jerusalem-blog

The eclipse of women

2012-01-15T07:06:00.000-08:00

In today's NYT, Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner write about the growing rift between the ultra-orthodox Haredim and the rest of Israeli society. While the current tensions are ignited by the mutual pressure of ultra-religious and secular Israelis over the "eclipse of women" from public view and the growing trend to enforce gender separation in areas hitherto thoroughly governed by secular principles (public buses, government functions), the tensions run deeper in a country of seven million where the ultra-orthodox, currently a population of one million, are the fastest growing segment of society, a poor community where sixty percent of men are intentionally unemployed, or--as they view themselves--employed in the service of life-long Torah-study.
See Bronner and Kershner's article HERE.

Matt Gross, a frugal traveler, is "lost in Jerusalem" (NYT)

2012-01-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

What is it like to visit Jerusalem as a vaguely Jewish American travel writer and globe trotter who always held the Holy City to be one of the least interesting places in the world? Matt Gross, writing in the travel section of today's NYT online edition, was surprised at the complex charm of the old and the new, the religious and the mundane. See his article HERE.

The Myth of United Jerusalem - The Atlantic

2012-01-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

An article from the Atlantic on the Israeli policy goal of keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli rule. The author, Daniel Seidemann, is an Israeli attorney specializing in Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem, and the founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based NGO that works towards a resolution to the question of Jerusalem consistent with the two-state solution. The Myth of United Jerusalem - The Atlantic

Muezzin Law-A noise complaint that was waiting to happen

2011-12-12T07:04:00.000-08:00

Haaretz and other media are reporting on a law, proposed in the Israeli parliament, the Knesseth, to ban the Muslim call to public prayers ("Muezzin Law"). It is worthwhile studying this closely for the responses of members of the public arguing for and against banning a practice that was always designed to be intrusive, but that is not without its charms if one is willing to befriend it. - We recently spent some time in Istanbul, in a relatively poor, ancient neighborhood on the verge of gentrification but still dominated by the small neighborhood mosques that begin to blare their calls to prayer very early in the morning. The problem, I thought this summer, when I felt miserably awakened way before dawn and way before I was ready to get up, are the loudspeakers. They amplify the call to prayer to super-human strength. To be sure, as a tourist I was inclined to be charmed as well, similar to how I felt in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico, where religious processions started early, carried on for a long time, and where accompanied by loudspeakers. The loudspeaker, a mid-twentieth century technology still dominates the air-space across the developing world, creating a particular sounds-scape of strong passions proclaimed by coarse and clumsy means. -- The charm of the muezzins of Istanbul was evident from their attention to one another. Broadcasting their really quite haunting intonations of the ever-same words, proclaiming the one-ness of Allah and the prophethood of Muhammad in call-and-response fashion made one listen not just for the call from the nearest loudspeaker but for the others as well, namely, for the interplay, the weaving of a tapestry of transcendence over hills and valleys of a sleep-drunken city. -- None of this is to say that it is not worth regulating the decibels of the output and making sure pious tradition conforms with the overall sense of decorum. To be sure, in Jerusalem and Israel more broadly, there are overtones that will likely make it difficult to regulate anything stepping on the toes of any religious community and its traditions. -- It may be worth remembering that the medieval Muslim rulers forbade Christians, long the majority of Jerusalemites, the ringing of church bells. To this day, the Armenian St. James Cathedral has its deacon hammer on a large beam of wood when it is time to call the faithful to prayer. The regulation of religious noise has long been a complicated issue and it has always been fraught with the desire to dominate.

Women should be seen and heard in Jerusalem

2011-11-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

The New Israel Fund is sponsoring an action to counter the ongoing push of Ultra-Orthodox groups to banish women from view in Jerusalem. For details about this action and on how you can contribute or participate, see HERE.
http://www.flickr.com//photos/new_israel_fund/sets/72157628221897445/show/

The Great Debate: Who Wins? Who Loses?

2011-11-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Bob Zelnick declared tonight's "Great Debate" on Who is to blame for the elusive peace: Israel or the Palestinians?, held at BU's Tsai Performance Center, a draw; even though the majority had ambled over to the side that thought Israel was to blame. Bob simply confused which side represented which of the arguments. The people who meant to indicate that they voted on behalf of the Palestinian grievances against Israel protested politely, in typical BU fashion, when Zelnick first declared the Israeli side the winner. In the end, all acquiesced in the Zel/omon/ic/k judgment.

This is what really happened: the winner was the audience! Not few of us gravitated toward the middle, perhaps because we thought that both sides were right, or both sides at least made important points that had been worth stating and that had been stated well. As neutral observers we simply wanted both sides to be heard! The audience won by being treated to eloquent expositions of both sides' grievances. Hussein Ibish, Senior Research Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, demythologized many of the apologetic saws presented by the other side and eloquently zeroed in on the one thing that matters if we are concerned with human dignity, namely, the fact that there's no equality between Palestinians and Israelis as long as one of these people lives under occupation and the other one doesn't (or does the occupying). On the other side, Robert Lieber, Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, passionately articulated the sense of dread that prevents Israelis and Jews from trusting even the moderates among the Palestinians. Geoffrey Aronson and Joshua Muravchik as well as a student speaker on each side of the debate also added valuable points, although the eloquence of Justin Bourke, who described for us the indignities suffered by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, was not matched by Phillip Kisubika who tried valiantly but failed to capture the Israeli psyche; this was done later by a member of the audience who described the terror suffered by his friends who live under the constant threat of random rocket attacks launched from Gaza.

Both sides had a point. Hearing both sides mattered. But the audience felt, I believe, that debating the conflict in this manner was ultimately unhelpful. Arguments on both sides have become routinized. They can be rehearsed and reproduced; much like in a family feud, it's the same old complaints one side hurls at the other. What was missing was any mention of mediation.

It became clear that, without mediation, the parties to this conflict may not be expected to generate the political will to settle their dispute along lines that have long been determined in numerous agreements, documents, and road maps. We know more or less that the only acceptable (though surely painful) solution to the conflict is the two-state-solution. So what's the problem? The elephant in the room seemed the realization that if both Palestinians and Israelis may be equally blamed for the current stalemate, and if neither can resolve it, then perhaps international mediation is required? But where is that mediation? What is the role of the US today? Why has Obama failed to make progress? Is it because of Iran and changes in the balance of power in the region emanating from an Iran boasting nuclear weapons, or is it because of the fickle US electorate that no decisive steps can be taken by anyone at this moment? Unfortunately, no one said this at this great debate. In that sense the audience lost.

Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem

2011-10-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

A virtual tour of a unique exhibition space, curated by Raphie Etgar. The link to the Museum of the Seam was submitted by Andrea Berlin, Boston University. (Thanks, Andrea!)

Social Divisions in Jerusalem

2011-10-01T09:53:00.001-07:00

Those were the days ...

2011-10-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought that we might be pining for Ehud Olmert one day? See this reminiscence of a peace-pace conference, not too long ago where Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Abe Foxman joined Kofi Annan and other eminent people to urge Israel to pick up the pace of negotiations. http://www.forward.com/articles/10741/

The hermeneutics of a holy city

2011-07-05T15:56:00.001-07:00

Attachment to Jerusalem, I’ve written elsewhere, differs in kind from tradition to tradition, group to group. Just as there’s no “essence” of Jerusalem, there’s no essential attitude or attachment. The city means different things to different people, and different people relate to it differently, though not necessarily at a lesser degree of emotional intensity. (What one actually relates to as “the city” within the larger conglomerate we call Jerusalem, also differs.)

The same is true with regard to pilgrimage. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all honor Jerusalem (Al Quds, Yerushalayim) by making pilgrimage. This has been true at least since all three traditions have been present in the city, i.e., since late antiquity. Christian pilgrimage became a mass phenomenon in the 4^th century, when Constantine or his mother Helena Augusta remade Jerusalem, or rather Aelia Capitolina, as a place where one could encounter testimony to the truth of the gospel. Such testimony, other than that provided by the Holy Spirit, namely physical evidence of the resurrection as proof of our immortality, had not hitherto been widely required. Christianity had been the religion of the chosen few, a faith that rendered men and women, free-born and slaves, Jews and Greeks, rich and poor into saints, namely, those whose willingness to imitate and share the suffering of Christ made them one with their LORD. Christian pilgrimage—to the Holy City (hagiapolis hierousalem), to the graves of saints, to reliquaries of any sort, receptacles and remnants of the spiritual and eternal that had touched the material and ephemeral—always was and remains a problematic middle path between the pagan, nearly pantheistic attitude toward the divine as always residing in proximity to the natural and the gnostic attitude toward the divine as always radically opposed to the material world. Christian Orthodoxy is the embrace of the miracle of incarnation, of God becoming man, of the eternal residing in the temporal, as the church as a corpus permixtum. This is what Jerusalem represents to the Orthodox Christian: the holy city embodies and attests to the fact that God appeared (epiphainei) to the world in a particular place and at a particular time and in a particular body. But there were always equally orthodox Christians who felt faintly or strongly put off by the glorification of the mortal and material remnants of Christ, Christians who were willing to accept the historia of Scripture only if and when it could be shown to support the theoria, literally, when Scripture could be made perspicacious enough so as to enable us to see God. Those who put too much stock in the realia of Scripture, such as the Jewish birth of Christ’s body and the saints and heroes of the Old Testament were considered carnal and as “Judaizers.”

What is the Jewish attitude to pilgrimage to Jerusalem? What is it one makes pilgrimage to? Is it the token or promise of resurrection? And if so, is resurrection primarily a symbol of individual immortality or of collective restoration, as it originally is in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones?

The normative Jewish hope, enshrined in ritual prayer recited by the ordinary Jew every day of his or her life and reiterated throughout the centuries of exile, is for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, more precisely, for the rebuilding of her walls and of the temple. If the walls represent political safety and independence, the temple represents the physical presence of God. The Jewish attachment to Jerusalem thus inevitably preserves an element of the ancient pagan belief in the proximity between God and human; in distinction to the pagan world from which it set itself apart, the Jewish God, to be sure, resides not in proximity of nature any longer (though elements of natural religion are aplenty in biblical rites and symbols) but rather in proximity to the political fate of the nation. Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem, though long suffused in mystical imagery of individual attachment (devekut), is ultimately a matter of forcing the hand of the divine persona to restore its strength to perform the miracle of old: the return of the Jews and the rebuilding of walls and temple. Divine perfection diminished by Jewish transgression is restored by Jewish life according to the Torah but the redemption wrought by such observance is not just personal and individual but collective, millenarian, and miraculous.

What of Muslim pilgrimage? The haj, one of the five pillars, was said to have been disrupted and diverted by the revolutionary Abd al-Malik, builder of the Dome of the Rock, for political reasons. This rationalization, forged at an age when the Umayyads had fallen out of favor with Baghdad-based Sunni theologians of (Shiites never thought of the Umayyads as legitimate successors of the Prophet), obscures that for a short period at least Muslim rulers seated in Damascus attempted to forge Islam in the image of Byzantine Christianity. Jerusalem (or rather Madinat bayt al-maqdis, city of the holy house) came in handy. Abd al-Malik—to his own mind, but also to the mind of chagrined Christians and elated Jews—rebuilt the temple of Solomon in its place, seeking to confirm the legitimacy of Islam as a restoration of Abraham’s religion. But pilgrimage remained centered in Mecca. What Roman Aelia/Byzantine Hagiapolis represented to the early Muslims was not initially a token of resurrection and judgment in the afterlife but evidence of divine sanction of rule. To visit Ilya and contemplate the truth of the Prophet’s message of submission meant to marvel at the wisdom of God and the folly of men who, even when granted divine revelation, tended to spoil it by their own pride and self-sufficiency. Jerusalem was a place to contemplate divine purpose and weigh it against human ends; a place of divine stories, rather than providential history. In this respect, Islamic attitudes toward Jerusalem (as expressed in hadith and fadail al-quds literature) resemble Jewish wisdom literature (some of which explicitly linked to King Solomon and hence to truths one could learn by living and observing actual life in Jerusalem; or any city) more than Jewish prophetic oracles about the fate of the city. The only fate that matters is expressed in the mythological account of the end: of judgment, of passage across a narrow bridge, when the wicked will fall into Jehennam forever and only the righteous will make it across to the gates of paradise, located in the cave under the rock, though now hidden … The holy city’s place is marginal in the taxonomy of human pilgrimage as an obligation to be performed at least once in a lifetime; but it is of unsurpassed importance in the scenario of ultimate resolution: in the end Mecca will make pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the place of the final judgment, attesting to the fact that Islam is not an Arabic religion but the affirmation of a first and oldest expression of belief in a single God and creator of the universe. Jerusalem’s overcoming of Mecca is thus also Mecca’s overcoming of Jerusalem, the rationality and universality of the divine asserting itself over all historical particularity.

In anticipation of the meeting between President Obama and PM Netanyahu

2011-05-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of the upcoming meeting between US President Obama and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, JStreet distributed the attached flyer, with the following introduction:

On the eve of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, more and more prominent Israelis are calling for recognizing a Palestinian state now and for negotiating with that state to achieve peace and security. They are calling it an “existential Israeli interest.”

Today, they ran unprecedented ads in Israeli papers making their case, signed by 18 retired generals and 27 winners of the prestigious Israel Prize, among others.
Their effort could not be coming at a more important time for Israel and the region.

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing a joint meeting of Congress on Tuesday and President Obama laying out his own Middle East strategy in a speech tomorrow, we've got to make sure decision makers in America, in Israel, and in the Palestinian territories hear their message loud and clear.

To support JStreet's ad campain, go to their website.

US Supreme Court Decides to Hear Case Concerning Jerusalem Birth

2011-05-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

The third branch of the US government decided to get involved in the ongoing dispute between Congress and the Executive Office concerning the status of Jerusalem. Can an American citizen born in Jerusalem officially claim to have been born in Israel? Yes, says Congress. No says the Secretary of State. Here are some legal details concerning this case, as submitted to "Unholycity" by Prof. Pnina Lahav (BU LAW):

• M.B.Z. v. Clinton, No. 10-699. Does the "political question doctrine" deprive a federal court of jurisdiction to enforce a federal statute that directs the secretary of state how to record the birthplace of a Jerusalem-born American citizen on a Consular Report of Birth Abroad and on a passport? Also, does Section 214 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003, impermissibly infringe the president's power to recognize foreign sovereigns? Section 214 provides a congressional statement of policy with respect to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and specifically provides in subsection (d) that the secretary of state shall, upon a citizen's or guardian's request, record the birthplace of a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem, for purposes of registering or certifying the birth or issuing a passport, record the place of birth as Israel.

High Court: Free education for all is the state's obligation to all children, including those in East Jerusalem

2011-03-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

See the full report on this matter in Haaretz.

Center and Periphery

2011-01-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

Center and periphery are mutually constitutive, but Jerusalem has not always been central to the same periphery. As the periphery changes, the character of the center changes as well. Nor was Jerusalem always central. According to the archaeological record, Jerusalem was an insignificant dependence rather than a center for the kings of the Israelite kingdom, and it remained so for the later Samaritans (populations in the northern regions of central Palestine that consider themselves descendents of the ancient Israelites and at times maintained a central sanctuary on Mt. Garizim, near modern day Nablus). Jerusalem’s rise to the status of a small imperial center with a significant periphery presupposed the destruction of the northern Israelite kingdom (722 BCE). The ideological or religious rhetoric of Jerusalem’s unique status, found in prophetic and hymnic literature of the late first temple period, is similar to the imperial rhetoric of exlusiveness (“I am He and there is no Other”) employed by the Assyrians. But the periphery of Jerusalem’s political, economic, and military power certainly never extended beyond the boundaries of the map drawn up to describe the fantastical boundaries of the empire of King Solomon at the height of his power (see 1 Kings 4:21). In the ancient Judahite imagination, even at its most extensive, the deity who had chosen the Israelites, the House of David, and the city of Jerusalem as the place, from among all the tribes, for his name to reside, never extended beyond the land of Canaan and its periphery. But, once established, the rhetoric of centrality could be extended as needed and as the purview expanded within which biblical texts were read. The rhetoric of centrality remained, but it took on new meaning as the world perceived by the committed readers of Scripture expanded their horizon to an ecumenical and, ultimately, cosmic range.

But the correlation of center and periphery is not limited to cultic centers or sacred places. Today, much of the wrangling in and over Jerusalem as a municipality and a capital can be described in terms of this correlation. Until June 1967 and from the perspective of the state of Israel, Jerusalem was a cul-de-sac capital, at the end of a corridor, divided in half, and surrounded by Jordanian territory. Its political and religious centrality was called into question by the marginality of its location, which was central only if it was mapped on the area of mandatory Palestine and if the Green Line drawn at the time of the cease-fire agreement of 1949 was considered tenuous rather than final. Jerusalem’s de facto marginal position within the Israel of 1949 to 1967 boosted Tel Aviv as an alternate center, reducing the government town of Jerusalem to the periphery. Even in religious terms, with the Temple Mount, the Jewish Quarter, and the Wailing Wall out of reach, Israeli Jerusalem offered little to Jewish, Christian, or Muslim tourists and pilgrims. The Israeli part of the city was economically peripheral to Tel Aviv and religiously peripheral to Arab Al Quds.

