The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

To many Israelis that was an unacceptable, maximalist demand. It was, however, the result of an evolution in Palestinian thought born of eighty years of defeat and a compromise of their previous ideal of a ‘secular, democratic state’ in all of Palestine. It had taken generations for them to realize they did not have the strength to win back the part of Palestine – 78 per cent – they lost to Israel in 1948. By the first intifadah in 1987, they were ready for independence in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers and Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Barak told Palestinians they were unreasonable to demand all of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Israel’s 1967 conquest, all of the 22 per cent. At Camp David, where Bill Clinton caused a conflagration with his quixotic pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize to redeem his tarnished presidency, Barak had excluded the largest settlement blocs from discussion and was prepared to consider adjustments only to the rest of the occupied territories. Under Barak’s vague proposals, Israel would have kept about 30 per cent or more of the land, 80 per cent of the water and all of the sky above for its right to fly and use the airwaves. Even a leader as craven as Arafat could not say yes to a mere 15 per cent of all Palestine on which to build his Arab Bantu-stine.

‘Israel holds all the cards,’ Jonathan said, ‘and they know it. They are furious with the Palestinians for failing to recognize that. This is more on the left than on the right.’ Jonathan had discussed this with the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. ‘Peres told me, we are not negotiating with the Palestinians. We are negotiating with ourselves.’ The Israeli leadership regarded its decision on what to ‘give’ the Palestinians as an internal matter rather than as a subject for negotiation with the occupied people.

‘When subcontracting control to the PA failed,’ Jonathan concluded, ‘the left had nothing else.’ Israel turned to Sharon ‘with his policy of hit them and hit them harder’. Sharon had his critics, but Jonathan said they were even further to the right, demanding that the old Arab killer ‘get tougher, expel’. The Palestinians were making the settlers feel insecure on their roads in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Palestinians now have guns and are willing to use them,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Gaza settlers are no longer safe. Period. Palestinians can exact a daily price, which means Israelis don’t hold all the cards.’

In response, he admitted, ‘The Israelis made life absolutely miserable.’ Sharon was, he said ‘absolutely furious. And he’s trying to keep it going. More incursions, more killings.’

In his pink Ralph Lauren shirt with preppy button-down collar, Jonathan Kuttab was as much American as Palestinian. But he misjudged the United States, as parts of the world did when the attack on Afghanistan was beginning. ‘America needs the Arab world,’ he said. ‘It cannot invade Afghanistan without neutralizing this place. Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the rest will not go along with this crusade unless the Americans do something about the Palestinians.’ He was wrong. The United States let Sharon deal with the Palestinian problem as if its only dimension were security, as if Israel provided the model for the US to deal with Osama bin Laden and the tribes of Afghanistan. It did not seek or obtain Arab support. ‘The only basis for optimists,’ Jonathan said, ‘is that you cannot ignore one billion Muslims for ever.’ Jonathan, a Christian, may have been wrong about that as well.

We went back to the local conflict that was emblematic of the larger dispute between an all-powerful America and a helpless, supine Arab world. And we were back where we began more than a year before: that total weakness of the man in the torture chamber. ‘It’s not pure sadism,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the first intifadah, the problem was that ordinary soldiers were doing the interrogation. That’s sadism. They beat them up. But it was not effective. They have to force them to give information and to sign confessions. And they need professionals to do that. When you physically weaken someone, humiliate him, you can force him to do what you want. They use sleep deprivation and violent shaking. They are more effective. They study this. They are scientific and methodical. There are time limits, when people are vulnerable. If they have not broken down by the fiftieth day, they let them go.’ Did he know anyone who had taken it longer than fifty days? ‘I had a client who did. They released him on the fifty-fifth day. He had a few teeth broken. He was tired, weak, but in very good shape.’

The ones who survived the best were those who neither confessed nor implicated their comrades. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experience of French repression in Algeria, had observed the same phenomenon. Those who cracked, who named names, left prison ashamed and broken. Those who held out – despite being tortured longer – recovered. One of Fanon’s other observations was that those most in need of psychiatric treatment were the torturers. He told of a French policeman who came to Fanon begging for help. He wanted to stop beating his wife and children but to continue torturing Arabs. A journalist at Ha’aretz told me of an Israeli psychiatrist who specialized in torturers, some of whom found their only remedy was to quit.

