HH362/ HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

TEL AVIV AND JERUSALEM: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

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SELECTION #1. FROM: HARRY GOLDEN, THE ISRAELIS: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE (1971)

[Harry Golden is an American Jewish writer who visited Israel in 1970 and wrote about his experiences. The selection you will read is about Tel Aviv, the largest city in Israel. This work, I think, captures the exuberant spirit of Israel in the euphoria following the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967.]

GOD IS A MAYOR

TEL AVIV looks like an immense Chinatown. Instead of Chinamen, however, it is populated by Jews. The sidewalks are filled with flower stalls, vegetable markets, restaurants, cafes, butcher shops, and a bookstore on every corner. The street signs are in both Hebrew and English, but the signs on the stores and on the banks are in Hebrew, an alphabet as calligraphically beautiful as Chinese ideograms.

Tel Avivians brag they live in the New York of the Middle East. Anyone who has ever lived in New York would find Tel Aviv familiar. Still, it doesn't look like New York. The streets are not laid out in the absolute grid system of major American cities. Many of the streets are heavily lined and shaded by trees big enough so that when the municipality dispatches tree surgeons to an ailing eucalyptus, its sawed branches become a traffic obstacle. Nor does Tel Aviv have distinct industrial and shopping areas. Where New York has a garment industry on the West Side around the 30's, an advertising complex on Madison Avenue, and mammoth department stores along Fifth, Tel Aviv does not have similar divisions. People live right beside the El Al Building where the advertisers do their thing. And they live right beside the Shalom Meyer Tower, which houses the biggest department store in Israel. What everyone tells you of the latter is that the tower occupies the site of the original Herzlia Gymnasium, the first high school in Tel Aviv. In fact, the Jews built the school before they built the city.

The traffic patterns are different. The Israelis buy small cars--Toyotas, Volkswagens, Fiats. Bicycles compound the traffic problem, as do dray horses pulling wagons and the rickshaw-style motorcycles pulling large carts, their cargo protected by a weathered canvas canopy.

Tel Aviv is busy and noisy. The Israelis are always up and about, filling its streets with determined passage. These Jews work a six-day week, opening up at eight and closing at six and often seven in the evening, although many of the shopkeepers follow the continental practice of shutting down during midday between one and three.

Tel Aviv finds peace and quiet on the Sabbath.

And the Sabbath comes to Israel with a vengeance, like a prairie cyclone sweeping away whole towns as it spins over the countryside. You cannot buy a baby milk on the Sabbath unless you show up at the dining room of one of the tourist hotels waving a bottle with a nipple.

The Sabbath starts with the first star on Friday and ends with the appearance of the first star on Saturday. In practice, the Sabbath starts arriving Friday noon and does not depart until Sunday dawn. By dusk the streets are virtually empty. Then you see men in gabardine, carrying shawls, prayer books, and tvilin, herding their young sons in yarmulkas decorated with Yemenite silver embroidery, all making for the neighborhood synagogue.

The movies and theaters are dark. The buses are garaged. The newsstands are locked tight, for there are no Saturday papers. Water slowly dries on the florist's cement floor.

On the Sabbath it is not quiet at all along the Dizengoff, a central boulevard in Tel Aviv. Rehov Dizengoff is crowded with literally thousands of Tel Avivians promenading in their finery from the Zina Dizengoff Fountain to Keren Kayemet Street, and often beyond. Quick passage through the crowd is impossible and slow passage is tortuous. Sidewalk artists sketch on the pavement in chalk, a huge crescent of people admiring the handiwork until their swelling numbers attract the police, who tell the artist he can draw anything except a crowd. I saw the same fellow chased week after week from the department store on the corner of Dizengoff and Frishman. Week after week, before the arrival of the cop, the crowd would ask him to draw Moshe Dayan, and week after week he would reply, "I only draw women."

Vendors equipped with pumps sell gigantic balloons which the mommies buy and tie to the stroller to amuse the tots. Whole families span the sidewalk proceeding hand in hand. Young soldiers home for the Sabbath parade with their arms around their girls' necks. Here are the girls in the newest fashion --the "Liquid Look," vinyl miniskirts. There is even a sprinkling of hippies with their long hair and bell-bottom striped trousers, most of them Americans.

Only the coffee shops are open. Every chair in the sidewalk cafe is occupied, people blockade the entrance to the ice cream parlor, and hungry customers wait patiently at Wimpy's for their hamburgers.

Walk down Gordon Street and you can feel the holiness of the Sabbath. Reach Dizengoff and it is dissipated in a joyous response to sun and air and people and a day off. This sense of celebration is unknown to American Jews. Everybody, willynilly, keeps a Jewish holiday in Israel.

The long work week is also eased by the advent of Pesach, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and another dozen-odd religious holidays. Not all of these are legally a day off, but enough people act on their own initiative so that they become so. Chanukah annually produces Tel Aviv's worse traffic jam. Everyone decides to vanish around noon. But the school children who march down the wide esplanade of Keren Kayemet to the Municipality singing festival songs and carrying flags block egress to the north, which means everyone who wants to leave town has to do so by the west. From Tommy Lapid's window in the Ma'ariv Building on Chanukah you see a line of steel and chrome stretching to the horizon, all of it impatiently honking.

Sometimes these partial holidays come as thick and fast as saints' days in Italy. They make one suspect God must have been a mayor who gave each generation of city employees another day off to insure a vote into perpetuity.

INDEPENDENCE PARK

THE SHERATON and the Hilton are the two high-rise hotels which dominate the Mediterranean shoreline in Tel Aviv. The distance between the two of them is one half mile, which is filled by the verdant expanse of Independence Park.

Here teen-age boys play soccer even when the temperature is in the 90's. Benches outline the paths. Every thirty yards one comes across a bevy of young mothers surrounded by a ring of perambulators, as though they were pioneers drawing up the wagon train to ward off the Indians. I have counted three separate playgrounds all equipped with sandboxes, seesaws, swings, and jungle gyms.

The unpaved, curving paths are wide, broad, and dusty. There are no cars. But there are a great many dogs. It surprised me to see so many German shepherds. No one needs protection here, even at night in a park. The Israelis are devoted to dogs, so devoted they have refused to pass curbing ordinances.

On one of the bluffs in Independence Park is a monument. A cylindrical pillar supports a soaring eagle. Off this point two Jewish pilots lost their lives flying Piper Cubs against Egyptian pursuit planes. Piper Cubs constituted the better part of the Israeli Air Force in May, 1948.

