When we finally uprooted from New York to Jerusalem in the summer of 2000 the situation was very different; there were negotiations and hope, and I had not seen checkpoints or settlements or suicide bombs or laws that kept children from living with their parents. I had been different too. I had not been someone who interviewed generals or wrote articles about places where we had lived. That began later, as a result of “the situation.”
Our previous move—to New York in 1992—had been easy. We were then working in Pakistan and Afghanistan, newly married, and I was a junior surgeon in the main hospital in Islamabad. When Andrew was posted to UN headquarters in New York, we packed our few suitcases and went. Transferring from New York to Jerusalem was more complicated: we now had three children. Swept along by the HIV/AIDS crisis, my career had morphed from surgeon to public health researcher: I had examined the role of the uterine cervix in transmission of the virus, worked in South Africa testing HIV-prevention methods and evaluating condom availability and then, back in New York, helped update doctors and nurses caring for people living with HIV.
With his new posting to the Middle East, Andrew had left New York ahead of me and the children, starting his new job as I finished mine (wondering what I would do next) and the children wrapped up their school year. While I sat on benches in New York parks or sofas in Upper East Side drawing rooms listening to New York friends who knew Jerusalem, Andrew talked to our French-Israeli friend, Ofer, who found us the house in East Jerusalem.
One of Ofer’s Palestinian friends had moved to Geneva with his Dutch wife, leaving their Jerusalem home empty: they needed a tenant and we wanted a house with a view. We took it and moved our life from New York to a village in Jerusalem, home to two families, one extended Palestinian and one Jewish. The New Yorkers who insisted that, even if living in Arab East Jerusalem were feasible, such a thing as a village in Jerusalem could not exist, turned out to be wrong. There are surprising patches of rural life left in the Holy City. The largest is the “Forest of Peace” to the south of the Old City, and it remains undeveloped partly because it was No Man’s Land, patrolled by the UN, between 1948 and 1967. In and around the pines and dusty patches of forest are a number of Palestinian hamlets. “Hamlet” is a lush word; these places are dry for most of the year. The houses’ bare walls with odd-placed windows sham lushness thanks to small gardens of powdery vines and spots of watered green: olive trees, figs, a rose or two.
Our house, in a garden of well-watered green, was near the top of the Forest of Peace on a hill called the Hill of Evil Counsel. Angled and concrete, veneered in limestone, with marble floors and bathroom walls, it looked out over the valleys of Kidron and Hinnom. Like the other houses, ours grew out of the slope of the “mountain,” as the villagers called it, with most of its windows to the front. Unlike the other houses, ours was not originally built out from a cave in the hillside. Inside, it was simple, white and modern, as I saw at 3 AM when we first arrived from the airport. We filed through the living room, an expanded corridor pierced by a spiral staircase leading to a room below, filled the three bedrooms, and fell asleep trying to make out the Dome of the Rock in the darkness.
Four generations of one Palestinian family lived in our hamlet. We understood that the Jewish family, who were Orthodox and private, preferred to keep to themselves and did not want to get to know the bounding British children from New York. We rarely saw them. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were happy to know us. Our landlord, uncle to most of them, had told Andrew that if we needed help, all we had to do was stand in the garden and shout for one of his nephews— “Ahmed!”—and sixteen-year-old Ahmed would appear to carry out whatever service we needed, like running off to pay utility bills. Such imperiousness was uncomfortable and from another era; Ahmed became a friend. I could pay the bills myself.
In the sharp Jerusalem light of our first morning, a few hours after we had landed, a young woman peered round the green metal garden gate to say hello, followed by three dark-eyed daughters. Maha introduced herself, promising to tell us everything we needed to know: the shops, the supermarkets, and the secrets of the Old City. Then she and her daughters—the children eyeing each other like the cats that seemed to be everywhere—showed us the fruit trees in our garden, the figs ripening by the garden wall, the peach, grapefruit, and lemon trees. They walked us across the yard to the little farm and introduced us to the rest of the family.
Our children, fresh from a New York Chelsea childhood of asphalt playgrounds and trees with their lower branches sawn off to prevent climbing accidents, looked about them in wonder: there were not only trees to scale, fields and forest to explore, but horses to ride, dogs to roam with, and goats to herd.