Arab Al Quds was, in fact, not as much a divided city than an amputated one, even though it was cut off from its western hinterland. The Old City, core of Palestinian life and central to Palestinian identity remained in tact even when Palestine was divided. Nevertheless, due to the Arab-Israeli conflict and heavy-handed Jordanian policies, Jerusalem suffered a reduction in status. It was no longer the capital of Palestine, its elites were in many ways prevented from fulfilling their traditional roles within the governance of the country, and Amman—the Ankara of the Hashemite Kingdom—begrudged rather than enhanced Al Quds its status as the Istanbul of Palestine, which remained a major center of historical research and religious tourism for Christians and Muslims, though no longer for Jews.

Today, with the separation wall sneaking through the hills of the Judean desert east of the city and cutting away Arab villages that had always constituted the hinterland and immediate surrounding of the city (an important and time-honored correlation of center and periphery), the correlation between center and periphery itself has become the most contentious issue. As a “final status issue” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem is all about whether Jerusalem can simultaneously function as a center to a plurality of peripheries.

Goodbye, Shepherd Hotel

2011-01-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

We bid goodbye to another landmark of Palestinian Al Quds, the Shepherd Hotel. Yesterday, bulldozers moved in and demolished part of the building. Meirav Zonszein, an Israeli-American journalist and a regular contributor to +972, which offers "independent commentary from Israel and the Palestinian territories," points out that the demolition coincided with a moment when American media were distracted by the tragic shooting in Arizona. You can read her brief report HERE.

Background: The Shepherd Hotel was built in the 1930s, when Jerusalem was the capital of British mandatory Palestine, by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine and representative of the Muslim community of the country. Originally planned as a residence, the building was later used as a hotel but remained in the hands of the Husseini family, one of the notable families who already played a major role in the life of Arab Al Quds when the city was ruled by the Ottomans. Though Hajj Amin became persona non grata after 1936, when he made himself the reluctant leader of the anti-Zionist Arab revolt that had broken out in response to massive Jewish immigration from Europe, he was originally a loyal civil servant, appointed by non other than Sir Herbert Samuel, and believed, as did all the notables, that the British would deliver Arab independence as promised in the Husayn-MacMahon correspondence of 1915. Much ink has been spilt over the Mufti's later alliance with Hitler in Berlin, a fact that was again emphasized at the occasion of the demolition of his erstwhile residence, as was mentioned in the NYT report on the event, today.

After 1967, the State of Israel took possession of the hotel under the "absentee ownership law" that has played a major role in the expropriation of Arab lands in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Later, the property was sold to Irving Moscovitz, an American Jewish gambling millionaire, who has been supporting the radical Jewish settler group Ateret Cohanim and others who aimed to implement the program, first publicly expressed by Ariel Sharon at the time of the first Intifada, that there should be no neighborhood of Jerusalem without Jewish residents. As Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is reported to have commented, the move on Israel's part to destroy the hotel in Sheikh Jarrah and make room for a new Jewish housing development in the middle of one of the first Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem built outside of the Old City is politically motivated. According to NYT,

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the demolition “is part of the political program of the Israeli government to pre-empt any solution on Jerusalem.”

He added: “Israel continues to change the landscape of Jerusalem, aiming to change its status and turn it into an exclusive Jewish city.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton roundly condemned the destruction of the Shepherd Hotel as detrimental to the piece process.

More background to the Shepherd Hotel:
An older but still illuminating article by Gershom Gorenberg, published in the American Prospect in 2009.

Laura Rozen in the Politico-blog of January 10, 2010, on Irving Moscowitz's contributions to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the new GOP chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

A Jerusalem Post report from January 10, 2011,on the affair, with many quotations of opinions on the controversy.

I knew it: Soccer IS the answer!

2011-01-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.nif.org/issue-areas/stories/jerusalem-united-as-160-arab.html

ei: Archaeology used politically to push out Jerusalem Palestinians

2010-12-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

ei: Archaeology used politically to push out Jerusalem Palestinians

Full Haaretz expose / How the state helped right-wing groups settle East Jerusalem - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

2010-12-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

Full Haaretz expose / How the state helped right-wing groups settle East Jerusalem - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

בעיר דוד מתפארים: אנחנו חופרים למרות חשש לקריסת בתי הערבים - פוליטי מדיני - הארץ

2010-12-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

בעיר דוד מתפארים: אנחנו חופרים למרות חשש לקריסת בתי הערבים - פוליטי מדיני - הארץ

כך מסייעת המדינה לעמותות הימין להתנחל במזרח ירושלים - פוליטי מדיני - הארץ

2010-12-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

כך מסייעת המדינה לעמותות הימין להתנחל במזרח ירושלים - פוליטי מדיני - הארץ

Fascism in Jewish state? - Israel News, Ynetnews

2010-12-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

Fascism in Jewish state? - Israel News, Ynetnews

NEW ISRAEL FUND SAYS “YES” TO PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU

2010-12-08T14:53:00.000-08:00

NEW ISRAEL FUND SAYS “YES” TO PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU

One-Woman-Show in Cambridge tonight!!

2010-12-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

Check out this show tonight in Cambridge (Central Square Theater).

Just in case one thought there were no Jewish boats to Gaza

2010-09-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

For updates on the Jewish boat to Gaza.

Blowing the Shofar at the Kotel During the Mandate

2010-09-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

Toldot Yisrael (for donors and producers see the credits at the end of the clip) and History Channel offer a glimpse of shofar blowing as an act of defiance under the British Mandate. Following the Western Wall riots of 1929 it was forbidden for Jews to blow the shofar, carry Torah scrolls, or engage in other demonstrative ritual acts. The sequence, mostly based on interviews with the surviving shofar blowers, embeds the story in the narrative of liberation and return (1930s, 1948, 1967).

Leave Jerusalem for last, but take seriously the plurality of attachments to the city

2010-09-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

There are multiple attachments to Jerusalem, as of course there are multiple ways of being attached to Jerusalem. But not all attachments are equal. What I mean concerns any attempt to treat Jewish, Christian, and Islamic attitudes toward this city. Since boundaries and conceptions of Jerusalem are fluid (even the name by which the city is referred to is not the same for everyone), it is important also to distinguish between what aspect of the city the attachment relates to. If attachment and city are correlatives, what one means or refers or relates to as Jerusalem differs from attachment to attachment.

Moreover, not every attachment is of the same kind. Some are exclusivist, claiming that their attachment (and, implicitly, their right to presence and sovereignty) is unique and must be realized at the cost of excluding the attachment of others (though this may be mitigated by appropriate compromise on non-essentials); others are “tolerant” (though not necessarily in the modern relativistic sense) of other attachments, recognize their relative right, though not to the point that they concede their own superior justification to rule and to serve as the arbiter between their own and the claims of others.

Even secular forms of attachment differ from one another. There is the local patriotic or particular attachment of individuals and families to their neighboorhoods. There is the focus on a particular quarter that renders the city as a whole an abstract entity or where one (erroneously) extends to the city as a whole the affection one harbors toward one’s neighborhood. There is the attachment various publics have to what they consider their city. These may compete for things like the most pleasant garden-neighborhood or take political dimensions during municipal elections, especially where neighborhoods or populations are sharply divided by class, race, ethnicity, religion, and other similarly strongly distinctive social qualifiers. There is the city as conceived by city planners, engineers, and administrations, and the city that is subject to different ideological visions about its past, present, and future (secularist v. religious, demographically Jewish v. open to everyone, cosmopolitan v. national, green/conservationist v. industrially or commercially developed, etc.).

It is important to acknowledge that the neutralist or objectivist perspective on such a city is also a position, one that cannot claim any greater justification than any other perspective. Someone like Folke Bernadotte, who tried to arbitrate between different attachments, was shot because he tried to impose a neutralistic vision or whatever he saw as a just solution onto Jerusalem that was unacceptable not least because Bernadotte lacked the intellectual modesty (a virtue then perhaps more rarely found than today) to acknowledge that the international view had no more authority or legitimacy than the view of those on the ground who lived their attachment to the city every day and were driven by millennial commitments rather than any more mundane or topical concerns. They were ready to die, or at the extreme, to kill for what they saw as their city.

Likewise, little is gained if one treats every religious or national attachment to the city as equal. They may be equally justified but they are not the same. They differ. They are not identical. That is what makes the sitution of a city like Jerusalem so difficult. When it comes to Zionism, for example, Herzl was wrong to think that the Jewish problem he hoped to solve and that he had diagnosed in a particular way could be solved anywhere other than in the Land of Israel. More precisely, Jewish attachment to the land was a force he neither fully understood nor could was he in control of the national-religious forces he helped to unleash and funnel in the direction of a political solution. The Uganda proposal erupted in his face. Likewise, all references to the disdain left-wing Zionist leaders are said to have harbored toward the Old City of Jerusalem and possibly toward Jerusalem as a whole and what it stood for must not fool us into believing that Zionism could have advanced or succeeded without Zion.

On the other hand, it is quite likely that Zion, namely, the conquest of East Jerusalem, killed Zionism as we knew it before June 1967. This is imprecise, of course. What died in June 1967, though its death was not evident for a while, was the superiority of left-wing idealism over right-wing idealism. The conquest or “return” to Jerusalem’s “abandoned” streets and markets marked the beginning of a new powerful coalition between neo-Zionist realism (rooted in Revisionism) and the religious settler movement working toward the redemption of Zion (a vague notion whose overall impetus is, however, clear in that it points toward maximalist goals such as settlement and rule over the “complete Land of Israel” and Jerusalem as the “eternally undivided capital” of Israel alone; not to speak of the building of the third temple).

The elephant in the room of political pragmatism and negotiated settlement today is the special attachment of “the Jews” to “Jerusalem.” All three major Abrahamic or monotheistic formations lay claim to the Holy City. But when it comes to Jerusalem, Jews are extraordinarily exclusivist or maximalist. This is not an insult but a statement of fact. Religious attitudes cannot be measured by the standards of the French Revolution. When it comes to Jerusalem, Jews feel no brotherhood with the rest of humanity or the equality and freedom appropriate for any peaceful competition. The Jewish feeling is: Jerusalem is ours, and we are Jerusalem’s! Perhaps it is even the latter more than the former that characterizes the Jewish attitude toward the city. No possession of any land is unconditional in the Jewish tradition. Everything is the LORD’s, the earth and those who are on it are all God’s creatures. But we, if I may include myself for the moment, are existentially, ontologically bound to Jerusalem. As Jews, we are exiles from the city of Judah, the Jerusalem of David and Solomon. This is an attachment of mythological proportions. It exceeds mere history. It is our cosmic place. This is why one finds Jews relate with derision to the Palestinian claim of tsumud, or “attachment.” “Clinging” to Jerusalem is second nature to Jews, and it is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our sense of self that we cannot but belittle the way in which others feel attached to the city. This is neither nice, nor is it politically correct, but it must be recognized in order for all of us who care about Jerusalem to be engaging what is real before we can get to some agreement on what is desirable.

It is an entirely different question whether a Jewish state, a Jewish nation, or a Jewish municipality can work its way around the Jewish existential attachment to “Jerusalem” (upper/lower, this-worldly/other-worldly, the whole nine yards) and allow for others to be attached to the city as well, in whatever way they may feel attached.

The extraordinary recent media onslaught launched by all sorts of friends of Israel (including the heaviest of all heavy hitters, Eli Wiesel) on the Obama administration at a moment when it seemed to pressure the Netanyahu government to compromise on Jerusalem or when it seemed that the US government took it for granted that Jerusalem should be on the agenda for renewed peace negotiations before these negotiations even started, this onslaught is not really surprising when we consider the depth of the anxiety caused by the prospect of relinquishing any sovereignty over those parts of Jerusalem that are both most intimately connected with the Jewish past, which are the same parts that are essential to any future Palestinian Al Quds. It may be sage advice, offered by Prof. Wiesel, to leave Jerusalem for last. But at some point the question will need to be confronted. When that time comes, it will need to be confronted in a manner that avoids any semblance of a liberal diktat that ignores Jewish attachment to Jerusalem. We don’t need more political assassinations; we also don’t need another Massada. On the other hand, the Jewish state, the Jewish nation, and the Jerusalem municipality (currently still boycotted by the city’s Arab residents who could easily influence municipal policies were they to accept Israeli sovereignty and participate in its political processes) needs to figure out how to build confidence among its Christian and Muslim citizens and neighbors that, even if Jewish attachment and the Jewish right to rule Jerusalem were fully respected, Jewish state, nation, and the municipality can leave mental space and make sufficient room for the equally genuine attachment of others to the same city and land.

Emblematic, not exceptional

2010-09-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

Jews and Christians tend to think of Jerusalem—and of the Jews—as exceptional. The Jews are a Middle Eastern people with a specific history that propelled them beyond their origins and into specific roles within particular societies. Their history is unique to the degree that every history is unique, while its particulars are never beyond analogy and comparison. Let us set aside the uniqueness of the Jews, which is ultimately a theological concept derived from the belief, shared by Jews and Christians and grounded in Scripture, that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jerusalem, I think, should not be regarded as exceptional but as emblematic. It is emblematic of the complex religious, social, and political reality of the Middle East. I say this in view of three respects. One is the multi-religious and multi-ethnic character of the Holy City. The city is not unique in its plurality but eminently represents this plurality which is broadly characteristic of Middle Eastern societies. (See Bernard Lewis, Middle East Mosaic) The second respect in which Jerusalem is emblematic is the desire, driven—in this case—by Jewish religious nationalism, to overcome the pluralistic character of the city and to impose on it the will of a single people at the expense of the self-determination and equality of others. This trend is not unique to the Jews or the Jewish state. It is emblematic of many Middle Eastern societies where majorities or minorities rule autocratically and attempt to keep the rest of society under their control. Examples of this abound. The third respect is the force of radical religion in shaping the radical desire for dominance within the ruling majority or minority. In Jerusalem, ultra-orthodoxy has been pushing out the erstwhile secular majority among the Jews; religious Jews are exerting demographic and political pressure in determining the character of Jerusalem by forcing the secular segment of Jewish society to comply with the demands of the Jewish religion as they and they alone understand it. (See e.g. the affair of the Women of the Wall) This, too, has its parallels in other Middle Eastern (and other) societies and not only in Iran. One can overlook the fact that this is emblematic of a wider phenomenon only if one regards the Jews as a priori exceptional and their social and political behavior as unique and grounded in divine choice. The fact is that other communities see themselves in light of the same or an analogous assumption. Jerusalem, and Jewish politics in regard to Jerusalem, are therefore emblematic rather than exceptional.

The City (a poem)

2010-05-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

A city is not just built, inhabited and ruled;

A city is visited and seen.

A city is not just its walls, buildings, and places;

A city is the contrast:

Between itself and its surroundings;

Between itself and other cities.

A city is not just the property of its owners;

It belongs as much to its visitors and guests.

A city is not just seen;

A city is remembered, related, made present from afar.

A city is one, and many in one.

A city is many villages and yet more than the sum of its parts.

A city has character and personality. Each city is unique.

A city offers protection. It excludes dangers, enemies.

A city withstands onslaughts and it surrenders. Sometimes it is conquered and destroyed.

A city has allure, it conjures happiness and it disappoints, abandons.

The city is dangerous. Sometimes it is in danger.

There is a king in the city. Or at least a mayor.

The people of the city are known by the city’s name: Athenians, Spartans, Romans, Jerusalemites.

There is a god in the city. YHWH is the god who dwells in Jerusalem.

A city needs water.

A city produces waste.

A city has markets where wares are bought and sold and people exchange news.

A city has a center and margins. It has different quarters for rich and poor.

Cities are visited and abandoned.

Cities thrive and fall into ruin.

Cities dominate regions.

Cities are sometimes known by different names.

Cities have mottos and monikers.

Cities attract artists and offer opportunities to planners and architects.

Cities have engineers.

Cities require ingenuity.

Cities compete.

Cities have temples and churches.

Old cities have antiquities and ruins, illuminated at night,

favorably displayed as the city’s past.

New cities are clean. If they are no longer clean, they are no longer new.

Documentary on Housing Inequality in Jerusalem

2010-05-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

I found this documentary on a blog maintained by Rabbi Brant Rosen. The narration and interviews are simple but striking in showing how administrative tools can be used for political aims.

Green Zone from Nimrod Zin on Vimeo.

(Un)Happy Jerusalem Day

2010-05-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem entered a new phase in its millennial history in June 1967 when the city was reunified after nineteen years of division. During these years, like Berlin and Nikosia, Jerusalem had been a divided city. The western parts served as Israel's capital, a capital connected with the main areas of the Jewish state through a narrow corridor. The rest of the city and its northern, eastern, and southern environs were past of the West Bank annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Israel conquered East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the Six Day War. Since then, Israelis have been celebrating Jerusalem Day.

