The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (48 page)

On the last day of the war, Israeli soldiers entered the Arab houses of the Mugrabi quarter next to the Western Wall and gave their inhabitants three hours to pack their belongings and leave. The houses were insanitary slums, the soldiers said, and they were going to be demolished. Days later there was a vast plaza where the houses had been, and crowds of celebrating Israelis. Just one piece of the old Mugrabi quarter survived the devastation: a cobbled ramp leading up to a door high in the wall. Deprived of the houses that once supported it on either side, the ramp looked insecure, but everyone decided to leave it as it was. It would be fine for now.

Eventually the United Nations condemned the occupation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Mugrabi quarter, and in a gesture of reconciliation the Israelis returned the Haram e-Sharif to the
jurisdiction of the Waqf. The Israelis kept the keys to the door at the top of the Mugrabi path, though—they still have them. As Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, said at the time, “We need to establish facts on the ground.” Once you have those, international resolutions and condemnations carry all the weight of hot air.

The facts weren’t just on the ground, but under it, too. On 27 June, the Israeli government announced that any antiquities found in any excavation whatsoever in Jerusalem belonged to the Israeli state. A month later it also declared that the whole of Jerusalem was an antiquity, and that no construction could proceed there without prior excavation. The combination of these orders neatly expropriated, de facto, the entire city.

And then the Israelis started digging. The destruction of the Mugrabi quarter was an obvious act of subjugation, but it was just the first of many. Benjamin Mazar’s excavation of the Western Wall wasn’t just an academic or even a historical exercise. Whether he intended it or not, the project was a strategic offensive. The tunnels that riddle the area are perforated with stairs and doors that allow the Israeli security forces to appear at will anywhere in the Muslim Quarter at any time. The burgeoning Israeli presence brought about by the tunnels has also encouraged increasing numbers of Orthodox Jews who are buying properties in the Muslim Quarter, establishing rabbinical schools and communes in the buildings there. Their yeshivas perch on the roofs of the Arab souk and survey the skyline of the Temple Mount; but they are also connected to the dark undercrofts of the medieval city, where the faithful pray at the buried foundations of the Kotel. The Muslim Quarter has been surrounded, above and below, as well as on every side.

In 2000, right around the same time that the Israeli authorities placed their embargo on construction in the Haram, Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, and Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel, met with Bill Clinton at Camp David for yet another peace conference. They weren’t making much progress, and perhaps President Clinton wanted his guests to reflect on their intransigence. Noting that the Haram was built on top of the ground that the Israelis wanted to excavate, he proposed that in this area the border between Israel and the future Palestine should not be a vertical plane, but a horizontal one. That is to say, the surface of the Haram should belong
to the Palestinian Authority, but the rock of the Temple Mount underneath it should belong to Israel. It was an absurd proposal, but in the context of Israel and Palestine nothing could have seemed more natural. Not, of course, that either side accepted the idea. The summit ended in failure, as everyone had expected.

After the collapse of the summit, the notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, then Israeli minister for defense, visited the Haram e-Sharif, although both sides in the conflict had begged him not to. He said to the waiting reporters: “I came here as one who believes in coexistence between Jews and Arabs. I believe that we can build and develop together. This was a peaceful visit. Is it an instigation for Israeli Jews to come to the Jewish people’s holiest site?” Then he walked off, surrounded by a thousand armed Israeli police. The next day, Muslims threw rocks down from the Haram onto the worshippers gathered at the Kotel below, and so began the second intifada.

Two years after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, Israeli architects Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal mounted an exhibition for the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. The key image in the show was a photomontage that showed a huge, hideous concrete overpass crossing the Kidron Valley between the Mount of Olives and the Haram e-Sharif. It was a proposal, Weizman and Segal baldly stated, to allow Palestinians to visit the Haram without encroaching on Israeli land or even entering Jerusalem at all. It was a deliberately absurd response to show just how absurdly tangled the situation had become. Today, the closest that most Palestinians can get to their Noble Sanctuary is a concrete wall several miles away; and just as the Jews gather at the Kotel to mourn the loss of their holy place, so Palestinians go to this boundary to mourn the loss of theirs. In reference to that other infamous dividing wall, someone with a memory of Berlin has written on the concrete, “Been there, done that.”

During the dispute about the Mugrabi path, the same cartoon kept on appearing in the Arab media: it showed a bulldozer marked with the Star of David undermining the Dome of the Rock. The Israeli authorities claim that all their work at the Mugrabi site is just archaeology, and that there is nothing to worry about. But the Palestinians have seen quite enough of Israeli archaeology not to believe them.

B
UT IT WASN’T
Israelis who started digging in this troubled ground, nor was it the Palestinians. The first excavators at the site of the ancient temple were Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Even today, the chief features of the Western Wall bear English names. At its southernmost end, a lump of stone indicates the broken remains of a bridge known as Robinson’s Arch, surveyed by Edward Robinson, an American missionary who was sent to the Holy Land in the 1830s. Below the Mugrabi Gate, partially hidden by the infamous crumbling ramp, may be seen the gigantic lintel of Barclay’s Gate, discovered by another American missionary in the 1840s. The largest chamber in the tunnels is vaulted by a Roman arch named for Major General Sir Charles Wilson, who surveyed Jerusalem in the 1860s for the British Royal Engineers.

