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Interior of Holy Seplicar Dome
The Church of the Holy Seplicar was built on top of the place where Jesus is thought to have been crucified - Mount Calvary, a.k.a. Golgatha. It is from here that he is believed to have died and resurrected.Jerusalem
Click here for more photos Introduction The following are my impressions of a short 3-day trip to Jerusalem after having lived in Amman for apx. 8 months. I realize that what follows will not be comforting words for most people, but I hope that you will at least respect my attempt to make sense of this city’s long and complicated history. This is not an attempt in anyway to recruit you to the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis. As you will see, I have serious reservations when anyone bases their claim to land on divine act or prophecy (This includes the doctrine of Manifest Destiny under the influence of which much of my own country was establish. Today, I believe that it continues to express itself in the misguided reliance on American exceptionalism, which I can only hope has been severely undermined by the financial crisis and its subsequent aftershocks.). I would be the first to admit that my impressions about this vast desert of history are perhaps unfairly based upon my observation from one grain of sand, but nonetheless here are my initial impressions for your entertainment.
”Welcome to Israel - Now Drop Your Trousers!” In early March, I
Mike at the Wailing Wall
"Nice cardboard yamaka." took some American friends in the region up on an invitation. They asked that I accompany them on a visit to Jerusalem during a long weekend. While I have always wanted to visit Jerusalem, I was skeptical after having heard multiple horror stories of pushy border officials and its heavily armed population. (Coming from the United States you would think that a heavily armed population would not bother me, but regardless of the US statistics on firearm ownership, I generally don’t see firearms and don’t feel threatened by them when in the U.S.) I can now attest to the validity of both stories through personal experience, but in the following paragraphs I will also attempt to elucidate these myths stripping them of their spectacular nature.
Entering Jerusalem was no small feat. A journey that would normally take about an hour and a half hours from Amman by car, notwithstanding the border procedures, ended up taking 9 hours. That’s roughly the same amount of time that it takes me to travel from Washington, DC to Columbia, South Caroline some 1,000km (600 miles) along the US’s mid-Atlantic coastline. The journey started with a taxi ride to the long distance taxi station
Dome of the Rock
Built in 691, this building was the first major architectural achievement of Islam and served as the inspiration for all Islamic art that came after it. While financed and designed by Muslims, the building was largely built by Christian masons. in northern Amman where after some negotiation I switched taxis and started down the hills of Amman towards the Dead Sea to our final destination at the King Hussein Bridge crossing. The crossing consisted of a few dusty car rental agencies and some small Jordanian governmental huts. After receive divergent messages from a number of suspect individuals lingering around the border crossing area, I finally got a definitive answer from a Jordanian official that assured me that while the Jordanian border remained open the Israeli side was now closed. My only option was to drive another 40km up the Jordanian-Israeli border to the Sheikh Hussein border crossing which remained open until apx. 11P.
The ride to the northern border crossing was uneventful except for the suspect roadworthiness of the taxi and the insistence of its driver to speed headfirst down the left lane of the road towards oncoming traffic before veering the car with one hard jerk of the wheel to the right to avoid near certain tragedy. While I smiled and enjoyed the rollercoaster ride, there was another part of me that was happy to arrive to the second border crossing in one piece.
Crossing the Sheikh
Hussein Bridge on the Jordanian side was a rather lackluster affair. It was a simple matter of paying a small exit fee, getting an exit stamp and then waiting for the bus to pass across the no-man’s land, the bridge, between the two countries. By the time we boarded the bus and made our way over the Sheikh Hussein Bridge and into Israeli territory, the veil of night had fallen and out the left hand side of the bus I could see a short Israeli women dressed in military fatigues searching through the bushes surround the check point with a flash light and a German Shepard half her size. Whether or not she ever found anything or anyone on her rounds around the perimeter is unknown, but it definitely expressed the intended message serious security.
After standing in a line and making it through a metal detector without a problem, I was told to head to a window that was staffed by a happy-go-lucky Israeli youth who was completing her mandatory military services as a border agent. Her demeanor was friendly and she began asking me numerous questions about my travel and family history. While the questions weren’t difficult,
she perked up in her seat when I told her that I had visited Syria last October. But soon enough I had worked myself back into her good graces and before I knew I was leaning over the counter and typing my address for her in the computer.
