From The Holy Mountain (51 page)

The Jerusalem Armenians became adept at living under foreign rule. In the eighth century, when Jerusalem was ruled by the Arab Abbasid dynasty, the Armenians managed to arrange it so that two of the Caliphs had Armenian mothers; in 1099, when the Crusaders captured the town, the first two queens of Jerusalem were also Armenian. Later, when Saladin reconquered the city for Islam, the Armenians played their cards with such skill that they were the only Christians who avoided being expelled or carried off into slavery.

After 1915, following the genocide of perhaps a million and a half Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks, the Jerusalem Armenian Quarter became a place of refuge for many of the ragged survivors. Within a couple of years the number of inhabitants in the quarter doubled, and the descendants of these people still make up about half the population of the quarter today.

Having lived through the rule of tyrants such as the hideous Mameluke Sultan, Baybars of Egypt (an ex-slave so ugly that he was once returned to the market by a horrified buyer), it might be expected that the Jerusalem Armenians might consider the current Israeli dominion over the Old City as a relatively benign period in their history; after all, the Jews and Armenians have much in common, sharing a history of wandering, trade, persecution and suffering. But it is not quite as simple as that.

A short distance from my room, in a cloister overhung with pot plants, vines and flowering shrubs, I found the rooms of Bishop Hagop Sarkissian, a friend from previous visits. Bishop Hagop is a gentle amateur antiquary who has renovated many of the medieval chapels in the quarter. His enthusiasm for Armenian architecture has overflowed into his rooms, which are now cluttered with small wooden models of Armenian churches, painstakingly reconstructed from old prints and daguerreotypes.

Bishop Hagop is a small, quiet figure with a lavender-blue cassock and a grey goatee beard. He is generally a gossipy, high-spirited man, but he has a penchant - understandably common among Armenians - for telling depressing stories about the genocide. Hagop's mother was the only one of fifty family members to survive the 1915 massacre of her people; his father, a renowned botanist and ethnographer, was one of the few Armenian intellectuals to escape the Young Turks' purges, and only did so by walking five hundred miles through Anatolia and the Levant disguised as a Turkish woman in full
chador.
Before he died in Jerusalem from the shock of the experience, he managed to finish writing what is arguably the best eyewitness account of the whole Armenian genocide.

As we sat in his rooms sipping fiery Armenian cognac, the Bishop talked angrily about a decision taken by Israeli television some time previously. A documentary film on the Armenian genocide scheduled for prime-time viewing had been mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. There had been a furious response not only from the Armenians but from many Israeli liberals, yet the television executives refused to alter their position.

'The Israelis are always insisting on the uniqueness of their Holocaust,' said Hagop. 'Now it seems they want our genocide to be forgotten. It is as if they want a monopoly on suffering.' The old man shook his head: 'In a million little ways, the Israelis make life difficult for us. Many of my people believe they want to squeeze us out'

'That is a pretty strong accusation,' I said. On my previous visits the Bishop seemed far too absorbed in the Armenian past to worry much about contemporary politics. So I was surprised when, after downing another glass of cognac, he began to pour out his worries about the future.

'Many right-wing Israelis now say that Jerusalem should belong to the Jews only,' he said, lifting his glass to his lips again. 'These people say that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and that we are trespassing in their city.'

The Armenians, he said, had been shaken a couple of years earlier when fundamentalist Jewish settlers of the Ateret Cohanim (Garland of the Temple Priests) had used a succession of Panamanian cover-companies to sub-let and take over the St John's Hospice near the Holy Sepulchre in the very heart of the Christian Quarter. The Armenians were more shaken still when it emerged that the settlers had been given $2 million of government funds to effect their purchase.

Under an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, non-Jews are excluded from the Jewish Quarter, and all Arabs resident there in 1967 were evicted from it. At the same time, on 10 June 1967, the entire Maghariba (Moors') district was demolished to create a plaza around the Wailing Wall. The area dated back to the fourteenth century, and included a mosque and shrine of Sheikh A'id; but despite their antiquity the 135 buildings in the district were bulldozed and the 650 Palestinians who lived there were expelled from their homes. Yet while all the two thousand Jews who had lost property there in 1948 had their land restored, none of the thirty thousand Palestinians evicted from the Christian suburbs of West Jerusalem in 1948 were allowed to return to their old homes, nor was any reverse law promulgated to prevent Jews from settling in the Christian, Armenian and Muslim Quarters of the Old City; indeed, funds from the Israeli Housing Ministry are available to finance such colonisation, on the grounds that Jews have a right to settle anywhere in their Holy City.

By Easter 1990, when the St John's Hospice was seized, more than forty properties in the Muslim Quarter had already been acquired by the Ateret Cohanim and other radical settler groups, but the takeover of the hospice was the first attempt by settlers to move into the Christian Quarter. The move quickly snowballed into a major international controversy.

According to a report in the London
Sunday Telegraph,
a Greek priest who had forced his way inside the hospice to try to stop the looting of the property asked a settler to hand him a picture of the Last Supper. The Israeli broke the frame over his knee and trampled the canvas into the floor.

Following this incident, the octogenarian Orthodox Patriarch, the owner of the hospice, led a Maundy Thursday protest march to the property. During the demonstration one of the Greek monks attempted to remove a Star of David which the settlers had just erected over a cross carved above the hospice doorway. As he reached for the star, the Israeli policemen assigned to guard the settlers pushed the elderly Patriarch onto the ground, hit him, then pepper-gassed both him and his monastic entourage. Television cameras recorded the entire incident, setting off a further chain of international protests.

