Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (22 page)

More people appeared as the Old City’s medieval wall came into view. Lights flared on the steps leading down to the Damascus Gate, and there were vendors selling kebabs and candy to the crowds breaking their fast for the day. A man was inflating silver balloons from a rust-streaked helium tank in the center. Another man handed out fluorescent soft drinks in plastic bags. I passed through the gate onto El-Wad Road, one of the narrow thoroughfares running through the old Arab Quarter. A few lamps burned in storefronts, but most of the little businesses had been shuttered for the night. Overhead, blue fairy lights strung between rooftops glinted against the black sky. Robed men, women in headscarves, groups of small children, moved along the narrow street. The air was warm, full of cooking smells and bursts of sound from radios: Arab pop and the distorted wail of prayers being chanted through megaphones. A glow appeared and around a corner a dozen men sat on rickety chairs outside a store with a single naked bulb, smoking narghiles. They stared at me as I passed, and I stared back, noting their tender, creaturely involvement with the pipes: the long, coiling, tail-like tubes held in one hand, the smoke bubbling through the murky stomachs of water.

I ate in a small restaurant and wandered on into a maze of alleys, unsure whether or not to be concerned about the darkness. As I turned onto what must have been the Souk Khan al-Zeit road, heading back toward the Damascus Gate, three Orthodox Jews, a father and two sons in black hats and coats, appeared just ahead of me; the father full-bearded and portly, the sons in knee breeches, sidelocks dangling against their pale cheeks. It surprised me to see them there, in the heart of the Arab Quarter. As I followed behind them it occurred to me that they were possibly from one of the national-religious factions I’d read about who had taken over buildings in East Jerusalem. They moved purposefully along the street, with what seemed a certain deliberately unwatching watchfulness. Out of the gate, they cut sharply up through the crowds on the steps. A loud bang came from the center and for a second I thought it was a gunshot, but it was a helium balloon bursting, and the three moved on without flinching, disappearing across the street above.

*   *   *

In the morning, Misha, a friend of a friend, gave me a tour of the city. Misha had grown up partly in America and moved to Jerusalem a few years earlier. He was a writer and translator, also a doctoral student with a half-finished PhD on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel
The Penitent
. I like Singer but I hadn’t read this book. It was the story of a womanizing businessman in America, Misha told me, who gives up everything to join the ultra-Orthodox Haredim after a visit to Jerusalem. I promised to read it, though it sounded a bit austere for my tastes.

We walked through the Old City, taking a meandering route that led past crumbling Mamluk palaces, down the Via Dolorosa with its dense crowds of Christian pilgrims bowed under heavy crosses, and into the Jewish Quarter. The buildings there were modern but faced in the ancient-looking sand-gold Jerusalem stone that was apparently statutory for all new construction. It was easy on the eye but created a slightly unreal, stage-set atmosphere. The human element added to the effect, consisting mostly of Haredim whose eclectic period gear, worn on a motor scooter or while chatting on a cell phone, seemed to collapse several eras into one. In Hurva Square we stopped to look at the new synagogue. It too was faced in Jerusalem stone, but of a whiter shade than its neighbors, which made it look eerily new, while its form—the shallow dome supported on a squat cube of four wide arches, with towers at each corner—was clearly antique, further compounding the sense of temporal confusion. I made some quick first-impression notes for my article, and we moved on.

Passing through the Jaffa Gate, we crossed into the wide, unshaded streets of the New City. At some point Misha described himself as socially liberal “but pretty conservative on security.” Despite, or perhaps because of this, he was careful to draw my attention to various injustices of municipal policy as we walked around. In Silwan, he explained how building safety regulations had been exploited to justify the seizure and demolition of Arab homes. In Mamilla he showed me the intended location of the imprudently named “Museum of Tolerance,” where construction had been halted because of international protests over the siting of the building on top of a Muslim cemetery. We talked about these protests, and the hostility that had been growing toward Israel in general over the past couple of decades: the academic boycotts, the consumer boycotts, the comparisons to South Africa under apartheid, and so on.