Israeli sentiments surrounding the Six Day War have been vividly described in Tom Segev's book 1967, namely, the anxiety and claustrophobia and the fear of a second Holocaust that preceded the war and the national exuberance and messianic mood that followed it. Along with the intoxicating sense of a miraculous victory and catastrophe averted, regaining access to the Jewish sacred and historical places, including the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, the Old City, all that played a major role in shaping the sense of national religious euphoria that prevailed at the time.

Nothing captures the national religious sentiments prevailing among many Israelis at the time better than the unofficial anthem "Jerusalem of Gold," a song written and composed by Naomi Shemer for a song contest held in West Jerusalem before the war in 1967. Today Tablet Magazine published a splendid piece on the history of this song researched and narrated by Liel Leibovitz. (A shorter version of this piece was broadcast by theworld.com.) As Leibovitz points out, some of the more odious aspects of the song, especially its depiction of Jerusalem (in the version preceding the conquest) as an empty void and as an abandoned city, were immediately evident at the time to the few sober Israeli observers who publicly took a stand against it, among them Amos Oz and the alternative folksinger Meir Ariel who rewrote the lyrics, calling Jerusalem a "city of iron."

***

Also today, Haaretz sardonically noted that PM Netanyahu used the opportunity of a Jerusalem Day speech to the Knesseth (the Israeli parlament) to educate "a lawmaker from Israel's Arab minority" on matters of "comparative religion."

Netanyahu (...) said, "There are those among us who lament the very day Jerusalem was liberated and the capital of Israel was freed from its stranglehold."

Netanyahu told the special Knesset session that "Jerusalem" and its alternative Hebrew name "Zion" appear 850 times in the Old Testament, Judaism's core canon.

"As to how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the holy scriptures of other faiths, I recommend you check," he said.

Heckled by a lawmaker from Israel's Arab minority, Netanyahu offered a lesson in comparative religion from the lectern. "Because you asked: Jerusalem is mentioned 142 times in the New Testament, and none of the 16 various Arabic names for Jerusalem is mentioned in the Koran. But in an expanded interpretation of the Koran from the 12th century, one passage is said to refer to Jerusalem," he said.

"There is no undercutting, nor do I intend to undercut, the connection of others to Jerusalem," Netanyahu said.

"But I do confront the attempt to undercut and warp or obfuscate the unique connection that we, the people of Israel, have to the capital of Israel."

We might add that it is difficult to imagine how a comparison of the number of occurrences of the name Jerusalem in the Bible with the number of occurrences of the name in the Qur'an is not to undermine the connection of "others" to Jerusalem. Nor is this particular comparison all that useful, though it is often heard. It can dazzle only those who conveniently forget that what is true for the Qur'an is also true of the Torah, which is equally fundamental to Judaism as the Qur'an is to Islam. In neither book is the city directly mentioned. Now here's room for a new, more interesting conversation!

Enchanting footage of Israel's past, in color

2010-05-04T07:50:00.001-07:00

Just Jerusalem: A Response to Elie Wiesel

2010-04-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

Prof. Elie Wiesel recently published a very moving one-page ad titled "For Jerusalem" in several major newspapers. In it he states that for him Jerusalem, the holy city of the Jews, is above politics and so it should remain.

Many people were upset by the tone and the content of the letter. Debra DeLee, the President and CEO of Americans for Peace Now wrote that she was "saddened" by Prof. Wiesel's intervention. In her words, "to follow your advice - to indefinitely postpone Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over Jerusalem - amounts to a future of blood and tears for Israelis and Palestinians alike. It is not a prescription for trust and hope, but for perpetual strife." (For the full wording of the letter see HERE)

Member of Knesseth Yossi Sarid wrote in Haaretz that he read Prof. Wiesel's letter "with interest" but he found it more informed on the heavenly Jerusalem than on the earthly one. (See HERE.)

Myself and other colleagues and graduate students at Boston University, where Prof. Wiesel holds several prestigious academic appointments, have been worried that our colleague may be squandering his considerable moral capital by investing it in a doubtful cause.

One of my colleagues forwarded to me the following open letter from friends in Jerusalem. It speaks for itself. The open letter was authored by a group of Jews who have been demonstrating in solidarity with Arabs evicted from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.

From Jerusalem, an open letter to Elie Wiesel

Dear Mr. Wiesel,

We write to you from Jerusalem to convey our frustration, even outrage, at your recently published letter on Jerusalem. We are Jewish Jerusalemites – residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We could not recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name.

Our Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets are lined with synagogues, mosques, and churches. Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers and a bearer of the collective memory of a people whose members actually bear many individual memories. Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women aand men, who prefer to see their city as a symbol of dignity, not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the Celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one.

For more than a generation now the earthly city we call home is decaying and disintegrating under the oppression of its own idealization. Your letter troubles us, not simply because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one. For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet your homecoming is made possible by our commitment. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it.

Indeed, your claim that Jerusalem is above politics is doubly outrageous. First, because contemporary Jerusalem was created by a political decision and politics alone keeps it formally unified. The tortuous municipal boundaries of today’s Jerusalem were drawn by Israeli generals and politicians shortly after the 1967 war. Feigning to unify an ancient cit, they created an unwieldy behemoth, encircling dozens of Palestinian villages which were never part of Jerusalem. Extending from the outskirts of Ramallah in the north, to the edge of Bethlehem in the south, the Jerusalem the Israeli government foolishly concocted is larger than Paris. Its historical core, the nexus of memories and religious significance often called “the Holy Basin”, comprises a mere on percent of its area. Now they call this artificial fabrication ‘Jerusalem’ so as to obviate any approaching chance for peace.

Moreover, your attempt to keep Jerusalem above politics amounts to divesting us of a future. For being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one’s life. As true Jerusalemites, we are dismayed when our beloved city, parts of which are utterly neglected, is used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation. All the while, they franticly “Judaize” Eastern Jerusalem in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition.

We invite you to our city to view with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction. You will see that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You will see the grosss inequality in appropriation of municipal resources and services between east and west. We will take you to Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their houses to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood, and to Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality’s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians.

We, the true residents of Jerusalem, can no longer endure the fantasies of those who love our city from afar. This-worldly Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it. Only a shared city will live up to the prophet’s vision: “Zion shall be redeemed with justice.” As we chant weekly in our vigils in Sheikh Jarrah: “Nothing can be sacred in a city of occupation!”

Respectfully,

Just Jerusalem (Sheikh Jarrah) Activists

(A request for a conversation with Prof. Wiesel on this matter is pending.)

The key question

2010-04-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

In Jerusalem, the key question to reconciliation and mutual tolerance of the religious and national communities is the question of Leviticus 19:18 and of the gospels, namely, whether I can regard the other as I regard myself. More specifically, can I regard the other's attachment to the holy city as equally valid as my own? Can I respect the other's love for the holy city not just as genuine and legitimate but as equally genuine and legitimate as my own?

The New York born and Israeli educated sociologist Adam Seligman tirelessly points out that toleration is useless and bloodless unless it is grounded in the deepest roots of our religious particularity. Translated into the situation of Jerusalem this means: never mind liberal Jews and Arabs and their ability to get along because they are liberals; can those deeply committed to the truth of a particular revelation also forge a path toward recognizing those grounded in an equally deep commitment to a different revelation as equally attached to the holy city?

To be sure, this leaves those of us not committed to any revelation out in the cold. Will those deeply committed to one revelation or another be able to tolerate us?

Nir Barkat's Tunnel Vision

2010-03-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

In an interview with the BBC's George Alaghia (broadcast today, March 23, 2010), Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Jerusalem is not a settlement. The interviewer probed further (I quote from memory): "How many countries have their embassies in Jerusalem?" The mayor feigned ignorance, though he was forced to admit that no major nation keeps embassies in the Holy City. (In fact, the last rather minor states that had refused to remove their embassies from West Jerusalem after June 1967 did so in 1982, after Israel's parliament passed a law declaring Jerusalem the eternally undivided capital of Israel.) When asked why Israel insisted on contested Jerusalem rather than uncontested Tel Aviv as Israel's capital, Barkat rejected the question as "insulting." "Just read the Bible" he said in exasperation, assuming that this was going to dissipate any vestige of incomprehension when it comes to modern Israeli or Jewish sentiments toward this city.

What if we took Barkat by his word and read the Bible for Jerusalem and its place in the Jewish past? Would it give us a clue to the place Jerusalem holds in the collective imagination Barkat and others are invoking when they speak of the city and its centrality in Jewish historical memory and aspiration? Does the Bible confer a political right of ownership to Jerusalem, or does it mandate that Jerusalem serve as the capital of a Jewish state? Just as Barkat does not seem to know whether or not any state maintains an embassy in the city of which he is the mayor, he ignores the fact that Jerusalem is not even mentioned in the Torah. The great code of Jewish law and the foundation of Judaism says nothing about the city, at least not directly, and what it says has nothing to do with the modern state. I would like to sit down with the mayor of Jerusalem and read Ezekiel chapter 16, a passage that does mention Jerusalem and its authorities, though not kindly or fondly.

What Mr. Barkat invokes rests on the modern national-religious narrative, not on the Bible. Why does he invoke it now? Why does he think it is politically useful or acceptable to idolize Jerusalem, i.e., to make it the object of a veneration that would be unworthy of being called Jewish were it not for the fact that it is shared by a great many Jews and not a few Christians? True, his constituents may idolize Jerusalem to the point of thinking that it is exclusively and eternally theirs by divine right, but this will not blind them (one hopes) to the point that they will ignore that Mr. Barkat's myopic vision does nothing to solve the city's acute problems. These problems are not exclusively political. What the ratcheting up of the national-religious rhetoric is meant to obscure are the perennial problems of a city whose problems are far more mundane and elementary. Barkat had won the recent mayoral election because voters (i.e., the majority of those who voted) hoped that he was able to attract investment to the city's fledgling high-tech industries and increase the dismal numbers of pilgrims and tourists on whom the city's service industry has always depended. It appears that he has been less successful than those expected who gave this political newcomer the benefit of the doubt. Now the exposed position of this ancient and contested though in fact rather provincial city has afforded this rather provincial man a platform from which to shape his public profile as the champion of a narrow vision of a Judaized and Israelitized Jerusalem. This should not make us forget that any and all nationalist rhetoric and the recent settlement shenanigans emanating from Jerusalem are mere ploys to distract the voters from the fact that the economic situation in Jerusalem continues to deteriorate.

The Bible is true after all (again): Apropos Eilat Mazar’s latest archeological finds

2010-02-23T07:19:00.001-08:00

Oy, there she goes again, is the first thought that came to my mind when I read about the recent “world historic find in Jerusalem” (Jonathan Tobin in commentarymagazine.com).

Eilat Mazar, granddaughter of prominent Israeli archeologist Benjamin Mazar (see HERE), who previously claimed to have discovered King David’s palace (see HERE), has now discovered evidence that 10^th century BCE Jerusalem was the strongly fortified seat of a “central government,” exactly as described in the early chapters of the First Book of Kings in the Bible. The release of these news through the Associated Press (see HERE) was immediately all over the internet, where it was enthusiastically received by two types of recipients: biblicist Christians (see, e.g., HERE) and right-wing Zionists (see, e.g., HERE). Nothing surprising here. What is remarkable is the blatant circularity of all of this.

According to Catholic Online Eilat Mazar’s dig was “privately funded by a couple in New York with an interest in Biblical Archeology” and conducted with the help of college students from Oklahoma, “hired workers,” and archeology students from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Considering the fact that Jerusalem is one of the best excavated cities in the world; considering that a vast amount of material from previous digs has not been published; considering also that most serious scholars have seen no evidence of monumental fortifications or other evidence of a “strong central government” from the 10^th century, Mazar’s find—if it could be independently verified—might indeed require us to revise our understanding of the age of David and Solomon.

Briefly put: The books of Samuel and Kings describe the origins of the Israelite monarchy in the great deeds of conquest and construction of the legendary founders of the House of David, the dynasty that ruled Judah until its destruction in 586 BCE at the hands of the neo-Babylonians under Nebuchadrezzar. Archeologists distinguish methodologically between literary accounts (which are of uncertain provenance and most likely of a much later date than the events described) and evidence in the ground, which must be free to tell its own story. All the archeological evidence (remnants of buildings and signs of habitation, such as shards of pottery with distinctive design) and epigraphic evidence (seals, inscriptions) of the period archeologists call Iron Age I (ending around the time when an Egyptian Pharaoh by the name of Sheshonq campaigned in Canaan or the biblical land of Israel, an event the biblical historians associate with the reign of Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam) put together does not confirm the presence of an Israelite empire of the sort described in the Bible for the time in question. Rather, the Jerusalem that existed at the time was at best a mountain fortress that was most likely beholden to a more significant and expansive Israelite state centered in the northern hill country of Palestine, the area around modern day Nablus (the ancient city of Shekhem). No serious historian doubts this today.

More importantly, no serious historian would go about digging for evidence of the historical truth of the Bible. The Bible is literature even where it recounts the ancient history of Israel, whereas archeology retrieves and describes the remnants of material culture. To dig for confirmation of literary conceits (whose meanings and provenance are contested) is not just bad archeology but it is also bad biblical scholarship. All of this is evident to specialists, but this does not mean that popular sentiments can not be appealed to with the aid of sensationalist “finds” of the sort trumpeted by Eilat Mazar.

What is Mazar’s interest? According to wikipedia, Eilat Mazar is the head of the archeology department at the Shalem Center, a neo-conservative think tank, of which the current ambassador of Israel, his Excellency Michael Oren, is also a senior fellow. The Shalem Center and its sponsors also support the acquisition of Arab property in and around the Arab village of Silwan (where Eilat Mazar previously “found” the palace of King David) and its settlement with Jewish families. In light of this concerted ideological commitment it is clear why Mazar keeps finding evidence of the truth of the Bible. The goal is to strengthen fundamental Christian support for Israel’s claim (official government policy since 1967) to East Jerusalem as the erstwhile seat of the ancient government of David and Solomon. By superimposing biblical history on the map of modern Jerusalem, the quasi-religious claim to Jewish ownership gains plausibility and legitimacy, at least in the eyes of those who are unable or unwilling to distinguish between biblical literature, methodical archeology, and modern politics.

Expect more “sensational finds” from Mazar!
(Thanks to my former student Shana Richards for alerting me to the AP news item.)

Bad Science

2009-12-26T06:30:00.001-08:00

To say, there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem is a historical lie (in the interest of de-legitimizing legitimate Jewish claims to their history in the city); to say Palestinians are not a people with distinct roots and attachments to the Holy Land is also a lie, used to de-legitimize the Palestinian sense of history and belonging.

To say, we don’t have evidence of a united Jewish kingdom at the beginning of Israelite history, i.e., to deny the veracity of the biblical stories about David and Solomon is not a betrayal of the Jewish nation of today but based on the belief that authentic nationhood cannot be based on unverified and unverifiable myths of origin at the expense of scientific veracity. To say that some biblical stories are contrived is not to declare the entire corpus of ancient Judahite historiography a literary contrivance. It matters, especially in connection with the repeated international calls among academics for a boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education, whether Israeli and Jewish scholarship elsewhere meet the highest standards of excellence. It is therefore of utmost importance that archeological explorations of sensitive places, such as those conducted in Silwan, the so-called “City of David,” are conducted under the auspices of internationally recognized bodies such as UNESCO. Right now, however, the “City of David” archeological park is run by the Jewish settler organization ELAD and excavated under the guidance of archeologists committed to finding evidence of the truth of “biblical” history, which is bad science and creates bad blood between Jews and the Arab residents of Silwan who are being harassed in the name of archeological research or, more accurately, by the concerted and state-sponsored effort of securing evidence of a biblical myth that is seen as the ultimate legitimization of Jewish rule over East Jerusalem. (On the controversial Silwan excavations, see this excellent short documentary.)

Paddy Ashdown: Battle for the Holy Land-Jerusalem

2009-12-14T19:27:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on this excellent video production when I read through the number 39 (2009) issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly, where Craig Larkin has a brief review. Well worth spending the hour and forty minutes it takes to watch the entire series.

Apropos David Brooks and the Story of Hanukkah

2009-12-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

Note: This is a comment on David Brooks's op-ed in the NYT of December 11, 2009, on the story of Hanukkah. (The NYT online edition no longer accepted comments by the time I read the article.)

Reading the Hanukkah story as a morality tale, as David Brooks does, is fine. It’s a kind of sermon that bases its moral claims, intended to teach a lesson about current trends, on trends one reads into the ancient scriptures. This too would be fine if the authority of the moral of the story did not rest on the claim to have uncovered the true historical core of an ancient story. Analogies between ancient stories and modern conflicts are a conjuring trick not just performed by preachers but also by historians who attempt to render ancient events plausible by using modern terms and situations to describe what is ultimately unknowable. We don’t know anything reliable about the Maccabees that goes beyond the lively but tendentious and contradictory accounts found in texts written decades after the events and in the interest of justifying the rise to power among the Jews of a family of usurpers who took the high priesthood and the title of kings without any leg to stand on in earlier Jewish tradition. Their only claim to fame was the act of cult restoration known as “hanukat ha-bayit,” the rededication of the temple. The Books of the Maccabees are ancient propaganda of a type familiar since the days of the Assyrian empire. Power required divine legitimization; no better source of legitimacy than the restoration of an ancient cult that had been tampered with. (For a brilliant scholarly analysis of this aspect of the story of Hanukkah see Steven Weitzman, "Plotting Antiochus's Persecution" in Journal of Biblical Literature 123/2 (2004) pp. 219-234.)

