The Battle Over Jerusalem: A New Year’s Story
In June, the Netanyahu government repudiated a carefully worked-out agreement that had promised Reform and Conservative Jews a place of worship at the Western Wall.SOURCE: THE NEW YORKER
BY BERNARD AVISHAI
Who controls the past controls the future, George Orwell wrote; who controls the present controls the past. In Israel, rightist Likud coalitions, such as the one currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu, have controlled the nation’s present for so long that it may soon be futile to try to retrieve a Jewish past that they have not contrived. Nothing suggests this turn more vividly than the season now ending, which pitted the coalition against, by turns, unesco, America’s Reform and Conservative Jews, Palestinian Muslims, and neighboring Arab states, all in the name of promoting Jerusalem as the sacred center of Jewish experience—or, in Netanyahu’s words, “the heart of the people, the place to which everyone turned to, went to and prayed toward.” This evening begins the Jewish High Holidays, which focus attention not on any historical moment or national narrative but on individual conscience, on God “remembering us as dust”—on whether matter matters. In the liturgy of the holidays, hearts are open to divine inspection, but Jerusalem appears only on a tangent, on the morning of Yom Kippur, when rabbis and cantors recount, operatically, how the ancient High Priest expiated sin through sacrifices at the Temple in the city. What, then, can Netanyahu mean by “the heart of the people”?
The occasion for his statement was an arguably superfluous unesco resolution, from early May, “reaffirming the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions” and “reminding” the world that Israel is the “occupying Power”—that its “basic law” annexing the eastern part of Jerusalem should be considered “null and void.” The resolution further “regrets” changes (“excavations, tunneling, works, projects”) made in East Jerusalem by Israeli archeologists and developers.
The proposition that East Jerusalem—including the Old City and its three hundred thousand non-citizen Arab residents—has, since the Six-Day War, in 1967, been occupied territory under international law is hardly contentious anywhere but in Israel. Even there, various leaders will concede the point if pressed. When Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas got serious about negotiations, in May, 2008, they agreed, at the Bush Administration’s urging, to start with the pre-1967 border, which ran through East Jerusalem, as the basis for future land swaps, and eventually agreed to internationalize the Old City, which they called the “Holy Basin.” According to an Israel Democracy Institute poll from last year, sixty-one per cent of Israelis think that Jerusalem is “divided into a western and eastern city.”
Nevertheless, for Netanyahu, the unesco resolution was proof of international antagonism, which, by now, most Israelis also take for granted. Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s Foreign Ministry said, is Israel’s “eternal capital”; presumably, no compromise is possible on Israeli sovereignty over the whole of it. Another poll suggests that two-thirds of Israelis would oppose a peace deal granting the Palestinians even “partial sovereignty” over the Old City. “Eternal” means “mine.” “There is no other people in the world for whom Jerusalem is as holy and important as for the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said. “We denounce unesco and uphold our truth, which is the truth.” Nor is the Netanyahu coalition’s view of Jerusalem coherent without a theocratic corollary, namely that what distinguished the past of “the people” was observance of Halachic law. This has increasingly meant empowering political zealots who reject as un-Jewish any deviation from a peculiar national orthodoxy, of which the veneration of Jerusalem is only a part.
Two nearly simultaneous confrontations with oddly different forces have resulted. In June, the Netanyahu government repudiated a carefully worked-out agreement that had promised Reform and Conservative Jews, including women rabbis, a place of worship at the Western Wall, within sight of Orthodox devotions. (I wrote about this curious agreement here last year.) A month later, the government was violently at odds with Jerusalem’s Islamic authority, the Waqf, over an attempt to place Israeli metal detectors outside the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, whose precincts include the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock—for Jews, the ancient Temple Mount—which was ostensibly a response to the killing of two Israeli police officers nearby but was also a clear effort to demonstrate ultimate sovereignty over the site. Surrendering to international pressure, including from the Trump Administration, the government relented on the metal detectors. It may yet relent, under pressure from American rabbis, on a prayer space for Reform and Conservative Jews. In no case, however, is there retreat in any quarter on the metaphysical elevation of Jerusalem; ironically, the fierce desire of liberal Jews for proximity to the Temple Mount seems of a piece with the very orthodoxy that they claim to be challenging.
Even unesco’s director-general, Irina Bokova, had implicitly accommodated Netanyahu’s “truth” in the week before the resolution had passed. Addressing the World Jewish Congress, she noted that Haram al-Sharif was also, as the Temple Mount, “the holiest place in Judaism, whose Western Wall is revered by millions across the world.” Bokova and unesco implicitly cast doubt on Netanyahu’s claim that Israel alone could be trusted to be custodians of such holy places, and that Jerusalem is holiest to Jews because it was most yearned for—“turned to,” sung to, “prayed toward”—and that yearning gets you sovereignty. (By that logic, Sinatra gets New York.) What no one seems willing to question is whether Jerusalem is “the holiest place in Judaism,” or, more to the point, whether traditional Judaism entertains the idea of a holy place at all.