During World War II, Independence Park was a convalescent base for Royal Air Force fliers. No monuments for them.

There is no vandalism in the park, if you will except Ze'ev Edelman and David Shmidl who were arrested for pulling up plants and cacti. They told the District Court judge that they were observant Jews and they did what they did because the plants and cacti hid couples making love. The judge took a dim view of their piety and found them guilty of destroying public property.

One thing I missed in the park was a drinking fountain. The parks in New York always had drinking fountains which were paved and round which we skated, hoping to squirt a slower and unsuspecting playmate. There were none, nor did I spot any in the park at Tiberias, the park on Arnon Street, or on the huge plaza of the Municipality.

Of course! This land is practically a desert. The Israelis have to conserve water. They don't even drink it.

Tommy Lapid said my reasoning was logical but specious. "It's cistern water, stale, flat. We drink citrus or Tempo soft drinks or for-two-cents plain [soda water], but not water. My wife, Shula, was born in Tel Aviv and she rarely tasted water until we visited Switzerland. Then she drank it only because the soda hop didn't know what two-cents-plain was. Harry, stay away from the

On my next stroll through the park, I saw a sprinkler system keeping a large bed of petunias in bloom. An Israeli came up, bent over, took a cup from his pocket, and let the sprinkler fill it up. He said, "Shalom," and offered me a swig.

The orange groves need a great deal of irrigation, which means costly and precious water. An Israeli agronomist hit on an idea which had the simplicity of all great discoveries: water the groves at night. At night, the water does not evaporate as quickly as it does under the Middle Eastern sun. This idea has saved Israel millions of gallons of water each season--the greatest bounty Israel agriculture has ever known.

CRIME IN ISRAEL

THERE IS no crime to speak of in Israel but, of course, I am speaking as an American. Law and order, crime in the streets, drug addiction, and juvenile delinquency are of such proportions in the United States that they have become election issues not only in the cities but on the national level. Crime is not of this proportion in Israel.

That is not to say that there are not mischievous and criminal elements in the country. Crimes are rarely crimes of violence. There is relatively little murder, even though a higher proportion of Israelis own firearms than do Americans. The crimes are commercial crimes--the police call them "Jewish crimes"--embezzlement, forgery, fraud, and income tax evasion.

There are some absolutely astounding statistics about the Israeli crime rate. For instance, the country has the highest incidence of traffic accidents and fatalities per capita in the world--but there is no drunken driving at all, one case in the last ten years. Patriots say this disastrous statistic is the result of men learning to drive in the Army, where they are expected to take risks, but the real experts, the cab drivers, say it is because the majority of drivers have had autos only for the last few years and they learn to drive in brand-new cars with 120 horsepower.

And there is almost no juvenile delinquency. The reason for this is that Israeli boys and girls all go into the Army at eighteen, where they have better things to do.

The Israeli bad boy perforce drops out of delinquency like the American bad boy drops out of high school. Not everybody wants to go into the Army, which is natural enough, but everybody says he does. "I am the only doctor in the world," an old Rumanian physician told me at a recruiting center, "who is trying to detect sick boys who claim to be healthy."

An Israeli boy who, for one reason or another, does not enter the armed services carries a stigma it takes him a long time to erase.

Yudin Ya'acov is one of these. Last November, Ya'acov sued for induction. He contended that his draft board refused to call him up because his hearing was defective. This handicap, not apparent to others, made him the victim of malicious gossip. He further claimed that his partial deafness did not make him unfit for Army service and that his 4F status caused him unjustifiable shame and visited disgrace upon his family. He won his case. The Supreme Court ordered the Western Galilee Draft Board to induct him forthwith.

I do not mean to insist there are no crimes of violence, for I have already described one, or crimes of passion, or prostitution, for indeed there are all three.

. . . . .

There is crime among the Bedouin, the Arabs, and the Druses. What threw the police for a loss one week was sheep rustling in the Negev outside Beersheba. The singular fact about the case was that two Bedouin women served as accomplices to the rustlers, an unheard-of deviation from the Bedouin way of life. The Arab women in the villages are never criminal. They are often victims of a crime, but never participants.

From time to time a brother will kill his sister because he thinks she has discovered sex before marriage and thus dishonored the family; and when village feuds flare out, the local Hatfield and McCoys do not worry particularly whether men, women, children, or brothers get in the way of the bullets.

One June, Salah Zabidat, a Druse serving in the Israeli Army, went into the streets of his village, Bosmat Tivon, and machine gunned to death Mahmud and Ahmed Sa'adi. Salah was sentenced to life imprisonment and his brother, Ibrahim, to four years as an accessory. Ibrahim's wife, Turquia, testified that Mahmud had made an indecent proposal to her. She told her husband and he told Salah, who was on leave from the Army and had his Uzi with him.

Arab terrorists are a crucial and continuing problem for the police. Occasionally, the terrorists plant bombs in jars of nescafe which they place on supermarket shelves, and they smuggle in grenades among the bushel baskets of potatoes. But the Israeli and Druse border police have great success in rounding up terrorists. They catch them by good surveillance, good detective work, and good luck. Obviously, too, the police depend upon a network of Arab informers.

Not long ago, an Arab crossed over from Jordan. Like all Arabs, he was subjected to an intensive search by the border police. The police found a small piece of paper in the Arab's knapsack on which was written a name in Arabic.

Asked, "Who is this?" the Arab came up with a lame excuse.

The name belonged to a druggist in Bethlehem. Going from that man to the next, the police eventually arrested forty terrorists in Hebron.

There are three thousand terrorists in Israeli jails right now. The reason for this high number is that when a terrorist is apprehended, he feels at a disadvantage with the other members of his cohort. To level things off, invariably he will tell the police the names of his associates, thus putting everybody at the same disadvantage for the next ten years to life.

The police call the professional Jewish criminal the parnossah geben, by which the cops mean the crook provides them with a livelihood. A police officer in the Tel Aviv Fraud Division told me, his voice quivering with admiration, that the Jews are absolutely ingenious in inventing tricks by which to steal money from other Jews.

One of these tricks is to steal foreign correspondence out of letter boxes. Out of one hundred letters from France, Chile, America, or Australia, a thief is bound to find two or three checks. He proceeds to a variety of different banks, opens a checking account in the name of the man to whom the check is made out, and then a week later, when the check has cleared, cashes in.

. . . .

Some Israelis attribute their honest government to its Jewish character. The more objective among them say the significant reason for honesty in the administration, the police, and other branches of the government is that all were trained by the British, famed for their incorruptibility, and the British system, in which corruption is almost impossible, is still used.

