The Pitiful Parent of the World Heritage Program (Israel and the West Bank)

Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Battir, and Hebron.  

For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

For photos, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Part 1. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

On New  Year’s Day, 2019, I flew to Dallas and then on to Tel Aviv via Paris.  I took my shoes off in a cheap hotel.  The clock said it was midnight, but the room was depressing, and for me it was four in the afternoon, so a few minutes later I put my shoes back on and walked to the beach, a block away.   I took my shoes off a second time, but the hard-packed sand was very cold on bare feet—it had stopped raining an hour earlier—so I went back to the hotel and somehow fell asleep.   It’s a strange world where you can walk into an aluminum tube and, twelve or twenty hours later, discover that time has slipped half a day.  I once boarded a plane and muttered to the pilot, who was standing at the door, something like, “The machine never stops.”  I thought he might find it vaguely threatening, but he one-upped me and said, “You can’t kill the beast.”

My hotel was in a Tel Aviv neighborhood containing about four hundred militantly modern low-rise apartment buildings from the 1930s.  UNESCO, which put the neighborhood on its World Heritage list in 2003, calls it the White City.  I call it Bauhaus by the Beach.

The Bauhaus style, established in Germany largely by Walter Gropius in the 1920s, said goodbye to social status expressed in architecture.  Good riddance to facades so heavy with classical ornaments that four story-buildings seem ready to sink into the earth.  In a welcome coincidence, Bauhaus simplicity was also the cheapest thing on offer at a time when most immigrants landing in Palestine didn’t carry letters of credit.  

Despite these points in its favor, I don’t much like the style.  Some years ago, I made a day trip from Berlin to Dessau, home of the Bauhaus in its peak years, and I found that I was more aware of seeing something famous than something I liked.  Shades of Antonio Canova: I recognized many of the buildings and knew that I was supposed to respect them, but they seemed heavy and so simple in conception that they looked like the houses I drew with crayons in third grade.  

I’m not objecting that the White City is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.  That list now includes an abandoned Uruguayan slaughterhouse whose corned beef was a chapter in the history of industrialization, and I have no problem with that, either.  I’d be happy to see Lakewood, California, or Wynnewood, Texas, on the list as examples of post-war American suburbia.  (I’d prefer them to a Levittown just because they’re less well known.)  I’m not denigrating ancient or beautiful places, either.   I’m only saying that guidebooks have a strangled notion of places worth seeing.  More slaughterhouses, I say; a lead smelter would be good, too.  I’ll all for learning about what we’ve done to the planet.  That’s probably the best way to get people to begin appreciating the importance of the places where we belong.

The White City is filled with two- or three-story apartment blocks whose only ornament is balconies, usually protruding though occasionally recessed.  The protruding balconies usually terminate at both ends in quarter-circles curving back to the wall.  Alternatively, they have square corners so sharp you could cut paper  on them.  They’re dead plain, but penniless immigrants arriving in the 1930s must have thought that they had died and gone to heaven.  

Guidebooks often point to Pinsker 23.  (Addresses in Tel Aviv are arranged with the street name followed by the number.)   Leon Pinsker, it happens, was a Russian Jew and medical doctor who grew up with the pleasant idea of Jewish assimilation.  Pogroms in 1882 changed his mind.  Pinsker then published Auto-Emancipation a decade before Theodor Herzl published his better known The Jewish State.  Overshadowed, Pinsker hasn’t been forgotten.  Forty years after his death in Odessa in 1891, he was reburied at a site fit for biblical patriarchs, a natural cave in the Hebrew University’s Botanical Garden on Mt. Scopus. 

I walked along a block of Pinsker Street where rows of bollards along the curb kept everything short of a tank from climbing the sidewalks.  Landward from the sidewalks, knee-high walls protected five feet of plantings wrapping Bauhaus-style apartments.  Almost all of them had three stories, and they bristled with balconies.   Not Pinsker 23, an econobox about forty feet wide and a hundred deep.  Designed in 1936 by Pinhas, or Philip, Hutt for thirty-five single women, Pinsker 23’s windows are spaced along three parallel ribbons around the shoebox.  The most distinctive feature of the building is a squared-off bump protruding two feet from the middle of the façade.  A functional ornament, the bump encloses the main stairway.  The entrance to the building was at the bottom of the bump and once was stylish, with a frame of black-glazed brick.  When I came by, many of the tiles were gone, and the swinging double doors were nicked and smudged.  The narrow hallways on each floor were paved with golden-glazed tiles obscured in the darkness until a motion sensor turned them on, revealing with a click doors as plain as the sides of a piano crate.  

