August 2, 2013
The Fight for Jerusalem’s Past, and Future
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/08/the-fight-for-jerusalems-past-and-future.html
This week, with subdued, if earnest, cheer, Secretary of State John
Kerry announced the restart of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in
Washington. The reaction was about as cynical as coverage of Liz
Taylor’s seventh wedding—we’ve been invited to this affair before.
There
are valid reasons for that attitude. The question of dividing or even
sharing Jerusalem was one of the tripwires that took down peace
negotiations in the past. It has never been resolved, and is now more
complicated than ever. The history of the city—and its holiness—has
always been the sticking point, but in recent years that history has
evolved. Parcels of Jerusalem slated for return to Palestinians have
become essential to the historical mythology of the city. Archeology is
another weapon in the fight over territory.
That phenomenon is seen most clearly in East
Jerusalem’s contested neighborhood of Silwan and a slightly smaller
section of it known as Ir David, or City of David, which sits in the
shadow of the Old City, across the road from the Dung Gate, the entrance
to the Old City closest to the Temple Mount.
This was the Biblical core
of Jerusalem, a Canaanite town later ruled by Judean kings. But the
modern neighbors, above ground, are Palestinian. “Silwan is where
Jerusalem was established,” says Yonathan Mizrachi, an archeologist with
an organization called Emek Shaveh that protests the politicization of
archeology. “What is Jerusalem without the beginning of Jerusalem?”
That’s true enough, but in the intervening thousands of years the area
has seen settlement by a half-dozen other peoples as well. And though
Israelis point to a small group of Yemenite Jews who settled there at
the end of the nineteenth century—and were protected by their Arab
neighbors during riots in 1929—Silwan remained on the Jordanian side of
the Green Line that divided Jerusalem in 1949.
That border meant Silwan was to be returned to the Palestinians under
the peace plan negotiated by Bill Clinton at the end of his Presidency.
The problem is that below and abutting the Palestinian residences is a
massive archeological dig, also called the City of David....
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