Neither David Brooks nor President Obama, in his brief message on this occasion, realized the ironies entailed in the rabbinic transformation of Hasmonean propaganda into the miracle of the small quantum of oil, sufficient for a day, that lasted for an entire week. Nor does David Brooks consider the irony of the fact that the rabbis banished the Books of the Maccabees from their canon. It’s not in the Jewish Bible, ladies and gentlemen; it’s only in Christian Bibles, where it is sometimes stowed away (along with other interesting literature) in the apocrypha. The Crusaders, btw, loved the Maccabees.

What Brooks is really saying is that the virulence of Hanukkah arises not from its psycho-social effect of compensating for Christmas but from its revival in the Zionist movement. The Books of the Maccabees celebrate brash action taken not just against the Seleucids (who were Macedonians rather than Greeks; the entire characterization of the Maccabean revolt as the uprising of a Taliban-like group [Brooks's "angry bearded men"] against Western universalists is amusing but significantly mischaracterizes the affair) but also against Jewish traditionalists, and for political reasons that were much simpler and more mundane than the morality tale allows. Modern Zionism realized an affinity with the ancient “muscled Jews” (as Herzl’s second in command, Max Nordau, called them) and has since foregrounded precisely those aspects of the story that the rabbis sought to obscure and neutralize.

Brooks's morality tale is, of course, quite timely. The modern synthesis of rabbinic religion and Maccabean political and military activism has bred a type of Judaism that is indistinguishable from the politicized Islam of the Mullahs and the Ayatollahs. This modern phenomenon gives us little to celebrate and much to fear.

Peace Follies

2009-10-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

Among Israelis and Palestinians, as across the international community, there are proponents and opponents of the peace process. Proponents of the peace process speak of the need for a two-state solution, the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with economically viable borders, though presumably demilitarized because of Israel’s security concerns. Opponents of the two-state solution—excepting extremists who dream of settling the conflict by total annihilation of the other—fall into two opposite camps. There are those who believe that a sovereign state of Palestine in most or all of the West Bank and Gaza would constitute a mortal threat to the future of the Jewish state and there are those who believe that no viable Palestinian state can possibly be established in the West Bank and Gaza and who therefore advocate a one-state-solution. This however is rejected by those who fear that this would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Then there is the disagreement between socalled “realists” and “idealists” among proponents of peace and a two-state-solution. The realists say they would like to see the peace process advance but they are not sure this is the time to advance it. Who has not heard concerned Jews and non-Jews point out that the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians makes no sense at this point because the Palestinians are internally divided and so there is no one there to make peace with? In contrast, idealists (such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Brith Tzedek v'Shalom, or Americans for Peace Now) took heart by President Obama's inauguration and the initiatives, taken early on in his administration, to revive the peace process at a time when on the Israeli side there seemed no one to make peace with, and the process appeared all but dead.

Is it possible that the pursuit of Middle East peace is a semantic folly and does more damage than harm, at least at this stage? No one wants to appear as intransigent, no one wants to admit that they actually benefit from conflict more than they would from compromise. But claiming to pursue peace (something most admit is unattainable) has by now turned into a tool for the perpetuation of conflict. Peace rhetoric may serve as a mere pretext for politicians and governments to improve their image in front of a world audience that is insufficiently familiar with the intricacy of the problems and hence naïvely longs for an unrealistic resolution. Peace rhetoric allows painting the other as an inveterate enemy of peace, while indigent populations can be violently repressed as threatening the peace, and military aid can continue to flow into an industry based on the production and testing of sophisticated defense technology, all in the interest of peace.

Is it useful for Israel to have the Palestinians divided into irreconcilable camps, one of which fits the mold of radical Islamism and the other appears as corrupt and powerless? Perhaps not in the long run, but for the time being it allows for a significant part of the Israeli electorate to be held hostage by the right-wing religious nationalist settlers who have little to gain and much to lose by the establishment of a Palestinian state. Since January 20, 2009, the call for a permanent settlement of final status issues and for the implementation of the two-state-solution, that is: the threat of peace, has hastened the aggressive settlement policies pursued in the occupied territories and in annexed East Jerusalem, it has accelerated the evictions of Palestinians from their homes under the pretense of law-enforcement, and it has added urgency to the revoking of residency permits in Jerusalem, all of which is part of the concerted attempt to accomplish a “silent transfer.”

Perhaps it is futile to press for a political settlement. Any peace between Israel and the Palestinians, even if this entailed full sovereignty for Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza and sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem, also entails for Palestinians to accept the division of what they regard as their ancestral homeland, their homes, cities, lands, and villages. Why should they be compelled to make peace and accept the finality of the partition of Palestine? And why should Israelis enter into a peace agreement with the Palestinians knowing full well that Palestinians can never be fully reconciled to a Jewish state anywhere in historical Palestine, even though they might temporarily be compelled to put up with it.

But there is a whole other view, one that also resonates with many Israelis and Palestinians, although it is less well understood abroad. A few months ago I attended a lecture by Dr. Abuelaish, a gynecologist and advocate of education and health clinics for women in Gaza, who lost two of his teenage daughters to an airstrike of the IDF on his private residence in Gaza during the December 2008/January 2009 incursion into the densely populated Palestinian enclave. (The Israeli army later apologized for what appeared to have been a completely unmotivated attack on the apartment building, though it took Dr. Abuelaish months to extract this apology.) During his lecture at Northeastern University, Dr. Abuelaish echoed a view I had first encountered among my Israeli friends when I visited the country last summer. What my friends had said was that no one believed in a solution of the Israeli Palestinian conflict anymore. The conflict cannot be solved, it can only be managed. Dr. Abuelaish recommended something similar. Please stop talking about peace, he said. There is no peace, and there may never be peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But, he continued, we can achieve something that is far more urgent and may have much greater impact on the lives of Jews and Arabs, and that is to remember that the enemy is still a human being. His message was that peace-rhetoric merely obfuscates what must be the primary goal for all of us, namely, to stop demonizing one another.

Peace requires shared or equal sovereignty, i.e., statehood that applies to Jews and Arabs alike, whether in a single bi-national state or in two states or in some other form of political organization. Israel is already a sovereign state, but Palestine is not, and as a stateless entity, Palestinians cannot make “peace” with Israel. Only a state can make peace with another state; a stateless people cannot make peace with the power that renders it stateless, and as long as the Palestinians regard themselves as a nation and Palestine as their homeland, they cannot make peace with Israel in the sense of reconciling themselves to the fact that the Jews have a state in historical Palestine but they do not. Peace, or a declaration of peace, cannot be the precondition of Palestinian statehood, which is a matter of dignity, justice and the right to national self-determination, a right Jews have justly claimed for themselves for over sixty years. (In this connection it must not be forgotten that it was not Israel alone but the Arab states, supported by England and France, who prevented the formation of a Palestinian state in 1948, even though they may still deny this.) What we can learn from Dr. Abuelaish is that dignity matters more than peace. Unlike peace, it is also attainable and it does not require governments to attain it. We can simply relearn how to confer it on one another, one person at a time.

The Ninth of Av (Tisha b'Av): Shall we fast?

2009-07-27T16:02:00.001-07:00

On July 30, according to the Jewish calendar: the ninth day of the month of Av, Jews are commanded to fast for a day of remembrance for the destruction of the first and second temple of Jerusalem. The first temple was destroyed by king Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon in 586 BCE. The second temple was destroyed by Roman general Titus in 70 CE. According to biblical history, the first temple had been built by king Solomon, sometime in the 10th century BCE. The second temple was built by Jews returning from Babylon under the Achaemenid Persians in the late 6th century BCE. Remnants of the platform that once supported the second temple are still visible today. They were restored by Umayyad Caliph Abd al Malik in 688-91 CE, who built the Dome of the Rock, the first monumental building of Muslim civilization, that until today graces the Herodian platform that Jews call the Temple Mount and Arabs know as the Haram ash-Sharif.

What is it that Jews mourn when they fast on the 9th of Av? Jewish history is replete with destructions that occurred on this particular date. According to rabbinic tradition, it was on this date that the Israelites were told that they could not enter the Promised Land but had to wander in the desert for another forty days. On the same date both temples burned, though these events are separated by six hundred and fifty six years. The first expulsion of the Jews from a European state (England 1290) and their last expulsion (Spain 1492) are said to have occurred on Tisha b'Av.

Should we fast? It is true: had the Romans not destroyed Jerusalem in 70 and crushed the last great rebellion of Simon bar Koseva (the Bar Kokhba Revolt, 132-135 CE), we might still have a temple. We would not have gone into exile. The vulnerability of exile might not have been our fate. Modern Zionism hoped to end this vulnerability. It declared exile, which pious Jews had learned to carry as a divine mandate, a mistake to be rectified, a mishap whose reversal was within human reach: Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen! as Herzl put it.

Not fasting but rebuilding Zion was the goal of Zionism. And rebuild they did. And yet, pious Jews are still fasting, are commanded to fast, until such time as the weeping for the destroyed temple is turned into jubilation over the temple to be rebuilt, "speedily and in our days."

At this point, if one were to write a sermon, one would need to make a decision. Are we still to fast, and if so, what are we fasting over? Only the past? And is such fasting a mandate to hope and pray for the restoration of the temple? Given the fact that Abd al Malik long since rebuilt the temple, how can we wish for another one without wishing harm on our brothers and fellow-Abrahamites? How does fasting over the destroyed temples not turn into hateful nationalistic egotism and hurtful fantasies of revenge? Is not the temple supposed to be a house of prayer for all people? How can it be if it is restored at the expense of the erasure it would require of what is there now? How can we wish for the age of mourning to be over without imposing mourning on others? Could this be the secret of the messianic age?

Can we imagine a ritual that does justice to the mourning of the Jews without merely, "keeping the hatred green," as Elie Wiesel wrote once, a long time ago? Is the current fear and hatred of the Jews, that is so common not just among our Arab brethren, not also nourished by the notion that somehow the Jews deserved their state of exile, that the Romans were merely the instruments of divine punishment on the Jews, as the Christians have always believed? Triumphalism is always evil because it teaches us to be resentful even when we are the ones dominating others. We are all guilty as charged. Perhaps, to remember this, it maybe worth fasting.

I always said, soccer was the answer ...

2009-07-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem 2020

2009-06-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

As reported by Sami Ershied in today's Huffington Post, the Israeli government is about to release a long awaited urban development plan for Jerusalem. We will track the document and the public debate of the plan as it becomes available.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat on Tuesday presented a city master plan for the next two decades that envisions the capital becoming the greenest city in Israel, and includes affordable housing for young residents, thousands of new apartments for Arab residents of the eastern neighborhoods, and the expansion of tourism and employment.

The JPost reports further that the report is currently held up for review by the Interior Ministry, which highlights one of the major obstacles to rational city planning in Jerusalem, namely, the intersection of urban planning with national political concerns of the state. This, in a nutshell, explains why Jerusalem has been an urban planning nightmare for the past forty two years.

Official Palestinian responses to the mayor's proposal have been critical since it does not sufficiently address the severe housing crisis in the Arab sector. (See the report in Haaretz.)

Sami Arshied, a lawyer from Jerusalem who, according to the by-line, specializes in land use and planning, concludes that only a political solution can correct the long-standing housing and development inequities between the Arab and Jewish sectors of Jerusalem:

Today, 42 years since the annexation of East Jerusalem, it seems that the future of Palestinian Jerusalemites is gloomier than ever, and that their pathways of existence are narrowing. Jerusalem 2020 utilizes seemingly professional tools to respond to the growing needs of an urban populace, but the plan is ultimately designed to serve a political purpose that marginalizes one of the populations most in need of a master plan. As long as Jerusalem sits at the heart of a historical conflict it seems that there is no magical solution based on master plans, creative as they may be. A true solution for Jerusalem will be bound with political negotiations and agreements between the two nations and three religions which call the city home.

There is, of course, another possibility, though admittedly it would require courage. Namely, instead of playing into the hands of the political establishment the residents of Jerusalem could take back the initiative. For example, the Arab residents could end their boycott of the municipal elections and participate in municipal governance, as they used to do until 1967. This could make a real difference, too.

Al Quds as a venue of literary gathering

2009-06-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

In today's Boston Globe, Claire Messud reports on "Palfest," a literary gathering in Jerusalem that ran into trouble with the authorities. You may find her report here. Her words are much more mild mannered than the rant Swedish author Henning Mankell published in the Swedish Aftonbladet immediately after returning from Israel early in June. For example, Messud refrains from using the word apartheid that Mankell employs prominently as a historical parallel to the situation in Israel/Palestine. Ms. Messud chose to wait and write something that is perhaps even more disturbing than a simple condemnation. Instead of emphasizing the political aspects she allows you to imagine yourself for a moment as a Palestinian. To do so she describes how difficult it is for ordinary Palestinians to enjoy a particular kind of freedom we take for granted, namely the freedom to move around in our own neighborhoods, cities, and fields.

Jews, Christians, Muslims and Jerusalem

2009-06-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

The life of the mind is a perpetual struggle against dogmatic slumber. Unless someone shakes us up and says, hey, wake up! our minds tend to go to sleep. Or we are asleep to begin with and never wake up. We are sleepwakers. Mental sleepwalking is the case when one unquestioningly accepts certain perpetually reiterated assumptions as true. One of these assumptions I am beginning to question right now is that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are equally attached to the city of Jerusalem. Now I don't want anyone to scream and yell at me and accuse me of bias. (You can accuse me of bias, but don't scream and yell, please.) -- Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all attached to Jerusalem, but perhaps not in the same way or for the same reasons.

This became clear to me when I explained what the book is about that I am working on. In a message to a friend I described my interest as follows. I said, I am trying to answer the question how a Bronze Age/Iron Age mountain fortress turned into a holy city for Christians and Muslims. This formulation suggested itself to me instead of the one I had hitherto been using. What I used to say my book was about was that I was trying to explain why we, that is, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, care about the city the way we do. The mistake was in the "we." "We" is, in this case, an academic abstraction. What is wrong with this is that it is people, rather than academic abstractions, who are attached to the city. Each specific people or group or religious community is a We. Whether or not there is a larger "we" that comprises all of these more limited We's without becoming an academic abstraction is very much the question.

So what about our We's and their respective attachments to the Holy City? For each We, Jerusalem means something different. What it means for each of these can be determined to some degree by looking at how they became attached to the city and in what way, sense, or respect they have remained attached.

That Jews are attached to Jerusalem is as natural as the fact that Romans are attached to Rome and Athenians to Athens. Nothing, not even the centuries of banishment following the Jews' eviction by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 CE, can change this. During the centuries during which residence was forbidden to the Jews, their spiritual leaders, the rabbis, developed a set of ritual practices that kept Jerusalem present and on every Jew's mind on a daily basis. This spiritual focus on the city probably by far exceeded the role Jerusalem had played in an ordinary Jewish life when the city and the temple were still firmly in Jewish hands. This is it in a nutshell. Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is perfectly natural for a Jew. It is also, in addition, intensely supernatural, providential, ritual, and mystical, due to centuries of rabbinic inventiveness and by the misfortunes of exile that made Jerusalem even more glorious in its absence.

Now let's take a Christian community, say, the Armenians. Setting aside that Armenians, skirmishing with the Romans in several Mithridatic wars, have many direct or indirecet historical connections with Jerusalem and the Jews that precede the conversion of their kingdom to the Christian faith, setting aside also that they supported the Frankish knights and the Latin kingdom (what else would they do as Christians?) and have been in Jerusalem ever since; over the past centuries, Jerusalem has become a second home, a home away from home and a refuge for Armenians. Survivors of the genocide of 1917 found their way to Jerusalem where they started afresh. That Armenians feel fond of Jerusalem is natural. It is also spiritual because to them, as to other Christians, Jerusalem represents heaven. The difference between the Jewish and the Armenian attachment to Jerusalem is this, among others. The capital of the only independent Armenian state, one only recently released into independence, is Erevan. The capital of the only independent Jewish state, one released into independence within living memory, is Jerusalem.