The head of the family, a small man in his eighties with a bad cough, welcomed us formally. “I understand English ways,” he said. He had worked for the British during the Mandate. Palestine was governed by the British after the First World War until 1948, when partition (passed by the UN in November 1947) was intended to create two states with an economic union. The UN plan allocated 44 percent of the land for the majority Palestinian population and 56 percent of the land for the minority Jewish population (who owned 7 percent of the land). In the resulting war of 1948, the new Jewish state ended up with 78 percent of Palestine; the Palestinian state remains unfounded.
“You gave Palestine away—not that it was yours to give,” said Maha’s husband Mohammed later, “—but we forgive you.” They laughed, and we laughed. The old man, Abu Anis, and his wife Fawziya were preparing a feast, the traditional way to mark the arrival of guests: piled platters of musakhan (chicken with onions), falafel, hummus, ruz falastini (rice with pine nuts and saffron), tabouleh and labaneh (salty cream cheese), kubbeh (patties of ground meat encased in cracked wheat) and za’atar (thyme). There were olives and pita bread, vegetables hollowed out and stuffed again, fruits and nuts, and Palestinian sweets: whipped pastries of honey, dates, pistachios, and almonds. And coffee: thick, sugared coffee in tiny china cups.
We sat in their small living room with a huge TV screen against one end showing the news, and one picture on the bare walls, a relief of the Dome of the Rock. The old man sat and watched us, talking of the Mandate, while his plump wife busied in and out, bearing dish after dish, which we didn’t dare refuse but could hardly dent. The children, in their fussiness, were no help, except with the conversation, filling in the gaps with requests for more Coke or less chicken and, too loud, “Do I have to eat this?”
The following morning Abu Anis was in the garden watering the flowers. A few minutes later he knocked on the door, bearing a plate of figs he had just picked from one of the trees. For a while our mornings were marked by his offerings and my return offer of coffee. Later we began to find the sight of his bobble-hatted head outside the kitchen window at breakfast-time too predictable—six days a week—and he found that my coffee was never quite right—the cup too big or the sugar too short—so his wife would be summoned down with coffee made correctly. Over the weeks he adjusted the timing of his watering and we breakfasted alone.
One of the hillside’s tiny terraces that formed our garden was just big enough for a tray-sized table under a fir tree that creaked in the breeze. From the terrace I would look out over the valley, listening to the noise of goat bells and church bells, muezzins, and children. My nostalgia for New York remained strong, jostling with the excitement at all the newness. Later on Jerusalem would thread its enchantment and I would fall to its allure, but at first all I saw—despite the forest—was a dusty, ungreen, and unwatered land, the dry Judean hills stretching away toward the Dead Sea, whose dark dullness we could glimpse from viewpoints in the neighborhood. The color green, the wet English green that I had grown up with, was missing.
Trying to anchor myself in this new place, I would sit under the fir tree, reading the English-language Israeli papers and gazing over the valley at the Dome of the Rock, gleaming small but supreme in the early light, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Western Wailing Wall, and the walls of the Old City. On the hill above us were promenades from which to take in Jerusalem, and, beyond them, at the summit of the Hill of Evil Counsel, Government House, built by the British, an austere monument to imperial control with Hindu swastika motifs embedded in its pre-war, limestone walls.
Andrew would hurry back from work, glad to be with the family again after months without us. We would talk, sit, drink, and he would play with the children. I would have done my playing with the children by the time he came home. Most evenings we would walk in the Forest of Peace. On that first evening we had met a family of French Orthodox Jews, like us enjoying the cool of the evening in one of the playgrounds. Our children were due to start at the French lycée; perhaps these children went there too? We talked, the children played together, and then as the family made to leave the parents told us to be careful not to stay beyond dusk.
“There’s an Arab village nearby,” they explained.