Next came 2 hours of silence and waiting that was abruptly broken by a older military man asking me for my bags, which he drug back to the x-ray area for a second inspection. This time it was not sufficient to screen the entire suitcase, but instead each article of clothing was individual taken out of the luggage and passed through the metal detector. This included each credit card, piece of underwear, and sock. After they finished with the suitcase, my body became the next subject of interest. I was taken into a 2 person dressing room and in fairly close quarters asked by a young military fellow to slowly remove each article of clothing until, thanks to my button fly jeans which kept setting off the metal detecting wand, I was left standing in my underwear as the bloke passed the wand in every imaginable place. I like to refer
to the exaggerated proceeding as “strip search lite.” After another hour of waiting a long curly haired lady came out from a back office to hand me my passport and wish me happy travels in Israel.
Was the border crossing nearly as horrific as the stories that you read online and hear from fellow travelers? No quite. The border guards were polite, smiled and even apologized for the quasi strip search, but behind the façade they were all business and there is no question that should they have found a reason doubt my story that they could have been hell to pay.
The remainder of the night consisted of a 2-hour drive through the West Bank to Jerusalem where I finally arrived to the hotel around 11P. While the roads were in near perfect condition only to be interrupted by random checkpoints, as I stared out the taxi windows into the darkness of the West Bank I could catch glimpses of barbed wire, walls and heavily armed men in military uniforms. Welcome to Israel the land of a thousand stories.
The Land of a Thousand Stories One advantage of being a non-practicing, Christian-cultured anglo-saxon that grew up
Tunnels beside Temple Mount
Although the exposed Temple Mount wall, a.k.a. the Wailing Wall, is the most recognizable site in Judaism, you can actually get closer to the Holy of Holies by traveling underground to the excavated tunnels that run underground along the western side of the Temple Mount. in suburban North Carolina is that you can try to come at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a sense of open-mindedness and even indifference. You might suspect having grown up in the States that I would sympathize more with the Israeli point of view than Palestinian. Yet, on the other hand, having now lived 7 months in Jordan and made friends with numerous 1st and 2nd generation Palestinians there could also be a good case made for having learned to empathize with Palestinians. The reality is that I don’t sympathize with either side but instead I empathize with both points of view and in specific with the majority of people on both sides who would like a final place to call home and the ability to dream about a better future for their children without the threat of constant war and destruction. There is no question that both sides have committed egregious crimes against humanity, one of which continues today with the Israeli siege (thanks in part to Egyptian acquiescence) of Gaza. Likewise, I understand how both sides believe that they have a claim to the land through both sacred myth and residence. But no matter how many thousands of stories of sacred prophecy, divine act, or inhumane cruelty this land has played host to for thousands of years there seems to be one ultimate reality, all signed the contract.
The Contact Over the past year, I have met more than a hundred people who have told me about their experience in Jerusalem or their take on its history and its current state. For Arabs in Jordan, and particularly for Palestinians refugees and their descendents, there is an almost uniform answer - they believe that their land was stolen; and more precious than any land in Palestine is Jerusalem, which many Palestinians claim to defend, with and without arms, until they once again they control this supposed holy city.
To give you a sense of their vantage point, imagine that you owned a house in Florida with land for farming that your family had tilled for numerous generations, perhaps since the end of Spanish rule. There was no official deed to the land, but it was communally understood that it was your family’s land and the community had respected this for hundreds of year. One day, a group of Native Americans with sticks, and eventually guns and tanks, tells you that this is their land that was given to them by the Great Spirit and that either you leave on your own freewill or you will be forced out never again to return. And then to make matters worse, the United Nations passes a resolution to allow the Native Americans to create their own state on your land. Although you were living there, this doesn’t matter because the Native Americans have a long history of persecution and it is time for the world to finally give them their land back so they can have a place of their own to live in security. I suspect that most Floridians would find this unfair, immoral and even criminal, while simultaneously wondering why they were paying the price for the sins of others. In the case of the Palestinians, many of them had been living on the land for generations that reached back to the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 638A.D and subsequent re-conquest of the city by the Kurdish General Saladin in 1187.
On the Israeli side, it’s pretty straightforward as well. The land was reportedly granted to the Jews by God, and until the Romans conquered the city and began the Jewish Diaspora, Jews controlled and transformed the land into a prospering society for ca. 900 years. (To be fair, the Jews, having been driven out of Egypt by Pharo, conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites.) Today is no different. Since the founding of the Israeli state, the Israelis have made the desert bloom and in 1967 regained control of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount after 2100 years of foreign control and endless persecution throughout the world that culminated in the Holocaust. Imagine that your family and people for 2100 years had passed from generation to generation the stories, hopes and dreams that someday you would once again return home to your land. You would finally have a place where you were not a minority and were you could live with the assurance that tomorrow brings peace. You can only imagine how proud and thankful you might have been in June of 1967 when Israeli troops stormed the Temple Mount and for the first time in 2100 years reunited your people with its past and what you consider to be the holiest place on Earth.