What had the Palestinians achieved with their suffering? In my lifetime, the Vietnamese had driven out the French and the Americans. The Algerians had expelled the French. The Belgians, the British, the French and the Portuguese had left Africa, the Dutch abandoned the East Indies. The whites of South Africa had surrendered power to the majority. Yet the Palestinians were left behind, ignored by the great powers, betrayed and used by the Arab states, beaten down by the Israelis. Young Palestinians emerged from the Russian Compound to repair their damaged spirit and flesh, then grew old to watch their sons relive the experience.

‘Let me tell you something,’ Jonathan said. His elbows were on the table. His black hair and moustache made him look like a sombre Charlie Chaplin. I leaned forward to listen. ‘I never defended anyone accused of possessing, manufacturing or buying communications equipment. Give me a break. I’ve defended thousands of security defendants. How come no one is trying to listen to the Israelis? This is so embarrassing. In terms of armed struggle, we Palestinians are not serious.’ It wasn’t the coffee or Valentine Vester’s young blossoms that filled the morning air of the courtyard just then. It was despair. Jonathan, who for most of his professional life had attempted to defend Palestinians in the military courts, said that he had switched to business law.

Hidden Treasure

Papa Andrea’s restaurant was empty. I liked the place, not for the food, but for its open roof in the Christian Quarter. Most of the old city’s landmarks were nearby, all Jerusalem’s domes and spires and rain troughs and polished stone roofs. Just below were the souvenir shops, whose owners had set tables and chairs to play cards with one another outside. The largest shop, Yasser Barakat’s, was shuttered and padlocked. Two years earlier, in preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit, the shopkeepers had no time for cards. The streets were crammed with pilgrims and tourists along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, the large fountain where five streets met was dry. Flies swarmed over discarded cans of Coke and Pepsi where clear water should have collected. At street level, the cobbled walkways, the deserted businesses and the broken fountain made the old city a forlorn setting. Between the street and the roofs were the windows of the settlers’ flats. Each window sprouted a flag and blue metal mesh shutter. Tiny T-shirts and large underwear dripped in the sunlight. In one window, children pressed against the grille to watch the Arabs at their card tables. Their parents had settled there with the express purpose of forcing the Arabs out, as they had forced other Arabs out of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh and, more recently, much of the West Bank.

Would those young faces one day rebel against their parents’ radical hatred and learn Arabic and play cards in the street with their neighbours? Or would they, like their mothers and fathers, find some subterfuge to seize another flat and evict its Arab residents?

A middle-aged settler – her hair bundled under a scarf and her legs hidden inside a long skirt, like so many modest Muslim women – limped past the card players. Dragging her groceries in a bag from the Jewish Quarter, she did not look at the men. They did not glance up from their cards. Neither existed for the other, the Arabs living in their pre-Israelite past, the settler in some Arab-free future.

The Armenians dwelled, like ghosts, between the two. ‘There are two thousand Armenians in the old city now,’ George Hultunian, community historian, said. ‘Their children have no future.’ Armenia was the first kingdom in history to embrace Christ, and its priests were among the earliest to establish hostels for pilgrims visiting the scene of their Saviour’s execution and resurrection. Most of the two thousand lived within the walls and gates of St James’s Convent. The Armenian Quarter had no shops apart from a few groceries, Vic Lepejian’s ceramics factory, the Armenian Tavern and a photo shop.

Benjamin Disraeli, who came to Jerusalem in 1830 and 1831, later compared its Jews and Armenians in his novel Tancred. Eva ‘the Jewess’ noted the similarities between her people and the Armenians:

Go to Armenia and you will not find an Armenian. They too are an expropriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: ‘In every city of the East I find a home.’ They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races and little degenerated; with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced Gods and prophets and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles [St Gregory the Illuminator] and who never knew his great master.

The resemblance turned to tragedy in the twentieth century when both peoples were subjected to genocide.