We had just set down the bones of an exchange. Was I now going to tell them that the village they were afraid of was our home, and that the Arabs who lived there were just then preparing a welcoming dinner for us? One minute we were two families in a playground, then, with a sentence of goodwill, of kind advice, we were about to step over a drawn line and take sides. I was back to the drawing rooms of the Upper East Side and the park in Union Square, hearing assumptions I was expected to share. Since the assumptions didn’t fit with the little I had seen so far, I said nothing.
I was at sea, not knowing how to find the comfort of the familiar. Apart from Maha, whose world was so unknown to me, I didn’t know whom to call, even what to do with the children when they weren’t playing with the children next door. I had put my work aside for the moment, to give the children the time and attention they needed to settle in, and I had never been good at domesticity. No doubt everything would fall into place in a few weeks, but for the moment even the basics were baffling: reading ingredient labels in the grocery store and signs over the shop doors—everything was written in Hebrew and not always translated. Were they grocery stores? Newly illiterate, I was never sure until I was inside, pressing the avocados. Once home, I would put the groceries by my laptop on the kitchen table, examine what I had bought, set something to cook and the children to play, and then write it all down, emailing friends abroad for companionship. And of course, the children, being children, were now teaching me.
To give me mobility and not to leave me stranded when he was at work, Andrew took me out to hire a vehicle. Driving the just rented car, I gingerly followed him out of the garage. I lost him immediately in the banter of traffic and found myself in a line for a checkpoint, with no map, no idea of what to say to the soldiers and no idea how to get home.
My first checkpoint, and I was clueless. All the vehicles were funneled into one lane that chicaned through a row of concrete cubes a meter high. Pedestrians were channeled through another chicane. I would soon learn that the crux of the checkpoint is the Israeli soldier, armed, bored, and powerful. He decides if you pass or not. Only the speed varies: permission can be instantaneous—the soldier’s nod—not for hours, or not at all. Faces in the line show resignation, irritation, humiliation. There were few discernible security measures, no searches, little screening of ID. Hang on, did I have the right ID? I swallowed panic. The soldier glanced at my car and waved me through. Andrew was waiting for me on the other side, patient as I threw my angry fear at him.
Now that I had a car, like many Israelis I took to driving to Bethlehem to buy supplies. A few minutes from Jerusalem, Bethlehem belies the carol sheets. It is large and sprawling, with refugee camps* sewn into the fabric of the city, story piled on story, alleys widening into main roads and narrowing, without warning, into nothing. Manger Square is one of many places where the threads of a Christian education lead you to expect one thing and you find another: a huge concourse flanked by modern buildings and the ancient fortress church built by Constantine’s mother over the caves where Christ was born. Whatever I had expected, I grew used to the town as it stood, and went frequently.
I needed help in the house if I was to get back to work in public health research, as well as to regain some control and independence. I wanted all three, but I was hesitant, telling myself I must see the children settled properly before I worked too hard. Two women in the village, Delal and Naimi, were keen to help, but were forbidden to take the job. Maha explained. It was not acceptable to work in a man’s house unless he was a husband or relative. She dismissed this as “bullshit,” old-fashioned and irrelevant—“if a woman wants to have a job, why not?” asked Maha. But she couldn’t impose her views: Naimi was her mother-in-law, Delal her aunt.
Instead, Maha found me a helper who could overcome the cultural constraints to work in our house. One of her acquaintances from Beit Sahour needed a job. Maha arranged the interview and asked her to bring me some meat from a Bethlehem butcher she recommended. Dina arrived with chicken and beef. The chicken still had its head on; I didn’t look at the beef. She changed her shoes, started preparing the food, and we talked. Christian, well educated and lively, she spoke English very well, like almost everyone I had met so far, except Abu Anis and his wife. The problems, as I then saw it, were her reluctance to work long hours—she wanted to be home by 2PM for the traditional family meal—and transportation. She had her own car but was not permitted to use it beyond the West Bank. As I drove her back that day I could see that I was going to wind up ferrying her much of the time and that didn’t make any sense, but it would do for the moment, and we made a temporary arrangement.