Not every immigrant arriving in early Tel Aviv was broke, and a good place to look for the exceptions is Rothschild Avenue, one of the few streets in central Tel Aviv with a wide, planted median.  In 1933 a house was built here for a Dr. Sadovsky.  Carl Rubin, the architect, gave the doctor a Bauhaus block with the entrance at a corner where a small, square void was cut out from the building’s rectangular footprint.   Perhaps each floor covers three thousand square feet, and the house originally had three floors.  That’s a lot of room, even if you set aside one floor for a clinic.

Rubin, the architect, had been born in Ukraine and had studied in Vienna.  He moved to Tel Aviv in 1920 at age 21 but later returned to Germany to study with Erich Mendelsohn.  Back in Tel Aviv in 1932, he got the Sadovsky commission.  I know nothing of Dr. Sadovsky and little of the subsequent history of the house, but in 2007 it sold for seven million dollars.  It was then popped up to four stories and chopped into a dozen apartments.  A two-bedroom unit, every interior surface harder than ice, was for rent in 2019 at about thirty-eight hundred dollars monthly.  What would the women of Pinsker 23 have made of such prices?  Zionists disdained bourgeois materialism, and if the women of Pinsker 23 had remained faithful to Zionism over the course of long lives, they would have been furious at the thought that Europe’s pathology had followed them.  A million dollars in every pocket may be the American and even the Israeli dream, but it wasn’t theirs.

I kept bumping into this contradiction.  It happened again as I walked along HaYarkon, the northbound street one block back from the beach.  (Yes, heavy traffic dictates lots of one-way streets, and if you want to drive along the water on this stretch of the coast you have to be heading south.)  I passed a four-story Bauhaus block at HaYarkon 96.  It was built in the shape of a right-angled U open to the street.  The ends of the arms were rounded, so from the street the building suggested a pair of whales breasting their way to the sea.  

The building was built for Karol Reisfeld, another immigrant who had landed penniless in Palestine in 1933.  Twenty years later, he and his wife Ala owned an engineering company, some citrus groves, and at least this one apartment building. They were childless and in 1966 willed the building to the Hebrew University.

 When I saw it, the building had recently acquired at the back an attached nine-story residential block, all glass and metal dark as death.  I asked the doorman about the shutters on the original wings.  They were lowered on every floor.  I figured I knew the answer, and I was right.  “The owners are not here,” he explained.  “They live abroad and are very rich.  Not like me.”   He showed me an old photo from the days when the balconies had overlooked the beach.  The construction of a Dan Hotel in 1953 blocked the view, which means that buyers in the last seventy years have known they wouldn’t see water.  Maybe the idea of being close to it was enough.  That, plus having a foot in the land of Israel.

That would have been a major comfort.  I once spent an unnerving hour at the Maidanek extermination camp.  It’s on the east side of Lublin, a Polish town about fifty miles from the Ukraine border.  There were no crowds.  A dome as large as the one over a full-sized merry-go-round sheltered a mountain of what looked like ash from a thousand wood stoves.   Nearby, the interior of a barracks had been subdivided by wire mesh into compartments with thousands of pairs of children’s shoes sorted by size, toddlers and up.  Perhaps because there were so few other people around, I found this camp more penetrating than Auschwitz and its evil twin, Birkenau.  That’s what happens to places with millions of visitors: you can’t help thinking about those places more as they are than as they were.

A visit to the old Jewish cemetery in Krakow sticks in my memory, too.  The tombstones were so tightly jammed together that as I walked between them—sometimes unavoidably walked on them—I imagined hands reaching up to grab an ankle.   Several generations of living in Israel may have left Israelis immune to such shivers, but I’ll bet that the foreign buyers of luxury apartments in Tel Aviv aren’t.   They may have escaped the charnel house, but they haven’t joined the reconstituted Jewish nation.  They’re still atoms adrift.

