***
The Temple Mount is today the most contentious issue in a rat’s-nest of contentious issues between Jews and Muslims. For the Jews it is the holiest of sites, really the holy of holies, the very site of those two Temples. For the Muslims it is the third holiest site, up there but not the big one. Muslims believe that the rock was taken from the Garden of Eden and that the indentation in it was caused when Mohammed’s foot touched it while on his way up to heaven. The attendant indentations are caused by the angel Gabriel holding the rock back44. One day, Resurrection Day in fact, the rock will be untied with the Ka’bah in Mecca. (Christian pilgrims during the crusader era saw Jesus’ footprint in the same indentation, also left while en route to heaven.)
The nastier Jews are very dismissive of Muslim claims to the site being holy on the grounds of unlikelihood: as if the whole story of Mohammed’s footprint could possibly be true! Unlikely, it has to be said.
It is too easy for the secular to poke fun at the literal interpreters. The latter can own slaves, but only if they buy them in neighboring countries (Leviticus 25:44); they can sell their daughters (Exodus 21:7); but they must refrain from homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22); they cannot worship if they have a sight defect (Leviticus 21:20); cannot have contact with a woman while she is in her period (Leviticus 14:19-24); cannot work on the Sabbath, on pain of death (Exodus 35:2); cannot plant two crops in the same field (Leviticus
19:19); cannot eat shellfish (Leviticus 11:10); cannot touch dead pig-skin - so no basketball or soccer (Leviticus 11:6-8); cannot curse, on pain of stoning to death by the whole village (Leviticus 24:10-16); cannot sleep with their in-laws, or be burnt to death (Leviticus 20:14); cannot have a haircut around the temples (Leviticus 19:27).
***
Our own experience of visiting the Temple Mount is instructive of the mess that is the Holy Land today. Saed is a Palestinian Christian but looks identical to the far more numerous Palestinian Muslims. The guides know their way around Jerusalem but even he doesn’t know which access points the Israelis are going to allow into the Temple Mount area today. There are supposed to be three possible ways in but, like checkpoints in the West Bank, they change and open and shut for no obvious reason - although the reason is always “security”. The idea is to discourage visitors from seeing the Temple Mount and I have to say that if I was not writing this book... after the third entrance is blocked by heavily armed Israeli police I would have quit too.
Saed makes a phone call. Word has obviously spread around the Ferguson Telegraph and a sizeable group is re-assembling back at the first gate we tried. It is now just before 1.30 p.m. when the gate reopens after lunch. Saed says the Israelis have taken down the shade and it is as hot and enervating as we wait there as it has been for the last hour traipsing around the Old City’s back alleys trying to find a way in. Beside us a large sign says, “According to Torah Law entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due the Holiness of the Site. By order of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.”
At 1.40 p.m. the gate opens and in we all go. We are near the rear and see the Israelis close this access point for the day. I tell Saed, “Now I know what it feels like to be a Palestinian.”
As we enter the Temple Mount more problems lie ahead. The Muslim at the gate has decided to only allow Muslim visitors in today. Why so? He won’t be drawn. There is shouting and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Eventually a compromise is reached. Groups with Muslim guides will be allowed in. Saed quickly sets us up with a fellow Ferguson and we join that small group. The tour is horrible as following us everywhere are angry-looking clerics ensuring we infidel dogs to do not defile their holy ground.
Back on planet earth, over Arabic coffee in the Muslim quarter, I complain to Saed, “This is really stupid. You would think that after all the bloody minded- ness of the Israelis it would be good PR - if nothing else - for the Muslims to say - like Muslims do everywhere except it seems in a mosque: “Welcome!” Show up the Israelis for behaving as they do. Instead of which some imam somewhere has decided to enter a bolshiness competition with the opposition. It’s such bad leadership.”
Saed looks into his coffee and says, “My friend, now you really know what it feels like to be a Palestinian.”
Mark Twain left Jerusalem with the words: “Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.” Today he might say: “Jerusalem is quarrelsome, and ill-at-ease and frantic. I would not desire to live here.” I agree. A visit to the scene of the accident before it happens is always memorable, but get out quick before the brakes fail.
38 I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of truth that there is a future life, and yet I am strongly inclined to expect one. Mark Twain, a Biography
39 Prophesying was the only human art that couldn’t be improved by practice. The International
40 After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. Adam’s Diary
41 If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. At least nowadays, because now we don’t burn him. Following the Equator
42 There are those who scoff at the school boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the school boy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain’t so. Following the Equator
43 I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass. A Salutation from the 19th to the 20th Century, 31 December 1900
44 I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it’s never happened yet. Mark Twain’s Autobiography
8: Bethlehem, then Home
The Excursionists left Jerusalem at 8.00 a.m. on Wednesday 25 September. Their first stop was to visit the Tomb of Lazarus, he of the dead-risen persuasion, in what was the biblical village of Bethany (whose name has been borrowed by dozens of towns and villages, schools and baby girls around the English-speaking world) and is now the teeming Palestinian suburb of al-Eizariya (whose name translates as Place of Lazarus in Arabic).
