'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking

I had a good day in Jerusalem today.  Starting with writing, writing, writing.  Yesterday after I got back to the Jerusalem Meridian Hotel, I started writing my second piece for Salon-- about the Hamas women in Gaza, and about Hamas more generally... And I'd hope to finish it yesterday, too.  But I have so much material from Gaza rattling around in my notebook and in my head that it took a while for it to settle down and "compose"... So I only made a start on the article yesterday evening.

This morning I got up, had a quick breakfast in the hotel's beautiful old stone-arched restaurant, then told myself, "Helena, write!"  Actually, I also had the hope of a rather interesting interview in Tel Aviv today, but by around 10 a.m. the guy's executive assistant had called to say it wouldn't, after all, work out.  So I got to continue with my writing instead.  And shortly after 2 p.m. the Salon  piece was done-- in at just under 3,000 words.  I don't think the shape is perfect-- I find it really, really hard to compose anything, let alone a longer piece like this, completely on the small laptop screen, without doing any printouts.  (I'm a big fan of self-editing on hard copy.)  But it is what it is.  There's a professional editor there at Salon at work on the piece, so let's hope he can rebalance whatever needs to be rebalanced in it.  Maybe it's two pieces, anyway?  Or one main piece and a sidebar?  I guess we'll see.

Holed up in a quiet hotel room writing, and eating from room service. It's not a bad situation to be in-- especially if, as is now the case, the room in question has a fabulous view out over the Mount of Olives, pierced on its ridge by the two towers of the Augusta Victoria Hospital and the Hebrew U. Mount Scopus campus.  But after nearly 24 hours of this holed-up-in-room-writing regime, I definitely needed to walk.  I had nearly an hour to spare before I was due to go visit my old Palestinian-Armenian friend Albert Aghazarian, who lives in the Old City, so I decided to take a roundabout route to his place there.

What a fabulous, intriguing city Jerusalem is, especially for pedestrians.  When I was in Gaza, I was once again acutely aware of how lucky I am to be able to come to Jerusalem whenever I want to.  Some of the Palestinians I talked to there had never visited this city.  Some hadn't been able to visit it for many years now.  It was actually easier for Gazans to get to Jerusalem during the height of the first intifada than it became after the conclusion iof the Oslo Accord.  But the Gazans all long for the city intensely.  A large, glowing image of the Dome of the Rock is the main decoration in many public places there (as, indeed, throughout the whole Palestinian diaspora)

... Well, my route to Albert's place turned out to be a bit more roundabout than I had expected.  He'd reminded me I needed to go to the Armenian Convent of St. James and ask for his house there.  So I walked along Salaheddine Street to the Old City walls, and then southwest along the outside of the walls a bit till I reached the Damascus Gate.  (It was cold out. It's been a blustery day here today: the first real time in all my visit that I've been glad to have the warm wool coat that I almost jettisoned ten days ago because it seemed such a pain to have to carry it around.)

In front of the Damascus Gate there's a broad stone plaza that's linked to the gate by a wide stone footbridge where normally a row of older Palestinian women from the villages around will sit and sell their herbs and other produce.  Most of these women-- both the ones sitting outside the gate and the far greater number of their sisters who sit at various points throughout the Old City-- wear the intricately embroidered dresses that are an important part of their dowry and their identity.  The other day when I was at the Damascus Gate, a gaggle of Israeli soldiers was hanging around the footbridge, with another soldier silhouetted in the high little window in the high stone battlements above the gate.

The gate is the real, proper, kind of entrance to what was built 400 years ago as a fortified city: that is, you go in and you immediately have to take a couple of quick turns under various potential portcullis or boiling-oil arrangements: not an easy gate to storm into with a 16th century cavalry.  Then you're at a relatively high point inside the city.  The stone-paved street in front of you leads quite steeply downhill for 50 yards, between all kinds of small shops and raucous street vendors, and then immediately forks into two.  I took the left fork, down Al-Wad Street, which is quieter than the other fork, the Souq Khan al-Zeit, which is a long, often suffocating beehive of vendors and shoppers.