I had been thinking about these subjects quite a bit since Nasreen had begun her attacks. Israel and the Palestinians had been constantly in the headlines. There was the invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008, but all year bad news had been spilling out of the region. I felt implicated in the conflict in a way I never quite had before, and compelled to take a position, though at the same time I found it impossible to anchor myself in any stable point of view. The question of where honest criticism of Israel ended and anti-Semitism began had started to interest me greatly, perhaps because I was trying to determine the line where Nasreen’s attacks on me, personally, crossed from legitimate grievance (at least in her mind) to deliberate, malicious smear. The boycott movement seemed bound up in this question, somehow, but I had to admit I had extremely confused feelings about it.

I remembered the story of the left-wing academic at Ben-Gurion University who had allegedly been told by the editors of the British journal
Political Geography
that an article he had written (cowritten with a Palestinian academic, actually) would be accepted only if he included a statement in it comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. Whatever one thought of the comparison, the stipulation seemed very obviously stupid and wrong. But not everything was as easy to dismiss, at least not for me. A few years ago, for instance, a petition was circulated by a group of architectural luminaries, calling for a boycott against architects involved in the “settlement industry.” Among the signatories were several British Jews and at least one former colleague of my father’s. I don’t think my father would have signed it himself if he had still been alive (he seldom signed anything), but he would have been troubled by it, and receptive to its arguments, and I think it might have made him wonder if it wasn’t just as well that his involvement with the Hurva project had ended when it did.

Of course, the rebuilding of a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City could hardly be considered part of the “settlement industry,” so from that point of view he would have been in the clear even if his design had been built. Or so it would have seemed at the time. But according to a book I’d read in preparation for my article, even this was now open to question. The book, Simone Ricca’s
Reinventing Jerusalem
, makes the very contentious case that the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter after the Israelis captured the Old City in ’67 was not the historically sensitive reconstruction of an “already existing” neighborhood that it purported to be, but rather a calculated, triumphalist exercise in the manufacture of Jewish “heritage.” Kollek, in Ricca’s hands, turns from enlightened visionary into a more stained and devious figure, hoodwinking the world into accepting the illusion of a much more substantial historic Jewish presence in the Old City than had ever in fact been the case. Using demolition, expropriation, selective archaeology, and architectural trompe l’oeil, he and his colleagues created, according to Ricca, not a reconstruction at all but a settlement, the ur-settlement in fact: the practical model and indeed the spiritual inspiration for most of the settlements that followed in its wake (the unbroken connection to the old Jewish Quarter being an indispensable element in the historic claim to the Land of Israel). The Hurva synagogue, along with the newly cleared esplanade beneath the Western Wall, was intended to form the centerpiece of this “settlement.” I can’t say exactly how my father would have reacted if the project had been presented to him in these terms rather than Kollek’s more nobly appealing “focus for world Jewry,” but I imagine he would have had some serious misgivings.

Whatever the case, the implications of this building seemed more incendiary than ever after I finished the book, and once again the thought of my (albeit tenuous) connection to it offered a certain gloomy satisfaction. This had to do with Nasreen, who was a constant presence in my mind during this trip. It seemed to confer a more dignified solemnity on our conflict, turning me into a larger, grander adversary, somehow, than her “daytrading” conspiracy theory implied. Better to be found complicit in the original sins of Israeli history than in some act of petty plagiarism.

At some point, as Misha and I discussed the world’s apparent fascination with Israeli politics, I repeated a line from Saul Bellow’s book
To Jerusalem and Back
, which I was also reading for my article (it contains a vivid portrait of Teddy Kollek at the time of my father’s involvement with him). “What Switzerland is to winter holidays,” Bellow writes, “… Israel and the Palestinians are to the West’s need for justice—a sort of moral resort area.”