This is where controlling the past especially helps. Netanyahu’s government ended the summer by reintroducing legislation that defined Israel as the “state of the Jewish people”—which may seem merely axiomatic in the cultural sense but actually aims to reinforce not only Jewish privilege but Orthodox strictures. According to Molad, a liberal think tank, ninety-four per cent of the millions of shekels that the Education Ministry directs to “Jewish identity” at state schools goes to Orthodox groups. The law would authorize judges in secular courts to cite Jewish rabbinic law, Talmudic precepts, and Jewish national advantage as a legal rival to the Basic Law of Human Dignity, the closest thing Israeli democracy has to a bill of universal rights. The Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, a leader of the ultra-rightist Jewish Home Party, put the matter bluntly in August: “Zionism should not continue, and I say here, it will not continue to bow down to the system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way.”
Netanyahu and Shaked are reflecting the triumph in Orthodox circles of “national Orthodox” Zionism, the ideology first elaborated by Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi during the Mandate period, who saw the whole ancient Land of Israel as consecrated and the Western Wall as a touchstone of worship. His son and mentee, Zvi Yehuda Kook, was the founder of Jerusalem’s fanatic Mercaz HaRav, and the moral inspiration of the settler movement. If the T-shirts of the thousands of the government’s young allies who march through the Old City every June to commemorate its conquest are to be believed, many Mercaz HaRav graduates dream of taking down the Dome of the Rock and rebuilding a new temple.
Jews have not always worshipped Jerusalem with such atavistic righteousness. In 1891, Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, writing under the pen name Ahad Ha’am, or “One of the People,” sent this report to his comrades in Odessa: “I went first to the Wailing Wall, of course, and there I found many of our brothers, residents of Jerusalem, standing and praying with raised voices—also with wan faces, strange movements, and weird clothing—everything befitting the appearance of that terrible wall. I stood and watched them, people and wall, and one thought filled the chambers of my heart: those stones are testaments to the destruction of our land. And those men? The destruction of our people. Which catastrophe is greater?” Shaked might have presumed these lines to be the musings of a progressive Jewish diaspora pundit. But Ginsberg was Zionism’s Emerson, an essayist, editor, and counsellor to the movement’s most consequential leaders: he mentored Chaim Weizmann, who secured the Balfour Declaration and inspired A. D. Gordon, the champion of the Labor Zionist pioneers, including David Ben-Gurion, who built and then steered the country. For them, Zionism generally meant secular Hebrew modernism, a great cultural adventure, and Jerusalem’s piety reminded them of everything to be superseded in their agricultural collectives in the Galilee and coastal plain. Weizmann and Ginsberg were moving forces behind the Hebrew University; after prospecting for its site, in 1913, Weizmann wrote to his wife that he saw the project as building a true “Third Temple.”
When I first encountered the Wall—in the weeks after the 1967 War, when Labor’s founders were still in power—it was largely a place of secular pilgrimmage: the site of an ancient catastrophe bearing witness to a recently averted one. When I moved to Jerusalem, in the early seventies, it remained a huge, rectangular, creamy-stoned abstraction—a Rothko-like shrine accepting our projections and sublime thoughts. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has had control over the Wall since the 1967 War, and formally prohibited non-Orthodox prayer, though, informally, pilgrims did what they wished. Orthodox sects did not tightly control access to the site until the eighties, as Likud governments consolidated their victories. The night that my first child was born, in 1973, I went there, my head uncovered, to talk with my parents, both deceased; when the Camp David agreements were finally signed, in 1979, Jerusalem’s cosmopolitan mayor, Teddy Kollek, set up a stage at the Wall for Yehudi Menuhin to play Bach.
Before 1967, in other words, observant Jews of all kinds would have found the veneration of Jerusalem vaguely idolatrous. In the Orthodox day schools of my childhood, Judaism’s “holiest place” was found in the moving touch of the chanter’s hand over the words of the Torah scroll. The synagogue, since the development of Talmudic Judaism, has been supposed a “mikdash me’at,” a small temple, substituting for the original—its worship and Torah reading substituting for the putatively cleansing animal sacrifice that Judeans had practiced but that rabbinic exiles had deliberately abandoned. Writing in PMLA in 2007, the Hebrew University’s Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (my wife) argued that diaspora rabbis traditionally assumed a necessary expanse between themselves and the Temple, which had been destroyed in more ways than one. Jerusalem had been transformed into a metaphor for deferred redemption and peace. Judaism had become a religion of symbols, substitutions, and deferred proximity to holy space: “Symbolic distance leaves room for human activity,” she wrote, for the “imperfectability that can (always only provisionally) be addressed by humble and self-deprecating acts of creativity.”
Yehuda Amichai writes in his poem “The Eve of Rosh Hashanah,” “At the house that’s being built / a man makes a vow: not to do anything wrong in it, / only to love.” The poem continues, “Sins that were green last spring / dried out over the summer. Now they’re whispering.” Netanyahu visited the United Nations on Monday, to adore Trump’s bombast, just after his government cut Israel’s dues by a million dollars. The cut, too, was a symbolic act, though perhaps not the kind rabbis always had in mind.
Bernard Avishai teaches political economy at Dartmouth and Hebrew University, and is the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” among other books. He was selected as a Guggenheim fellow in 1987.