The Old City is a complex, three-dimension jigsaw of a stone rabbit warren (wrapped up in an enigma.)  You'll be walking along, say the bustle and hubbub of Souq Khan al-Zeit and you'll look sideways and see some beautiful calm steps leading up under a sunlit arch.  Or you can occasionally catch a glimpse of an interior courtyard, or a small garden.  But the main thing in the city is Jerusalem limestone in all possible colors and configurations: arches, steps, cantilevered little rooms, dark hallways, tiny tunnels, mysterious side-alleys; bleached white, glowing godlen, lichened and dark, rose-colored, or honey-buff.  And people!  Whether the Palestinian traders in Bab al-Silsila Street trying to sell you their mishmash of Jewish, Palestinain, and imported-from-China tchotchkes, or the yeshiva student slipping along an alley on his way to the Kotel to pray, or a massive long skein of Christian tourists from Nigeria shivering in the cold and anxiously trying to keep up with their tour-guide, or a group of three women trying to maneuver a large (though still symbolic)  wooden cross around a tight corner, or a large family of Orthdox Jews talking in loud Brooklyn accents in a courtyard in the Jewish Quarter...

So from Al-Wad Street  I slipped left into the Souq al-Qattanin, which has been nicely rehabbed since I was last there-- by, I believe, the Palestinian Welfare Society. Halfway along it I found a gate I hadn't seen before leading to something called the Al-Quds University Jerusalem Studies Center.  I went in.  Hey, maybe I could find my old Oxford buddy Sari Nuseibeh who's the President of Al-Quds University and whom I've been trying (in an off-and-on way) to see ever since I got here.  Inside there was a clean, hushed courtyard, with not a soul in any of the offices leading off it. I spied a nice stone staircase in one corner and climbed it.  Who knew where it might lead?  The noise and bustle of the Souq had completely disappeared.  I climbed up to a spot that I suppose might have been on the souq's roof-- it was rather hard to tell-- and looked behind me at a stunning view of the Dome of the Rock's gold dome, and the more austere and classically shaped grey dome of  Al Aqsa.

Sadly, that walkway didn't lead anywhere.  I went down, rejoined the Souq al-Qattanin, and walked along to the far end-- which turned out to be an entrance into the two mosques' Noble Sanctuary (which is also, I guess, the plinth of the destroyed Jewish temple?)  Four Israeli police officers lounged at the gate and told me I could not go in.  "On whose orders is that?" I asked.  "The Waqf," said one (that is, the Muslim religious endowment that runs the holy places).  "The Israeli police," said another.  They talked a little among themselves.  "Both institutions together," they concluded.

So I got another glimpse of the mosques through that gateway, and turned back.  Now, time was getting short and I needed to hurry.  I had a general idea of where the city's Armenian Quarter is-- it is one of the four areas into which the Old City was divided under the Ottoman millet system, the others being the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Quarters. I walked briskly along to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, then struck left towards the small piazza at the base of David's Tower.  An insistent tour-guide assailed me there.  I assured him I didn't need to hire him, but he was nice enough to tell me exactly where I'd find the Armenian Convent of St. James.  It involved walking along the rather barren expanse of Armenian Patriarchate Street for a little while-- "under the arch", as he said-- and then I'd find it on the left.  However, I took an entire left turn too early, and ended up wandering through a maze of small, very blank-walled streets in the Armenian Quarter, searching with increasing desperationn for the Convent of St. James.  Many of the walls there are liberally plastered with a "Map of the Armenian Genocide".  But I thought it would have a lot more useful to have had a few actual maps of street-plan and major attractions posted there as well. At one point I thought I'd found my destination, and turned in to the gateway relieved.  But a startled old man popped out of a kiosk and peering at me through bottle-bottom eye-glasses said, "No, you need the Convent, not the Monastery."

Well, I did find it soon after.  Once again, a big arched stone entrance pierced with a large heavy door which in turn is pierced by a smaller postern.  Once again the watchful door-keeper, eager to offer help.  "Albert's house?" he said, and taking me by the arm he walked me to the end of the entrance-way, pointed across a large, bare stone courtyard within and said, "You see that staircase?  Don't go up it.  Look for the doorway underneath and ring the bell."

Albert, his wife Majdoleine, and their kids live in a warren of rooms set around their own internal courtyard here.  Majdoleine led me in across the courtyard as the first drops fell in a rainstorm that soon after became almost a tempest.  But we sat snugly sipping tea in the room where Albert works these days: its arched walls all piled high with books.

Albert Aghazarian was a key spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation that attended the breakthrough first Arab-Israeli peace talks at Madrid in October 1991, and he continued to work with the Palestinian delegation-- which was led by the veteran Gaza political figure Haidar Abdel-Shafei-- throughout the months that followed.  I last saw him in summer 2002, when he received a large delegation of Quakers of which I was part.  This time, as then, I found him intensely disappointed with the way things had turned out, angry, and pessimistic.  "We are heading for Armageddon," he said at one point.  "But anyway, Zionism is finished... These people think they can achieve anything with raw power-- without trying to understand other people at all.  It's like the attitude of the people at the very dawn of the colonial age, in the 16th century: all brute power and arrogance...  The Americans are just as bad as the Zionists."

