with Jordan, now a highway, and swerve past black-coated ultra-Orthodox hasidim as I cut through Mea Shearim, then up to the Russian Compound, where a notorious prison for Palestinian detainees sits in the shadow of the magnificent Holy Trinity church.
My home stretch takes me past my local watering-hole, the Restobar. Some locals still know it as Moment—the name it had when a suicide bomber entered it and killed himself and 11 others in 2002. I slalom through security gates into the quiet little street where the prime minister’s house is, and race past a tall, strapping security guard who watches me from behind impenetrable sunglasses, assessing whether I have a weapon concealed in my lycra shorts. Past the Belgian consul’s house, a superb neo-classical mansion whose Palestinian owner leased it to the Belgians in 1948 to keep it out of Israel’s hands. And home.
Every stone in Jerusalem has a history—or several, and often contradictory. Many outsiders find it an oppressive place. But where else can you cover over three thousand years by bicycle in less than an hour and a half?