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.