Читать книгу The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 31

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.’

He dropped his pipe in an ashtray and jumped up to find a book. Then another. He handed them to me. One was Robert Friedman’s Zealots for Zion and the other Dilip Hiro’s Sharing the Promised Land. ‘Look on page ninety-nine,’ he said, pointing at the Friedman book. There it said that an Armenian named Martyros Matossian had received $3.5 million to assign his family’s protected tenancy in the hospice to a group of Israeli settlers. The Hiro book, on page twenty-two, made the same allegation, but said Matossian, who then fled the country, received $5 million.

Albert explained that most of the property in the Christian Quarter belonged to the churches – with the Greek Orthodox owning most. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘my mother has leased her house from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate since 1932. The leases are with local tenants, and tens of people in a family could have shares in the same house. The settlers find the one who needs money. They ask him to sell his room in the house. Then they elbow their way in.’ Albert knew families who had settlers in one cramped bedroom of their house. ‘If there is an explosion,’ he said, meaning a Palestinian bomb targeting Israelis anywhere, ‘the settlers will get angry and beat everyone in the house. They go on the rooftop and pee in the water tank.’

The old city settlers were, for the most part, extremely religious. ‘Traditionally, the Jewish religious establishment opposed Zionism,’ Albert said. ‘Ben-Gurion told them, we have a state and it must be based on the rule of law. We have conscription. We have state education. We have public transport on Saturday. The money we receive is for all the Jewish people. You must reach an accord with us. And they did. It was the new status quo.’ The religious establishment, who believed Jewish nationalism contradicted the centrality of Jewish faith, arrived at a mode of co-existing with the state. The religious were exempt from military service. They sent their children to religious, rather than secular state, schools. Public transport did not trespass in their neighbourhoods on the Sabbath. They took a share of government expenditure to disburse among their own as they saw fit.

‘From 1948 to 1967,’ Albert recalled, ‘the father of Avraham Burg, the speaker of the Knesset … his father, Yossef Burg, was the longest-serving Knesset member. As head of the National Religious Party, he served in all of Israel’s governments. He did not get involved in Israeli politics. Instead, he represented religious interests. It created a strange relationship. He used your money to attack you, the government. After 1967, a completely new relationship emerged.’ The religious colleges, the Yeshivas, developed a new theology and, with it, a new politics. ‘Their interpretation was original. For the first time, they said, we now have Hebron. We have Jerusalem. This means we are living in Messianic times. Our mission is to redeem the land. This line of reasoning surfaced in 1972 in Hebron when the Gush Emunim grabbed its first settlement.’

Gush Emunim, Bloc of the Faithful, settled in a Hebron hotel. To persuade them to leave the centre of the Arab city, the Labour government allowed them to establish Kiryat Arba on a hill it confiscated above Hebron. ‘After Kiryat Arba, the religious settlements began to proliferate, like amoebae, under different names: Ne’vot David at St John’s, El Ad and the rest. These are now the people who are holding the government by the balls.’ The settlers had also returned to Hebron, where they regularly abused and attacked the Arab inhabitants. One of them, Baruch Goldstein, had shot and killed twenty-nine men in the Grand Mosque.

Albert showed me one of the settlers’ slogans, in English, on that most American of political advertising media, the bumper sticker: ‘G*d is a religious Zionist.’ He laid some of their literature, booklets and pamphlets on the table. There were biblical passages from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua on ridding the land of Canaanites and Philistines. ‘I predict,’ Albert said, as if sermonizing from a pulpit, ‘that within ten years, the religious will take over the army.’ The army, in Albert’s view, was already leading the country. Sharon remained more soldier than politician. His tanks and helicopters swarmed all over the West Bank and Gaza, but he did not know how to pass a budget. ‘This is a government that serves the army,’ he said. ‘How far can this go?’

From time to time during my stay in Jerusalem I would stop by Madeleine’s kitchen. It was no accident that my visits often coincided with lunch. She cooked well, and her food was the closest to Lebanese in Jerusalem. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis were great cooks, but the Lebanese and Armenians were. Among the Armenians, Madeleine Agazarian was one of the best. I understood why Albert and the children lunched at home almost every day. It was rare that I was the only guest. Sometimes, George Hultunian was there in a tattered cardigan. Often, women of the Armenian Quarter or further afield appeared. There were occasional academics and journalists, but I never saw a priest.

During one lunch, the women were talking about ‘the settler’. There were so many settlers in old Jerusalem that I did not know why they singled out this particular man. Madeleine and one of her friends had seen wives of the Arab labourers who had worked for him restoring his old house. They were standing outside his door, begging for their husbands’ unpaid wages. One of them had a small baby. ‘Haram,’ one of the Armenian women said. Pity. I asked what was going on, and Albert said it was not important. I pressed the women, and they told me the story.

‘The settler’ was an American, who had taken a house on Ararat Street next to St Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Church. It was at the edge of the Armenian Quarter, not far from Habad Street in the Jewish Quarter. The house he took needed work, and he hired Arabs to do it. When the time came to pay them, he replaced them with other workers. The labourers demanded their wages, and he ignored them. They were afraid to tell the police. Arabs from the occupied territories could not approach the authorities without being arrested themselves for working without permits. Their wives went to the settler’s house to shame him. But, the women said, he refused to give them any money. It was the scandal of the Armenian Quarter, and no one had the power to make the settler pay.

In the evening, I walked from Armenian Patriarchate Road into St James’s Road, a footpath too narrow for cars. At the Ararat Grocery, I asked the way to St Mark’s. ‘That’s my church,’ the young man behind the counter said, not without pride. There were a few hundred Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem, and he was one. He took me outside, and under the feeble lamps of the ancient city carefully pointed the way. Passing under the arches, the vaults and sky, I found the Church, no larger than a small chapel, of St Mark. Behind it, extending in a graceful curve over the lane, was the house of the American settler. I recognized it by the new, unfinished cement steps built by the unpaid workers. A ramp, with two-by-fours nailed to it, led to the front door. This was where the neighbours said the workmen’s wives had stood crying and begging for the money their husbands had earned. I went to the door, but no one was home. What was I going to say? Would I tell him, American to American, to pay the men? Or would I ask him for his side of the story? Taking a man’s labour without paying him was slavery, and we had fought a civil war over that.