From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  The distinguished Israeli writer Amos Elon echoed some of Giva's concerns in a long article on politics and archaeology in the New York Review of Books. Elon argued that the worst abuses took place in the early years of the Jewish state: 'In the ethnocentric atmosphere of these early years there was a rush to identify Jewish sites, an overemphasis on digging them up, and a tendency to expose to public view the Jewish strata of a site even where other layers may have been historically or artistically more significant or revealing. The task of archaeology was to prove a point about Jews in the Holy Land and not always as it probably should have been, to explore material remains in order to determine the circumstances of ancient cultures and civilisations in a country where they have been so varied and so many.'

  Other liberal Israelis have attacked the way the history of the region is presented to tourists. The former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvinisti, himself a respected historian of the Crusader period, has attacked the bias in the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem, the principal museum of the Old City. 'After the Israelite period,' commented Benvinisti, 'the written text informs us that the city was occupied by foreigners. Describing them as foreigners emphasises the exclusiv-ist character of the museum's perspective - only the Israeli-Jewish claim to the city is granted legitimacy. In fact the Israelite period only lasted six hundred years, but all the periods which followed it are represented as a chain of occupations - Persian, Byzantine, Mameluke, Ottoman and British.' Moreover, Benvinisti pointed out that the word 'Arab' does not appear even once in a vast display covering maybe thirty rooms, while the only Arabic name mentioned in the entire complex is that of the conqueror, the Caliph Omar. 'Distorted history is being presented,' he concludes. 'The victor's version of history.'

  The archaeologist I most wanted to meet to discuss all this with was Fr. Michele Piccirillo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. Piccirillo is an Italian Franciscan who has lived in Jerusalem since 1960 and who since then has single-handedly rediscovered much of the monastic world described in The Spiritual Meadow. In a series of remarkable excavations, he uncovered many previously unknown Byzantine monasteries, chapels, churches and villas dating mainly from the sixth to the eighth century, and in the process brought to light a breathtaking treasury of late antique floor mosaics, including some of the finest mosaic work ever discovered in the Levant. I had seen some of them as I passed through Jordan on my way to Israel, for the finest set of all lies around Madaba and Mount Nebo, immediately above the Allenby Bridge, the frontier post leading into the West Bank. There is little of the ascetic spirit that is visible in Walid Jumblatt's mosaics from

  Porphyreon. Instead Piccirillo's mosaics are animated by a remarkable classical joie de vivre that hints at a revival of Hellenistic taste - if not a wholesale classical renaissance - in the period immediately after Justinian: leopards chase stags through swirls of acanthus; personifications of the seasons sit enthroned with crown and sceptre, looking on as shepherds process through scrolls of vine branches; satyrs with flutes lead a Bacchic procession while cupids swoop above the orange trees.

  But the importance of these new discoveries goes beyond mere aesthetics and art history. Perhaps their most unexpected aspect is the astonishing degree of continuity they reveal. According to Piccirillo, the Arab conquest of the seventh century is archaeologically invisible: the rulers changed, but life went on exactly as before. Indeed much of the finest 'Byzantine' work he has dug up dates from the period immediately after the Arab Conquest, when order was better kept, trade was flourishing and the area was released from the crippling taxes imposed by the Byzantine exchequer. 'The archaeologist who searches for a break between the pre- and post-Muslim conquest searches in vain,' wrote Piccirillo in The Mosaics of Jordan, the book which sums up his life's work. 'Archaeology demonstrates an uninterrupted continuity between the two periods.'

  There are reasons for this. Just as Angle and Saxon mercenaries were drafted into Western Europe to defend Rome's northern borders before the barbarian invasions that brought down the western half of the Roman Empire, so Christian Arab tribes were drafted in by Byzantine rulers to defend the eastern frontiers several centuries before Mohammed. Justinian, for example, had an alliance with two of the Christian Arab tribes: the Banu Ghassan and the Banu Taghlib, both of whom he settled within the boundaries of the Christian Empire. By the time of the Arab conquests, therefore, Arabs already made up a significant minority within the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire.

  Piccirillo's work has, however, implied that the Arab infiltration of Palestine must have been even more gradual than had previously been recognised; so slow, in fact, that the conquest seems to have brought little immediate change in the racial composition of the inhabitants of the country. After the conquest, the local population soon adopted the Arabic tongue and over the centuries many converted to Islam, but the conquerors' armies were not large and initially provided little more than a military caste superimposed on the existing population. There was no wholesale exchange of population. The Palestinians we see today - and especially the Palestinian Christians - are therefore likely to be the descendants of roughly the same mix of peoples Moschos saw on his travels through this region in the seventh century: an ethnically diverse blend of the many races that have passed through this area since the earliest periods of prehistory.