According to Hagop, the settlers were now stepping up their efforts to buy Armenian land in the Old City. Every month, he said, the Armenian Patriarchate received dozens of enquiries from middlemen acting for settlers willing to pay very high prices for a toehold in the Armenian Quarter. Others applied directly. Ariel Sharon, architect of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, had allegedly offered nearly $3.5 million for an empty parking lot and some houses backing onto it.

'We refused, of course,' said Hagop. 'But these people are fanatics. They will never give up.' The Bishop frowned. 'I am seriously worried for our future. We have been here for 1,600 years, yet we cannot be sure what will happen tomorrow. The Israelis claim that they are champions of religious freedom, but behind that smokescreen they make it impossible for our community to flourish. They have not granted one building permit to us since 1967, and they destroy any building we construct illegally. It took four years for us to get a telephone for our infirmary, while a Shin Bet [Israeli Secret Police] informer I know got one within a week. They neglect our streets. The Jewish Quarter is properly maintained, but the streets in the other quarters are subsiding because the old Ottoman-period drainage system is collapsing. It's worst of all in the Muslim Quarter. The people there believe the Israelis want to make their houses uninhabitable so that they have to leave; then the buildings can be acquired by settlers.'

The Bishop snorted: 'They even use their tax system to put our shopkeepers out of business, charging them totally arbitrary tax demands. In 1967 we had eighty or ninety shops in the Old City, now - what? - maybe ten are left, possibly less. All the rest have been bankrupted by tax officials who refuse to believe their accounts. In several cases shopkeepers got demands for more than the entire value of their businesses.'

I suggested to the Bishop that maybe he was getting just a little paranoid. The old man shook his head. 'In the course of the furore over the St John's Hospice it emerged that the Israeli government had allocated 7.5 million shekels [£2.5 million] to buy more Christian and Muslim buildings in the Old City. That figure is not disputed. It is not my imagination. There is a concerted government policy to Judaise the Old City. We are an obstacle to that policy. Sooner or later they will find a way of getting around the obstacle we represent.'

The Bishop poured another glass of cognac for me. 'In my lifetime I have seen my community wither like a diseased tree. The Armenian community used to contain millionaires. Now the young Armenians in my choir look up to their contemporaries who manage to get jobs as waiters in Israeli restaurants. The most ambitious and talented young people are emigrating, to America mainly. They know there is no future for them here. But it's not just the young. Whole families are going.'

When Bishop Hagop had been a young man, he said, there were over ten thousand Armenians in Palestine. Now fewer than two thousand were left. The whole community structure had shrunk. In the old days there had been five Armenian clubs and a theatre group; there had been plays, concerts, gatherings, dances. Now the quarter was a quiet place; those with energy and ability had left and made new lives for themselves in Boston and New York. A shadow had fallen over the Armenian Quarter; the place seemed to be shrinking in on itself.

On my way back to my rooms later that evening I fell into conversation with some Armenian teenagers. To my surprise they echoed the Bishop's despair.

'There is nothing for us here,' said one girl. 'Nothing. If Armenian boys are lucky they will end up washing dishes, or working on a construction site. For us there is even less choice. No non-Jew can get a decent job.'

Another of the teenagers, Krikor, said that the month before there had been a stabbing incident and the Israeli police had randomly arrested him and five hundred other non-Jewish boys. He had been taken to a police station, beaten up and made to stand all day in the sun without water. During the
intifada
that sort of thing had become almost routine.

The girls agreed. One said how, only a week before, she had been beckoned over to a car belonging to an Orthodox Jew which was parked outside the main gate to the quarter. Thinking the man was lost and needed directions, she had bent down to talk to him. The man spat in her face and drove off. She was tired of all this, she said. She wanted to emigrate to Boston, where she had distant cousins.

'The Israelis rule us, but we are not Israeli citizens,' she said. 'We have no votes. We have no influence.'

'They make us feel like a piece of filth they would like to flush down their lavatories,' added Krikor, 'that we are somehow too dirty to be in this town.'

'All of us want to leave,' said the girl. 'Everyday life is just too difficult in Jerusalem. They make
everything
a struggle for us.'

The Armenians were not alone. In the days that followed, as I walked around the Christian Quarter talking to the Palestinian Christians, I found that the inhabitants of the Old City were overwhelmingly gloomy about the long-term prospects of a Christian presence surviving in Jerusalem. Rightly or wrongly, the Palestinians all seemed to believe that there was a concerted campaign to drive them out, or at any rate to make their life so difficult that the majority would opt to leave of their own volition. In 1922, 52 per cent of the population of the Old City of Jerusalem had been Christian; now they made up just under 2.5 per cent of the population of the municipality. There were now more Jerusalem-born Christians in Sydney than in Jerusalem. The Old City ceased to be dominated by Christians in the 1940s; now everyone agreed that it would probably soon have no permanent Christian presence at all.

All this is part of the most dramatic decline in a Christian population to have taken place anywhere in the modern Middle East, with the single exception of Turkish Anatolia. There the progressive campaign of massacres and deportations, culminating in the 1915 Armenian genocide and the 1922 Greco-Turkish transfer of population, left only a few thousand Christians where at the turn of the century there had been around four million. In Palestine the decline of the Christian population over the course of this century has been more gradual, but no less overwhelming.