On the short journey between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Dina pointed out two built-up areas, one well-established and one under construction. “You should notice these places: they are illegal settlements,” she said. The first was Gilo. The second had two names. Dina called it Jebel Abu Gneim; “the Isra-eelis,” she said, using the Palestinian inflection, “call it Har Homa.” Over the weeks and months, I watched the two-named settlement grow as I traveled between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Dina’s village was in its lee. “We see it all the time,” she said. “We watch our land being taken from us by force or under different ‘legal’ ruses and then we watch these things being built on our land, but we can do nothing.” I dropped her off in Bethlehem, and headed back to Jerusalem.
At home I sat in front of the laptop I had been given before I left New York and wrote. Every detail went down on the screen: my illiteracy, the frustrations of Jerusalem traffic, the children’s first days at school, and Jebel Abu Gneim/Har Homa. Some of the details ended up in emails, and I saw that I was screening the details I sent according to the sensibilities of each friend. I was choosing details I thought each one would accept, but the touchstone was not interest or hobby or like-stage in career. It was politics—the situation—and one of the criteria was to avoid being judged.
The rhythm of school was beginning to give me grounding. The children were making friends; Xan in particular with a French boy called Balthazar. Some of the parents—Hazel, Libby, Mike, and Steve—had become “co-parents” and were helping me navigate the unknown. I was slowly—for the moment—getting used to being dependent on Andrew, and thanks to Naimi being able to babysit unofficially, we were seeing something of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by night. The buzz of our new life was beginning to trump the frustrations.
In order to keep up, I would buy either the Jerusalem Post or the International Herald Tribune, which came folded inside the English edition of Ha’aretz. In the Jerusalem Post I read the story of a Jewish family who almost drowned in the Sea of Galilee; a young Palestinian Israeli swam out and rescued them but died in the process, and the newspaper led a campaign to raise money for his widow and their two toddlers. One morning the newsagent said: “Sorry, no English papers today.” The man behind me smiled, chiding: “You should be practicing your Hebrew.” He assumed I was making aliya. I looked confused, so he explained: if I were Jewish, under the Law of Return I could settle in Israel and take Israeli citizenship. I would be encouraged to learn Hebrew as quickly as possible, and would enroll in intensive language classes.*
One Saturday Andrew and I drove the children to Jaffa for lunch with Ofer, the friend who had found us our house. Jaffa, an ancient port abandoned overnight by many of its inhabitants fleeing the advancing Israeli forces in 1948, is now mixed, with rich beachside houses and poor broken-down homes abutting each other: villas with columns and balconies next to wire-bound shanties with pecking chickens. Ofer and his wife Halley lived with their three children in a shady ochre house filled with New York furniture. Halley emerged from the bedroom and beamed at us. We sat for a while, reminiscing about New York and mutual friends.
Halley’s youngest, Max, was older than Catriona’s sixteen months, and I told myself this justified Halley’s working and my not. And I’d just arrived. It had nothing to do with inertia, fear, or lack of self-esteem, nothing at all. Halley’s success as a photographer put her in a different frame; since arriving I had sat in a box labeled “wife,” and had done nothing to change that, so far. New life was one thing, becoming a part of it was another, and I was listening, watching, taking it all in, as a passenger. This place was full of options and I would wait, I told myself. In a few weeks, things would look more settled; no need to rush.
Ofer and Halley took us to a restaurant overlooking the beach, blown by the breeze and safe enough for the six children to roam about while we drank arak and white wine.
Catriona sat in a plastic highchair, playing with bread and calamari. Archie and Xan, six and three, followed eleven-year-old Elamar, who had a Discman and a problem at school. Halley told us about it.
His class had been set an assignment: make up a board game. Being a fan of MTV, Elamar applied lessons learned there to his homework. His mother found herself summoned to a conference with the teacher and the headmistress. The two women lambasted her in Hebrew, which she didn’t speak well, so she responded in English. Her son’s project, they told her, had been entitled “Monopoly of Sex.” The first square had been “buy a condom,” the second, “book a hotel room” (he’d named the one his grandparents stayed in during their visit), the third was “meet Madonna,” the fourth “kiss,” and so on. They demanded to know what he was seeing, reading, listening to, and being subjected to at home. She battled her way out of the interview.
A couple of days later the teacher said, “I’ve been having sleepless nights about you and your son. But I’ve worked out what the problem is.”
