JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN CITY OF SANCTITYAND SANDBAGGED POSTS

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27851, 27 December 1955, Page 8

JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN CITY OF SANCTITY—AND SANDBAGGED POSTS

[By the Middle East Correspondent of “The Times”}

Old Jerusalem is golden still, especially viewed from the Mount of Olives or through the gnarled trees of Gethsemane on a late summer evening. It is still the holiest of holy places, <?till a magnificent Islamic city, still a fortress.

Its buildings, scarred in the fighting, stand meilow and serene; through its tortuous streets move the pilgrims and priests, Bedouin, bootblacks, coffee-sellers, and gowned merchants of its tradition; upon its ramparts, uarding the embattled frontier with Israel, the soldiers of the Arab Legion stand guard in pink-cheeked kufiyahs and battle-dress. Golden are its stones, and golden still the indescribable aura of sanctity, age, foreboding, and promise that seems to impregnate its very air.

Implacable Frontier It would be alien to this spirit for Jerusalem to be peaceful: deaths and battles, armies and sieges, bloodshed and privation are the normalities of Jerusalem. Among its sparse hills the place certainly lies in a wonderful silence, calm, cool, with the first chinks of light appearing and the call to prayer ringing from the mosque on the Hill of Ascension. But an implacable frontier divides the Old City from most of its modern suburbs: and the blaze of light in the western ridge marks the centre of New Jerusalem, now in the hands of the Jews and as inaccessible to the Arabs as Bhutan. Eecatise an enemy is literally at the gates of the city, the quiet of Jerusalem is overhung by a sense of danger.

Sometimes at times of stress or menace (a skirmish far away at Gaza or El Auja, an Arab killed in a frontline village, a dead marauder returned across the barbed wire) lhe traveller is reminded that there is still only an armistice in Palestine. “Look at the Damascus Gate,” whispers the nun on the roof of the convent, the white of her habit gleaming in the moonlight. “You see? They have cleared everybody away! The soldiers are practising.” And there beyond the jumbled darkness of the streets is the small brightly lit courtyard beside the great gate, hung with awnings like the deck of a tourist liner, but all echoing and deserted. From the wall above comes the familiar clink of a rifie-butt and a spasmodic clatter of boots. “Poor soldiers!” observes the nun. “They w’ork so hard and always so late at night too.” Prosperous Streets

But the Old City, used to such matters, has readily adapted itself to the present tense situation. Its citizens can comfort themselves, as a sage remarked the other day over an excellent lunch, that things were infinitely worse in A.D. 70 when Titus was at the gates. The spirit of Jerusalem has withdrawn from the grand new suburbs, now mostly in Israel, into the walled city, where it belongs. The streets are crowded, properous, and clean. Big American cars are driven precariously up ramps along some of its stepped alley-ways. The Armenian post-card seller wears a new pair of brown shoes. Many Arab retailers, driven from New Jerusalem, have set up shop within its walls. They will tell you, as you sip their spiced coffee, of the enormous emporia. the vast estates, the bursting bank balances they invariably seem to have lost in the holocaust. (Just as the bourgeois householder of Charleston. South Carolina, has long ago convinced himself that he is decended from dukes, so the literate Arab refugees from Palestine are establishing a myth of vanished opulence, a sort of gilt-edged Atlantis of the soul).

Sadly such unfortunates will kake you to the top of their buildings for a view into No Man’s Land. There it runs, a narrow strip of depressed and littered soil, cluttered with derelict buildings, coils of wire, piles of miscellaneous rubbish. Into a few tumble-down buildings near the Arab line a few poor house-hunters nave surreptitously seeped; in the middle an Israeli housewife. oblivious of international asperities, has hung her washing; and on the very edge, close to the wails of the Old 1 City, a small Jewish army post sits boldly behind sandbags on top of a ruined terrace. Across the line, beyond the King David Hotel, stands a big new structure rather like the Festival Hall in London. “If you ever go across there,” remarks the merchant, “you might find out what that thing is. It's just around the corner from where the store used to be, and we're curious about it.” . For it is another world across the

frontier, bland and barred, as if some totally foreign and aloof civilisation has emplanted itself there: the Arabs, of an immemorial aristocratic society, can only look across the wonder. But they live in the second holiest city of Islam, and their own world survives. The glorious Dome of the Rock was damaged in the fighting; but surrounded by its wide courtyards, its arches and stairways and o’.d walls, it is still of a shimmering splendour; and the peasants still stand reverent and awe-struck before its lovely Persian tiles and the old heaving rock of Mount Moriah. Franciscan Pilgrims The Christian, too, as he wanders among the sacred sites, will feel his philosophies secure in Old Jerusalem. The Mixed Armistice Commission may be meeting that afternoon for another session of hopeless legalisms; but the Franciscan pilgrims will make their way as always along the Via Dolorosa, the brown-robed monks, the American women in cotton frocks from Macy’s the family of Italians, kneeling on the hard cobblestones beside the Stations of the Cross. The traditions of Christian Jerusalem live cn most potently of all in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the fulcrum of the faith. The old church, split, shuttered, disfigured, and profaned by ancient schisms and rivalries, is more peaceful now than for generations; for many a hereditary ecclesiastical difference has lately been sunk, and many a bitter memory expunged. The Latins conduct their daily procession through the church in the early evening: cultured .voices and Gregorian chants, a visiting English priest, a stream of pilgrims carrying lighted tapers. A few moments later come the Greeks, their music harsh and discordant, their aged bishop so enshrouded in his vestments that only his spectacles and a few white hairs can be glimpsed beneath his hood in the halflight. An old woman lays down her stick and raises her hands in worship in the subterranean chapel of the Armenians; a tall Abyssinian monk stands, lost in meditation, silent among the pillars; in the little Coptic chapel behind the Sepulchre a rppon-faced kitchen clock ticks tinnily upon the altar. Houses Laid Waste The piety of Old Jerusalem survives, and countless sects of Islam and Christendom still thrive among its walls. But this city is never at ease, and in its southern section, inside the Dung Gate, there is a wide expanse of ruin, flattened houses, and crumbling courtyards, inhabited only by unhappy scabrous refugees begging Lakshish. The Jews have left their quarter of Jerusalem, and their houses are laid waste. The Wailing Wall is deserted, with never a crumpled prayer or pious paper inserted between Herod’s gigantic stones; cabbages are growing in the Jewish cemetery that climbs the hills above the Vale of Kedron; the Hebrew characters have been defaced from the beautify! tiles with which Sir Ronald Storrs embellished St. Francis. Street.

Jerusalem the golden retains, as always, its corners of sadness, its reminders of cruelty, and its hinted prophecies.