Tired of Bauhaus monotony, I walked south until I bumped into Neve Tzedek.  This is the neighborhood that was begun in 1887 by the first Jews to move outside Jaffa, and it’s startlingly visible on satellite views where, stuck between the south end of Rothschild Avenue and the sea, it shows up as an island of red roofs.   The red is clay tiles on pitched roofs, a Class A felony under Bauhaus law.

Many of the houses in Neve Tzedek look as though they’ve been airlifted from Old Europe.  Some are decrepit, but others have been elaborately renovated.  At the corner of Barnet and Amzaleg, I passed a wall that looked like a ruin, roughly patched, missing large stone blocks, and braced by iron tie-rods.  A porthole high up revealed a disc of blue sky.   Perhaps it was the heavy double doors, studded with bolts and freshly stained, that made me wonder.  Perhaps I pulled on a shutter.  I don’t remember, but I have a picture of the inside, where rustic walls enclosed a new wooden deck leading to new flagstones around an infinity pool and a flanking lawn with an oscillating sprinkler.  Talk about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  There’s no River Nile in Israel; there’s only the Sea of Galilee, an aquifer, and desalination.  The women of Pinsker 23 would not have believed their eyes.  

The Neve Tzedek Tower rose in the distance.  The name comes from Jeremiah, chapter 50, and is translated in the King James Bible as “habitation of justice.”  Jeremiah’s “habitation” is not a place, however, it is God himself, so the Neve Tzedek Tower, taken literally, is God’s Tower.  It’s a forty-four-story residential building, and it was completed in 2007.  Airbnb has listings, and some of the three hundred units are always for sale.  Were there objections when construction began?  Of course there were, as there would be anywhere when a high rise is proposed for a neighborhood of single-family homes, but as a local resident told a reporter, “When the municipality and a businessman hook up, there is no power on earth that can stop them.”  I probably don’t have to repeat my mantra.

2.                          

I hadn’t come all this way to see money murder an idea, so I drove up to Jerusalem.  

In the 1990s I had spent three summers in Beit Sahur, a village just downhill from Bethlehem and by car ten minutes from Jerusalem.  I thought I knew my way around, but for some reason I put myself this day in the hands of Lady Google, who directed me to Jerusalem’s Old City by a circuitous path.  Maybe it made sense, but she took me through nondescript industrial neighborhoods guaranteed to discourage any pilgrim on the trip of a lifetime. 

I managed to park close to Jerusalem’s former railroad station, now an entertainment venue.  The station is about half a mile west of the southwest corner of the Old City, which is roughly square and wrapped by a wall about forty feet high and half a mile long on each side.  The walk to the Old City from the railroad station drops down into the Hinnom Valley and then climbs up about a hundred feet to the southwest corner of the city wall.  It’s a small miracle that on that walk—down, across, and up—about fourteen hundred feet of the western side of the Old City’s wall is on display, stretching from the wall’s southwest corner north to the Jaffa Gate, midway along the western side of the Old City.  

This view of the Old City’s wall might have been destroyed as the city expanded during the twentieth century—it now reaches some three miles beyond the walls—but soon after occupying the city during World War I the British created a narrow green belt around the Old City.  The belt is not really very green—Jerusalem is semiarid, with a bit more precipitation than Madrid and a bit less than San Francisco—but the law succeeded in prohibiting the construction of buildings touching the city’s wall or lying within the belt.  Israelis have few fond memories of the British Mandate in Palestine, which lasted until 1948, but with regard to the preservation of the Old City they are in Britain’s debt.  So are the city’s visitors.  It was a warm afternoon for January, the sky was clear, and the wall’s stone blocks—their colors on the tan-to-rust spectrum—not only looked but felt warm.  

