O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [1]
A word about this story’s setting may be in order. In January of 1919, the Palestine that Ms. Russell entered was freshly under British authority. The previous October, British forces had broken the back of German/Turkish control over the area. The year before that, in late 1917, the holy city of Jerusalem had been freed from four centuries of Turkish control. The Paris peace talks opened on January 1, 1919, bringing together Emir Feisal, T. E. Lawrence, Chaim Weizmann, and the other authorities charged with hammering out policy and boundaries, while in the Middle East itself, unrest continued to seethe in a climate of tragic misunderstanding coupled with basic disagreement. In March, rebellion broke out in Egypt; in April, five Jews and four Arabs were killed in a series of outbursts; in September, a riot took place in Jerusalem.
The twentieth century is only the latest chapter of bloodshed in the story of the Middle East, for the history of Palestine is a litany of warfare. The Hyksos and the Egyptians, the Philistines and the Assyrians, Egypt again and Babylon were followed by Alexander, the Seleucids, and the Romans. Persian gave way to Moslem Arab, Crusader failed to hold it against Saladin; even Napoleon tried to take Palestine, losing a war to fly-borne eye disease.
In the midst of all this fighting, in the early centuries of the struggle for control over this precious land bridge connecting three continents, the small walled town of Jerusalem came into being. Built around a spring in the desert hills, on a patch of rocky ground amid three valleys, there the people lived, and there they built their holy place. Weapons evolved from bronze to iron, the city wall grew thicker and higher, and eventually, with tremendous feats of engineering that ensured the supply of water during a siege, the town shifted uphill from the life-giving spring. The holy place at its center remained.
The Temple that defined early Judaism, the center of cultic worship, was laid atop a hill. Over the centuries the Temple was damaged and repaired, devastated and rebuilt anew. In the first century of the Common Era, a troublesome rabbi and carpenter from Nazareth was paraded alongside the walls of the holy enclosure, to be executed on a hill across one of the valleys. Forty years later, the Temple was finally razed, its stones overturned, the city laid waste, its surviving population dispersed. Two and a half centuries later, the Roman Empire converted, to follow the rabbi it had executed, and under the resulting Byzantines, Jerusalem became a Christian city in a Christian country.
Then Islam rose up out of the south and covered the land, and the followers of the Prophet Muhammad claimed the Temple Mount as their own holy ground, and built on it their houses of worship, ornate and intricate, passionate expressions of geometry and color. Crusaders arrived and were thrown out; the Mamelukes ruled; and the Ottoman Empire reached out from the north to occupy the land as far as the Red Sea, until that empire too became corrupt and weak. In the second decade of the twentieth century General Edmund Allenby pitted his clever mind against the dying empire and in September 1918 achieved his victory in the fields of Armageddon. The British declared a protectorate over Palestine, and began the process of impossible decision-making—decisions whose effects and implications have shuddered through the years to the present day.
There is, I am obliged to say, no clear