fugitive peace

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

It had never really occurred to me to wonder whether questions of halakha, Jewish law, might hamper human-rights work. OK, driving to a protest on the sabbath is clearly out. But leave it to Rabbis for Human Rights to agonise about the conundrum that the shmita, or sabbatical year — which we are in now, when Jews may not farm their land — creates for a God-fearing Jew who wants to show solidarity with Palestinian farmers harvesting their olive crop. This came in today from their mailing list. I rather like the halakhically dubious but morally bracing conclusion:

Up until this point we have not really answered the question of how we, as a rabbinic organization, are participating in agricultural work in the Sabbatical Year. For those who accept the rabbinical permit to “sell” one’s land, there is no problem harvesting on land which is not ours and given the fact that we will not be profiting financially. Even the permit, however, stipulates that planting must be done by non-Jews because this is seen as an activity prohibited by the Torah and not just by the rabbis. We can certainly be present to guard and even digging the holes is permitted. Maimonedes says that when we see a non Jew doing the work that we are forbidden to do during the Sabbatical Year we should offer words of encouragement and wish that their efforts be successful. I think that, when we are talking about land that has laid fallow for all too many years because of settler violence and difficulties of access, the Land has had her rest and now is the time for justice.

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.

The 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?

The image on the left is a map that I bought in an antiques shop in Jaffa. It is dated 1940 and shows Jewish-owned land in green. Under the legend “FACTS”, it states, “The greater part of Palestine is still uncultivated. Jews now own less than six percent of the land of Palestine.” It enumerates three zones: in the largest, called Zone A, “land transfers to others than Palestine Arabs are prohibited”. The map is issued by the “Keren Kayemeth Leisrael”, the Jewish National Fund.

The image on the right is the JNF’s land holdings today. As I wrote in last week’s story, there is some disagreement over dates, amounts and prices, but between 1949 and 1953 either 1.25m or 2m dunums (1,250 or 2,000 sq km) was added to the 6% or so that Jews owned before Israel was created, by means of selling the JNF land that the state had confiscated from those same “Palestine Arabs” who had fled the war.

It took me a while after I bought the antique map to read the legends properly and realise that it was propaganda. The JNF was trying to show how little land Jews controlled, and how restricted they were from acquiring more, in an attempt to stave off criticism that they were taking over Palestine. In the preceding years tensions had flared and land prices had gone up many-fold as the Arabs in Palestine started to resist the slowly growing Jewish influx.

The figures are, of course, somewhat misleading. The 6% refers to the whole of Palestine, of which a great deal was and is desert, and does not easily support large population centres. Much of the Jewish land shown in the 1940 map is concentrated in the coastal strip, where Tel Aviv and its metropolitan sprawl, the biggest population concentration in Israel, are today. Looked at in terms of population rather than land, the picture changes: though estimates vary, by 1940 Jews were around 30%.

Likewise, today’s dispute about the JNF is based on a somewhat misleading figure. According to its charter, its land can be leased to Jews only. But it owns only 13% of Israel. So is it really such a big issue? When you look at the map on the right, where the JNF holdings are so tightly packed that they clearly outline the northern West Bank, it becomes clear that in the bit of Israel that most people want to live in, the non-arid part—in other words, from about the level of Ashkelon northwards—the JNF owns a great deal of the land, perhaps as much as half.