How about Arab attachment to Jerusalem. This is extremely complex, but it is not exactly the same as the Jewish or the Armenian one. Arabs lived in and around Jerusalem long before the Arab conquest of Syria, when Arabs came in the name of Islam. Arabs appear in the Bible under the name of Ishmael, the son of Abraham. If the Jews are descendants of Isaac and the Arabs descendants of Ishmael, Ishmael was in the "promised land" even before Isaac, since he was Abraham's first born, and both buried their father together in Hebron (presumably they made up after the deaths of their respective mothers, who did not get along). From Assyrian documents we know that Arabs were among the first to be settled in Samaria, after the Israelite kingdom lost its independence and Israelites were deported to the Hebar river. These Arabs became YHWHists and may be among the ancestors of the surviving Samaritans. The Nabatean kingdom, southeast of Roman Judea, was at one point renamed Arabia, though the language of state was Aramaic, the same as in Judea. An Idumean prince who ruled Jerusalem and turned it into a gem of the Roman East, was an Arab on his mother's side. If anything, one could say that Arabs, though Judaized in religion, were part of the Jewish elite in Roman times. By the way, the Arab/Idumean/Jewish king, I just alluded to was none other than king Herod who ruled in Jerusalem from 37 until 4 BCE and built the temple whose destruction Jews have mourned ever since.

Today, when we speak of Arabs, we most likely mean the descendants of those who came from the Arabian peninsula and established a world empire reaching from Spain to the Hindukush. The memory of these heirs of Cyrus and Alexander reverberates in Arab history. Arabs have resided in Jerusalem ever since. Unlike the Byzantines, and the pagan Romans before them, these conquerors had no taste for exlcusivism. The Byzantines were allowed to stay and to keep most of their land and quite a few of their privileges, and the Jews were readmitted. This, by and large, has been Arab policy in Jerusalem, even long after the Arabs were themselves subjugated by others, such as the Rum Seldjuks, the Kurdish Ayyubids, the Turkish Mameluks, and finally by the Ottomans. Though not completely independent, the families of Arab notables who have lived in Jerusalem at least since its reconquest in 1183 basically ran the city well into the twentieth century.

Muslim generosity toward non-Muslims, on the other hand, while applying in Jerusalem, never applied to the other holy cities, that is, to Mecca and Medinah. Jews were expelled from or massacred in Yathrib (i.e., Medinah), which had been a predominantly Jewish city in Arabia. Mecca is forbidden territory for non-Muslims.

To be sure, religious exclusivism was common in the ancient world. It has its parallel in other ancient temple cities, including Jerusalem, when it was still a temple city. Since the time of Ezra the scribe, the chief architect of the temple cult following the Babylonian exile, it was forbidden for non-Jews to enter the precincts of the temple. Similarly, non-Christians were generally not allowed to enter Christian churches until they had been baptized. Constantine's basilica in Jerusalem was off limits to tourists. Exclusivism used to be the norm when it came to religious rites. It is all the more remarkable that Herod introduced a "court of the gentiles" to the architecture of the temple.

What is my point? My point is that we must not be surprised at the asymmetries in the attitudes and feelings people harbor toward the Holy City for religious and other reasons. Everyone's attachment is different. Jerusalem is an erstwhile Canaanite hill fortress that became the royal city of Judah and later the temple city of the Jews. It was the anchor of their identity as Jews even when it lay in ruins. This is a special connection that cannot and must not be denied. That Jerusalem is also a holy city for the Christians is more surprising and requires explanation since the Christians are not simply a kind of Jews. Why are Christians attached to the city at all is the more complicated question, one I hope to answer in my book.

That Arabs should be attached to the city is also complex. All things considered, they have been present in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land as conquerors for well over a millennium and their historical roots precede this conquest by more than another millennium. Jerusalem is not a holy city for the Arabs qua Arabs. For the Arabs of Jerusalem, of course, the city is their ancestral home, a source of identity and pride. This type of attachment is characteristic of Jerusalemite Arabs. It is natural and deserves respect. Palestinian Arabs more generally see Jerusalem as the symbol of Palestinian national identity. This is not local patriotism but national interest and sentiment and as such it also deserves respect. Jerusalem also plays a role in Muslim history and imagination, which is not the same as Arab identity. Historically speaking and in symbolic terms, the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik established Islam as the new dispensation displacing the Byzantines as divinely sanctioned rulers of what was then Syria. For the Umayyads, as for the Byzantines, politics, architecture, conquest, and belief in divine rule were all interconnected. Living in close proximity and constant exchange with their Jewish neighbors, the Arabs of Jerusalem developed a literature in praise of Al Quds that is often indistinguishable from Jewish midrash. One's attachment has since rivalled the other's.

Love is exclusivist. Jewish historical experience and spiritual traditions have conspired to plant a love for Jerusalem in the heart of every Jew. But the same can be said of many Arabs, foremost among them the families whose names have been inscribed in the annals of the city's history since the Middle Ages. A Jew may feel that no one else can possibly love the city as much as "we" do. But what this Jew refers to is the spiritual Jerusalem created by the rabbis, when the real Jerusalem was inaccessible. History and religion produce the desire to merge the real and the imagined, to realize the intangible. This love is frightening to behold, especially for those other We's who love the earthly city just as much, though perhaps differently.

Michael Oren named Israel's ambassador to the US

2009-06-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Reuters "Axis mundi" blog posted an interview with the newly named Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, a historian affiliated with the Shalem Center, a neo-conservative think tank. The Jerusalem issue comes up in the interview exactly as one might expect, namely, as the non-negotiable eternally undivided capital of Israel, an actual conversation stopper in the interview.

The purpose of the appointment is clear. With Oren as the chief diplomat under Lieberman, public relations damage is to be minimized while pressure on US government, lawmakers and Israel lobby are to be maximized in support of Israel's current hard-line nationalistic policies. It will be interesting to see how far this goes.

After Cairo ...

2009-06-16T19:58:00.000-07:00

How, if at all, has the Jerusalem question been affected by President Obama's great speech of Cairo, by the elections in the Lebanon, and by the astounding mass protests in Teheran that have been hailed as the harbingers of a second Iranian revolution? -- In his widely noted recent speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his support of the two-state-solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As also widely noted, he attached so many unacceptable conditions to it that the spirit of the speech contradicted its letter. One of the conditions he made that would need to be met for him to accept Palestinian statehood was for the Palestinians to recognize Jerusalem as the eternally undivided capital of Israel. It is clear that this position is unacceptable for Palestinians and it is clear that Netanyahu knows this. Hence the impression that his concession on the question of Palestinian statehood was disingenuous.

On the other hand, there are reasons to see in Netanyahu's speech more than a closing of the door to peace by a closed-minded representative of the Israeli right. For one, Netanyahu correctly represented what is a widely shared Jewish sentiment concerning the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is of symbolic value to the Jewish nation, even though it is a pain in the neck from any rational political or urban planning point of view. There is no doubt that, politically speaking, the city remains ungovernable as long as the Israeli national sentiment insists on squaring the circle of holding on to an undivided Jerusalem while pursuing Palestinian statehood. So what is good about Jerusalem's reemerging as a bone of contention?

I believe that Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have it right in their essay of 11 June 2009, published in The New York Review of Books, where they argue that the crux of the matter, at least for the Palestinians, is not so much statehood as such, at least at this point, but the question of national interest, a question that is strangely undermined by the Israeli and international pressure to pursue the so-called two-state-solution.

As Agha and Malley argue, the larger symbolic issues on both sides of the conflict may be more central to solving it than the tried and failed negotiations over (or the imposition of) Palestinian statehood alongside Israel. For the Palestinians, this includes the matter of the return of the refugees. For the Israelis, whether we like it or not, it includes a stubborn insistence on the historic right of the Jews to the Holy City.

I admit, I find it odious to read pronouncements of the sort recently published in an opinion piece in the English edition of Haaretz by Nadav Shragai, a piece that proudly pronounces that "Jerusalem is ours". But the sentiment this piece expresses is as true as the Palestinian sentiment concerning the land of Palestine, concerning the legitimacy of the rights of refugees to return to their land, and concerning the sense, derided by Nadav Shragai, that Jerusalem, or rather Al Quds, is and should remain an Arab city.

Sentiments of this sort and how to deal with them is, according to Agha and Malley, more important than whether or not a "humdrum" two-state-solution is imposed on Israelis and Palestinians any time soon. Netanyahu has, at least, articulated views that, while beyond the pale from the liberal and western point of view, captured the sentiments of the right-wing and the religious sector of Israeli society and it did so without completely closing the door to a negotiated settlement. Negotiations need to take into account the sentimental aspects of this conflict, too. In this sense, Netanyahu's speech may not have been a complete waste but rather a reminder of the more complicated issues that both sides will bring to the table once serious negotiations resume.

So has anything changed in Jerusalem since Obama's speech in Cairo, elections in the Lebanon, and the ongoing second Iranian revolution? There has been movement. Though falling short of the standards established by previous Israeli administrations, including those of Sharon and Olmert, Netanyahu has moved the last bastion of the Israeli right beyond the tabu of even mentioning the possibility of a negotiated settlement that considers the Palestinians as a nation that deserves its own state within the historic boundaries of what pious and right-wing Jews like to call Eretz Yisrael. This may not look like much but it actually was a huge concession on Netanyahu's part. But there must be action to follow such pronouncements. If Agha and Malley are correct, some of this action must come from the Palestinians themselves and it needs to be in keeping with their collective national sentiments rather than being perceived as a mere response to foreign, non-Palestinian interests, be they the interests of Washington, Cairo, Beirut, Teheran, or those of the Israelis. Of course we all hope that this initiative, when it is taken, will be a constructive one.

Mastercard advertises family fun in the City of David

2009-06-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Gush Shalom's blog has alerted us to a new advertisement campaign by Mastercard in Israel, aimed at Isracard holders, to make use of a coupon for a tour of the City of David, courtesy of the settler organization Elad, which runs the archeological site and aggressively pursues the expansion of the excavations over the legitimate concerns of the Arab residents of the village of Silwan. If you wish to join the letter campaign of protest against this seemingly innocuous advertisement and for more background on the issue, see http://gush-shalom.org.toibillboard.info/letter.htm.

Nostalgia or obligation?

2009-06-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

It is completely natural for Jews to feel attached to Jerusalem. It is also a religious obligation, though it is not immediately clear whether there is a connection between the nostalgia most of us are susceptible to and the obligation felt by few, not as a historical but a divine imperative. What is Jewish obligation in regard to Jerusalem? Is there a religious obligation for Jews to hold on to the sovereignty of the Jewish state over part or all of the city, or is this already a secular kind of attitude in the disguise of religious romanticism? Are we halakhically obliged to build a new temple if we have the opportunity to do so, and if so, who is to say that what presents itself to us now (a sovereign state in control of the city, though without international recognition) constitutes such an opportunity? For twothousand years, Jews prayed for the rebuilding of the temple, but only now some Jews and their Christian supporters are trying to bring about what had long been a more or less utopian idea. As Bernard Avishai points out in a recent post on this question, the desire to build a Jewish temple in place of the Dome of the Rock is a departure from Judaism as we knew it, a Judaism that secular Jews like Avishai and myself feel increasingly nostalgic for. What happened to the Judaism of the exile, a Judaism that prayed for a speedy rebuilding of the temple without arrogating to itself the power or right to make it happen? Where, more importantly, is the rational theology that denies divinity to any and all objects given to sensory experience? Are groups like the “Templemount Faithful” (ne’emaney ha-bayit) (see http://www.templemountfaithful.org/) destroying Judaism as we know and love it?

Today, Jerusalem is at the heart of a new dilemma, namely, the question of the future of Judaism in a Jewish state. It is perhaps an unprecedented dilemma that calls for unprecedented solutions.

To understand Jewish “religion,” past and present, it may be helpful to remember an important rabbinic distinction. The rabbis, who were lawyers, distinguished between two types of material within the body of sacred text we call the Torah, namely, narrative and legal; in their terms: aggadah and halakhah. Halakhic or legal material constituted the obligations, the dos and don’ts of the Bible; haggadic material was everything else, including what we might call theology. Thus, for example, you can be obliged to affirm that there is only one God but you cannot be obliged to hold any particular opinion as true. You can be obliged to know God, i.e., to pursue the knowledge of God, but you cannot be obliged to accept anyone’s particular opinion about God as true. To be sure, you are also obliged to respect your elders, to live according to local custom, and generally to seek what is best for your community, and this is where things become fuzzy. The sophisticated rabbinic distinction between truth and opinion does not necessarily work in favor of an enlightened and rational point of view. It may also lead to mystical, illusory, even delusional beliefs. BUT: all of these views are, and by virtue of Halakhah itself, are matters of debate, at least in theory. But what happens to this nice, open, non-dogmatic rabbinical system (for which Bernard Avishai expressed nostalgia) when it enters the realm of a Jewish state?

Can religious Jews reconcile themselves to existence in a secular and pluralistic state where the majority is committed to Jewish nostalgia but not to enforcing halakhah as the law of the land? Jews are obliged to rebuke one another if they see someone who does not live by the Torah. But the concern, halakhically speaking, is not with making converts to a halakhic lifestyle rather than with the impression we make on the gentiles around us. In a pluralistic society and a pluralistic world we make a poor impression if it appears that our law, the law of the true God, makes us less committed to the wellbeing of our neighbors than to our own wellbeing. If it makes us look like inhuman religious creeps. Religion is supposed to curtail our natural self-interest, manage it by weighing it against a greater interest. It is clearly broken if instead it makes us more self-centered, even and especially if this collective self is enhanced by a transcendent deity.

Is a religious Jew obliged to pray for a rebuilding of the temple or even to exploit the possibilities of a secular system to advance the founding of the “third” temple? Perhaps, but that depends on how one determines Jewish religious obligation. There are differences of opinion. 19th-century liberal Jews, seeking to integrate into the republican societies of Europe and the United States, eliminated all references to a return to Zion and a rebuilding of the temple from their prayer books because it conflicted with their civic and patriotic obligations. What might a liberal prayerbook in the Jewish state look like? (To be sure, liberal or reform Judaism is a very small movement in the Jewish state.) Would it also need to eliminate all references to the building of the temple?

Perhaps it is time for a new, national liberal Jewish religion, one that affirms the values of biblical times: the love of neighbor and the insight of the prophets who were the critics of their own state. Something like Micah 6:6-8, for example:

With what shall I approach the LORD,
Do homage to God on high?
Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings,
With calves a year old?
Would the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
With myriads of streams of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgressions,
The fruit of my body for my sins?

He has told you, O man, what is good,
And what the LORD requires of you:
Only to do justice
And to love goodness,
And to walk modestly with your God.

For the practice of this Jewish religion, no temple is neeeded.

Urban crisis or opportunity?

2009-05-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

The city is in crisis. It has been for a while. I don't mean Jerusalem alone, which through a number of unfortunate measures has been turned into a sprawling ugly duckling. But it may be useful to see Jerusalem's urban crisis not just in the terms of the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians but in terms that lend themselves to comparison with other urban centers in crisis. Having just returned from a trip to Paris, it became clear to me that Jerusalem is not the only city that struggles with issues of planning, governance and representation, civility, equity, services, education, transportation, sanitation, and other issues of concern to every city, though aggravated where national and municipal concerns intersect and overlap. Jerusalem is a capital city and also the largest urban center within the state. The same is true of Paris, Berlin, and Cairo, for example. Like Paris and Berlin, Jerusalem suffers from sharp ethnic divisions. Unlike Paris, Berlin, or Cairo, however, Jerusalem is a religiously divided capital and urban center, which makes cooperation and commonality of purpose among all of its inhabitants even more difficult to achieve. (Cairo, as swine flu related events reminded us, also continues to harbor an ancient religious divide between Christians and Muslims.)

In the case of Jerusalem, interests of state often interfere with the interests of viable urban development. But is this not also true in the erstwhile capitals of empires that have been confronted with large minorities of people who have every right to live and thrive among the historic majority, and for understandable reasons refuse to assimilate or integrate nationally, ethnically, or linguistically? Many cities around the world face similar problems in this post-colonial age.

There is an almost universal change in the role and character of cities: cities have become the location of civilizational conflict; they are the places where post-colonial societies struggle to find peaceful ways of coexistence. There are interesting medieval models that suggest that different religious and ethnic groups can get along just fine, as long as that is the goal of a central government or power. Meanwhile, the age of nationalism has given us models that are definitely not to be emulated further. The nation state with its endemic desire for homogeneity cannot help resolve the modern urban crisis because it produced it.

Jerusalem's place as world heritage site and as a city holy to the three Abrahamic traditions should be a testing ground for creative and innovative solutions. Its diverse populations should be encouraged to participate in cooperative and constructive ways of achieving a modus vivendi that is favorable to all without favoring any. Where else but in Jerusalem, where all of us feel responsible, should we expect to make significant progress on how to build the new city, a place where plurality can be an asset rather than a liability? Wouldn't this be in the spirit of our religious traditions, too?

Is Compromise on Jerusalem good for everyone or only for the Palestinians?

2009-05-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

In a comment, reported in today's Haaretz, Abbas Zaki, the Palestinian Authority's ambassador to Lebanon, is quoted as saying that a compromise on Jerusalem and settlements in Judea and Samaria would amount to a demise of Zionism's "dream." Verbatim: "With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People?"

This is a very puzzling thing for a Palestinian statesman to say. Though he might think so, clearly, saying it in public amounts to providing ideological support to the hardliners in Israel.

Setting aside for now who said it and why, Zaki's musings raise a profound question, namely, whether compromise on the question of sovereignty over the Holy City can be a good thing not just for the Palestinians but also for the Israelis.