The Old City of Jerusalem is another UNESCO World Heritage site.  It could hardly not be one, given its antiquity and cultural importance, but the city is as indigenous as corn in Transylvania.  I mean that it’s not indigenous at all.  The Romans, after all, destroyed the city of David in about A.D. 70.  They then rebuilt it as a typical Roman colony, with a square footprint, cardinal orientation, axial east-west and north-south streets, and a set of infilling parallels creating a street grid within the square.  The form is a lot like early American towns on the Great Plains or, for that matter, like scores of towns planted in the nineteenth century across the Argentine pampas.  This does not mean that I object to the UNESCO listing.  Cities built on a Roman plan are as much a part of the world’s heritage as slaughterhouses and lead smelters, and there aren’t many Roman cities as well-preserved as Jerusalem.  Trier and Merida, the oldest surviving Roman cities in Germany and Spain, are both UNESCO sites, and neither of them displays its Roman form as clearly as Jerusalem.  

Still, getting Jerusalem on the World Heritage List was tricky.  Article Four of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage—that name must have been contrived by someone for whom English was a fourth language—Article Four specifies that nominations for the list can come only from a “State Party” that has signed the Convention and which is nominating a location “situated on its territory….”  At a 1981 meeting in Paris of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, Israel was told that it could not speak because it had not signed the Convention.  (It would do so almost twenty years later, in 1999.) 

Jordan had signed the Convention but, here’s the catch, had lost control of the Old City in 1967, during the Six-Day War.  If the committee had been evenhanded, Jordan, too, would have been told it could not speak, but the committee had already allowed Jordan to nominate the Old City, and so it perhaps felt compelled to allow Jordan’s representative to justify the nomination.  Taher Masri, Jordan’s ambassador to France and himself a Palestinian, assured the committee that Jordan was “not using this Committee or your deliberations as a vehicle for political claims.” Ralph Slatyer, Australia’s representative, said that the nomination should have been “accompanied by a declaration stating that inscription carried no explicit or implicit endorsement of any claim to sovereignty.”    

The American delegate, David Rowe, was blunter.  He assured the committee that he recognized the “universal cultural and historical value of Jerusalem,” and he spoke of “the high esteem of the U.S. delegation… for the distinguished Jordanian delegation.”  Then he cut to the chase.  Approval would be “a failure to adhere to the articles and provision of the World Heritage Convention.”   Rowe was absolutely right, but he had only one vote, and the committee voted in favor of the listing by fourteen to one with five abstentions, including Australia’s.   The official record of the meeting includes this statement: “The U.S. delegation regrets the result of this extraordinary session and asks that the record reveal our full disassociation from its outcome.”

Rather than accept the loss gracefully, the United States declared that it would remain in the World Heritage program but would no longer support it financially.  The amount of money was small ($330,000 in 1981), but the first paragraph of section sixteen of the Convention specifies compulsory contributions.  Curiously, in the very next section the Convention gives each State Party the right to not make that compulsory payment.   You must pay, but you don’t have to.  You see: diplomats are sly dogs.  In case you’re wondering, the section was included at the insistence of an American negotiator.

A year later, the United States resumed payments, but the spat was not over, because in that same year the United States withdrew from UNESCO, the World Heritage program’s administrative home.  The stated reasons were American dissatisfaction with bureaucratic bloat and with the agency’s alleged hostility to free markets and a free press.  Despite this withdrawal, the United States continued to participate in UNESCO’s heritage program.  The United States rejoined UNESCO in 2003, but the saga of UNESCO and the United States was far from over.

These shenanigans are confusing, but Jerusalem doesn’t care. The top half of the city’s old wall dates from about 1540, when Suleiman the Magnificent ordered the reconstruction of what was then mostly in ruins.  The more interesting part of the wall is the lower half, which is made of much bigger blocks that seem to grow from the horizontally bedded natural rock.  This lower half was built by order of Herod.  He fares badly in the Bible, but anyone flying in from the United States today will look at his masonry and think of walls lasting forever.