He said he had retired almost completely from public life now, and he spends most of his time working on translations.  He told me he speaks seven languages -- which is not an unusual number for Armenians of his generation.  (Armenian, Turkish, Greek, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French.)  His kids, he said, "only speak four."

At four o'clock he settled in to his usual afternoon pastime of watching the world news digest that Hizbullah's TV station, Al-Manar, produces every day, and that he picks up with his satellite dish.  "It is really well done, really professional," he said.  "You can learn such a lot just by watching this."  I watched a little with him, then decided to get on my way.

Of course, I got lost trying to get out of the Armenian Quarter, as well.  Or rather, I got lost in the absolute maze of the Jewish Quarter.  At one point I mounted one set of steep steps (smelling strongly of cat-piss after the recent rain), and then up another, and another-- and I found myself on a broad-strectching stone and concreted roof area, punctuated by the humps and bumps and the occasional square grid of a ventilation hole through which I could peer down onto one of the Palestinains souqs some 30 or 40 feet below.  Which souq?  I hadn't a clue.  I was quite lost, and the pathway that had brought me up here had just sort of fizzled out.  I retraced my steps, thought I had found my way out... and then the second or third time I ended up in Bab al-Silsila Street once again I knew I had to focus a littlke harder on my direction finding.

... So eventually, fairly tired, I arrived at the American Colony Hotel, with just 15 minutes in hand to read my newspaper in one of its intesnely gentrified lounges before my "date" with the former Deputy Knesset Speaker Naomi Chazan.  (Back in 1989, Bill and Lorna and I lived for two months in the American Colony. In those days they had a nice, plainly furnished, separate house across the street from the more famous courtyarded main structure. And if you were a journalist you could get a room there for around $60... That was before the Swiss management of the hotel discovered there are plenty of "journlists" with very deep pockets indeed. They jacked their prices up by about 44% and gentirified the whole place and we haven't stayed there since.)

After Naomi came in, we settled down in a corner of the bar (so she could smoke, ugh; but who am I to stop her?) and chatted for nearly an hour and a half. Naomi has worked for many years with the leftist Meretz Party.  She's not on Meretz's electoral list this year.  ("And as result, everyone in the party is a lot nicer to me than they used to be in the old days.  Then, I always felt the knives were out all around me.  But now, suddenly, everyone wants to be my friend!  They treat me like a kind of elder statesman.")  She was on the party's Platform Committee, and expressed a lot of authorial pride in the platform that they (or she?) produced.

One of the several things she expressed concern about  was the possibility of a low voter turnout.

The way she looked at the possibilities coming out of the election were as follows.  "You should think of Kadima as a road.  The question is, will it be the pivot party after the election-- the party without which no-one else can form a government.  That depends on how wide the road is, and how wide the shoulders are to each side of it.  If the road is just a narrow lane, then it won't be a pivot."

She said she thought Kadima needed 35 seats to emerge as a clear pivot party. (Today's latest poll in Ha'Aretz gives it 37.)  She thought it was also possible, however, that the rightist parties would emerge strong enough to be a pivot party-- though for them, given the smaller chances they'd have of attracting coalition partners from the left, the threshold to become the pivot was higher: 45 seats. (Today's poll gives them 35.)  She thought that if Kadima is the pivot party, then it might have a number of interesting ways to form a coalition, depending on width of the two "shoulders".  One possibility she spokle of is Kadima and Labor and Avigdor Leiberman's Yisrael Beitenu party forming the crux oif a coalition-- that is, without Likud.  But could we expect Israel's Amir Peretz to join Kadima's firmly unilateralist policy toward the Palestinians, I asked.  "Absolutely," she said.

I'm too tired to write anything more about what she said.  But I should just note that she said she'd attended a really great International Women's Day gathering in Tel Aviv yesterday.  It was organized by Na'amat, the organization of Israeli working women.  They had invited a mnumber of Palestinians speakers, some of whom had made what Naomi described as fairly fiery anti-occupation speeches.  "But well ended up dancing there together," she said.  She said-- need this be added?-- that no Hamas women had been on the roster.

As we walked out, there was a phalanx of dark-suited security men, in the middle of which we saw the white-maned, slightlly smug-looking figure of Jim Wolfensohn. Also, the US Consul-General.