No government escapes entirely. There is no corruption, but there is "influence," "patronage," if you will. A Rumanian, for example, is the director of the Israeli lottery, the profits of which go to schools and hospitals. Of the 3,000 personnel who administer the lottery, 2,500 are Rumanians.

Well, they say he who has a Hungarian for a friend needs no enemies, and the Hungarians say with the Rumanians around you don't even need Hungarians.

. . . . .

ENGLISH WITH SEVENTY ACCENTS

IT TAKES time and enterprise to find someone in New York City who speaks fluent Serbo-Croatian or the Indian dialect of Coocheen. It is relatively easy to find a Hungarian, but the chances of his speaking an honest English are something else again. You could find someone who spoke at least one of these languages on any street corner in Tel Aviv.

Employment questionnaires have five spaces in which the applicant can list the languages he speaks. If a corporation president in the United States speaks two languages, Fortune will devote several paragraphs to this facility.

The population of Israel is one quarter that of New York City, yet these 2,500,000 people speak seventy languages.

Everyone speaks Hebrew.

The children of European immigrants are usually also proficient in their parents' native tongue--Yiddish, German, Polish-and the children of North African immigrants are usually proficient in theirs, French. Sephardim speak Ladino, which is related to Spanish as Yiddish is related to German, and most sabras and all Oriental Jews speak Arabic.

In addition, virtually all educated Israelis speak English. English is taught in grammar school and it is a prerequisite for college, because the textbooks are in English.

English enjoys a special status in Israel. During the British mandate, mostly government employees spoke it. It was the language of the imperialist. But this dislike ended with independence. English is the lingua franca of international life, in diplomacy, in science, and in tourism, and American tourists are part and parcel of Israeli life.

The American paperback book, the least expensive reading available in Israel, played a great role in spreading the English language as well. So too, curiously, did Time magazine, which is "required reading" in the homes of the educated, more so than in the United States.

Political, economic, and family ties with America also exerted some influence.

American influence on Israel is profound. Israelis unaffectedly have adopted many of our idioms. Israelis know the names of our Senators, have memorized the "Gettysburg Address" and are unhappy about Abe Fortas.

One Israeli, disagreeing with another, said to me, "Do not listen to him. He is not the real McCohen."

I went to the village of Kfar Shmarvahu in a cab. It is a beautiful small town, filled with expansive villas all surrounded with exquisite shrubbery. As my cab driver counted out the change, he said, This, sir, is the place where the Levys speak only to the Cohens and the Cohens speak only to God."

. . . .

PLEASE IS BAVAKASHA

THE TWO Hebrew words you need to get around in Israel are be-vakasha which is "please" and to-da-ra-bah which is "thank you." You need not memorize them now, for they will be the first two words you learn upon arrival.

Every conversational exchange in Israel, whether it is paying a cab driver or discussing an itinerary with Mr. Land or at the Government Press Office, is preceded by bavakasha and terminated with todarabah, and sometimes in reverse. You can pay your cab driver with todarabah, and as he makes change he will say bavakasha, as though you were both schoolboys parsing a sentence to find the predicate.

"Please" and "thank you" do not indicate the formal society. Indeed, the opposite is true in Israel. The only man in the country who would dare wear a jacket and necktie in the summer is Abba Eban, the Foreign Minister.

No, the Israelis are informal. They repeat "please" and "thank you" because, though they all suspect there are class distinctions, they want to pretend such distinctions do not exist.

The officers and men in the Army address each other by their first names. There is no need for spit and polish, of course, when not far to the soldier's rear is his own home. And almost every Israeli officer was at one time an enlisted man.

In the composing room of Ma'ariv, the publisher addresses his typesetter by first name and the typesetter addresses the boss similarly. The request for locked trays or dummy layouts is included within the parenthesis of bavakasha and todarabah.

Behind the politeness, the informality of dress, the camaraderie of officers and men is the deep-rooted Socialist ethic. All work is honorable. Work confers dignity upon the worker. Money in Israel doesn't make that much difference. The average Israeli family spends 1,000 pounds a month, which means the average Israeli family makes 1,600 pounds. Out of $110 a week, the taxpayer takes home $80. More money means a car but not a larger house. Most of the apartments and villas are built to the same scale. More money means a vacation in Greece but not finery, because no one wants to compete with the elegant Abba Eban. One month out of the year, the wage earner is in the Army reserves, for which he receives the better part of his salary through a special arrangement between his employer and the state.

But everyone in Israel, salaried or self-employed, executive or laborer, receives complete medical security, from eyeglasses to heart surgery, and not only for himself but for his family, for as little as $5 a month. The average Israeli can hardly afford an auto, but for another $2 a month he can guarantee some of the costs of a college education for his children.

The Socialist ethic insures an absolute and universal equality and the ethic makes a profound political impression.

. . . .

THE DEBORAH HOTEL--pronounced Dvorah--is on the corner of Gordon and Ben-Yehuda streets. It is a modern building, fifteen stories high. It caters to the ultra-Orthodox tourist. There are more yarmulkas on guests in the Deborah than there are in the whole neighborhood.

On Friday afternoon, the girl on the switchboard not only goes home, she throws a white muslin sheet over the switchboard. Over the Sabbath, the desk at the Deborah looks like an early American living room where all the furniture was always covered. Even the tourist brochures disappear until Sunday morning. The management screws a plate over every elevator button, both those in the halls and those in the car. The elevator works automatically, stopping at every odd-numbered floor for five minutes over the next twenty-four hours. There are two signs by the staircase. One reads NO SMOKING, and the other reads POSITIVELY NO SMOKING ON THE SABBATH.

On the street level of the Deborah is the Gordon Cinema; on the lobby level is a dairy restaurant; on the mezzanine, the hotel restaurant; and above that is a synagogue. There is a synagogue in the Hilton Hotel, but the rabbi there wears a yarmulka of white silk; the rabbi at the Deborah means business--his yarmulka is as black as his beard.

No guest can check out on Saturday because it is against Orthodox law to handle money on the Sabbath.

The kitchen prepares the food for the Sabbath before dusk on Friday. No one cooks on the Sabbath. Breakfast is fruits, bread, and hard-boiled eggs; luncheon, cold meats and salads; dinner, cold borscht and gefilte fish. Which led Moshe Barzilai to remark that while the ultra-Orthodox Jew loves fried or scrambled eggs on Sunday, he always manages to forget someone has to transport those eggs on Saturday.

Tel Avivians call the Deborah the "Jewish hotel."

MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY CHICKEN SOUP ALONE

ONCE YOU say the food is substantial, you have said it all for the Israeli cuisine. If you like the Israeli breakfast as your main meal, which derives from the kibbutz and consists of all the citrus you can drink, olives, cheeses, tomatoes, peppers, fish, and eggs, you are in business.

Otherwise, the food is simply terrible.

All meat is kosher slaughtered, bloody cuts which are, to say the least, unfamiliar. Personally, I have seen better meat on dying cows than I saw in any Israeli steak house. Meat in America is aged, "marbled" as the butchers call it. An abattoir looks neater than the meat counter at the Super Sol. The clever Israeli housewife buys her meat two weeks in advance and lets the cuts marbleize in the refrigerator.

In addition, meat is dear because it is all imported and kosher slaughtering and its supervision incur extra costs. A pot roast which would feed my son, his wife, and their little boy for two meals costs $8.

Chicken is cheap. Along Ben-Yehuda Street a shopper can purchase a four-pound roasted chicken for $2. Turkey is also a staple of the Israeli diet. The Israeli butcher calls turkey "schnitzel" and sells it in white meat slices, again already roasted and breaded. It passes for veal.

Fish is cheap. And eggs. And an avocado as big as a man's head costs 25¢. The Miron cheese is superb and the bread and the rolls are freshly baked. How did we Americans ever become addicted to bread with additives which comes wrapped in wax paper? An egg and tomato sandwich from an open-air stand costs 12¢ and is an hors d'oeuvre of which no one need be ashamed. But there is no pastrami in Israel. There isn't a bagel the length and breadth of the land. The blintzes are crepes suzette. I truly doubt if the Israelis have heard of matzoh ball soup.

On the package of one of the few frozen foods is the warning, "Open within twenty-four hours."

The country is poor, admittedly. But what really devastates the cuisine are the kosher laws. It is against the law to sell ham in Tel Aviv, although the clever housewife again manages. There are small under-the-counter butcher shops. Not only must a chef subtract ham and pork and shrimp and clams from his repertoire, but he cannot mix milk and meat. Beef stroganoff at the Hilton or the Sheraton or the Dan or the King David Hotel is Argentine stew meat disguised by a garlic gravy laden with spices. As I say, it is substantial, but it isn't beef stroganoff. Take away cream sauces from the chef and his ingenuity cannot meet this challenge. Nor should it.

SELECTION #2. FROM AMOS ELON, JERUSALEM (1989)

[Amos Elon, also author of Reading #20, has lived in Jerusalem for most of his adult life. The selection you will read offers some of his impressions of Jerusalem in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a transition time for Israelis between the high spirits of the late 1960s and the malaise of the late 1980s.]

CHAPTER FOUR: DANGEROUS CITY

THERE was still sporadic gunfire in the Old City when, during the war of 1967 the chief chaplain of the Israeli army raced through the via Dolorosa with a Torah scroll in one hand and a shofar in the other. "Don't be rude," he yelled at a young infantry officer who tried to hold him back. The chaplain turned left, ducking gunfire as he ran, and a few minutes later reached the narrow alley in front of the Western Wall. Here, he triumphantly raised the scroll and blew his shofar.

No Israelis had worshiped at the wall for more than nineteen years. Shofars had been outlawed there since 1931. The rare foreign Jew who had reached the area between 1948 and 1967 had been able to do so only by producing a bogus baptismal certificate.

The wall area had been captured by Israeli troops less than an hour before. A dozen or so soldiers were gathered before it, some of them wounded. They welcomed the chaplain with loud cheers. The chaplain blew the chafer again. The harsh wail hung in the hot air, unfurling like a flag. Some of the soldiers wept. All were deeply moved. The scene has been described by several eyewitnesses. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air. The mood was one of exultation. It was not necessarily a religious experience, though for some it must have been that, too. The young soldiers at the Western Wall--and the mass of civilian Israelis who would come soon after--were face to face, many for the first time in their lives, with the most important historic relic of their people.

There was a certain irony in the fact that in a "new" nation, largely secular until this time, the relic was a religious site. But there was no other. The Western Wall was both trophy and myth--what the French call architecture parlante. Its capture conveyed a message most people wanted to hear at this time in an unambiguous manner. The wall was a monument in the domain of memory and of faith. At this moment, it symbolized a widespread urge to transform the political into the religious. The victory in the 1967 war--its high point was in Jerusalem, in what was called the liberation of the Western Wall--had come to most Israelis as a surprise. Many seemed to feel something miraculous had been involved. Rabbis spoke of messianic stirrings. Politicians referred to the finger of God. Jerusalem--until 1967, a sleepy little town at the far end of a narrow corridor in the hills--came to personify a new element in the consciousness of the nation. The Western Wall emerged as a national monument as well, a secular shrine, set aside as a sacred space for the self-expression of Israel. The first tendency after its capture was to place it in the care of the National Parks Authority.

Before 1967, Israelis had been a people with too much history and too little geography. After 1967, the opposite became true. The territory of Israel prior to the 1967 war, while rich in Roman, Nabataean, and Crusader ruins, actually had few historical monuments testifying to its Jewish past. The pre-1967 territory of Israel embraced not the historic homeland of the ancient Hebrews, who had been a people of the hills, but rather that of their enemies in the coastal plain, the Philistines, as well as the Negev of the Edomites and the so-called Galilee of the Gentiles. The 1967 war abruptly confronted modern Israelis with the geography of their remote history. Its cradle was not Tel Aviv, an ultramodern city on the sea, but the walled Old City of Jerusalem, where the ancient Jewish temple had stood. In the words of one prominent witness: "We felt we were joining hands with history."

In the weeks following the war, hundreds of thousands streamed to Jerusalem, and to the wall, where for a time it seemed, almost, as though the past was but the backward continuum of the present. For many, it was a dream come true, the ancient Jewish dream to stand at the Wailing Wall as free men. Devout people, who had been unable to worship at the wall for years, kissed and hugged the soldiers who had fought to allow them back. There were also moments when, judging by sights and sounds alone, the scenes at the Western Wall resembled the rituals in southern Italy following a "miracle." Women ululated. Men sobbed.

The name given to the war suggested six mystic days of creation and rebirth. Israel had won that war against great odds. Her enemies had foolishly provoked it. It had resulted in enormous, unexpected territorial gains. The most emotionally charged gains were in Jerusalem. In the context of that war and of the dread and panic that had preceded it--only twenty-two years had passed since the Nazi holocaust--there was an element of catharsis in the general exultation. There was a foreboding as well.