The Jaffa Gate, midway along the Western side of the wall, is also at the western end of the city’s axial east-west street, called David Street because the Crusaders believed, incorrectly, that King David’s palace fronted on it.  The street is no more than a pedestrian lane paved with stone, and it extends east about a thousand feet to its crossing with the axial north-south street.  Turn left here, and it’s less than a ten-minute walk north to the Damascus Gate.  Continue straight on David Street past the intersection and in a thousand feet you bump into the walled precinct that Genesis calls Mount Moriah.  In modern Hebrew it’s Har Habayit.  Muslims call it the Haram esh-Sharif or “Noble Enclosure,” and English-speaking foreigners usually call it the Temple Mount, a name referring to Solomon’s temple, destroyed by the Romans.  Whichever name you use, the walled precinct protects the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.  Unlike Solomon’s temple, which is gone except perhaps for some flagstones, those two buildings are intact, though modified over the centuries.  The Dome of the Rock, for example, is instantly recognizable today from its brilliant gold leaf but until 1960 was roofed with lead plates.  They were replaced in the 1990s with an aluminum alloy, which was gilt a generation later.

Kaiser Wilhelm in 1898 rode through the Jaffa Gate on horseback.  General Edmund Allenby a generation later entered on foot.  It’s a provocative contrast.  Why did Allenby dismount?  Some people will dismiss the gesture as a publicity stunt, but I think it was genuine humility on the part of the representative of the world’s chief imperial power.  Jerusalem has a charismatic power over anyone who has ever respected Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.  It even has charismatic power over the occasional atheist.

          I turned left before the central crossing and headed north to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is roughly at the center of the Old City’s northwest quarter.  Just beyond the scarred and scraped wooden door to the church, I passed a young Filipina in a pink hoodie and an Orthodox grandmother in black, both kneeling to kiss the Stone of the Anointment, but it was a Sunday, the church was dangerously overcrowded, and I left almost at once.  The church had been destroyed in A.D. 1009 and never rebuilt except for a rotunda marking the supposed burial place of Jesus, and I worked my way around several intervening buildings to find a patch of open ground rimmed by great arches and columns.    These were the remnants of the destroyed nave, its space occupied now by a half dozen severely plain plastered brick buildings, windowless, roofed with dusty corrugated sheet metal, and fitted with padlocked doors.  Inhabited by members of one or more of the sects sharing custody of the church, the buildings are far closer to the ascetic heart of Christianity than any display of cathedral treasure.

I went down to the Temple Mount, too, unchanged from what I remembered from twenty years earlier, except that people hoping to touch the Western or Wailing Wall now waited in long lines to pass through airport-style body scanners.   A day later, I myself passed through those scanners.  It was the only way to get up to the Temple Mount. (There are several other entrances, but Israeli police allow only Muslims to use them.)   I then tried but failed to enter the Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock.  This was another change from the 1990s.  I told myself to stop complaining and let the Palestinians exercise the trifle of power that the Israelis allow them.

I wandered over to the deserted northwest corner of the enclosure, where Solomon’s temple was probably located.  That’s when I noticed the double wooden doors leading west into the cotton market, the Suq el Qattanin.   I had never before paid any attention to these doors, partly because Israeli police make sure that non-Muslims do not enter the Temple Mount this way, but each door is about twelve feet high, three feet wide, and several inches thick.  Painted green and partly covered with a carved pattern of irregular polygons, they must weigh three hundred pounds each.  The doors were open when I saw them, but what caught my eye was that the doors did not come to rest against the thick wall.  Instead, they sank deftly into pockets in the thick wall.  Design, design, design.                                  

Like the gold leaf on the Dome of the Rock, these doors aren’t old.  Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, wrote of the cotton market that “this fine mediaeval bazaar had degenerated through neglect into a public latrine.  The shops were filled with ordure, the debris was sometimes lying five feet high, and the picturesque doors had been broken up for firewood by the Turks.”  Storrs, who went on to unhappy postings on Cyprus and in Northern Rhodesia, wrote that “there are many positions of greater authority and renown within and without the British Empire, but in a sense that I cannot explain there is no promotion after Jerusalem.”   That “sense I cannot explain” is what got Allenby to dismount at the Jaffa Gate.

As Jerusalem’s governor, Storrs hired Charles Ashbee, a British Arts and Crafts designer who renovated the market and replicated its doors.   That wasn’t all.  The Armenian genocide had brought the Red Cross to the Middle East for a few years, and Storrs wrote that Ashbee “bought the looms which the American Red Cross had set up for the relief of Armenian and Syrian weavers, and installed them in the ancient Cotton Market—the Suq al-Qattanin.”   Foreign competition killed the weaving business, and even the keffiyehs or checkered scarves worn by many Palestinian men today come mostly from China.   A few dealers elsewhere in the Old City sell old thobes, the traditional black Palestinian dress fitted with bright chest panels or gabbehs, but I wondered what Storrs would make of the big plastic tubs I saw in the cotton market now.  They were filled with penny candies.