“Oh yes,” said Halley, “and what is that?”
“He’s been spending time in America.”
We laughed and headed for the beach.
Back in Jerusalem I was beginning to feel the “situation” weave itself into the days. Ofer had talked about his work bringing Palestinian and Israeli youth together and the web of problems he faced. Halley worried about the effects of living in a militarized society: both of them dreaded their children’s conscription. Dina, who most days was managing to get to work without a lift from me, brought daily details of encounters with the occupation—she was not complaining but I had to ask why she was late so often and I couldn’t blame her for the checkpoint delays that thwarted her attempts to leave extra time, or for her mornings standing in line at the Israeli Ministry of the Interior for her permit. Twice she stood in the heat all morning only to be told when she reached the front that the office had just been closed and she must start again another day.
I was finding that the situation was like the stone and the light of Jerusalem: mesmerizing. Everyone talks about it, but it is hard to put a finger on. The light and the stone only go so far in explaining Jerusalem’s appeal; the fear and the terror that General Gilad later described and we experienced only go so far in explaining the situation. And fear was an option that very few resisted. Something happens to everyone in Jerusalem. Not in the ordinary way that things happen, but in a specific, Jerusalem way. After all, we lived just across the valley from Hell. Hell, according to biblical lore, was the Hinnom Valley, where children were burned alive as sacrifices to the god Moloch, and where Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied that the fires of punishment would burn, an abyss of damnation. It now houses a movie theater.
I soon found that when you arrive in Jerusalem you land not so much in hell as in a maelstrom that has swallowed thousands before you and will swallow thousands more. Eventually you are spat out, land in a heap, and shake down the reality and drama of the place. People say the place has bad vibes. It is Jerusalem Syndrome, but not as it was described to me by a French psychiatrist, a psychosis where visitors wrap themselves in hotel sheets and believe themselves characters from the Bible: I was never Mary Magdalene. Instead personal dramas echo and mirror and fester within the wider human tragedy. Our life, like so many others, was subsumed by the political. The personal became inextricably wound into it, enmeshed, and left us longing for light—quiet, expunging light. So much for my few weeks of settling in: there was just time to touch down before everything went up.
Soon after we arrived, the stones and the light and the legend lured me to the Old City. I would head there before driving to school to pick up the children. Within its walled square mile you can round a corner and be in 17th-century Poland, turn down an alley and be biblical. Costume is transporting: striped coats belted at the waist with cummerbunds, immaculate fur-trimmed hats, stockinged male calves and polished shoes; long robes, unbelted, keffiyehs draped; white robes sweeping, water-pipes coiled among their folds, their owners sitting in the smoke under ceilings of vaulted stone; women in veils, women in hats; hair shaven, heads bewigged, hair hidden, wrapped in secret; sideburns—pey’ot—long and curled with care, beards stark; faces, eyes, mysteries. Stories—a whirl of histories in which every one of us is wrapped. And then back into the isolation of the schoolyard: mothers too harried to be friendly, fathers businesslike, children being much as children anywhere—noisy, running, breathless, the older ones disdainful, testing, flaunting, laden with books, hormones, and expectations.
On a brilliant September Sunday we took the children to the Old City. We began with a walk along the ramparts, the majestic walls of the Old City that have come to signify Jerusalem and were built in the 16th century by the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. We started from the Damascus Gate, abuzz with Palestinian vendors, hawkers, veiled old women squatting on the floor beside pyramids of figs, melons, and sheaves of fig leaves. It’s a fine place to enter the Old City, right bang into the bustle of it. At the Jaffa Gate we toiled up twisting flights of steps and caught our breath at the top of the ramparts. There was the whole city, laid out, rigid in the upright shadows, meeting all expectations. The Sunday School image of Jerusalem has squat square buildings topped with domes, with shady palms and corrals of sand sheltering animals for stars to shine on. Now there is no sand and there are few animals, but much of the Old City bears out the image, and throws in minarets and bell towers, Mamluk and Byzantine, Christian domes and Arab domes in metal, silver, gold, and stone, flights of alam and crucifix, bustling blocks of old and new, arches and buttresses, all pale stone, emerald tile and shaded green, clustered within the great thick walls we stood on.