Some may remember the dictum by Moshe Dayan who, in June 1967, famously dismissed the Old City, just captured from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, by asking "What good is this whole Vatican?" (Sounds better in Hebrew, but the meaning is clear.) Israel existed for two decades before East Jerusalem was captured. While West Bank, Sinai, and the Golan Heights all had strategic importance (security, bargaining chips), Jerusalem had important symbolic importance. Gaza only constituted a headache and no one in Israel (or in Egypt) wanted to hold on to one of the most densely populated Arab areas of Palestine anyway. It never was part of the vision of a Greater Israel, even among those who, like Menachem Begin and his ideological heirs, were interested in holding on to the West Bank areas forever.

What I am saying is that Mr. Zaki is wrong. If a reasonable compromise can be achieved between all parties and once security is no longer an issue, then of course Israel, a Jewish state with or without a significant Arab minority, neither needs to control the West Bank nor exert sovereignty over East Jerusalem. It existed without it before and it can exist without it again in the future. Any negotiated settlement would need to include free Jewish access to the Western Wall and control of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, but neither Zionism, nor the idea of a Jewish state, nor Israel's flourishing in cultural, economic, social and political terms depend on Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif or even on whether or not all of the village of Silwan is turned into a Jewish history museum. None of this really matters. While maximal and total control of what two thousand years ago may have been the gem of Jewish life seems desirable and legitimate to some, Zionism does not necessarily consist in a striving to restore the ancient system of priestly rule and biblical sacrifices. In fact, this is a distortion of Zionism's original goals. There are different Zionisms. The vision of a restoration of the ancient Jewish way of life is odious to many Jews and Israelis. It is an absurd and dangerous religious idea, which should be resisted not just by Palestinians but by all reasonable people.

But make no mistake, Mr. Zaki. Even seventy years after Reichskristallnacht, we are not likely to give an inch when it comes to the right and legitimacy of a Jewish state. We will defend it with our blood.

Netanyahu: "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours"

2009-05-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Now that's a sentence that needs parsing! (For background see here.)

The season: According to the official calendar of the State of Israel (a combination of Jewish tradition, based on a Babylonian calendar, rabbinic clarifications based on biblical notions, and modern Zionist lore) it was "Jerusalem Day," i.e., time to commemorate the June 1967 war, in the course of which East Jerusalem was taken from the Jordanians and subsequently annexed by the State of Israel (in contrast to West Bank and Gaza, which were merely brought under Israeli military occupation).

The cause: Prime Minister Netanyahu reaffirms the government of Israel's resolve to hold on to Jerusalem as the "eternally united capital of Israel," as stated in the "Jerusalem Law" of 1980.

The audience: 1,000 ultraorthodox Jews and religious Zionists assembled at the "Merkaz Harav," spiritual center of the movement founded by the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of, then, Palestine ("chief rabbi" like "grand mufti" being an office created by the British), Rav Kook, and much enhanced by his son, who saw the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem as a providential act, bringing us nearer the messianic age.

The reason (in my humble opinion): Israel's government has been (and will be) compelled to make concessions on rogue West-Bank settlements, so at least Israel's newly elected and installed right wing prime minister Netanyahu, bullied by the Obama administration, must emphasize that he won't give an inch on the question of sharing sovereignty over Jerusalem.

The claim: "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours."

The fallacy: Jerusalem, i.e., the municipal boundaries that constitute the current municipality of the city of Jerusalem vastly extend beyond the historical boundaries of the city. This Jerusalem is unprecedented; before 1967 and subsequent laws extending the municipal boundaries, the area now included in the city never constituted "Jerusalem." Furthermore, the notion that Jerusalem "was always ours" may be true in certain Jewish fantasies pertaining to property rights extended by divine fiat, but is certainly not true in terms of actual ownership by common political standards. The Jewish people lost sovereignty over the city to the Romans (in stages between 63 BCE to 70 CE, and completely after 135 CE), and never held sway in political terms until the modern era, and not over East Jerusalem until 1967. Even this claim of sovereignty has been internationally contested and has not been recognized by a single nation.

In short: Prime Minister Netanyahu is pandering to the religious zealots who are bound to be hit by the concessions on settlements in the West Bank that will most likely result from a strong US involvement in Middle East negotiations. To compensate for showing flexibility on settlements Netanyahu is digging in his (rhetorical) heels in the question of Jewish sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. Nothing less was to be expected.

Have we lost our sense of humor?

2009-05-15T05:50:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog, Richard Silverstein (at tikkun-olam, May 13, 2009) points out that people on the extreme left and the extreme right have lost their sense of humor. They cannot take a joke, or rather they read nefarious intentions into expressions of artistic wit. The occasion for these musings was the publication of a map in which Palestine appears as an archipelago surrounded by water. The map L’archipel de Palestine orientale (‘The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine’) was made by French cartographer Julien Busac. If first appeared at strangemaps.wordpress.com with comments by the editors and the artist. (For further discussion see Robert Mackey's post on The Ledge.)

Perhaps it is not just people on the extremes who have lost their sense of humor, and perhaps it is not "the situation" that has caused us to lose our sense of humor. Hermann Cohen famously points out (as recently reiterated in a book by Myriam Bienenstock) that the God of monotheism leaves no room for irony. That may be the real problem.

Realism or idealism

2009-05-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

None of us know exactly where we ought to stand on the question of realism or idealism. Realism means to embrace policies for reasons of state. Idealism means to embrace policies because they increase the good in the world. But what if the two conflict with one another? What if, say, what is conducive to the increase of power and safety of one party in a struggle for dominance is detrimental to another party? For reasons of state you would say, whatever is conducive to the increase of power and security of your own kith and kin is right, even if it is at the expense of the well-being of others. Idealism means you strive to minimize the damage to others that is incurred by striving for the well-being and safety of your own, because, in a final analysis, we both ought to live in safety, security, and dignity. The ultimate division is not between us and them but between humanity and inhumanity. When it comes to Jerusalem, there is a conflict not so much between Jews and Arabs or Muslims but rather between those who would settle the conflict on the basis of equity and security for all and those who insist on the legitimacy of their claim to ownership, even at the expense of others. Where do you stand?

Ill prepared, unscripted: quo vadis, papa?

2009-05-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

The Catholic Church is one of the largest and best established multinational religious organizations with followers across the world who revere their leader, the bishop of Rome, as the vicar of Christ on earth. This explains why even non-Catholics look up to this man. What he says matters. What he fails to say or to perceive or to prepare for also matters.

Previous blunders of this Pope have already been widely noted. The recent rehabilitation of certain renegade priests consciously or inadvertently overlooked that a significant element of the opposition to Vatican II, the reform council that did away with the millennial curse on the Jews as Christ-killers, was rooted in anti-Semitism. The recent papal visit to Yad Vashem is not likely to make up for this oversight, especially since the Pope eschewed any language that would have hinted at what really matters about the destruction of European Jewry, what sets it apart from other mass atrocities committed in recent memory. What matters is the intentionality and method of the mass annihilation, not its scale or the human tragedies it brought about. By focusing on human tragedy, the Pope sentimentalized rather than directly addressed the complexity of the Holocaust. He catered to what he presumed to be the common humanity between the former German Hitlerjunge and the survivors and descendents of genocide. There is a common humanity here, which is worth emphasizing. But it is not what the Pope as Pope should have focused on.

What followed was an interfaith meeting, disrupted by a known hatemonger. Again, the Pope or his handlers were ill prepared. They did not anticipate the disruption, no interpreter was on hand to explain what this was about. Congratulations to those who thought you could expose the Pope to the actual views of unscripted individuals. Welcome to the unmitigated hatred of the Jews that is so palatable when you travel to Jerusalem.

Pope visits the Holy Land

2009-05-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Here are some voices from reasonable people who hope that the papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land will do some good, especially for relations between the Christian community and others. Christians are now a minority in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, mostly due to comparatively low birth rates and emigration when other communities have higher birth rates or demographic growth through immigration. Demographers speak of Christians as the "vanishing third," but perhaps that's too dramatic. If one takes the long view (say over the past two millennia), this means that Greek and Roman influence on the culture and society of the Middle East has only been fully marginalized and eclipsed through events that unfolded over the past century. The remarkable longevity of the age of Hellenism is still evident in the fact that the Greek Orthodox Church continues to be the most significant landowner in the Holy Land after the State of Israel.

A shoutout to David Satran, who opens the documentary.

60,000 soon to be homeless in East Jerusalem?

2009-05-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

In a Washington Post Foreign Service article of May 2, 2009, which was picked up by the Boston Globe, Howard Schneider reports on a U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs study, which finds that “60,000 Palestinians Risk Eviction in East Jerusalem.” (See here.)

60,000 Palestinians are threatened with eviction from East Jerusalem? How can that be? What have so many people done to deserve to live with such a threat hanging over their heads? Are they illegal aliens, perhaps? Did they live in Jerusalem without proper papers for all these years? Have rules of residency or other regulations been tightened that would warrant such an enforced exodus?

But, wait a minute: not from East Jerusalem, but in East Jerusalem! 60,000 Palestinians are not to be evicted from East Jerusalem but merely from their houses! So why is this? Are they squatters? Are the houses unsafe? Or is someone else to live in their homes instead? Is this an initiative to make room for more Jewish housing? No, this isn’t it either, or not immediately, since the houses are not to be used at all. The houses, not the Palestinians, are illegal since they were built without a permit. When a house is built without a permit, the state or the municipality may be legally obliged to demolish it. After all, part of orderly city development is to issue or deny permits, based on the common good of all citizens. To allow residents to build without permit means anarchy.

Now, it has long been known that many of the houses that were built in and around the very small and somewhat declining Jordanian municipality that existed from 1949 until June of 1967 were built without permit. The U.N. OCHA report mentioned in the Washington Post article finally puts a number on it. Within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, boundaries vastly extended after June 1967, 60,000 individuals are now threatened with eviction and housing demolition should the State of Israel decide to enforce its laws. Enforcement of such a draconian law is a matter of politics. It is not a matter of municipal planning, but it, like many other political issues, emanates from the government of the state. Housing policy for Jerusalem is made by the Israeli cabinet, not by the municipality. It is a matter of national interest.

It is therefore extremely disingenuous to dissimulate, claim otherwise, and blame the Arab residents of Jerusalem for their own situation, as Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman quoted at the end of the Washington Post article does when he says as follows.

But it "is not part of some all-encompassing government plan to do this or that," said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "It is municipal policy."

Arab residents of East Jerusalem traditionally have boycotted municipal elections on the grounds that they are living under an occupation. "If they are not trying to influence the municipal policy from within, which they can do," Palmor said, "then they cannot complain."

The problem is, if Arab residents (a minority of about a third of the population of Jerusalem today) decided to participate in municipal elections, they would legitimize the policies the majority imposes on the minority; they would accept the legitimacy of Israeli claims to a united Jerusalem; they would therefore merely put their signature under their eviction from their homes. At least, if they must be homeless in Jerusalem, let them keep their pride!

Beyond Cultural Narcissism

2009-04-26T06:07:00.000-07:00

Can Freud help us understand the sustained policy failures and the perpetual return to tried and failed attitudes that have tended to prevent new solutions to the ongoing conflicts in and around Jerusalem from being considered and implemented?

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud comments from a psychological perspective on the mechanisms of hostility to civilization. What he writes is subtle. First of all, he reminds us that there is hostility to civilization, i.e., to any political order or regnant paradigm, because all civilization rests on the repression of some urges. This is generally so, but it becomes more tricky--and more interesting--when one considers privations that are imposed on some rather than all. All nation states, so Freud, are based on the privations a minority imposes on a majority. The repression of a majority is accomplished by a kind of mental coercion in addition to other forms of violence. This mental force is often exerted in the name of the ideals of a civilization that represent the great accomplishments of the past.

“It is understandable,” writes Freud, “that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share.” Written in 1927, this statement focuses on economic repression and the resentment it breeds, which leads to the hostility of an economically repressed majority toward the values of the wealthy elite. But the continuation shows that this observation may equally apply to a situation where the power inequilibrium between groups is enhanced by what Freud calls the narcissism of cultural ideals.

Whether it is the unequal distribution of wealth or other factors that lead to the imposition of privations on one group but not on the other, the effect on the relation between these groups seems to be the same. Here is how Freud describes the effects of an unequal distribution of privation.

In such conditions an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on destroying the culture itself, and possibly even on doing away with the postulates on which it is based. The hostility of these classes to civilization is so obvious that it has caused the more latent hostility of the social strata that are better provided for to be overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

How does this illuminate the current situation in Jerusalem? After all, the Arab population of Jerusalem is, in demographic terms, barely a third of the population of the municipality and hence a minority. But the very demographic situation, created by repeated redrawings of the municipal boundaries (see http://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/Jerusalem/Dellapergola_J%27lem2020.ppt.htm), is the result of politics imposed on the Arab minority by the State of Israel and its security establishment (but not necessarily supported by every municipal administration). The demographic policies pursued by all Israeli governments since 1967 have been based on Zionist ideals, shaped in years of struggle, pioneering, and state-building. These policies amount to an attempt at disenfranchizing the Arab populations, but even it this weren't the case the ideals on which they are based cannot be shared by the Arab population. The natural and, according to Freud: inevitable, resistance of the Arabs to the civilizational ideals imposed on them by the Jewish state equally inevitably appears to the Jewish population as resistance to their ideal of civilization and hence as nihilistic and uncooperative.

Freud’s analysis of what one might call differential privation goes a long way toward explaining the miscommunication between Israeli governments and the Arab populations affected by policies based on the ideal of Jewish statehood. The sacrifices imposed on the Arabs are neither commensurate with the sacrifices imposed on the Jewish population, nor are they legitimized by ideals that would compensate the Arab minority for its material losses.

But Freud also speaks of a “more latent hostility of the social strata that are better provided for,” a hostility often overlooked. This points to the fact that the dominant group is not unambiguously committed to self-sacrifice, hard work, and the lasting existence of its civilization. The alienation of the dominated is accepted by the dominant not because it is the price to be paid by the dominated for the continued existence of the dominant civilization but rather despite the fact that it may well contribute to the undoing of the dominant civilization. Freud explains this counter-intuitive and counterproductive behavior by pointing to the narcissism of cultural ideals.

The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is (…) among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws.

Modern Israelis are not ancient Romans. But Freud argues that the narcissism of cultural ideals is endemic to all nation states:

On the strength of these differences (to wit: between cultural ideals) every culture claims the right to look down on the rest. In this way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between different cultural units, as can be seen most clearly in the case of nations.

But they also act as glue in a disparate and disjointed society. The cultural ideals common to all Israelis would be insufficient to bridge the gap between religious and secular, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, rich and poor, were it not for the narcissism implicit in the sense of difference between Jews and Arabs. Were it not for this narcissism, it might be possible for many Jews and many Arabs to recognize their common interests, set aside concerns with the cultural ideals of their respective and conflicted pasts, and work toward reasonable solutions of problems that can only be solved if one overcomes one's cultural narcissism.

The Fetishization of Jerusalem

2009-04-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

With its multiple destructions, Jerusalem became a unique object of veneration—beyond the ordinary veneration afforded an ancient royal city. (I am referring to 586 BCE and 70CE. It was destroyed twice.) Its destructions are the condition for the transformation of the city itself into an object of desire. The city takes on what was originally perhaps attached to the temple; Psalms of pilgrimage give lyrical voice to a longing to “see God,” to “reside in his forecourts forever,” rather than merely to “appear before God” as tersely commanded in the Pentateuch. Originally this language reflects a cultic longing (or the promotion of such longing) attached to the sanctuary and its festivals. With the absence of such a sanctuary and its replacement with mere commemorative shrines (and with the absence of national sovereignty this destruction of the temple signified to the ancient Jews) the semantics of these well known phrases changed and they continue to change.

Today we have a new situation. Jews have regained sovereignty, de facto, if not de jure, even in East Jerusalem, but the temple is still absent. For reasons to be parsed and motives to be considered carefully, this absence of the temple has begun to mean something new and different today. It has certainly fuelled a reinvestment in realistic projects of preparation for the imminent reinauguration of a building that only exists in the scriptural imagination of a few. What was, until recently, a devotion to the ruins of the temple (over the last centuries focusing on the Western or Wailing Wall) has, since 1967, turned into a devotion to making arrangements for the imminent rebuilding of the temple. Secular Zionism does not know of such anticipations. This is the difference between secular and religious Zionism. Where secular Zionism seems to have fulfilled itself in the heroic act of capturing Jerusalem (and has been celebrating in Tel Aviv ever since), religious Zionism captivates the imagination of those who feel that the establishment of a state was merely, in the words of Rav Kook, “the beginng of redemption.” To escape the ennui of the new Israeli materialism and to justify the continued contest with Palestinian nationalism, religious Zionism can plausibly claim that essential work remains to be done.