The Armenians of Jerusalem were cut into factions and sects and categories as if they had been a million. By faith, they were Gregorian (Orthodox), Catholic and Protestant. By Armenian politics, they were Hanshak or Tashnak, dating from the pro- and anti-communist fights of the Russian Revolution and its Soviet conquest of non-Turkish Armenia. They were also, like the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, either local families or descendants of refugees from massacres. Many were Palestinian nationalists while others just wanted to get by, no matter who governed Jerusalem. George was from a native Jerusalem family, a Gregorian and a Palestinian nationalist. His friend Albert Agazarian, he said, was a refugee from northern Syria, a Catholic and also a Palestinian nationalist. Neither he nor Albert had strong views on Armenian politics, having made their stand as Palestinians. Eight Armenians languished in Israeli prisons for resisting occupation, and one Armenian, Artin Gouzelian, had given his life for Palestine.

George said that an organization to which he belonged had sent 350 Bibles in Arabic to Christian political prisoners in Israeli custody. Christians, including the Armenians, were leaving the country. Muslims, particularly since the new intifadah began, were leaving as well. Christians went to the West, whose countries gave them visas. Muslims, more than 100,000 in the previous year, went over the bridge searching for work in Jordan. Natalie Zarour, one of the managers at the American Colony Hotel, was emigrating with her family to Canada in a few weeks. Christians from Bethlehem, the Zarours were tired of the violence, the restrictions, the settlers who treated Arabs as sub-humans. I had known Natalie for years and would miss her beautiful face behind the Colony’s reception desk.

George took me upstairs to the refectory of the Armenian Convent. Among long tables of stone and marble, under vaulted ceilings, I imagined the monks eating in silence and awaiting an unwelcome visit from the city’s Turkish governors. A bridge, under which I had often walked and driven, formed part of the refectory. George indicated a hidden door. ‘If the Turks came,’ he explained, ‘the monks would disappear through here.’ It was an Armenian Bridge of Sighs, along which the monks would, like Casanova, escape. It was built in AD 1370. Until 1830, he said, the Ottomans did not collect fixed taxes. Instead, they demanded money when they needed it. ‘The Turks raided the monasteries. They were a good source of income, because of the pilgrims.’ The monks would clamber through the priest’s hole, across the covered bridge and onto a roof. After that, they hid or dispersed in the gardens on the other side of the city wall.

As we stepped onto the convent roof, guarded by a sixth-century gable, George explained the economics of Jerusalem life before the British occupied the city in 1917. ‘Three or four hundred people lived in the convent,’ he said. ‘It had about eight hundred rooms. They filled with pilgrims at Easter. In fact, at the times of pilgrimage, the whole city’s population grew about ten times. This convent could take in eight to ten thousand people.’ After the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the convent filled with refugee families. Some of them, like Albert Agazarian’s, were still there.

‘In 1917,’ George said, ‘three days before they left Jerusalem, the Turks demanded the Treasury.’ The convent’s treasure of gold, silver and jewels lay hidden behind another secret door within the church. George opened it, but swore me to keep the secret of its location until I died. ‘The Armenian patriarch filled wagons with the treasure in sealed boxes. He covered the boxes in coal.’ Horses pulled the Armenian community’s wealth to safety outside the city until the Turks withdrew. It seemed strange that no Turkish sentry would question a load of coal leaving the city in winter. George referred me to Sir Ronald Storrs’ Orientations, where the tale is recounted as he told it.

The Cathedral of St James, beyond a small plaza near the iron-door entrance to the monastery, was more beautiful to my eye that any other church in Jerusalem. ‘In sharp contrast to the sombre weariness of the Holy Sepulchre,’ Fr Jerome Murphy-O’Connor wrote in The Holy Land, ‘this church mirrors the life and vigour of a colourful and unified people.’ I was not sure about the unity, but the ceilings and walls let loose tributes of colour and vigour. In terms of icons per square foot, St James’s could hold its own with any Greek church. It also contained one of the holiest relics, the head of St James the Less. Herod the Great’s feeble son, Herod Antipas, had done with the apostle’s head what his father had to John the Baptist’s, in AD 44. George, with great patience for a man who must have shown the church to hundreds of ignorant visitors, told me the story of every panel, every painting, every door.