The way the Wall/Fence twists and turns through East Jerusalem as it scoops up settlements and suburbs and cuts through Palestinian land and villages makes it confusing to know from a distance which town is in Israel and which is in Palestine. Al-Eizariya is clearly visible one and a half miles away in a dip in the concrete as one surveys the view from the Mount of Olives. Unfortunately or not, al-Eizariya happens to be in Palestine and this calls for another fun visit through the Wall/Fence. The only consolation is that our favorite Ferguson, Mr. Farki, will be waiting the other side for us and will guide us from there to Jericho, the Dead Sea and on to Bethlehem.
Media friends have warned us that this is a particularly unpleasant checkpoint as al-Eizariya is rumored to be on the short list, with Ramallah, as the future capital of any Palestinian state - and the Israeli government rumor is that al-Eizariya is riddled with “potential terrorists”. Better by far, the wisdom goes, to travel there on a Jerusalem daytrip tour coach heading to the Lazarus Tomb site and then on to Bethlehem; the travel agency is responsible for making sure no Palestinians sneak on board, and the coaches generally go through the Wall/Fence on the nod. My plan is to get off the bus at al-Eizariya, tell the tour company that we’ll make our own way back, meet up with Mr. Farki and pick up Mark Twain’s trail again all the way to Jaffa. This is indeed the Home Run.
(Actually, and I hope you don’t mind, but for the first and last time
I’m going to deviate from the Excursionists’ route. They left Jerusalem for Bethany, Jericho, the Dead Sea, the Mars Saba monastery and Be
thlehem and then returned to Jerusalem for a second time. After two more days here they then left for Ramla and re-joined the Quaker City at Jaffa. It’s not clear why they detoured to visit Jerusalem again but for me to do so means two more trials through the Wall/Fence, adding several hundred miles to the journey and losing Mr. Farki before strictly necessary. So after Bethlehem I’m going to go directly to Ramla and Jaffa.)
***
As we find every time we move, travel around Jerusalem was considerably quicker in Mark Twain’s day than it is now. He “stopped at the village of Bethany, an hour out from Jerusalem”. Lucky he, what with the traffic and checkpoints before the Wall/Fence and the wait at the Wall/Fence it takes us all morning to reach al-Eizariya. If Twain had better transportation at least I hope to see better housing: “It is fearfully ratty, some houses, mud, 6 ft. square, and others holes in the ground, all windowless.”
“They showed us the Tomb of Lazarus. I had rather live in it than in any house in the town. And they showed us also a large ‘Fountain of Lazarus,’ and in the center of the village the ancient dwelling of Lazarus. Lazarus appears to have been a man of property. The legends of the Sunday Schools do him great injustice; they give one the impression that he was poor. It is because they get him confused with that Lazarus who had no merit but his virtue, and virtue never has been as respectable as money.
“The house of Lazarus is a three-story edifice, of stone masonry, but the accumulated rubbish of ages has buried all of it but the upper story. We took candles and descended to the dismal cell-like chambers where Jesus sat at meat with Martha and Mary, and conversed with them about their brother.
“We could not but look upon these old dingy apartments with a more than common interest.”
***
Sadly the housing is better only in the sense that the concrete will last longer than the mud. Rubble and rubbish abound; we must be back in the West Bank. The tomb itself is standard issue biblical invention - or not. Lazarus may well have lived there, he may well have died there, he may even have been re-born there but, like Mark Twain, one visits the site without much conviction after all the other hoaxes of Christendom. At least it was not discovered by St. Helena, so there is a chance it may be genuine.
What is genuine is my advice not to visit it with a tour group; even more genuine advice is not to visit it at all. Access to the tomb is via a tiny doorway off a busy unshaded street. As you wait - and wait and wait, this is a one at a time job - traffic blares and fumes beside you. Unsightliness abounds. When your turn arrives you have to bend double to enter the stairwell then clamber down two dozen uneven steps. A product liability lawyer would set up shop next door. In the depths there is a tomb, Lazarus’ or an imposter’s, and the smell of dank and damp. If I were Lazarus I would have preferred to remain dead than to come back to this hovel.
I tell the tour coach driver we want to disembark now and make our own way back; I had arranged to reunite with Mr. Farki at the Abber Hotel nearby the Tomb an hour ago. Problem. We are on the crew list. The tour company is responsible for checking us out of Israel and checking us back in. No one-ways. Why not? The driver, an old Palestine hand who looks North African, laughs and shrugs. “Israel! Like to make problems for us.”
A phone call later Mr. Farki arrives and they argue the toss. The bus is now full again, full of tourists on a short temper leash, tourists who left their hotels five hours ago and have so far seen only traffic and checkpoints, concrete ugliness, rubble and rubbish and a dismal tomb. Now there seems to be another delay, this one caused by two of their own. I turn my back squarely to the rumbles and grumbles, like the chap at the front of a long bank queue who is taking more than his fair amount of time. Gillian is somewhere in the shade.
A deal is reached. Mr. Farki will fax a photocopy of our passports to the tour company with a note in Hebrew saying we both have runny tummies and had to go and find a doctor. Must have been something we ate. Mr. Farki, the driver and I shake hands on this unlikely sounding solution. I turn round to wave an apologetic goodbye at the tourists but goodwill time for the whole day out expired three hours ago and I’m met by looks of ice and fire.