Edward Robinson had come to the Holy Land as a missionary, but he was quite aware of the political dimensions of his work.

The people in general in this part of the country were ready to give us information, so far as they could; and seemed not to distrust us . . . The inhabitants everywhere appeared, for the most part, to desire that the Franks [i.e., western Europeans] should send a force among them. They were formerly tired of the Turks; they were now still more heartily tired of the Egyptians; and were ready to welcome any Frank nation which should come, not to subdue (for that would not be necessary), but to take possession of the land.

In 1865, the British established the Palestine Exploration Fund, which sought to know everything that could be known about that part of the world. For the devout Protestant Britons of the PEF, the Holy Land was no terra incognita. It was a region whose ancient history they already knew intimately from a Bible in which they believed absolutely. It was a place whose true and sacred geography lay dormant under the sleepy Arab villages and farms that had buried it for centuries. The excavation of this land was therefore a religious
duty. Gathering knowledge of the Holy Land was not science but an act of piety.

And dominion over the Holy Land would be an act of piety on a monumental scale. At the founding of the PEF, the archbishop of York spoke with breathtaking confidence: “The country of Palestine belongs to you and me. It is essentially ours. It is the land from which news came of our redemption. It is the land we turn to as the foundation of all our hopes. It is the land to which we look with as true a patriotism as we do for this dear old England.”

The Muslim authorities were well aware of the intentions of the British, and they consequently forbade them to make any excavations in the Haram. The explorers, of course, ignored the prohibition. Charles Warren, an officer in the British Royal Engineers (and later the chief of the London Metropolitan Police at the time of Jack the Ripper), rented properties around the south of the Haram e-Sharif and dug deep shafts through which he penetrated into the ancient vaults of the mount. Hidden among the rubble he found the “Great Sea,” a vast cistern carved into the rock, and numberless other caverns.

These exploits were more than imperial derring-do; they were pursued with true missionary zeal. Robinson and Warren had been appalled by the Christians that they found living in the land of Christ, sunk in Byzantine rituals and superstitions. The imperial powers hoped to save these Christians from their error and convert them to the more rational precepts of Protestantism. Impressing the locals with the scientific methods of history, archaeology, and geography would, the missionaries assumed, replace their childish cosmologies with a modern worldview.

The British weren’t too enamored of the religious practices of the other natives of the Holy Land either. They observed how the Jews used to stand before a ruined wall in the middle of Jerusalem, weeping and rocking with grief; and with amused detachment, they called it the Wailing Wall.

T
HE JEWS WEEP
at the wall because it is the only thing left of their temple. Referring to the Muslim buildings of the Haram e-Sharif, the Spanish poet Yehuda al-Haziri wrote: “What torment to see our Holy
Courts turned into an alien temple! We tried to turn our faces away from this great and majestic church now raised on the site of the ancient tabernacle where once providence had its dwelling.” And the Jews weep, also, because the wall is the closest they will ever get to the place where the temple once stood. This is not only the result of Islamic control of the site. Somewhere under the Haram on the Temple Mount is the site of the Holy of Holies; and the Holy of Holies is so sacred that it can only be entered by the high priest, purified and barefoot, and then only once a year, on the day of Yom Kippur. Any Jew who enters the Haram runs the risk of treading accidentally on the sacred spot and committing a grave blasphemy. It is for this reason that most rabbis warn Jews against going into the sanctuary.

In 1850, Abdullah, a prominent Jew of Bombay, attempted to buy the wall from the Ottoman authorities, and in 1887 Baron Edmond de Rothschild tried to buy the whole quarter of houses that faced it. In both cases their requests were refused. The Waqf had no objections to the Jews praying at the foot of the wall, but it was part of the Noble Sanctuary, and that was that. Any attempt to make it into a permanent place of worship was quickly suppressed. At one point, when the Jews erected a screen to separate the women from the men at prayers, a riot ensued and several hundred people were killed in the violence; the screen was made of nothing more than a row of chairs. When the mood took them, Muslims would taunt the Jews as they prayed at the Kotel, dropping stones onto them from the Noble Sanctuary above. They still do, from time to time.

In 1902, a German Jew by the name of A. S. Hirschberg went to Jerusalem and visited the wall. He was a modern sort of man, and he found Jerusalem a squalid sort of place; but as he approached the stones he found himself dissolving into tears, overcome by a strange sorrow he never knew he possessed. He later wrote, “All my private troubles mingled with our nation’s consciousness to form a torrent.” There can be no greater symbol of the tenacity and the suffering of the Jewish people than the fact that they seek God by worshipping at a ruin that, they are told, does not even belong to them. No wonder they are so keen to excavate as much of it as possible.