Amos Oz, the novelist, was serving in the army at that time. He remembered wandering through East Jerusalem one day after the war, in uniform and armed with an automatic rifle, wishing very much to feel like a man who had vanquished his foes and regained the city of his forefathers. He very much wanted to share and be part of the general celebration. "But people are living there. They are at home and I am the intruder." If only there had not been all those Palestinians. "I saw enmity and resentment, hypocrisy, fear and degradation and new evil being plotted." He felt like a man who had broken into a forbidden place. "A stranger in a foreign city."

This was a minority view in the aftermath of the war. As it fused in some hearts the intransigence of aroused nationalism with the archaisms of religious fundamentalism, so it produced new areas of friction between Israelis and Arabs. The Temple Mount--a great Moslem sanctuary now, but in antiquity the site of the great Jewish temples--was a case in point.

On the Temple Mount, the fusion of nationalism and religion was producing a critical mass. Safety measures to prevent an explosion--with unforeseeable consequences--would henceforth be a major concern for every Israeli government. Friction over the Temple Mount began almost at once. A few hours after it had been taken by Israeli troops, Moshe Dayan, the defense minister, announced: "We have returned to our most sacred sites never to leave them again." But with his keen eye for spots where trouble is best avoided, Dayan immediately ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock--where it had been hoisted by enthusiastic Israeli soldiers--as an unnecessary and dangerous ostentation. (A photograph of that flag later served Arab and Iranian horror propaganda: "Jews defile our holiest mosques.")

Dayan did not--or could not--prevent an equally ostentatious military parade in the forecourt of the great mosques. The victorious troops were addressed there by their commander, Colonel Mordechai Gur (a future chief of staff), with the words: "You have been privileged to restore to the people of Israel their capital and their sanctuary." (In his memoirs, Gur described his feelings in the sanctuary, and his reason for choosing not to visit the Western Wall on that day, with a certain braggadocio: "I had achieved my aim. The Temple Mount is the Western Wall, too. On the Temple Mount, I am in the drawing room. I am not attracted by the exterior walls. Here I feel at home. The farthest frontiers of longing. Temple Mount. Mount Moriah! Abraham and Isaac. The zealots. The Maccabees. Bar Kokhba. Romans and Greeks. ALL converge in one's thoughts.")

Dayan solemnly promised the Moslem clergy that there would be no tampering with their control over the area. He also reinstated the Arab security men, employed by the Moslem Supreme Council, as guardians within the sacred precincts. He asked only that Jews be permitted to enter as peaceful visitors. The request was granted--not surprisingly, under the circumstances--though with reluctance. "These are Moslem mosques," Dayan later wrote, "and the Moslems are entitled to be autonomous there." He clearly underestimated the passions generated among Jewish nationalist and religious extremists by this policy and his statements about it.

Prominent voices in Israel were soon calling for the eviction of all Moslem "abominations" from the Temple Mount. After all (so the argument ran), the Maccabees, too, in 165 BC had demolished and thrown out the idols from God's temple, after their victory over the Greeks. Others proposed to construct a Jewish synagogue on the wide platform between the two mosques. The government firmly resisted all such calls.

The government at that time comprised, as it still does today, a secular majority and a minority of religious politicians. The former feared a bloodbath. The latter wished, above all, to conform to the letter of halakah, Jewish religious law. According to Jewish lore, the third temple shall be built only by God after the coming of the messiah. A rabbinic injunction forbids Jews to set foot anywhere on the Temple Mount for fear of a possible desecration of the site of the former Holy of Holies. Though this is often thought to be under the Dome of the Rock, its exact location is not known. Lest someone step on it inadvertently--everyone is considered impure today--the ritual taboo was extended to the entire Temple Mount area.

But the war, which inflamed powerful national passions among the secular, also aroused deep messianic stirrings among the religious. Repossession of the Temple Mount was construed as a sacred duty by a small but vocal minority of fundamentalists. Traditional Jewish religious leaders saw themselves challenged by a new breed of militant radical rabbis who proclaimed that messianic days were near. They were joined by right-wing nationalists, who were attracted to the Temple Mount as a powerful national symbol. Anti-Arab feelings were widespread in the aftermath of the war. A public-opinion poll commissioned by the municipality of Jerusalem disclosed so much Jewish hostility toward Arabs that the results were never released in order not to poison the atmosphere even more.

With the proverbial sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, some of the more zealous in Jerusalem argued that legendary deeds contracted during the Bronze Age were sound legal basis for concrete real-estate claims as good as those made only yesterday in the Jerusalem District Court. One leading Orthodox rabbi bluntly announced that in the war of 1967 Israeli bayonets had established "the Rule of God" throughout the Holy Land. Fervent expectation soon produced spectacular results. Tombs of renowned Hebrew prophets and kings, all said to be absolutely authentic, as well as Saul's own throne and Samson's alleged cave were being discovered almost daily by enthusiastic and inspired amateur archaeologists. The new discoveries also included tombs of relatively minor biblical figures such as Abner, King Saul's chief of staff, and the prophet Nathan. (The "discoveries" were reminiscent of similar finds during the First Crusade--for example, the discovery of the "holy lance" at Antioch and the recognition by Baldwin I of the "cup of the Last Supper" among the booty at Caesarea.) The minister of religious affairs issued an official statement criticizing a well-known archaeologist, Professor Yigael Yadin, for suggesting in the press that the medieval tombstones within the great mosque at Hebron were not those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their respective spouses but, more probably, those of a few long-forgotten Arab sheiks. Some old stones, of whatever origin, became the subject of an adoration that bordered on fetishism. While reminiscent in many ways of Catholic practice--the cherishing of bits of the cross, the handkerchief or footprint of Jesus, the tooth or nail of a saint--this was a new element in the traditionally abstract character of Jewish religious worship, at least in the West. In the Levant, there had always been among Jews a certain amount of tomb and relic worship.

A few hours after East Jerusalem surrendered, Dayan flamboyantly ordered army engineers to bulldoze a road through the surrounding hills wide enough to enable "every Jew in the world to reach the Western Wall." Accommodating the masses at the wall itself was a more complicated task. In the narrow alley in front of the Western Wall, there was room for 200 or 250 worshipers at the most. To make way for the endless stream of people about to descend on the area, an entire densely populated neighborhood--including a small mosque--was razed overnight. Its Moslem inhabitants were given three hours to move out. Bulldozers and heavy road rollers driven by ecstatic civilian volunteers crushed and packed tight the debris to produce a flat surface. "In two days it was done, finished, clean," Mayor Kollek boasted in his memoirs. In a statement characteristic of the mood of the time, he urged everybody to stop using the century-old term Wall of Tears, or Wailing Wall. According to Kollek, the time of tears was over.