The last perspective I would like to elaborate on is that of the modern day tourist/pilgrim to Jerusalem, of which I was one. Having spoken to numerous tourists about their experience in Jerusalem, I have come to understand that many people’s Jerusalem experience is strongly influenced by what they bring to it. For the more religiously inclined, I have been amazed by people’s stories of inspiration, awe and increased faith having visited the city. (I found this hard to believe while watching a mini-bus carrying cases of soda and falafel down a narrow cobblestone street relentlessly beeping its way past a group of Christian pilgrims carrying a large wooden cross as they traced Jesus’ supposed last steps on the Via Dolorosa.) There is a strong sense of faith among the residents and tourists that roam the city streets, and even the most doubtful believer could be easily intoxicated by the narrow stone alleyways, endless mosques, churches, and synagogs, and whiffs of strange and wonderful scents at everyone corner of the Old City. The entire environment easily conjures up feelings of the ancient and mysterious, which for many are then surpassed by a strong sense of the divine. I, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, did not fall into this category.
My experience of Jerusalem was not of the sacred, but of the profane. A city that since the proverbial being of time has been a strategic location for trade, as much as prophecy, has attracted the attention and jealous greed of numerous peoples among which are some of the most recognizable in human history: Jews, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, and British. At one point in time they all claimed Jerusalem as a shining jewel in their crown and the more religiously inclined of them had a habit of dismantling and/or building on top of the sacred sites of the previous people only to then claim them as religious sites of their own. While many will point to sacred occurrence and divine prophecy as a justification for these invariably bloody and horrific events, it cannot be denied that this process also produced one of the most beautiful and influential architectural achievements of human history - the Dome of the Rock. Personally, I error on the side of believing that the catalyst for these holy sites was in fact the greed of men intoxicated with belief that their God gave them the right rule over those that came before them. However, what their God failed to mention was that in order to add Jerusalem to their crown of conquest, they had inadvertently signed a contract with the devil.
Oversimplifying and synthesizing the history of Jerusalem can be done by stating that it is the most conquered city in the history of the world and all who have lived there have had to fight to rule and maintain ownership, only to at some point loose it to another nation. This is the implicit, universal contract that all peoples signed when they took control of the city. You will fight to gain control, your will struggle against outside invaders to maintain your rule and sooner or later you will spill the blood of your descendants in their futile defense of the city. The Arabs are not alone in their suffering. They are only the most recent example of a people that fell asleep at the wheel while a better-equipped, more motivated people violently took possession of the city. Such is the story of Jerusalem and until some injunction is made to end this 3,000+ year-old history, Jerusalem’s streets are likely to once again be bathed in blood.
Setting aside the fantastical religious prophecies and events that are often used to justify ownership of Jerusalem, I believe that if we are honest with ourselves we cannot deny that none of us has an original claim to the city. Of all the people who at one time called Jerusalem home, the oldest recorded occupiers are no longer in existence. If anyone has an original claim to the city it would be them, but unfortunately they no longer around to make such a claim. (A similar argument could be made to justify a controlled but yet fair immigration policy to all that demonstrate their ability to be productive citizens within the United States. Who am I to say that you can’t immigrate to the United States? Frankly, the U.S. is not the land of my ancestors.) This being the case, it seems difficult for anyone to allege that Jerusalem is theirs. While I haven’t research the numerous ramifications of the following suggestion, perhaps the Old City in Jerusalem should be a site maintained by an international organization and kept off limits to claim of any single people or nation. Next time I am there, I would rather it be a place for all humanity to enjoy and a monument to the ageless beauties and atrocities that religion can produce when abused and blindly accepted without logic or inquiry than an enchanting but tense enclave filled with post-adolescent Israelis carrying assault weapons. Today, there is no true peace in Jerusalem, but only a temporary absence of war.
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S. R. Davis
non-member comment
A beautiful, terce treatise on the struggle for peace in the face of religious dogma (nay,as an excuse to justify the hegemonic control of not just a land, but its dispossessed and disenfranchised people) which spans, at once thousands of bloody years, and but the equivalent of a few seconds of the arc of human history. Written so elegantly and with such a humble sense of at least some of the struggles, I feel fortunate to know its author, and with it the opportunity to share ever more of the insights and perspectives that come with that connection.