Misha liked that. He repeated it approvingly: “moral resort area.” He told me there was actually a well-organized “moral tourism” industry in Israel these days, with bus trips to weekly protest venues all around the country. He knew of an Italian art professor who brought his students to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem on a regular basis, for a class on protest photography. Seeing me write all this down in my notebook, Misha clarified his position. “I’m not opposed to the protests themselves,” he told me, “just to certain oversimplifications they encourage.” He began to lay out the complexities of the situation as he saw it, speaking with a curious inward-directed frown, as if he were arguing with himself while addressing me, and I glimpsed something that became increasingly evident as I spoke to other Jewish Israelis, namely the uncomfortably narrow margin a person of any moral sensitivity must have to operate within here: bounded between conscience on one side and, on the other, a natural reluctance to commit oneself to a line of reasoning that, pursued too far, would begin to place one in opposition to one’s own existence.

Before we parted Misha took me to his favorite used-book store. We rummaged around, and by chance I came upon an old paperback of
The Penitent
on a dusty shelf near the back. It looked as forbidding as I’d imagined: a faded illustration of a bearded man in gabardine and fringed garment on the cover, along with a not very enticing quote from the
Chicago Tribune
describing it as the story of “one who has returned to the faith of his fathers.” But I felt compelled to buy it all the same.

*   *   *

I spent the next few days interviewing people for my article. The architect of the newly replicated Hurva gave me a tour of the building. I went to Tel Aviv to talk to scholars and critics. Back in Jerusalem, an architectural historian who knew the complicated story of the building invited me to his house in the suburb of Malcha.

Before I set off, I googled the address and stumbled briefly into a universe of websites denouncing the Zionist takeover of what had once been an Arab village, al-Maliha.

The term “ethnic cleansing” was used. I navigated away, but the phrase wasn’t so easy to shake off. It is another of those contaminating terms, like “apartheid” or “rape,” that trigger a very specific shunning reflex when you hear them: an urgent impulse to dissociate yourself from the person or group they are applied to, even if you question the validity of the application.

The phrase pulsed in my mind as I set off, tinged in the blood-light of the Yugoslav massacres for which it was coined. Again I was aware of something connected with Nasreen—some trace or emblem of her that had by now taken up permanent residence in my own consciousness—clutching onto the two words with a kind of avid, triumphant tenacity. They seemed to shed their taint on everything I saw as my taxi cruised into Malcha: the quiet residential streets curving around their hilltop, the rows of shiny parked cars, the pedestrian-only enclave where the historian lived, with its stepped, bougainvillea-lined walkways, at the safe heart of which a lone boy my son’s age was shooting hoops in the waning daylight.

The historian’s house was compact and modern, with framed abstracts mounted alongside folk-art weavings and carvings. The historian himself gave an impression of wanting to seem more detached from the fray of Jerusalem politics than he really felt, and the result was an uneasy geniality punctuated by bursts of sardonic gloom.

He knew Teddy Kollek well—well enough to have had a public falling-out with him. “He called me a clinical psychopath,” he remembered, smiling drily. He told me that he’d disliked Louis Kahn’s design, and then added bluntly, “I didn’t like your father’s design either.” Both, in his view, were too provocative—to aesthetically conservative Jews as well as politically wary Palestinians—to have stood any real chance of being built. There was also a short-lived third plan, he remembered, designed by an architect close to the ultra-Orthodox and backed by Ariel Sharon. “Terrible,” he snarled, showing me a picture of a model that looked like a space helmet dipped in bronze. “Dome of the Rock, Yiddish style…”

We got onto the subject of the Vilna Gaon’s prophecy and Palestinian anger at the rebuilding of the synagogue. Was it possible, I asked, that the project really did amount to some kind of proxy action for rebuilding the Great Temple?

The question drew down another grimace across the historian’s lined features. He nodded. “For some people, yes.”

There was a thriving “Third Temple” subculture in Jerusalem, he explained. Somewhere in the Old City was a basement full of proposed models for the building, each more lavish than the next. Funds could be raised to build any one of them in six months, he assured me gloomily, if any government was foolish enough to allow new construction on the Temple Mount.