South of the new plaza by the Western Wall, which was big enough to hold at least a hundred thousand people, a ramp led up to the Temple Mount. Large signs, put there by order of the chief rabbi, reminded Orthodox Jews of the rabbinic rule against entering the sacred precincts. More warnings were posted elsewhere in the Old City. As time passed, they were ignored more and more readily by fundamentalists driven by messianic stirrings.

Leading them was one of Dayan's senior officers--soon to be elected chief rabbi of Israel--the then chief military chaplain, Major General Shlomo Goren. He believed he was hearing the footsteps of the messiah and that fate had cast him, Goren, in the role of being his herald. On August 16, 1967 (the 1897th anniversary of the burning of the temple by the Romans), Goren, in full military garb and followed by a group of fervent disciples, broke through the stunned Moslem guards onto the Temple Mount. Goren claimed he had unraveled the great secret of the ages, enabling him to circumvent the ritual taboo. He did not claim he knew the location of the Holy of Holies, but he thought it was possible to say with assurance where it had not been: in the large courtyards between the two mosques. Jews may, even should, set foot there--after due preparation, of course, which included fasting, prayer, and ritual baths. Goren led a prayer service in these forecourts and proclaimed his intention to build a synagogue there. Throwing fresh fuel on the flames of religious discord, Goren argued that the mosques' courtyards were not sacred to Moslems, as they were to Jews. Moslems themselves were admitting to this, he polemicized, by removing their shoes only inside the mosques, never outside, on the surrounding platform.

Panic spread among the Moslems of Jerusalem. Goren was reprimanded by his superiors, but his demonstration lent new weight to an Arab obsession dating from the days of the British mandate, a Moslem preoccupation that was reinforced by Nazi propaganda during World War II: the belief that the Jews were determined to raze the mosques in order to rebuild their temple. The government promised the Moslem clergy that the next time Goren tried to enter the sacred precincts he would be stopped by the police. The panic abated, only to be rekindled a few days later by the minister of religious affairs, the ultra-Orthodox Zerach Warhaftig. The minister declared in an interview that by civil law, the Jews were the "owners" of the Temple Mount and of everything on it. The interviewer wondered how this could possibly be. The minister explained that the Jews had retained a valid title since the days of David, "who had paid the full price for it [fifty shekels of silver] to Araunah the Jebusite, as is recorded in Samuel II, chapter 24, verse 24."

Question: "Haven't a few things happened in the thousands of years since then? Are you saying that the Temple Mount . . . is Jewish property even today?"

Warhaftig: "Yes, [it was] acquired in more than one sense. Generations have shed blood in order to make the Land of Israel ours; and the full price was paid [by David] in money as well."

The minister went on to say that while there was no doubt that Jewish rights on the Temple Mount overrode those of the Moslems, and while the Jews even had a right to raze the mosques there, they had no intention at the moment of actually doing so. The implication was that this was so only for the time being, and so it was understood. The atmosphere has remained poisoned ever since by the continuing rhetoric of the fervent and by recurrent violence. The legal battle has remained unresolved. Successive Israeli governments and courts have thrown the ball back and forth between them, avoiding a clear-cut decision on this issue.

The 1967 Israeli Law for the Protection of Holy Places was passed simultaneously with the act of annexation of East Jerusalem. It did not address itself directly to the question of holy places sacred to more than one faith. The law guaranteed members of all faiths freedom of access to their holy places. Freedom of access seemed to imply freedom of worship as well. The courts have since formally proclaimed the Temple Mount a "Jewish holy place" and have upheld the right of Jews to worship there. But, on the basis of an old British decree, the courts conveniently sidestepped the main issue by holding the executive branch responsible for public order at the holy places. The executive has until now ordered the police to enable Jews to visit but not to hold prayer services on the Temple Mount. The situation has left everybody unhappy. Liberals have protested the absence of a decision in principle. Fundamentalists have protested the Kafkaesque surrealism of not being able to exercise what is recognized as a "legitimate" right by the highest court in the land. Islamists and Arabists continue to warn of a possible Armageddon as a result of tampering with Moslem rights on the Temple Mount. The Moslem clergy continue to live in fear, knowing that what is "legitimate" might not for very long remain disallowed. They have never recognized Jewish rights at the Western Wall and are even less inclined to bend on the issue of Jewish rights to pray on the Temple Mount itself.

This is one of the reasons for the long-standing refusal by the Moslem clergy to allow archaeological surveys on the Temple Mount. Aerial photography suggests that there have been extensive physical changes there since 1967. Several pre-Islamic archaeological remains on the Temple Mount seem to have been bulldozed away or buried under lawns. Tunnels leading to ancient Jewish vaults under the Dome of the Rock have been walled up. The Moslem clergy are said to have made great efforts, since 1967, to obliterate all physical traces linking the Temple Mount to its Jewish past. This may be a hopeless undertaking; but it is easy to see the fears that have inspired it.

Prominent Israeli figures have continued to advocate holding Jewish religious observances on the Temple Mount. Among them have been two chief rabbis, Shlomo Goren (1969-1979) and Mordechai Eliahu (1982-). Goren ordered the removal of the signs placed by his predecessor at the entrance to the Temple Mount. Eliahu, shortly before his election as chief rabbi, pronounced himself in favor of evicting the infidels from the Temple Mount. At the very least, he would establish a synagogue and a yeshiva there. "We see with our own eyes," he explained,

that foxes roam there and strangers walk upon and desecrate the site of which it has been said that "the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death." Our sages of blessed memory ruled that pagans were unclean and forbidden entry to the holy place. There is a sacred duty to prevent this sad state of affairs [from continuing], and let no one fear of what [gentiles] might say.

The fate of the new large plaza in front of the Western Wall is another indication of where things might be heading. After it was cleared and provisionally paved in stone, the Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie was invited by the municipality to submit plans for the permanent structuring of the entire site and its immediate environs. Safdie and the municipality have submitted at least four proposals since 1970, only to see each rejected by the rabbinate. The rabbinate has even opposed shade trees, preferring the plaza's present rather improvised, provisional look. Meir Yehuda Getz, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, explained why: "Safdie's plans were too grandiose.... I don't want the Wall to be the Third Temple." It was not that Getz did not want to see the third temple. He wanted it built, he told an interviewer, but in the right place--on the Temple Mount itself. "You will see," he said, "the right moment to build it [there] will come. Perhaps there was such a moment in 1967. We missed it."