Jerusalem’s standing as a city protected by God is enshrined in the historiography of the first monarchy (i.e., the Book(s) of Kings). A city once captured for reasons of state (to create an independent stronghold for the upstart David; or for reasons unkown to us), Jerusalem came to represent the spirit of Judahite independence. The moment of salvation at the time of Hezekiah’s rebellion against the Assyrian Empire was enshrined in 2 Kings 19:35-37 as a providential indicator, a moment when divine protection of the city had become manifest (the angel of death wreaking havoc in the Assyrian camp, forcing Sennaherib to lift the siege; 701 BCE). Yet this remained ambiguous since it engendered a superstitious belief in the inviolate status of the royal city, a delusion (as in the German Wahn) insightfully scolded by prophets a few generations later when this superstition blinded the Judahites to the harbingers of change that required prudence and realistic adaptation to a shift in the regional balance of power (I am referring to the rise of the neo-Babylonian Empire, in 609 BCE; prophet Jeremiah was famously jailed for counselling submission to the new hegemon). While the biblical prophets were realists, the land-owning class, backbone of the royal economy, were ever ready to invoke the glorious past in the belief that it guaranteed divine protection of their independence in the future.

Then and now, religious faith and political pride tend to combine with the result of making Jerusalem not just a prized possession, but a fetish. Fetishization, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined it, entails the making of natural means that have the purpose of reminding us of our moral duty into ends in themselves. Among such natural means are the many symbols and rituals that make up the alphabet of our religious languages. Bowing down or praying in a particular direction, baptizing with water, and any number of other rituals have the effect of helping us reflect on why we are here and what we ought to do as we restrain our bodies and train our minds to pay attention to the ritual performance itself. Jerusalem has long functioned both as a symbol in its own right, as a point of spatial orientation, and as the locale of particular shrines. The monotheistic religions, as Ludwig Feuerbach argued, have the tendency of transcending the real in favor of the imagined. In this case, real access to the city of longing gives rise to renewed longing for a better, more Jewish city, confusing more Jewish (i.e., more resembling one’s scriptural phantasies) with more godly.

What one may learn from this is that the mission of secular Zionism is not complete; it is time for the celebrants in Tel Aviv to sober up and remind themselves that the task of the state cannot be limited to its own founding and to the securing of its military and economic well-being. As long as the religious future of the state is delegated to the religious Zionists and to the ultra-orthodox fringe, the secular state is complicit in its own undoing. Wake up, Tel Aviv!

Israel and Palestine for Dummies

2009-04-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

One shouldn’t think that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is intractable. Nor does one need to know its entire history in order to understand it, though it’s not a mistake to know this history. Needless to say, where there are multiple players (such as in the case of a political conflict between two nations) there are multiple narratives. Where there are multiple narratives, revisiting the history of the conflict usually ends in a clash of narratives.

Here is where it’s at: Palestinians don’t have a state, but Israelis have a state. Israel is a nation state, one which declares itself both Jewish and democratic; Palestine is, well, even saying what Palestine is is tricky. It is definitely not a state. It is a geographic unit created by the British (on biblical boundaries, hence a “scriptural phantasy”), divided by UN resolution, so as to provide the basis for two states, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Arab. (According to the 1947 UN partition plan, Jerusalem was to remain extraterritorial, a corpus separatum, under an international regime.) Mandatory Palestine therefore turned into a divided body: part of it is today the geographic base of the State of Israel, founded in 1948, while another part or other parts of it constitute the Palestinian territories. One of these territories, the West Bank, is still under Israeli military occupation and the other one, the Gaza Strip, was recently subject to an Israeli military campaign though it was previously vacated by the Israelis in an act of unilateral withdrawal. Both Gaza Strip and West Bank came under the autonomous governance of the Palestine National Authority after the Oslo Agreements of the mid-1990s. De facto the two regions are now ruled by two different Palestinian factions (Hamas in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, or rather the PLO, in the West Bank). The West Bank continues to be riddled with expanding Israeli settlements established since 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the West Bank is militarily controlled by the State of Israel, which reoccupied the Palestinian territories during the Al Aqsa Intifada, which broke out in 2000 and has never officially ended, though it has since fizzled out. An additional feature is the “separation wall,” a security fence (including miles of concrete barriers) separating Israeli from Palestinian territory, though the wall’s placement has caused lots of grievances and complaints about the unnecessary hardships it imposes on Palestinians whose villages are sometimes cut off from their fields. The separation wall also attempts to sever East-Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jews and Arabs have been fighting over Palestine. Setting aside the history of the conflict, there are a number of possible resolutions.

1) Establish a Palestinian State alongside Israel in the territories of Gaza and the West Bank with a connecting corridor. This is the much cited two-state-solution to the problem of Palestine, resulting in the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

2) Establish an Israeli-Palestinian confederacy with internally autonomous areas and joined administration of federal lands and resources. This would be a kind of one-state-solution with parity among its disparate constituents.

3) Get rid of the State of Israel and replace it with a democratic state of Palestine, with equal rights for all citizens.

4) Establish a rigorously radical Jewish state in Greater Israel, or a Muslim state in all of Palestine.

5) Continue managing the conflict without a resolution of the political issues.

Of these options, number one, the two-state-solution, has been the stated goal of the negotiations between the State of Israel and the PLO, which led to the Oslo Accords and subsequent agreements. It continues to be advocated by the PLO, the PNA, by Tsipi Livni’s Kadimah party, by Ehud Barak’s Labour party, and many others to the left of the current Likud government. The two-state-solution is widely supported among moderate Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the Palestinian state requires agreements with its neighbors, the Israelis, the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Egyptians, that would guarantee control over roads and bridges, air and sea traffic, tourism, water, agriculture, industry, etc. This is not even so difficult to imagine, as long as Israel respects the integrity of this state and its territory and as long as this state respects the integrity and security needs of its Israeli and other neighbors. Major problem to be solved on the way toward such an agreement: what to do with the Israeli settlements. This issue could be resolved either by vacating settlements or by compensating the Palestinians with territory currently held or claimed by the Israelis.

If I am not mistaken, option two (one confederate state) is advocated by Palestinian intellectuals who don’t believe that the two-state-solution is either viable or just, that Palestine is a single region, that Israeli Arabs are part of the Palestinian people and that one should not base a state on religious or nationalistic distinctions. Currently I know of no Israelis who feel this is the way to go, though in the past this was advocated by Brit Shalom, established by the likes of Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Henrietta Szold. This solution has been discredited as too idealistic, i.e., as not taking into account the need for national self-determination, and hence of the nation state as the only viable form of realizing national interests.

Option three would require a return to the status quo ante 1917, an undoing of a century of Zionist development in Palestine and the undoing of well ensconced instutions of a highly functional state. The Palestinian notables responding to the new situation created by the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of British mandatory government that separated Palestine from Trans-Jordan and from Syria were hoping to achieve sovereignty for the population of what they perceived as overwhelmingly Arab lands, nothwithstanding the religious affiliation of its inhabitants. This appeared as the most natural development, though it ignored the sincerity of the British commitment, made in 1917, to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This goal has therefore always been undermined by the resourceful competing interest of European supported Jewish nationalism. If it didn't work before the state of Israel came into being, it is unlikely to work now.

Option four, the radical Judaization of Greater Israel (including the biblical lands of Israel located, of all places, in the high lands of Judea and Samaria, i.e., in the hill country north and south of Jerusalem that are the West Bank) or the radical Islamization of Palestine (an unprecedented idea given the long Jewish and Christian histories in the Holy Land): either variant would be plainly absurd and undesirable, except from extremist perspectives, which does not mean that it is not advocated by the respective radical fringes. And since radicals speak more loudly than moderates, it appears that there are not few advocates of radical solutions on either side.

Option five is de facto the position of the current Israeli government. It has been widely noted that, in his first address to the Israeli parliament, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu failed to mention the term "Palestinian state." Instead he spoke of peace with Israel's Arab neighbors. To speak of the latter without mentioning the former means that the new Israeli government is planning to return to the tried and failed policies that were in place before Madrid and the first Intifada, the "Shaking-off" movement that began late in 1987. All the gains made in direct negotiations would be lost because Israel would deny the Palestinians the status of an actual partner in the negotiations between two sovereign people, reducing the Palestinians to an autonomous population without sovereignty. Clearly this is a blow to moderate Palestinians, aimed at delegitimizing them in the eyes of their own people and encouraging Palestinians to return to violence, which in turn will justify those Israelis who will be able to say, we told you so, the Arabs don’t want peace.

How does Jerusalem fit into this picture?

In the two-state scenario (option 1), Jerusalem is one of the “final status” issues, to be settled by negotiation. Other final status issues are the return (or compensation) of Palestinian refugees, i.e., a settlement of the claims of millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Palestine, the Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere, and the exact boundaries of the future Palestinian state. As to Jerusalem, Palestinians demand sovereignty over East Jerusalem, i.e., those territories of the city captured by Israel in 1967. Return to the pre-1967 borders (i.e., the 1949 armistice line) is also the overall condition for peace stated and affirmed by the Saudis in recent years. In other words, a return to something like the status quo ante 1967 (though replacing Jordanian by Palestinian self-government) would satisfy not just moderate Palestinians but much of the rest of the Arab world.

Secular Israelis have no big issue with this, but both the religious-Zionist settler movement and some ultra-religious Jews are adamantly opposed to giving up sovereignty over the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, over the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall), the City of David, and ultimately would like to take full ownership of the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). Jewish religious attachment to East Jerusalem is enormous, and it appeals to the endtime phantasies of Evangelical Christians who support this kind of attitude.

Religious Zionism which really came into its own only after 1967 has recently latched on to East Jerusalem so vigorously that it appears even more difficult to dislodge it from this, its religious and national hub, than it would be to dislodge it from settlements in the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria, including such embattled places as Hebron. So much emotional, ideological, and material capital has now been invested in the Judaization of Arab East Jerusalem that it appears virtually impossible to reverse course without major civil and political disruptions over the Holy City. The secular authorities of the State of Israel are to be blamed for having supported the policies of unification of the city under the banner of its Judaization; none of the major political parties are exempt from blame for the failed policy objectives pursued in regard to the Holy City; hence it will require a major national effort to reverse course in this respect.

Because of the elaborate mythological and concrete investments of religious and secular groups alike in the Judaization of Jerusalem, the most likely option to be pursued in the near future is option five, the continuation of conflict management rather than the resolution of the conflict. This is so because to pessimists (and most Israelis are pessimists today) it appears the most realistic. It may also be expedient to a government devoted to a delegitimization of the Palestinian claim to statehood to foster what appear to be historically sound and religiously grounded Jewish claims to the Holy City. For this reason, government support of the settler institution currently entrusted with the excavation and display of the City of David will most likely continue and the claims of the Arab residents of the Village of Silwan will most likely continue to be dismissed.

For now, we can only hope that the Obama administration will muster the courage and patience needed to bring the parties back to the negotiating table. Human conflicts can only be settled by human means, i.e., by means of reasoned compromise rather than by radical solutions. Israelis and Palestinians need to learn once again to regard one another as legitimate antagonists with equally valid claims to dignity and self-determination. To accomplish this equilibrium at the negotiating table, mediation is needed that only the United States can plausibly and credibly provide.

Apropos Lieberman (Avigdor, not Joe)

2009-04-02T19:37:00.001-07:00

Politicians can change their minds; after all they’re politicians. But it helps if they are strong-armed. This helps them to save face when they abandon long-avowed positions. In the case of Binyamin Netanyahu, combined European, Russian, and US American pressure may be needed to sway him to abandon a mindset and a set of avowed policies shaped before the first and certainly before the second Intifada. The first Intifada, the “shaking off” of the yoke of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories best remembered as an uprising of juvenile stone-throwers, brought about a seachange within Palestinian society. It was home-grown rather than PLO initiated, though in the end it was smothered in the handshake between Arafat and Rabin that put the PLO in charge of keeping the peace while Israeli occupation and settlement-building continued.

With the new administration in Israel being sworn in, look out for a return to the agenda of a few well-worn propagandistic causes. While making consiliatory gestures to largely irrelevant moderate Arab and Muslim nations, Netanyahu, in his first address as Prime Minister spoke of the threat of annihilation represented by Iran; this at a time when the US administration is trying a different path, one recognizing the possibility of turning an enemy into a partner for peace and stabililty in the region.

One of the issues likely to return to the forefront with a Netanyahu administration in Israel is the Holy City. Part of the new ruling coalition are those ultra-religious groups that won’t give an inch when it comes to Judaizing the eastern parts of Jerusalem, captured in June of 1967 and since expanded and unilaterally annexed by Israel. It may not be too early for President Obama and Secretary Clinton to remind the new Israeli Prime Minister that Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem defies numerous UN resolutions and that any further enforcement of the harsh residency laws aimed at evicting as many Palestinians as possible from the city will be noted by the international community and by the US government. There may even (gasp!) be consequences, such as the imposition of sanctions on Israeli trade and tourism.

Under Netanyahu, we are likely to see maximum administrative pressure, this side of legality, on Palestinians to leave a city that belongs to them as much as to anyone else. But we are also likely to see secular western governments hesitate to bring pressure to bear on a shrewd politician who has proven in the past that he knows how to pander to the religious right. Considerable political will and a clear understanding of the issues at stake will be necessary to prevent the next blow-up in the Holy City.

Sacred Place

2009-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

The central location in modern life is the self. This is true not just for philosophers such as Descartes who discovered the Thinking I (ego cogito) as the source of all certainty, but it is true also in many other respects. To be sure, our selfperception as moral agents may be inflated and illusory, as Marxist critics of Western spirituality have it, but this does not make the notion of a centrality of the self less powerful and a less widely accepted presupposition.

Rousseau, Goethe, and others have taught us that the modern preoccupation with the self is a double-edged sword, one that is all the more potentially self-destructive for its powerfully seductive and self-flattering qualities. In the following, I consider the modern self’s infatuation with itself in light of two competing metaphors, that of sacred place and that of sacred space. Sacred place is a common notion in the study of religion and usually applies to the phenomenon of the location of the sacred or divine in space. Sacred place signals an immediately accessible and hence quite atavistic experience of the divine. The identity of a place is purely extraneous and hence more easily remembered and less abstract than the identity of a time. “It was here, that …” or “Here is where …” can be pointed to and it impresses itself on those who did not themselves witness the theophany but who are taught to associate its telling with the place, associating the ephemeral word with the immovable object, the outcropping in the rock, the towering terebinth, the mountain peak. The sacred may linger in any place that arouses our curiosity, attracts our attention, or frightens us.

Sacred place may interact with sacred time when rituals are involved but this is not necessary for the experience of a place as sacred. Sacred place precedes sacred time. The difference between here and there is prior to the difference between now and then, although they may also simply reside in, or preside over, different spheres of consciousness. The primal discovery that here is unlike there and that this here is different from all others (to the extent that a conception of “all” is at all necessary to form the impression of difference), may live on in our sense of home, of being housed instead of homeless, oriented rather than disoriented, rooted rather than rootless. Place and home, i.e., the sense of a special place, correlate with the circularity of the seasons, with the repetition and sameness of time. But here we seem to transition to something that is better named sacred space. Sacred space, in contrast to sacred place, indicates freedom, empowerment, domination, and room to move. It is not limited to experiences associated with a sedentary lifestyle. One can imagine hunters and gatherers returning to the same cave again and again for ritual purposes or shelter. But space can also describe the boundaries and range required by the migration of herds for pasture. The ancient city represents both, sacred space and sacred place, namely, protected space and divine presence, in that it is understood as the residence of the deity on whose power depends the regularity of the seasons and hence the fertility of the land and the fecundity of the herd.

To be sure, with the exception of certain rugged individuals and the stars ruling the heavens of politics and commercial entertainment, most of us don’t show any trace of similarity with extraordinary places that might qualify as theophantic loci. But the sacred place represents the source of sustenance and the ability to represent it depends on the expectations held by those who approach it and the efficacy with which it is able to fulfill these expectations. What if the self has turned into a place that is approached by others with expectations that are analogous in some important ways to those with which one traditionally approached a shrine, an altar, or a holy city?

In the Middle Ages, geocentric cosmology, neo-Platonic ontology, and belief in divine providence contributed to a richly symbolic and largely unified view of life. God was at the top of a hierarchy of beings; the heavenly bodies mediated the divine influence to the sublunar sphere; just as God ruled the eternal motion of the stars, king and pope ruled society, and all were held accountable. The charme of this worldview consisted in the notion that the earth as a whole was the center of the universe (and hence of divine attention), that the Holy City (Jerusalem) was the center of the habitable earth, and that the shadowy material world was more than just the often dismal conditions of life, namely, the microcosmic mirror of the underlying imperturbable and eternal order of things. The dignity of human life was grounded in its relation to the transcendent source of life rather than immanent in nature. This changed with the shift from a geocentric to a Copernican view of the universe. Modern science initially retained many of the intuitions and assumptions of neo-Platonic ontology, most importantly the notion of the unity of the cosmic order, the uniformity of laws of nature governing all natural phenomena. The only exception to this rule that science had to allow for, at least from a Kantian perspective, was the lawgiving capacity of reason itself. This allowed Kant to retain a sufficient foothold for the idea of freedom. The divine spark did not need to be abandoned or denied altogether but it had to be relocated from the place assigned to it by the worldview of myth to the place assigned to it by the worldview of critical philosophy. Without a physical center, the location of the divine source of life was compelled to move to the only place that remained open to the idea of freedom, i.e., the human spirit. But even from a non-Kantian and more utilitarian perspective, the source of life shifts from divine providence to the enterprising spirit of man. Thus, perhaps inevitably due to the collapse and displacement of the medieval worldview, the enterprising or entrepreneurial individual, the modern Faustian man or homo faber, moves to the center.

