fugitive peace

I think I must be coming down with Jerusalem Syndrome.

I was up late writing and had decided to pack it in. I went to close the balcony door and was arrested by the sight of a big billow of mist. I went outside. Warmish-coolish dampish clouds rolled by. And then I heard it.

A kind of ethereal chanting. Male voices. Hard to tell how many; sometimes it sounded like one, sometimes like half a dozen.

Hard also to tell where it came from. The walls of the buildings around here bounce sounds back and forth. My first thought was the muezzins of East Jerusalem. But the wind was blowing from the west, so they couldn’t have carried that far, and this wasn’t the prescribed chant of an Adhan but something less structured, rising and fading out, and in a more Western musical key.

I couldn’t sleep, so I took my bike out. I rode down towards the old city, stopping every so often to listen. I still heard them. The direction was still vague. I reached a vantage point in Yemin Moshe overlooking the floodlit old city walls. I could hear the voices, faintly, but they were at the threshold of my hearing; they might have been coming from inside the old city, but maybe not.

I turned and rode back up towards the centre of town. It’s hard to overestimate how empty Jerusalem is at four in the morning. In ten minutes I saw maybe half a dozen cars and a handful of pedestrians. I invented outlandish stories for what each one of them was doing walking the streets at this hour. I guess none of them looked like he was listening for disembodied voices though.

I reach the pedestrian precinct and suddenly came upon crowds of teenagers out drinking. Voices, raucous, cheerful. Not the ones I had heard. I carried on to the beginning of Mea Shearim; maybe it was from an early-bird yeshiva. But I could hear nothing.

I turned back again. A JCB digger was partly blocking a road and a taxi was trying to pass it. The taxi driver hooted a couple of times, waited, then advanced with extreme caution. Since a guy went crazy on a bulldozer yesterday everyone’s afraid of earth movers.

I got home, stopping a few more times. By now the voices were in my head as much as outside it; I thought I heard them, and they would resolve into a car engine, the wind in my ears, a radio playing in a house I passed.

Outside my house I waited a long while and listened. The unsteady flapping of the Belgian flag on the consul’s residence; distant whispers of cars; a leaf drily hitting the ground. No voices. One of the guys I had cycled past a few minutes earlier walked by. He didn’t meet my gaze.

I went in and up to the balcony. Birdsong. Wind. The beginnings of sunrise. No more mist. No voices.

Just back from two very busy weeks in the US, hence my lack of recent posts. I have to limit what I can post for now about my trip to Washington, since a piece is due in The Economist about the Annapolis summit and I can’t pre-empt it.

Not that I have a big scoop or something. Both in Washington, and in my interviews in Jerusalem and Ramallah in the couple of days since returning, I’ve found nobody who knows what the substance of the summit will be, when it will take place or even whether it will happen at all. A Palestinian official I saw today confirmed what Abu Alaa, the chief negotiator, said today in a press conference: they want a timeline for a peace accord to be announced at Annapolis. Israel opposes this, and in months of talks the two sides have come no closer on it.

Does Annapolis really matter? What’s the criterion for success? What if it doesn’t succeed, or doesn’t happen at all? The answers depend on the politics of whoever you’re talking to. Broadly speaking, the further to the left/pro-Palestinian people are, the more they think the summit matters and less likely they think it is to succeed. On the right/pro-Israel branch, they think the summit could yield something but its importance has been exaggerated anyway. Those happy few who are most enthusiastic about the summit are therefore in the political centre, at the equilibrium between optimism and importance. It’s just like the equilibrium of supply and demand.

What has this got to do with the French buying Jerusalem? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I returned to find the former site of the Israeli foreign ministry surrounded by billboards (above) advertising a new luxury housing complex. Old-time Jerusalemites have long been griping about how property prices are being driven up by the influx of French buyers - some of them immigrants, some merely investing for a rainy day - but this is the first time I’ve seen houses advertised directly at the French market.

Oddly, the Hebrew and English versions promise “a new lifestyle culture” while the French version offers “a new life and culture”. I’m not sure if that is just a bad translation, or a hint that the targets are existing Hebrew- and English-speaking Israelis but new French immigrants.

Just back from seeing “Jerusalem - The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story“, an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.

The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.

One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.

The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”