Question: "What about the mosques on the Temple Mount?"

Getz: "No worry! They will disappear.... The Almighty will destroy them. We will lend him a helping hand." Getz, according to the interviewer, gave a knowing smile. Then he added: "The scenario is clear."

Maniacs and cranks have thought so all along. Now and then, someone steps forward to lend God a helping hand. On a hot August day in 1969, at seven o'clock in the morning, flames suddenly shot through al-Aqsa mosque above the Western Wall. A mentally disturbed, twenty-nine-year-old Australian tourist named Denis Michael Rohan had found his way into the locked mosque at this early hour and stuffed a load of kerosine-soaked cotton under a wooden pulpit. After lighting the rags with a match, Rohan calmly walked out, watched by unsuspecting guards (who recognized him later).

Within minutes, the mosque was ablaze. Rohan watched it burn from a distance--laughing (as he claimed later in his confession to the police) and taking pictures with an Instamatic camera. Rohan was a member of a chiliastic Protestant Christian sect. He believed that unless all "abominations" were removed from the Temple Mount, the Second Coming of Christ or that of the Jewish messiah--it was never made clear which--would suffer a tragic delay. His ambition was to end this delay, which he believed was causing sin and unhappiness throughout the world. Rohan believed that the burning of al-Aqsa would usher in the millennium. He saw himself as God's special envoy for that purpose. He wanted the Jewish temple rebuilt, "for sweet Jesus to return and pray in it." He had been roused to his task in Australia, he told the police; it seems he was listening on his shortwave radio to a station called Radio Church of God, and in fact had come to Israel to better hear the transmissions, which emanated from Amman, Jordan.

The fire quickly spread to the dome at the southern end of the mosque and to the heavy old beams under the roof, which came crashing down. Crowds of infuriated Moslems gathered on the Temple Mount, protesting the presumed torching of the mosque by the Jews. Hysterical men and women shouted insults at the firemen, pulled at their tools and overalls, and threw down their ladders. A few tried to snatch away the hoses--which, they feared, were pouring gasoline, not water, on the flames. In the ensuing struggle and confusion, the work of the firemen was considerably delayed. The fire was fully extinguished only five hours later. When the smoke finally cleared, the great damage the blaze had wrought was evident: in addition to an exquisite pulpit, carved in Aleppo in 1187 to celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem from Crusader rule, a good part of the dome and the ceiling had been destroyed.

By this time, Arabs and Moslems all over the world were accusing Israel, and the Jews, of premeditated arson in Islam's third holiest spot. Incensed crowds from Morocco to Pakistan clamored for jihad. A preacher on Radio Baghdad announced that rivers of blood would not atone for this unspeakable outrage. One of the ulemas in the great mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo called on the faithful to wage uncompromising war against the Jewish enemies of God and human life, "as is evident from their holy book." In Jerusalem, Arab shopkeepers went on strike. Demonstrators filled the streets of the Moslem quarters with cries of "Nasser! Nasser!" and "Death to the Jews." The Moslem Supreme Council in Jerusalem called a press conference and announced that the firemen had been intentionally sluggish; worse still, they alleged, the city had deliberately cut off the water supply to the Temple Mount during the fire.

Official Israeli reaction to the catastrophe was a mixture of apology and fury at its exploitation by the Arabs. In the two years since the 1967 war, Israelis had convinced themselves that the Moslems of Jerusalem were reconciled to Jewish rule. The disappointment of discovering otherwise generated new fears and more anti-Arab prejudice. The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, rushed to the scene and described it as a terrible disaster; he was immediately attacked by right-wing activists for identifying too much with Moslem sensibilities. Prime Minister Golda Meir, shattered by the possible consequences of what had happened, told her cabinet: "We must condemn this outrage." Menachem Begin, one of her ministers (and a future prime minister himself), retorted: "Yes, of course. But not too much." The disaster served the Arab cause so well that at least one Israeli cabinet minister suggested that the mosque had been set on fire by an Arab provocateur.

Rohan was quickly apprehended. He claimed later that he had planned all along to give himself up. He would walk into a police station and say, "Good morning, boys, I burned the mosque. I did it to make Jesus come back to Jerusalem and save the people there." He was eager for all the world to know what he had done, and why. It had been his destiny. He was proud of it. Before setting fire to the mosque, he had wandered around the city drunk with biblical texts and their heavenly revelations. He believed he was chosen to build the Temple of the Lord on the ashes of al-Aqsa. It is facile to say, as many did at the time, that Rohan was "mad." Of course he was mad. The Gnostic doctrine, with its hallowed belief in salvation through the gutters of the world, blurs all distinction between the madman and the fanatic, between faith and frenzy, between fervor and psychosis.

Rohan seemed to enjoy his trial. He remained calm and composed throughout. A young Arab tourist guide who had taken him around Jerusalem on the eve of the fire testified that Rohan had impressed him as a bit of a "fool." He made a popular gesture with his hand to indicate what he meant. "The audience in the court," wrote Professor Shlomo Shohan, a Tel Aviv University criminologist who attended the trial, "burst into laughter in which Rohan also joined. At that moment the barriers between judges and audience, prosecution and defense, sanity and insanity seemed to melt and the gentle smile on Rohan's troubled face reflected the fool in Christ."

Shoham argued that any model of deviance could no longer exclude religious faith and other transcendental factors. "Deviance motivated by religion is not confined to a Rohan, or a Charles Manson mesmerizing his California hippie initiates into a murderous trance, or even a Jean Genet performing a black mass in a desecrated cathedral. The deviant avenues to salvation would appear to be just one logical step further from conventional mysticism." The court found Rohan had acted through an "irresistible impulse" and confined him to a mental hospital. Because of his delusions, it implied, he could not help acting as he did.

The Rohan trial brought back memories of the murder, in 1951, of King Abdullah of Jordan on the same Temple Mount (and in the presence of his grandson, the present king, Hussein). The assassin was a young tailor named Mustapha Shukri Ashu. He was associated with an organization called the Holy Jihad and with a leading Moslem politician of Jerusalem who had spent the war years in Nazi Germany. Ashu was a devout Moslem. On the day before the assassination, he had wandered about Jerusalem as drunk with Koranic lore as Rohan had been with biblical. He shot the king for trying to make peace with the Israeli infidels.

One wonders how in the common discourse of three great religions Jerusalem ever became the proverbial city of peace. The city was founded by a warrior king. Jehovah was a "Lord of hosts." Christ foretold war and pestilence ("the love of many shall wax cold"); Mohammed was certainly not a peacemaker.