Three hundred and fifty candle-bearing lamps, all lit and suspended from ropes, could be lowered and raised via small pulleys. Each bore the inscription of its Armenian donor community. Much of the church’s beauty was the gift, George said, of an eighteenth-century patriarch called Gregory the Chain-bearer. In Gregory’s time, Armenians elsewhere were neglecting their church in Jerusalem. He went to Constantinople to shame them. ‘He put a chain around his neck and sat in front of the churches to raise money,’ George said. Gregory’s takings paid for the grand plaza, or porch, at the church door and for much of the restoration within. The cathedral was a warren of hidden doors and secret passages. Some led to chapels, others to refuges from tax collectors – the world’s first tax shelters.

George and I wandered through the convent grounds. They comprised about a sixth of the old city and almost the entire Armenian Quarter. At the Convent of the Olive Tree, there was indeed one olive tree. ‘This is, of course, a very young tree,’ George said, ‘but they say it is Ananias’s tree.’ By very young, George meant a few hundred years. Ananias had been a high priest two thousand years ago, when, legend claimed, Christ had been tied to the tree and whipped. Interestingly, both a non-Armenian church and a mosque stood within the grounds of the Armenian Quarter. St Mark’s, believed to have been the house of St Mark’s mother, Mary, was a Syrian Orthodox church. And the tiny Yaqubieh, or Jacob, Mosque had once been the chapel of the martyr St James of Persia. He was known as St James the Cut-Up, because the martyr’s singular form of execution was to be chopped to pieces.

The entire Armenian Quarter was clad in the smoothest stone I had ever seen, as slick as a seal’s back. The roofs, the courtyards and the plazas all had surfaces you could run your hands over or run barefoot across without taking a scratch. The rooftops and walkways formed an intricate system of water collection. Every massive stone was set to point the water towards a channel, and every channel made its way to a reservoir. ‘Under every church,’ George said, ‘there is a cistern. Before the rainy season, people spend weeks cleaning the roofs.’ Like the Nabataeans of the desert, the people of Jerusalem saved every drop the sky gave them. To waste water was a sin. To run dry was death.

The Armenians, like the Arab Christians of Palestine, were running out of people. We walked by the yard of the Armenian school, where a few boys played basketball. ‘The children have no future,’ lamented George, himself unmarried and childless. ‘Our generation didn’t care about the future. Albert and I, for example, have no possessions. We are a proud generation. We lived under Arab sovereignty and dignity. We were treated as normal citizens.’ He looked at the children, all born long after Israel conquered the old city in 1967. ‘They have known only occupation. They have had only humiliation. They challenge it in the intifadah, but that is superficial.’

The Armenians had survived genocide by Turkey. They would survive the Israelis, I said. Jerusalem, he reminded me, was a long way from the massacres in Anatolia, northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Jerusalem, in the last years of the Ottomans’ chaotic empire, was a refuge. ‘The Turks,’ he said of those who ruled the old city, ‘wanted money. These people want the land.’ The monks hid their money or begged for more. Land cannot be concealed or replaced.

George, a bespectacled and subdued man in a grey cardigan, hated the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the indignity meted out to both Arabs and Armenians. He told me that the only way he had found to endure was, like the monks of old, to seek a refuge. His refuge, he said, was the nineteenth century.

The View from the Convent

Jerusalem had always been a real estate scam, Albert Agazarian told me. George had left me at Albert’s house inside the convent. Albert lived there with his wife, son and two daughters. At home in his Syrian stone house, where every room opened on the courtyard as in old Damascus and Seville, Albert was a pasha. Madeleine, whom he had married when they were still in their twenties, brought coffee, tea, tobacco and sweets without his asking whenever anyone dropped by. He often had a guest – a journalist, a diplomat or an instructor from Bir Zeit University where he worked and his children studied. He usually received them in his library, a cluttered, domed room, with overstuffed sofas, shoe-sized ashtrays and books in no discernible order that he pulled down to quote some passage or other. There was no point in making an appointment to see Albert. He and Madeleine rarely bothered to answer their telephone.