As we circled the Old City the boys played crusaders between battlements, and then we descended back into the bustle. A film crew blocked our way down, and we had to watch actor Jean-Claude Van Damme perform before we were allowed by. We paid a short visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian Quarter, where the English friend who had come with us was moved to tears by the elderly pilgrims kneeling to kiss the stone on which Jesus was laid out. It is called the Stone of Unction and dates from 1810.
It is not unreasonable to look for spiritual tranquility in the city of monotheism, but there is none in the relations between the different churches controlling Christendom’s most holy place; perhaps this is not surprising. The Greek, the Armenian, and the Syrian Orthodox churches, the Latins, the Ethiopians, and the Copts have fought savagely over portions of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for centuries. In a land choked by territorial wars, the church at the center of the Christian faith is no exception. Stories of priests wrangling over space and jostling over rights echo British Mandate records that tell of officials wrestling with the claims of the various Christian sects—infighting so intense and full of loathing that for several hundred years the key to the Holy Sepulcher has been held for safekeeping by a Muslim family, the Nusseibehs.
Our final visit was to the place that to Jews is Temple Mount and to Arabs is al-Haram al-Sharif, the “Noble Sanctuary.” It would be my last chance: a few days later the Intifada would close the site to all non-Muslims. Despite its extraordinary serenity, the place is fraught with religious significance, legend, and history. It is a manmade table mountain, shored up by massive walls whose vast dimensions were created 2,000 years ago by Herod the Great. On top, where the First and Second Temples once stood, are a number of separate buildings, not only the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, but also colonnaded gates and lesser domes, madrasas, covered arcades, and a Mamluk fountain offering pilgrims sweet water.
The Umayyad Dome of the Rock, which adorns the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif, and the al-Aqsa Mosque 150 yards away, form the third holiest site in the Islamic world. The whole area serves as a mosque, the acres of open space filled with praying Muslim worshippers every Friday. I was happy to loiter about, not yet over-aware of the place’s heavy political weight. There had been many attacks on the Temple Mount and plots to destroy the Dome: an Australian Christian, an American convert to Judaism, a Jewish sect of moon-worshippers, a gang of yeshiva students, and a group of West Bank settlers have all had a go at the site, burning, shooting, and killing, or plotting to dynamite the Dome of the Rock and thereby hurry along the Messiah. Some were deranged, others were politically and religiously motivated. A few were ranking army officers and confessed to a string of terrorist acts. Whatever the mental state of the attackers, no one doubted where conflict over the Temple Mount could lead.
Belief and commitment aside, the Dome of the Rock makes you stand, shoeless, and gaze. It has inspired Christians not only to wonder at its spirituality and beauty but also to bemoan the failure of the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulcher to come anywhere close. It gleams golden across the valleys: a marriage of sublime architectural harmony and mathematical perfection, the experts say. In the middle of the building there is a rock. It sits, bald, unworked, and misshapen, at the center of so much exquisite mosaic and green and blue tile; it is, variously, the place of Adam’s birth and burial, the resting place of David’s Ark, the scene of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac, and the site of Mohammed’s ascent to heaven. The rock, it is said, tried to show how much it revered the Prophet by following him heavenward, but was held down by the archangel, whose handprint remains on its rough surface.
You can believe what you like of the legends and whispers and mysteries, but you cannot underestimate the significance of the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif for millions of Jews and hundreds of millions of Muslims. And this is where, on September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon came marching in.
* With the war of 1948–9 resulting in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homes in Palestine, refugees (more fled in the war of 1967) were housed in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Many of these refugees and their descendants remain there still, partly because they have not been allowed back to their homes or compensated, and partly because their Arab hosts (with the exception of Jordan) have refused to integrate them.1
* The revival of Hebrew is impressive. An ancient Semitic language, it was given life by the efforts of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a revolutionary in Tsarist Russia who emigrated to Palestine in the wave of aliya during the 1880s. Recognizing the need for a common language among the new immigrants, he set about forming one from biblical Hebrew and a range of other languages including Yiddish. The result of his work is now the native language of Israelis.