. . . .

The epithet may have originated in the ancient name of Jerusalem --Salem (after the pagan deity of the city), which is etymologically connected in the Semitic languages with the words for peace (shalom in Hebrew, salam in Arabic). Paul's epistle to the Hebrews evokes Melchizedek, the ancient priest-king of Salem, "which is King of peace." And perhaps the epithet was but a prayer, as in the famous, postexilic Psalm 122:

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem

They shall deserve quietness that love thee

Peace be within thy walls

Calm within thy palaces.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the great German Protestant exponent of the Enlightenment, placed "The Three Rings," his well-known fable of religious tolerance, in, of all places, the capital of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, perhaps the most fanatic and cruelly narrow-minded realm of the Middle Ages. Lessing's Jewish friend and follower Moses Mendelssohn called his own book on tolerance and religious freedom Jerusalem.

Jerusalem's peacemakers often must have felt they were plowing the sea. Jeremiah was thrown into a dungeon. Jesus was crucified. Frederick II, who sought a peaceful accommodation between Christians and Moslems, was excommunicated. Judah Magnes, first president of the Hebrew University, preached Jewish-Arab compromise; he was ignored by Arabs and vilified by Jews. Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish United Nations mediator, was assassinated on a Jerusalem street in broad daylight, as was King Abdullah of Jordan. Both were killed while trying to make peace between Arabs and Jews. One of the suspects arrested at the time in connection with Bernadotte's murder would be a leading militant, forty years later, in the movement to rebuild the Jewish temple, and a frequent speaker at American Evangelist conventions.

While the dominant religions of Jerusalem have alternated, nothing has been more constant than the fanaticism of their militants. In the past nineteen hundred years alone, the dominant religion was changed at least eleven times, often at great human cost: by the Romans in AD 70 and 132, the Byzantines in 335, the Zoroastrians in 614, the Byzantines in 628, the Arabs in 638, the Crusaders in 1099, the Arabs again in 1187, the British in 1917, the Jordanians in 1948, and the Israelis in 1967. Few other cities have such a record.

. . . .

What the Jews call Temple Mount, Moslems call Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). The ancients named the sacred precinct Moriah. Walking through it shortly after dawn, you can see the sun rising behind Olivet. The Dome catches the first rays, then the drum lights up in vivid blues and yellows. Long shadows, dark and ghostly, fall on the great platform paved with pink and gray polished stones. At this early hour, it has the aspect and loneliness of a mountain peak. The breeze rustles the cypresses and pines. From afar comes the murmur of the awakening city. The gilded Dome covers the bare piece of raw rock, which has been the sum and meaning of so much exhortation and piety, so much joy and lamentation, and so much violence and bloodshed. The Dome glistens in the sun. The supplicants have not yet arrived. The tourists, nowadays, are allowed in only between 12:00 and 3:00 PM. The chant of Jews praying rises from behind the great supporting wall in the west. A lonely usher is still asleep in one of the dark doorways leading into al-Aqsa. But on the ramparts in the east and in the south, the guards already walk up and down nervously, carrying walkie-talkies. Up and down they walk, between the watchtowers and the searchlights set up in recent years to keep out intruders during the day and dynamiters and arsonists during the night. No one is taking any chances. According to Moslem lore, the Noble Sanctuary is the spot on earth nearest to paradise, where the righteous are attended by beautiful youths who never grow old and where the one incantation constantly heard is "Salaam! Salaam!"

In the early morning, military jets often slice through the sky like silver knives above the shimmering walls and ramparts. It is odd to think of this cradle of the religions as a forbidding fortress. Its very architecture breathes conflict. The massive walls, the protective towers, suggest siege, rather than pilgrimage. The great sanctuary on the Temple Mount is a fortress within a fortress. So is the Western Wall area nearby, with its cordons of armed guards and special riot police who block every access and search for bombs in every bag and sack. On the rooftops above the wall area, army sharpshooters are forever alert with guns and binoculars, on the lookout for terrorists.

In a nearby narrow alleyway, the memory of a victim recently stabbed to death is commemorated on a rudimentary stone plaque inscribed with Hebrew letters standing for "May God Avenge His Blood." After each such act, municipal workers, in cars marked JERUSALEM CITY OF PEACE in three languages, rush to the scene with rags and brooms. They wash the blood off the flagstones. Life is soon, in the jargon of the newspapers, back to normal. Commerce continues. Tourists, hardly aware that blood was shed here a short time before, throng the souvenir stands. They move in a dream world of their own, donning funny hats and smelling of deodorants and suntan lotion. It is easy to ridicule them. But as you watch the crowds pushing through the narrow bazaars, you feel how right Samuel Johnson was when he said that people are never more innocently occupied than when making or spending money.

The thick human traffic flows through the bazaars, past the commemorative stones, under the bowed arches, down the quaint steps, seemingly unconcerned. The holy sites touch. Some are jammed one on top of the other within the same building a mosque, a synagogue, a church--all equally bent with age, reliquaries, and tombs. Through a tunnel burrowed out north of the Western Wall after 1967, Orthodox Jews reach a first-century vault, deep under the Moslem quarter, to hold a prayer service. Directly above them, the qadis of the Moslem Supreme Council might be deliberating a fine point of Islamic law. On the ground floor of a rickety building nearby on Mount Zion, Jews venerate the alleged tomb of King David, as they have since at least the fifteenth century. One floor above, in the same building, Christians venerate the Cenacle, the room where, according to Christian lore, the Last Supper took place. To add to the confusion, the building, sacred to both Christians and Jews, is surmounted by a Moslem minaret.

Through the arches, there are glimpses out to the surrounding countryside. Its "fields of tension between conflicting geological and geographic factors, between the desert and the Mediterranean region," writes Leo Picard, a noted geologist, mirror "the history of the city and the spirit of the inhabitants."

One modern writer who captures this precariousness in his work is the poet Yehuda Amichai. "It's sad to be the Mayor of Jerusalem," he says in a celebrated poem. It's terrible. What can he do with her? How can any man be the mayor of such a city? He will build, and build, and build,

And at night

The stones of the hills round about

Will crawl down

Towards the stone houses.

Like wolves coming to howl at the dogs

Who have become men's slaves.

The Arab geographer Muqaddasi, whose very name implies that he was a native of Jerusalem, expressed a similar sentiment ten centuries earlier. "Jerusalem," he wrote, "is a golden basin filled with scorpions."