“Thanks Mr. Farki. Let’s rewind and start again. I read this place was being considered for the future capital of Palestine.”
“It is.”
“But compared to Ramallah it’s, well, horrible. The Wall/Fence goes right by it. There’s a terrible atmosphere. Even in the tourist coaches people look at you with hatred.”
“Only the Israelis want the capital here, do you know why?”
“Not unless you tell me.”
“Because when the Jordanians were here they responded to the Israelis evicting the Palestinians from Israel by evicting the Christians from here.
There were never many, but enough that the Israelis can say ‘OK, we asked some Muslims to leave, but you did the same to the Christians in al-Eizariya.’
But it will never happen.”
“The capital?”
“Not here, it can only be Ramallah.”
“It’s as grim as we’ve seen. I can’t believe it has a future. Unlike its most famous son. Time to move on.”
“Jericho?”
“Jericho.”
Jerusalem rises 2,500 feet above sea level; Jericho lies 850 feet below sea level. Using all ten fingers and thumbs that means a descent of 3,350 feet. They are only fifteen miles apart. As the Taoists say, “The Journey is the Reward.” It is one of the most dramatic drives one will ever see. There is a fine new road that swerves gently from side to side as it swoops down through the valleys of gigantic dunes. The landscape changes from lunar to Mercurial to Venusian. We have Mr. Farki’s Daewoo Chevrolet’s aircon maxed and the outside temperature is 41°C. It can’t be much less inside.
About half way down to Jericho the road rises and one crests a high dune and the surroundings become barren and aimless as one takes one’s first view of the Dead Sea. A minute later the road drops down past the Sea Level sign.
Even after several rises and falls above and below sea level it still seems spooky to us sailors who spend most of our time bobbing up and down on Neptune’s bounty. Bedouin camps line either side of the road. Pick-up trucks have replaced camels; off-road motor bikes have replaced donkeys45; aluminum cladding has replaced canvas. I don’t suppose it was a bag of laughs back in the romanticized days of David Roberts’ paintings; it looks like hell now. The Bedouin live like nomads without the fun of nomading. Mr. Farki blames the Israelis, but then he would. If he won the lottery he’d suspect an Israeli plot.
When he tells us dismissively that many Arabs are certain that 9/11 was a Jewish plot to discredit the Muslims I have a sneaking feeling one per cent of him suspects it might just be true. To change the subject I read Mr. Farki Mark Twain’s passage from The Innocents Abroad on what we are seeing now:
“We had had a glimpse, from a mountain top, of the Dead Sea, lying like a blue shield in the plain of the Jordan, and now we were marching down a close, flaming, rugged, desolate defile, where no living creature could enjoy life, except, perhaps, a salamander. It was such a dreary, repulsive, horrible solitude! It was the ‘wilderness’ where John preached, with camel’s hair about his loins - raiment enough - but he never could have got his locusts and wild honey here.”
Once the land levels, sprouts of green palms mark small oases. On the smaller hills around are settlements, again highly contentious. There are now twenty-six settlements around this part of the Jordan Valley and like all settlements they blossom and bloom at the expense of everyone else: the Jerusalem Post estimates that 75 per cent of all water resources in the West Bank are used to service them. Especially here, when all around is barren beyond description, the lush verdant hilltop settlements look particularly provocative, deliberatively wasteful; intentionally so, no doubt.
There is a new part of the old city
of Jericho and we go there for lunch and to sit out the early afternoon heat blaze. There is nothing much here. Poor old Jericho has always been impossible to defend, the first town after the desert the invaders reach from the east and the first town the invaders from the mountains reach from the west. But the constant invasions, the last two by Jordan in 1948 and by Israel in 1967, have not wiped Jericho out - far from it, as it claims, along with Damascus, to be the oldest constantly inhabited city of the world. Mark Twain had little to say of it except: “Camped near old square tower (Middle Ages, no doubt) and modern mud Jericho, garrisoned by 12 men, Bedouin war.”
The old square tower is still there, albeit now not in the center, the buildings are shabby and concrete - and this being Palestine are surrounded by rubble and rubbish. But the most interesting part of modern Jericho is the garrison, now itself largely rubble, ankle deep in rubbish, no longer even able to muster a dozen men at arms and only at war - with Israel - as a fantasy. However, there is an interesting modern story to tell and a story to appeal to Mark Twain’s love of decisive action.
A story should have a beginning but in the case of Middle East politics it is hard to pinpoint at which point tit became tat and goes on to become tit again.
But for the sake of brevity let’s start in mid-2001 during the second intifada. A Hamas suicide bomber walked into a luxury Park hotel in Netanya and blew up thirty Israeli guests. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) claimed the glory. In retaliation Mossad assassinated PFLP Secretary- General Abu Ali Mustafa and in retaliation for that the PFLP’s Ahmet Saadat assassinated the Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi - the latter a particularly unpleasant racist and bigot, but not the only one of those in any given Israeli government.
Innocence and War Page 25