“What is Jerusalem worth?” Balian of Ibelin, played by Orlando Bloom, asks Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven . “Nothing,” replies Saladin. And then, after a pause, he adds, “Everything.”
The question and the answer resonated in me as our van moved towards Jerusalem, on a balmy evening this summer, offering me a full first glimpse of the Holy City. Saladin, an Ayyubid Muslim sultan — who had won the Battle of Hattin following the 1187 Siege of Jerusalem — fought for Jerusalem with a passion that was raw and sharp. Like him, many kings and their militias fought through the ages to take control of Jerusalem, ironically called the City of Peace.
Most history books show Jerusalem as a continuum of chaos and crises. But the city had developed in me a sense of kinship during my childhood. I was born in Kombodinjamakkal, a village in Kerala that lies some miles from the sleepy town of Mala, which has a Jewish cemetery. The Jews had left Mala decades ago for Israel but the local populace had decided to keep the graveyard, however dilapidated it had become by then, as a monument to and symbol of Mala’s deep links with people from exotic geographies. In Hebrew, Mala (Mal-Aha) means a place of refuge.
Local historians believe that the Jews came to Mala for trade and shelter in AD 72. Some 40 Jewish families found a home in Mala.
For my Catholic family in Kombodinjamakkal, Jerusalem was the land of divinity, where they believed their hero, Jesus, preached and died. “ Orshalemin naayakaa (the Lord of Jerusalem),” my mother would sing the popular movie song in the middle of her prayer most nights. For many like her, Jerusalem was an ideal, a solace and, most important, a distant dream they wanted to revisit whenever they could.
But Jerusalem has also been a nightmare for many. In its over 4,000 years of existence, the city has seen more than 200 bloody conflicts. It was razed twice, besieged nearly two dozen times and even witnessed five terrorist attacks in the past century. Yet, when I stood inside the Old City of Jerusalem, all I came across were streams of sweaty, shining and smiling faces, pious exchanges, and the aroma of food of myriad hues and tastes. I immediately decided to go back and tell my mother about the image.
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“History is a tricky business in here,” said Abigail, our guide. “It has many versions and many interpretations. So when you ask someone in Jerusalem about its past, present and future, the answer clearly depends on who you ask.” Abigail in Hebrew means “my father’s joy”. Abigail is a young mother whose father had seen many military conflicts involving Israel and neighbours, including the 2006 Lebanon war. “If you ask him and then me about Jerusalem and the claims around it, you may get two different perspectives,” she said.
Abigail was right. Jerusalem is a complex geography. Even though this was my first visit to Israel I could gather that there were different versions and interpretations of almost everything. In Jerusalem, what you see is not exactly what you get, for Jerusalem is a multi-layered, non-linear story. What you make of its past, present or even future depends on from where you exactly begin experiencing it.
When I started the process as a confused altar boy at the Mary Immaculate Church Kuzhikkattussery, which was the parish my family in Kerala was attached to, it never had the weight of history or geography. It was not even a place. It was an emotion.
Those days I read the Bible almost every day, and Jerusalem had left its enchanting stamp everywhere — the priest’s sermons, my mother’s evening prayers and even in the school recess talks where we plotted ways to impress girls with quotes from the Bible (“I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon”). For a decade or so, I yearned for a rendezvous with Jerusalem.
But people and books would later tell me that if I ever visited the city, it would disappoint me. “Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in Jerusalem: The Biography . “The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion.”
My disillusionment with Jerusalem began the day I figured out I didn’t need a God for the rest of my life and when I realised the futility of expecting divine interventions to make a difference to my life. I started seeing Jerusalem as a slice of history weaned away from Biblical niceties.
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That’s why the very first thing I noticed in Jerusalem were not signs of divinity but stones. Big, rectangular and uneven-faced stones marked houses, roads, lanes and even shops in Old Jerusalem, with creeping clusters of bougainvillaea in full bloom capping walls of most buildings. From afar, the deep pink patches looked like large stains of blood and the patches of mirage popping up under the hot sun appeared to be wailing ghosts of the daughters of Jerusalem I met in the Bible aeons ago. During his fateful march to the cross over two millennia ago, Jesus clairvoyantly surmised the fate of the city and its people. “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.”
A 16th-century wall surrounds Jerusalem, which has four quarters: Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian. I was in the Jewish portion. “This is where the future meets the past,” a woman at one of the narrow streets told me. She worked at a nearby shop which ran a VR (virtual reality) show that presented “all you want to know about the Bible”. She smiled at me hopefully, expecting me to sign up for her show. The Bible is not a Holy Book to me, but a compendium of nice, readable stories. “But VR is real,” she guffawed. “Anyway, this is just a business, mate.” She was right.
Even inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, faith translated into business. Two women I met told me about a Malayali priest living across the street. He was from my hometown in Kerala; they said and he could get me the rosaries my mother had asked for. When I told them that I had found shops near the church that sold rosaries, they laughed and said the ones I would get from the Malayali priest would be “blessed”. Their cajoling didn’t work and I finally bought the rosaries from a shop run by a Muslim family.
The shrine of Holy Sepulchre is where Christians believe the crucifixion of Jesus took place and where he was buried, only to be resurrected on the third day. The lane that took us to the church had on both sides streams of shops selling souvenirs and curios. In the afternoon sun, the stony walls shone like the back of a golden turtle and the chattering of the crowd bargaining with vendors filled the narrow pathways that smelled of incense, spices and human sweat.
The church’s history is curious. Today, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has its headquarters at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But there is no single entity that controls the shrine. A few Christian sects and other entities are in charge of it as a result of a complex and, to some, comical web of regulations and agreements evolved over the past 170 years. Apart from the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolics, Roman Catholics, the Coptic Orthodox church, Syriac Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox and others have staked claims over the monument. In a way, the church epitomises Jerusalem — which has multiple claimants, vague and complex clauses and twisted historical treaties.
Tell all this to, say, my mother or grandmother. They would be unhappy and broken. “I wish I were younger,” my 90-year-old grandmother, Mariam Rose Margalita, told me last summer. “The local parish (church) is now organising tours to the Holy Land, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and I don’t think I will be able to go even if I have the money and approval (of her children),” she lamented.
Now that I, from Mala, was looking at Jerusalem painted in yellow sunlight, I felt sorry for the place and for the people, for what history had done to them and how unlucky they had been to have not learnt from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their generational journey.
“We want to live in peace,” said our guide Abigail looking at the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount Mount (Haram esh-Sharif for the Arabs) in the Old City. “I’m sure they [Arabs] want that more than anyone today,” she added. “But peace is something that has always eluded us.”
An estimate says nearly 9,800 Palestinians and more than 1,200 Israelis have been killed since 2000 in Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. And many more are dying.
It is said that even if you write a cookbook on Israel, the conflict that has engulfed the region will creep in somehow. “There are no simple solutions to this conflict,” said Gwen Ackerman, a senior journalist with Bloomberg in Jerusalem. “I guess nothing is simple about Jerusalem.” I’m sure Saladin, and all the people who fought for it, would agree.
( The writer visited Israel at the invitation of Jerusalem Press Club )