  Piccirillo's evidence is very important, for official Israeli histories still paint a picture of pillaging nomad conquerors sweeping in from the desert, massacring or wiping out the indigenous peoples and leaving the area a depopulated desert - until the birth of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that no serious historian, in Israel or elsewhere, would even begin to try to defend such a crude distortion of Palestine's medieval history, this version still possesses a curious half-life in government propaganda. Facts About Israel, for example, is an information book produced by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs which is prefaced by a fifteen-page account of 'the history of the Land of Israel'. Here, following an extremely detailed account of the Biblical Israelite kingdoms, fourteen hundred years of the region's Islamic history is written off in a small section entitled 'Arabs in the Land of Israel':

  Arab migration in and out of the country started at the time of the Arab conquest of the Land in the seventh century, fluctuating thereafter with economic growth and decline ... Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when increased Jewish development stimulated economic and social revival in the Land, many Arabs from surrounding countries were attracted to the area by its employment opportunities, higher wages and better living conditions.

  I rang Piccirillo and arranged to come around for tea that afternoon. We sat in his small cell in the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum and talked for a long time about his work.

  'All the sites I have excavated,' he said, 'call into serious question the old view that the Arab invasions resulted in the destruction of Christian buildings, that the Arabs persecuted the Christians and prohibited the building of new churches. The sheer number of Christian mosaics dating from the Umayyad period constitutes very strong evidence not only for the continuity of the Christian presence but also for the tolerance of the new Islamic rulers.'

  I asked him about the accusations I had heard of bias in the Israeli archaeological establishment. He was quite clear in his response. Whatever the situation in the early years of the state, he said, current Israeli archaeological methods were thoroughly professional. In his opinion the historical sites of Israel were excavated impartially, without regard to religion. But he was equally adamant about the serious disparity in the presentation of those finds.

  'The conservation of Christian remains is systematically less good than the treatment accorded to Jewish remains,' he said. 'Of course conservation is a problem everywhere. But here, where it so easily becomes a political issue, the Israelis should be doubly careful. The fact is that the Holy Land has many communities. Each has its rights, and if a state wants respect
it should respect others.'

  'How does this neglect show itself?' I asked.

  'Synagogues they look after beautifully,' said Piccirillo. 'They cover them with shelters and stop people standing on the mosaics. But newly excavated churches or monasteries they can quite easily rebury, as they did with those outside the Damascus Gate. They would never dream of doing that to a synagogue, and the religious establishment would never let them. With Christian buildings, if they don't bulldoze them, they leave them just as they find them. In Jordan every single mosaic I have excavated is now under specially built shelters, even in specially built museums. But there are churches with good mosaics open to the air all over Israel.'

  'Does that matter?' I asked.

  'It matters very much. If these Christian sites are not guarded they can get attacked.'

  Only a few days before there had been a report in the Jerusalem Post of an assault on an unguarded Byzantine church at Mamshit, near the Israeli nuclear facilities at Dimona. The vandals, suspected haredim, pulled apart colourful mosaics and shattered columns that held up the church's ceiling,' read the report, which said the incident was one of a series over the previous fortnight which had included the vandalising of another Byzantine church at Sussita on the Golan Heights. The haredim who were apparently responsible were said to be against archaeological excavations in general, and so were not setting out specifically to target Christian sites; nevertheless, Christian sites did figure on their hit lists.

  'But you see,' continued Piccirillo, 'it's not just a matter of protecting from vandals. A mosaic ...' He broke off and searched for words: 'A mosaic which is not looked after is like a rosary whose string is cut. Once one or two tesserae have gone, the whole mosaic falls apart. In a short time everything - everything - is lost.'

  Jerusalem,14 November

  One of the most depressing aspects of Israel and the West Bank is the degree of separation between the two peoples who share the Holy Land. Israelis employ Palestinian labour to do the jobs too badly paid, too dirty or too boring to attract their own compatriots. Palestinians work on production lines, clean the streets, wash the dishes. But beyond that there is no contact and few friendships. There are no mixed dinner parties; intermarriage is virtually unknown. The few places where Palestinians and Israelis meet side by side on equal terms - such as in prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron - are famous for their tensions rather than for playing any part in bringing together the two mutually antagonistic peoples. The divide appears to be too deep to be bridged.

  All this is in stark contrast to the situation during the early Ottoman period, when Palestine, like everywhere else in the Middle East, saw a degree of religious interaction unimaginable today. In Syria I saw that cooperation still surviving in Cyrrhus and Seidnaya, and I was interested to find out if anything of the sort had survived in the Holy Land, if there was anywhere where shrines were places of interaction between the two communities, rather than battlegrounds.

  In the Ecole Biblique I had found a book by J.E. Hanauer published in 1907 entitled Folklore of the Holy Land: Muslim, Christian and Jewish. It mentioned a shrine in the village of Beit Jala, beside Bethlehem, which at the time was frequented by all three of Palestine's religious communities. Christians regarded it as the birthplace of St George, Jews as the burial place of the Prophet Elias, Muslims as the home of the legendary saint of fertility known simply as Khidr, Arabic for green. According to Hanauer, in his day the monastery was 'a sort of madhouse. Deranged persons of all the three faiths are taken thither and chained in the court of the chapel, where they are kept for forty days on bread and water, the Greek priest at the head of the establishment now and then reading the Gospel over them, or administering a whipping as the case demands.' In the 1920s, according to Taufiq Canaan's Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine, nothing seemed to have changed, and all three communities were still visiting the shrine and praying together. What, I wondered, happened now?