Discouraging?  I hadn’t seen discouraging until, returning to my car, I detoured to St. Andrew’s Memorial Church, dedicated by Allenby in 1927.  A brass plate reads, “To the Glory of God and the Undying Memory of the Officers and Men of the London Scottish Regiment who laid down their lives in the Palestine Campaign, 1917-1918.”  Another plate, placed in 1937 by General Arthur Wauchope, high commissioner at the time, reads: “In memory of the Black Watch Royal Highlanders who fell in Battle in Palestine, 1917-1918.”  

Both plaques are perfectly customary and might even be dismissed as perfunctory, and so might the church itself, which has a barrel vault divided into segments by widely separated ribs.  There is absolutely no ornamentation.  In some more peaceful part of the world I might have said that this simplicity was an economy measure, but not here.  Here, perhaps because of the centuries of conflict—this side, that side, another side—the blank walls said that life itself was blank, pointless, signifying nothing.  Perhaps there are more radical thoughts to entertain in the Holy Land, but I can’t think of any.  

Part 2. Bethlehem and Battir

Bethlehem basically adjoins Jerusalem on the south, and I had driven between the two many, many time in the 1990s, which was why I was startled to find that the old checkpoint was gone and traffic had been rerouted.  Two Palestinians in street dress directed me aggressively into an informal parking lot close to the notorious Separation Barrier that now keeps West Bank Palestinians out of Israel. The men insisted that I could not bring my rental car into Bethlehem, and they demanded an unreasonable parking fee, which proved to be negotiable.  

I walked through a gap in the barrier.  No heritage here, no irrigated landscaping.  Just a concrete wall with a square gap big enough for two vehicles to pass simultaneously, one each way.  Israeli security forces were methodically checking vehicles coming into Jerusalem, but nobody was checking traffic going the other way.  I walked through the gap, got a taxi, and went a few miles to Solomon’s Pools, on the far side of Bethlehem.  Despite their name, the pools are actually Herodian, with Roman and later modifications.  Bigger than Olympic swimming pools, they were built to provide domestic water for Jerusalem, and bits of the aqueducts built by the Romans to convey water northward survive, not as monumental constructions but as tiny channels running like rivulets along the contours of the gnarly limestone.  Although the pools are one of the most scenic spots around Bethlehem, since I had last been here the Palestinian Authority had enclosed them with chain-link fences, as if the people of Bethlehem needed more barriers.                   

The pools sit in a valley, and I continued a mile or so east and downstream to an irrigated patch of ground, visually spoiled by plastic greenhouses.  The Crusaders thought that this was the Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden of The Song of Songs.  Their error explains the name of the village here today, corrupted from Hortus to Artas or Urtas.  At the suggestion of an archbishop in Montevideo, a nunnery was built here.  It opened in 1904 and still looks as it always has, except for the addition of the greenhouses, which belong to the nunnery.

Nineteenth century Europeans living in Jerusalem began summering in Artas to get some relief from Jerusalem’s heat, and in the 1920s a Finnish anthropologist named Hilma Granqvist lived in the village while studying the lives of village women.  Her house is now a museum and a fine example of the domed houses built across the West Bank from Roman times until the 1950s.  They’re windowless, charming perhaps with their domes and supporting pendentives, but they’re dark and unplumbed.  Houses built in the last 50 years or more are almost always made of concrete blocks stacked and mortared between concrete posts and beams.  Houses are usually two or three stories tall and left incomplete, with rebar protruding at the top so that another floor can be added someday.   The new style, introduced with a one-story model by a British planner in the 1940s, is ugly but does have the advantage of windows and running water.   The planner, Henry Kendall, went on to a posting as city planner in Uganda—the British Empire played a lot of tricks like that on its servants—and vanishingly few Palestinians in the West Bank today know that, in a sense, Henry Kendall built their house.

