Another day in Jerusalem, with some walking

More blustery and foul, rainy weather in Jerusalem today. In the morning I did great back-to-back interviews with Naomi Chazan and Yigal Kipnis. Naomi’s the Chair of the Meretz Party, a former leading Meretz MK, and one-time deputy speaker of the Knesset. Yigal is a farmer/settler on Golan who’s very supportive of the idea of a land-for-peace deal with Syria and has written a lot about the history of the Golan. Two peaceniks with interesting perspectives on the decline of their country’s peace movement– which is what I was principally asking about.
I did those interviews holed up at one end of the lounge at the American Colony Hotel. Time was, I could afford to stay there; but its prices skyrocketed a while ago so now I just go and get the occasional coffee there.
One interesting thing about the vast majority of Jewish Israelis– even peaceniks– is that they don’t know much about about the geography of the predominantly Palestinian portions of East Jerusalem and often seem a bit confused if you mention the name of any hotel here other than the American Colony. That probably dates back to the ‘Good Old Days’ of the First Intifada when most of the press conferences held by intifada leaders were in the National Palace Hotel, which is now closed, and many of the other meetings– like the ones between George Schultz and Faisal Husseini, or Hanan Ashrawi– were in the American Colony Hotel. Since Oslo, however, the Rabin government and all the governments since then have worked hard to try to eliminate all Palestinian political activity from Jerusalem… Once the PLO people came back to their homeland, they were not allowed to live or run offices in Jerusalem at all, and the center of their West Bank activity was established in Ramallah…
Anyway, I enjoy sitting around in the lovely spaces of the A.C. and can just about afford a cup of coffee there.
After those interviews I came back to my hotel to do some logistics. I called young Jason in the Government Press Office, to check on the progress of the application I made seven days ago for a foreign press pass. He checked up on my file and said he could make me a “freelancers’ press pass” within about an hour– and that yes, that would enable me to go to Gaza.
Yay!
I told him I’d be by his office later in the afternoon to pick it up.
Half an hour later he called back and said, Oh dear, there’s been “a problem” (unspecified.) He can’t, it turns out, make me any kind of press pass until unspecified further things have happened. No, there’s nothing I can do to make this happen faster.
(Jason: You reading this? Give me a call! Tell me what’s happening!)
By that time I had about 90 minutes spare time before my next interview. Just enough to walk at a rapid clip down to the Old City, have a quick walk round there, grab a sandwich, and do a few errands. It was raining and blustery on and off. The kind of day when you don’t know if it’s worth putting up your umbrella because at any moment the rain might stop or the umbrella get blown inside out and ruined. Or, the rain might get a lot harder and your umbrella get blown inside-out and ruined.
Once inside the Bab al-Amoud (Damascus Gate) I headed down the Souk Khan el-Zayt. The two Israeli soldiers were guarding the Bab were down at street level, standing around under an awning with their big assault rifles dangling down by their shins. In the Khan al-Zayt, most little storefronts have a plastic or metal “lid” that projects between two and three feet out into the narrow stone-paved alley. These give some protection from the rain if you keep under them, but of course the rain then just torrents down from the edge of the lid, sometimes forming an almost solid sheet of water down the middle of the alley. The shops were all open and there were a few other hardy shoppers dodging between the raindrops like me.
I ducked into one of the restaurants there that look small on the outside but that, once you go in, have several rooms set deep back into beautifully arched and stone-vaulted interior space. Had a quick shawerma sandwich with fries. Continued on to the Via Dolorosa and found a great little store near the 8th Station of the Cross selling beads and nice assembled bead-and-silver necklaces. (Presents for the daughters.)
It’s amazing how the history of Jerusalem is layered and layered upon itself. Was this indeed the Via Dolorosa, I wonder? And anyway, when did anyone start observing “the Stations of the Cross” and when did they get inscribed onto the floor-plan of this ancient city in this way?
I went back down the Via Dolorosa to Al-Wad (Valley) Street and turned back up it toward the Damascus Gate. In the middle of Al-Wad Street you have to walk right under the enormous great edifice– built right across the street– that Ariel Sharon bought as a second residence for himself sometime back in the 1980s. Israeli flags waving limply from several places along its roofline. No sign today, though, of the huge security presence that used to be required to guard it. A handful of small Palestinian-run stores operated at street level in the arched space beneath it.
… Well, back along Salahuddine Street to the American Colony for the third interview of the day, this one with Efraim Inbar, a pro-Likud strategic-studies specialist (and Director of the “Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies” at Bar Ilan University) with whom I’ve kept in some degree of touch over the years. We talked for over an hour, me furiously scribbling notes because he talks fast and said a lot of extremely interesting things.
So it’s been a good day. This evening I’m going for dinner with an old friend, walking (I think, weather permitting) along a route that will take me directly past the tent where an elderly Palestinian woman called Um Kamel has been living for a number of years now, after settlers and the police evicted her from the family home she and her husband (who passed away a few months ago) and his family before him had lived in for 150 years.
I believe she was the same one who was there when we interviewed a family in just those circumstances, in just about that same exact place, seven years ago.
In this weather. Tents– here in Jerusalem and there in Gaza.