  I asked around in the Christian Quarter in Jerusalem, and discovered that the place was very much alive. With all the greatest shrines in the Christian world to choose from, it seemed that when the local Arab Christians had a problem - an illness, or something more complicated: a husband detained in an Israeli prison camp, for example - they preferred to seek the intercession of St George in his grubby little shrine at Beit Jala rather than praying at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. But what of Muslims and Jews? Did they still attend? Beit Jala lay a short distance from Jerusalem, so I drove over to try to find out. By pure good fortune I happened to arrive at the same time as the shrine's Greek Orthodox custodian.

  Fr. Methodius - grey-bearded, blue-robed, with a small black chimneypot hat - slammed the door of his Subaru station wagon and locked it with a click of the remote-control bleeper. Then he looked over to the door of his church, and frowned.

  There, waiting patiently by the door of the Church of St George, were two Muslim women in white headscarves. One was holding a fine damask veil, the other a small rectangular prayer mat. To one side stood three unshaven Palestinian labourers, each grasping a lead. On the end of each lead was a small, bow-legged, rather scraggy-looking sheep. Fr. Methodius took the gifts from the women with a peremptory nod, and handed the sheep over to the doorkeeper - an ancient hunchbacked Arab in a dirty keffiyeh -who led them away to a shed by the monastery gate.

  'I'm afraid I won't have time to sacrifice these sheep until Monday,' said Fr. Methodius to the labourers, a little curtly. 'Come back at four if you want to collect the blood.'

  The labourers shuffled off backwards towards the road, bowing gratefully, like schoolboys thankful to be dismissed from the headmaster's study. Methodius signalled to me to follow him into the church, and pointedly closed the door behind us.

  'Look at this!' he said, holding the prayer mat at arm's length, as if it might somehow infect him. 'It's got a picture of Mecca embroidered on it! You tell me: what can we do with it? And this veil? What's the price of this? Ten shekels? Never mind. Those sheep: that's something.'

  'Do you get many Muslims coming here?' I asked.

  'Many? We get hundreds! Almost as many as the Christian pilgrims. Often when I come in here I find Muslims all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down' - he made a rocking gesture with his hand - 'bottoms in the air, prayer mats on the floor: yes - in an Orthodox church!'

  He snorted into his beard. 'You see, like us they believe this church marks the site of St George's birthplace. And St George is a great saint for them also.'

  'And Jews?' I asked. 'Do they come and pray here too?'

  'In the old days the Palestinian Jews would come,' replied Fr. Methodius. 'But modern Israelis would never come to such a shrine.'

  He led me up to an icon hanging from a pillar in the nave. Beneath the sepia smudge of smoke stains and the clustering silver-work I could just make out the familiar classical face: the young Byzantine cavalryman with his golden breastplate and spear, mounted high upon a white charger.

  'All the Arabs - Christian and Muslim alike - call him "Khidr" - the Green One. The Palestinians think St George can help give women babies or bring good crops to their fields or healthy lambs to their sheep. And if they get what they want, then they all come back again and give me these ...' he stuttered as he searched for the word: '... these ... these ... rugs.'

  'Or a sheep.'

  'Yes; that's better. But of course I get to keep only a very small portion. The rest goes to the poor, while the donor takes the blood and smears it on his doorpost. That's the tradition.'

  'It sounds very pagan.'

  'It may well be,' said Fr. Methodius, his face puckering into a frown.

  It was all very curious: Orthodox priests merrily slaughtering sheep, and doing so in homage to St George. Not the way, perhaps, that the Knights of the Garter might expect their patron saint to be venerated. After all, the English have always liked to believe that they have something of a monopoly on St George
. If the Victorians had no qualms about proclaiming that God was an Englishman, then few had any doubts at all about claiming for England the country's own patron saint. What English schoolboy did not know the battlecry 'God for Harry, England, and St George'? Did the saint's body not lie in Windsor Castle? Was not his flag the national banner, the linchpin of the Union Jack?

  However, no one can travel for very long around the Middle East, particularly among the Christian Arabs, without quickly realising that the English are not the only people to claim St George as their own. The English may fondly believe that they have got their patron saint safely stashed away in St George's Chapel in Windsor, but this will come as news to the nine monasteries on Mount Athos, the thirty-five other churches in Greece, the twenty-four churches and monasteries on Crete and the Greek islands, the six churches on Cyprus, the fifteen churches in Egypt, the five churches in Israel and the West Bank, the citadel in Aleppo and the two monasteries in northern Iraq which also claim the honour of possessing part or all of the ubiquitous and clearly many-boned St George.