Heading back to the center of Bethlehem, I went briefly to the Church of the Nativity, which was as insanely overcrowded as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher had been the day before.  Both churches had originally been built by order of Constantine, but while the Church of the Holy Sepulcher lasted until the eleventh century, the Bethlehem church was destroyed in the sixth.  Justinian promptly rebuilt it.  Since I had last been here, part of his floor had been removed to reveal, a couple of feet below it, part of the mosaic floor built for Constantine.  Other mosaics added in the twelfth century have recently been uncovered high in the nave, but what I liked most about the church was the exposed nave trusses, which arrived in 1480 as a gift of the English King Edward IV.  I have no idea how they got to Bethlehem, which is about fifty miles from the sea.  I suppose that Roman roads helped.  

Much as I love old timberwork, the shocker for me, hands down, remained the Separation Barrier.  You have to walk along the thing to begin imagining life behind it.  The Warsaw Ghetto comes to mind, of course.  So do the urban freeways built in the United States in the 1960s to keep Blacks out of downtown.  These are useful comparisons for anyone struggling from a distance to understand how Palestinians feel about their situation.

The character of the wall varies along the border between Israel and the West Bank, but in Bethlehem it is a solid concrete wall about twenty feet high, topped with wire fencing and periodic guard towers.   It was built in 2003, but there’s no use looking for it on Google Maps or Google Earth, where coverage of Israel is deliberately blurred.  I walked along the Bethlehem side and was both shocked by the wall and impressed by the graffiti. “Believe in Peace.”  “Fuck Trump.”  “Freedom should not be a privilege.”  Some were wryly humorous.  “Make hummus, not walls.”  “Another wall bites the dust.”  One, under the Nike swoosh, said, “Just Remove It.”  Still others had elaborate artwork.  A good likeness of Alice peering through a small rounded-top doorway had the caption, “Palestinians in Wonderland.”  Another, without caption, showed Donald Trump patting the wall fondly. (Intentionally or not, this Trump had an uncanny resemblance to Ariel Sharon.)  

Across the narrow street hugging the wall, I passed the Walled Off Hotel.  There was a shop called Wall*Mart, with a sign advertising spray paint, stencils, and ladders for hire.  If the Israeli guard towers were manned—I couldn’t tell—the guards paid no attention to either the graffiti artists or the foreigners taking photos.  I passed another visitor looking at the wall.  I said something like “Unbelievable, eh?”  She said something like “Absolutely.”  We were both struck almost dumb.    

4.

I tried walking back to my car through the same gap I had walked through before, but I was going the wrong way now, and an Israeli guard waved me away and pointed toward a pedestrian channel walled and roofed with chain link fencing.  A full-height turnstile locked behind me.  Another was locked in front of me.  An officer behind ballistic glass asked a few questions and checked my passport.  

A moment earlier, two Palestinians with passes to enter Israel had cleared the compartment.  About a hundred thousand West Bank Palestinians, or about one in six people in the West Bank labor force, have those passes.  Officially free, in reality they are extremely expensive—almost $800 per month in 2022, or about a third of the average salary of a Palestinian working in Israel.  Subtract additionally the cost of travel, and the permittee’s take-home pay isn’t much higher than it is for workers who stay in the West Bank.  

The daily crossing is humiliating, too, one more in the cascade of humiliations that are part of daily life on the West Bank.  In the 1990s one young man in the nearby village of Battir told me that his father was a chauffeur at the American consulate in Jerusalem, but that he himself, the son, could not enter the city.  With a mixture of pride and bitterness, he showed me a framed photo of his father with a beaming Jimmy Carter.  I also met a young woman in the village.  She looked from her window over to a new Israeli road bladed into a hillside five hundred yards to the east.  I asked her what she thought of the road, and she snapped, “I hate it.”  Serves me right for asking such a stupid question.   

I decided to go over to Battir.  About five miles west of Bethlehem, the village lies in a small, narrow valley with a view gently downslope a couple of hundred yards to a much larger and even more gently sloping valley, which happens to be followed by the old railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem.  For decades, pilgrims and tourists on their way to Jerusalem looked out the window on the right side of their rail car and got what became a classic glimpse—perhaps the classic glimpse—of a Palestinian village.  The view was particularly attractive because the slope from the track up to the village had been converted over the centuries into a set of terraces irrigated by a spring at the center of the village.  Battir in those days had its own train station, and village women raised crops of mint on the terraces.  In summer they took bundles of mint by train to Jerusalem, sat down at the Damascus Gate, and waited for customers who needed mint for tea.  