God, could Albert talk. ‘You went to the leather tannery?’ he asked me. The ‘leather tannery’ was Dabbagha Square, just below Papa Andrea’s rooftop restaurant. ‘Up until 1860, that place stank like hell. After the Crimean War, the Russian pilgrims started coming. There was a wedding here between Russian piety and generosity on the one hand and Byzantine cunning on the other. It was Eftimos, the Orthodox treasurer, who got rid of the tannery and the smell from those dead cows and rotting hides.’ He said it as if the aroma had just cleared his nostrils. ‘Eftimos built the first well and the first hotel in the old city. It was not a khan.’ A khan, or caravanserai, was common in the Levant of the nineteenth century. Travellers stopped for shelter, but brought their own blankets and food. A hotel that provided beds, linen and meals was an innovation. ‘This hotel was the Hospice of St John, the first modern hotel in Jerusalem. This is where the settlers have been since April 1990.’ Those were the blue-grilled windows with Israeli flags that I had seen at lunch.

Madeleine, supporting a tray of coffee and cakes, pushed through the door and cleared space among the papers on the coffee table. Albert got up, opened a drawer and searched for something. Whatever it was, he did not find it. Madeleine poured the coffee and started for the door. I asked why she did not stay. Friends were waiting for her in the kitchen, and their conversation was more interesting.

‘The hotel was successful,’ Albert continued. ‘Its success instigated the Greek Orthodox to open the Grand Hotel and Grand New Hotel.’ The two hotels, built of Jerusalem stone in the high splendour of late Victorian and Habsburg design, dominated the western portal of the old city at the Jaffa Gate. ‘The Grand changed its name to the Imperial when Kaiser Wilhelm visited in 1898.’

The period from the Egyptian invasion of 1830 to Kaiser Wilhelm’s pilgrimage in 1898 made modern Jerusalem. The Christian powers – Russia, England, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy – erected churches and hospices in the Christian Quarter, on sites they bought in the Muslim Quarter and on hills outside the walls. German Christians erected the Augusta Victoria Hospital on a summit where the Kaiser was said to have had his first view of the Holy City. Prior to that, Imperial Russia staked its claim to Jerusalem with the construction of the Ascension Church, all onion domes and multicoloured like St Basil’s in Moscow, in 1870. Most of the modern Christian Quarter was built with foreign Christian donations in the late nineteenth century. England and Prussia opened the first Protestant church in the Holy Land, Christ Church, near the Jaffa Gate in 1849. It was a time when ideas born in Europe invaded the near Orient, Jerusalem in particular: imperialism, la mission civilitrice, the romantic Christian Zionism of Lords Shaftesbury and Palmerston (who suggested in 1840 that Europe’s Jews should be removed to Palestine and originated the phrase ‘land without a people for a people without a land’), nationalism, the forced opening of Ottoman markets to European trade with all its dislocating effects, the political Zionism of Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl and the first purchases with Rothschild money of Arab land for Zionist settlement. The Kaiser’s well-publicized procession through the Holy Land attracted Herzl from Vienna. Herzl paid homage to Kaiser Wilhelm and requested German sponsorship for the colonization of Palestine. At the Herzl Museum in West Jerusalem a photomontage in badly focused sepia depicted the elegantly dressed, bearded Father of Zionism on foot and doffing a white pith helmet to the mounted Kaiser. The Kaiser did not sponsor the Zionist project, whose architects wisely turned to Britain.

‘Before 1831,’ Albert said, ‘the population of Jerusalem was never more than 10,000. There were 4000 Muslims, 3000 Christians and 2000 Jews. The gates of the city were locked at night.’ From 1840, with the European Christian building programme and the missionary attempts, mostly failed, to convert Muslims and Jews to Christ, the modern age began. Britain in 1917 accepted the status quo in the old city, freezing the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim land holdings where they were. Israel, after 1967, was more flexible. This took Albert back to Jerusalem’s first hotel, the St John Hospice, where I had watched settler children staring through wire mesh at the Arab world below them. ‘The settlers got in through the protected tenant,’ he said, ‘who unfortunately was an Armenian.’