It is this centrality of the self in modern life that suggests that the self may have come to stand in for functions formerly exerted by sacred place. The new “Cloverleaf-Map,” one might argue, would be something like a “Google-Earth,” with “my maps” linked to the place of the self as its central location. Personal computing, flextime, and connectivity have dismantled the traditional notion of a work place, and the separation between between home and work (and even the commute that used to separate them temporally and spatially) has been replaced by the unified home-office. Where commute still happens, it has become just another purely extraneous and tangential element in the ubiquitous performance of work by means of wireless phones and blackberries. With the conditions of work being available anytime and everywhere, the self has become the mobile location and pure source of productivity. The only remaining location that truly matters is the self in its presence to itself that is now challenged to transform itself into a readily available presence to its others. The expectation of others is that the self be available to their demands, just like the deity is available at a sacred place either from far away (through prayer) or up close (through pilgrimage). The arrows pointing to the self as a hub of productivity and communication threaten to eradicate all privacy not just because of the expectations of others but also and perhaps primarily because the attention and constant demand exerted by potentially profound bits of information (e.g., emails or sms from family, friends, and colleagues, market updates) constitute a potent source of a radically individualized form of entertainment and the perpetual sustenance of a feeling of self-importance and meaning (“you’ve got mail!”). The intensity of productivity or its simulacrum, the availability and technologically stimulated activity, is the measure of selfhood and hence of one’s actuality. The virtual character of this type of actualization has, of course, long since been noticed, just as the increasing difficulty to distinguish between the virtual and the actual has been widely exploited not just in the entertainment but also in the service industry (think offshore call centers).

The self as the locus of freedom turns into the self as the focus of productivity. This comes with the loss of privacy and hence, paradoxically, with the destruction of the freedom on which productivity depends. It is as if the Faustian bargain of perpetual engagement has subverted freedom into its opposite: a complete sell-out of the room to move that is implicit in the modern notion of the self. What suggests itself as an antidote and a representation of an alternative is what above appeared as the correlate of the nomadic conditions of life, namely, attention to space rather than place. The self is drowned and extinguished when it is forced to function as a sacred place but it may be liberated and restored when construed in the sense of a sacred space. The irony of this reversal is that it suggests the substitution of an image of emptiness and abstraction for an image of engagement and fulfillment. Sacred space, somewhat reminiscent of Rousseau’s notion of nature in its opposition to the business and traffic of civil society, suggests a limit or boundary: up to here and no further! To be sure, the modern self will still be haunted by the paradox that the self remains at its center: hic Rhodus, hic salta! but it cannot fulfill the role assigned to it in the post-Copernican world unless it regains a sense of space that allows the self to reconstitute itself.

Traditional sacred place, the obligation to turn in a certain direction for prayer, the commandment of pilgrimage—although excentric from the perspective of modern assumptions about freedom and autonomy, these forms of theocentric spatial orientation remain available to us and have become a source of fascination for those in need of restoring a sense of sacred space. The most attractive destiny of pilgrimage for the alienated modern Western self has been the East, esp. the ashram. The ashram is attractive because it provides relief from the pressures of self-determination. The very goal of Buddhist meditation is the overcoming of the self and hence of the sickness of post-medieval Western man. While pilgrimage to Jerusalem may serve to some as a welcome source of spiritual reorientation, it seems to me that meditation, prayer, and yoga, as the more readily available sources of spirituality and of making space for the individual, have eclipsed the Holy City as a destiny of pilgrimage. The centrality of the self to modern man remains unchallenged. Can this modern self, this location of productivity that considers itself the location of divine freedom and creativity and that is in dire need of space to recover its anonymity in order to regain a sense of the preposterousness of the burden it carries, can this modern self be aided by a visit to the Holy City or will it be condemned to remain—a mere tourist? Even if one were willing to accept the hardships and self-deprivation required by a traditional pilgrimage, the modern city hardly requires it. It is also highly doubtful whether, to its modern visitors, the spiritual meanings of Jerusalem are able to penetrate the thick fog of political meanings the city has acquired over the past ninety years. Most importantly, however, not even as charming and complex a city as Jerusalem can disrupt the sense that the sacred is either in ourselves, or it is nowhere.

The Holy City as a Scriptural Fantasy

2009-04-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem is over 3,800 years old. The name appears in Egyptian execration texts, bowls or figurines with the names of enemies to be smashed in rites of sympathetic magic by priests concerned with protecting Egypt from encroachments from its northeastern borders. At just about the same time, which archeologists refer to as the Middle Bronze Age, we have evidence of monumental fortifications and a tower near the only source of perennial water that was the reason why someone built this city in the first place, on a narrow ridge, surrounded on three sides by steep valleys, in the southern central hill country of what the Egyptians called “the land of the retenu,” what the Bible calls the Land of Canaan, what since Roman times has been known as Palaestina or Palestine, and what Muslims, Jews, and Christians refer to as the Holy Land.

Uru-shalimum or Urusalim, meaning “Founded by Salem” or the evening star, is neither one of the world’s most ancient cities, such as Jericho (which goes back about 10,000 years), nor one that served as administrative center of a great empire, such as Babylon, Nineveh, Persepolis, or Rome; in fact it was repeatedly conquered or subjugated by competing civilizations, either because it was on their path to more desirable prizes or because its residents refused to pay tribute. It was twice completely destroyed, once by the Chaldeans or neo-Babylonians, and once by the Romans. In its place, the Romans built a military colony, which they called Aelia Capitolina, in honor of Hadrian. This should have been the end of Jerusalem. In the event, it was not Jewish irredentism but a curious turn within Roman civilization itself that led to the revival or, one might say, to the resurrection of the city in the 4th century CE.

I have been working on the history of Jerusalem as a symbol of the western Scriptural monotheisms. No city has been more thoroughly excavated and probably no city has attracted more attention from pilgrims, tourists, and scholars. Few other places stimulate similar competing popular sentiments. The question I am trying to answer is why we—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—care about the city the way we do. The answer, I believe, has to do with Scripture. Without Scripture, the Christian movement would have attached no significance to an erstwhile Jewish royal or temple city; without Christian attention to the complex meanings of the city in Scripture, Jerusalem would not have been excavated by Empress Helena; without Constantine and his successors and their attention to the symbolic value of Jerusalem, Umayyad Caliph Abd Al Malik would not have chosen this mainstay of Christian Orthodoxy as the location of the first monumental building in the long and thenceforth distinguished history of Islamic architecture; without the scripturally motivated desire for reconquest stoked by Urban II, Jerusalem would not have been taken by the half-starving, half-frenzied Frankish knights in the bloodbath of the First Crusade; without the model of the Crusading Franks as their enemy and Jerusalem as their prize, the much divided Sunnis of Syria would not have united behind a jihad for the Holy City, accomplished by Salah-al-din; Suleiman the Magnificent, the new King Solomon, rebuilt the walls of Al Quds and invited Jews to settle in his realm because he, too, saw himself as the prince of peace and the manifestation of a scriptural order; without their Protestant Biblicism, the British would not have made Jerusalem the administrative capital of mandatory Palestine, drawn up along scriptural boundaries; and without its eschatological undertones, Israel’s capture of the Old City of Jerusalem and the “Temple Mount” in 1967 would not have turned into the ticking clock of an endtime scenario popularized by Jewish mystics and their Evangelical allies alike.

Scripture depicts what archeology tells us was a modest Iron Age hill fortress as the glorious capital of a “united kingdom” under David and Solomon; it is this kind of fantasy that has made Jerusalem the stumbling block for the nations that it is today. To be sure, Scripture is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Jerusalem to rank centrally in the political design of communities, nations, and empires. Things are not that simple. What a Scripture is, how Scripture and politics interact, and how Jerusalem played into Jewish, Christian and Muslim imagination across the ages cannot be stated in a few words.

What is immediately clear however is that it may be necessary to understand the role of Scripture not only in the making of traditional attitudes toward the Holy City but of the role these attitudes, or fantasies, in the making of the modern political conflict.

What is astounding to those of us who came of age in the 1970s in an environment where it was taken for granted that religion was merely the vestige of the reactionary capitalism of the conservative 1950s, is that religion has returned to the front and center of national and international conflict across the globe. There is a growing realization that we must get used to the staying power of religious commitments. I venture to say that our liberal teachers failed to prepare us for this fundamentalist resurgence. We must therefore try to figure out ourselves, what gives religion this staying power and how to deal with the onslaught of the political theologies of the day.

When the Romans destroyed the Herodian temple of Jerusalem and eventually banished the Jews from living in its vicinity, they underestimated the power of memory and of a type of religion based on a major institution of memory that was both detached from city and temple and yet preserved the memory of city and temple across time and space. This institution is Scripture. It is the Jerusalem of Scripture, of the biblical writings preserved, studied, annotated, interpreted, and perpetuated by Jewish and Christian groups, that allowed the memory of the earlier Jerusalem not only to remain alive but to grow into the focus of intense apocalyptic expectations: Jews, Christians, and Muslims share the belief that Jerusalem is to be the location where the creator-god is to end the rule of injustice and establish a final dispensation, the reign of God on earth, accompanied by the resurrection of the dead, the punishment of the wicked, and the reward of the righteous. In this Scriptural fantasy, Jerusalem is the symbolic center of the earth, the location of divine rather than merely human judgment. This alone suffices to explain that any political compromise, any pluralistic and inclusive arrangement, and any sharing of souvereignty over the Holy City goes against the grain of the increasingly uncompromising fundamentalist factions among all three religious communities.

Seduced by Scripture, the Roman Empire itself was too weak to stem the tide of this powerful belief and in fact enhanced it by lending it the power and representation of the state. The transformation of Rome into Byzantion signifies the beginning of a political world dominated by Scriptural fantasies in which Jerusalem figures prominently as a kind of “exhibit A,” providing tangible evidence of divine providence.

Jerusalem would long since have been forgotten had it not been resurrected by the Roman Empire, which was the first in a succession of major political powers to utilize the remnants of a more ancient Jerusalem to create a shrine, a center of pilgrimage and worship, and a symbolic center of the earth that Rome itself no longer plausibly provided for the citizens of an empire largely centered in the east. If we understand this moment, when this earlier Jerusalem was excavated, if we understand the powers released by this resurrection of ancient Jerusalem, then, I believe, we understand what is going on in the Middle East today, where excavation of the biblical past has been the tool du jour for those staking a claim to legitimate ownership and justified rule.

Scripture provides the basis for shared assumptions that provide mechanisms of both inclusion and exclusion. Scripture provides sources of history grounded in divine volition and prophetic revelation. For moderns, Scripture provides a strong counter-model to nature as the ground of equality; it is used to establish and sharpen communal and national differences. In a post-secular world, which has seen a decline of classically modern political ideologies and utopias, Scripture has reemerged as a source of identity and orientation. Let me call this phenomenon the “re-religionization” (Moshe Zimmermann) of theo-politics by means of Scriptural fantasies.

My goal is to tell the story of this city in a way that does not already presuppose the valuations drawn from its Scriptural configurations. As historians, we aim to retrieve the openness of every historical moment. This is an elusive, fragile goal, because we always already presuppose the historical sources that were shaped by its outcome. Thus, any study focusing on Jerusalem is configured by the focus on Jerusalem that we inherit from our Scriptural traditions. Even the most seemingly neutral study of the ancient world of the southern Levant is therefore always fraught with predispositions, partisanships, distortions, polemics, and apolegetics.

My goal is not that of biblical history or archeology. Rather I am interested in identifying and understanding our received narratives for what they are, namely, imperatives formulated for the present or future of their authors in light of their historical experience. This implies partisanship rather than objectivity and interest rather than disinterest (the elusive goal of the modern historiographer). While this is true of every history based on existing historiography, in this case we are also dealing with the canonical or sacred history of the scriptural traditions (texts, interpretations, institutions) that received this ancient body of texts in a particular manner, formed in light of particular historical experiences and present interests that are in many way discontinuous with those of its predecessors and hence employ well-honed strategies (such as figurative interpretation; paraphrastic renarration; augmentation; etc.) that serve the goal of obfuscating difference.

Jerusalem’s late ancient resurrection and refashioning into a commemorative shrine to the truth of divine providence reveals something about how, and why, the symbols of monotheism work, and why they exert such a lasting influence on a large segment of the world’s population.

When I set out to write a book on Jerusalem, I did not anticipate the degree to which my work was to consist in deconstruction or, to use a less odious term, deflation.

I realized only gradually that the goal of my work is to engage the tacit assumptions and unquestioned presuppositions that guide not just policy makers but every ordinary Christian, Jew, and Muslim, and that make it so difficult for all of us to think afresh the question of the future of the Holy City.

Tacit assumptions work in the most extraordinary ways. This is true whether they’re consciously exploited or simply exert their influence as shared assumptions around which political and religious consensus crystallizes.

I approach the Holy City as a secularist, a skeptic, and a scholar of religion. As a secularist, I look at the religious attitudes people bring to the city of Jerusalem and I ask myself, why is it these people care about it the way they do. The object of my study, therefore, is not the city as such but the attitudes people bring to it and that make it what it is—to them. As a skeptic, I proceed from the assumption that we have no knowledge of essences, of things in themselves, such as God, for example. What we can have knowledge of must be the object of possible experience, as Kant might say. As a scholar of religion, I look at religious attitudes, and make them the subject of my study, trying if not to explain, then at least to understand what they are, where they come from, and, if possible, how they work.

There is an obvious utility to this approach in the case of a hotly contested site as Jerusalem, where religious and national sentiments are mixed in many ways and where disentangling the religious from the secular may be very much in order. In this context I find it extremely difficult to swallow really just one attitude, and that is the attitude of deference many well-meaning secularists and confessing unbelievers bring to the religious attitudes of others. Unbelievers often don’t consider themselves competent to judge believers. This is particularly dangerous in divided societies, and modern societies are generally divided rather than homogeneous in this respect, that is societies are divided between secular and religious, unbelievers and believers, but generally the argument of the believers is louder and more vigorous and presented with the tone of conviction, and hence commonly carries the day. As someone subscribing to the agenda of the Enlightenment I tend to believe that it matters to strengthen the voice of reason, i.e., the voice of skepticism, caution, moderation, and compromise. In this sense, I am not objective. I take a stand, in the classroom and in my writing on Jerusalem, in favor of reasonable compromise. The purpose of my entire teaching and writing on religion is to find a way of identifying the causes and the uses of radical belief, a belief I find equally dangerous among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It is the self-righteousness and smugness of belief that bothers me, and, in the case of Jerusalem it is the political exploitation of belief that bothers me.

Does this approach lend itself to a resolution of the modern political conflict?
Radical solutions, such as flattening Jerusalem or banishing Scripture may be desirable but they may not be attainable. But we may be able to at least deflate some of the common assumptions by which religious claims acquire a degree of plausibility that can be exploited to evoke spontaneous assent even among basically secular or religiously moderate people. In other words, my hope is that by retelling the story of Jerusalem, I will make believers into skeptics, or at least sufficiently rattle the unacknowledged presuppositions of the moderates so as to persuade them that it might be alright to withhold one’s assent to the schemes of one’s more radical peers.

2009-04-01T04:21:00.000-07:00

The Jerusalem-blog is a place to consider why Jews, Christians, and Muslims consider the city holy, and what can be done about it.

I don't advocate radical solutions. To the contrary, the goal of this blog is to provide mental and verbal space for the advancement of moderation and compromise.

Here are some more radical solutions that I've considered in the past but that I don't believe are practical.

1) Hand the city over to FIFA, play soccer turnaments every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Anyone who does not like it should move to Damascus or Tel Aviv.

2) Flatten the city. (The Romans tried, but didn't have the necessary foresight to do a thorough job.)

3) Eliminate all holy scriptures so as to cause believers to forget why they raise such a fuss about the city. (Book burnings have been tried by the Catholics and the Nazis. This also isn't very practical or successul at erasing every possible memory, other than in science fiction.)

I am inviting everyone to post alternate solutions to the Jerusalem problem, which I venture to predict is about to make headlines again, now that Binyamin Netanyahu is back in charge.

Cheers-
Michael Zank

Michael Zank is professor of religion at Boston University where he teaches classes in Judaic Studies, western religion (Bible, Moses, Jerusalem), and the philosophical critique of religion. He holds a graduate degree in Protestant Theology and a doctorate in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies (Brandeis University 1994) and is currently writing a book on why we-Jews, Christians, and Muslims-care about Jerusalem.