The mint business was destroyed in 1948, when the railroad’s valley—the Israelis call it the Nahal Refa’im, and Palestinians call it the Wadi es-Sikka—became part of the Green Line, the border between Israel and Jordan.  No longer able to take the train to Jerusalem, villagers had to undertake an arduous climb south from the village up to the spine of the West Bank.  From there, Bethlehem was about five miles to the east.  The Damascus Gate, which fell on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem, was another five miles to the North.

Enter Battir’s paterfamilias, Hasan Mustafa.  Educated at the American University in Cairo, Hasan Mustafa had lived in Iraq before returning to teach in Jerusalem.  After 1948, he would work with the Red Cross and with the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, the primary source of United Nations assistance for Palestinians.  These organizations, aided by Hasan Mustafa and the villagers, would build a clinic, a girls’ school, and a craft center at Battir.  Hasan Mustafa did one more thing, in 1950 supervising the construction of an access road.   Seventy years later, that road may still be the straightest road anywhere in the highlands of the West Bank.  More than a mile long, with barely a hint of a curve, it rises about seven hundred vertical feet.  That’s twice the maximum grade allowed on the U.S. interstate system.  At the top, the road joins the older road network leading to Bethlehem and other places.

I remembered how to get to Battir from Bethlehem, but because I had been told I couldn’t drive into Bethlehem I backtracked into Jerusalem and found my way to Route 60, a superb highway built by the Israelis to help Jewish settlers on the West Bank get to and from Jerusalem quickly.  After a few miles, I exited near the top of Hasan Mustafa’s road and stopped at a large, red-and-white trilingual sign.  The English version read: “This Road Leads to Area “A” Under the Palestinian Authority.  The Entrance for Israeli Citizens is Forbidden, Dangerous to Your Lives And Is Against the Israeli Law.”  Should I disregard the sign and its surprisingly broken English?  Figure it didn’t apply to me?  Figure that the odds of a rental car getting trashed were small?  When I say that my excursion to Battir proved peaceful, I will be told, “You were lucky.”  

There’s never a shortage of history in this part of the world, and Battir has a lot of it, going back at least to the Third Jewish-Roman War, known also as the Bar Kokhba revolt, which came to its conclusion at Battir in 135 A.D.  The uprising had begun about three years earlier, as the Romans were rebuilding Jerusalem.  According to the ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed during the war.  The Talmud speaks of the “eighty thousand officers bearing battle trumpets in their hands, who entered the city of Beitar when the enemy took it and killed men, women and children until their blood ran into the Great Sea…. For seven years the gentiles harvested their vineyards that had been soaked with the blood of Israel without requiring any additional fertilizer.”

          I drove down Hasan Mustafa’s road and stopped at the site of what is now known to Palestinians as the Khirbet al Yehud, “the ruin of the Jews.”   A sign read simply “Battir Park and Restaurant,” but I found neither a park nor a restaurant.  I did find unfenced olive terraces on a steep slope down to the railroad, along with a distant view of Jerusalem.  As for ancient Battir, dry-stacked stone walls on the site might speak eloquently to archaeologists, but I could not tell whether they dated back two centuries or twenty.  Unlike the much-visited ruins of Masada, which is in Israel, this “ruin of the Jews” was deserted.  There were no educational signs, no fences, no guards, no excavations in progress.

When I first visited Battir, in the late 1980s, I was with an American engineer working for an aid organization.  He was nervous, insisting I not get out of the vehicle.   He took me to Battir’s ancient spring and showed me how his organization had diverted the water from an ancient stone-lined channel to a steel pipe.  I thought that the people of Battir could make much more money from tourists attracted to a Biblical landscape than they ever could by reducing seepage in their irrigation system, but I didn’t argue the point.  On the subject of seepage, I have learned that irrigation engineers bend as little as their pipes.

Twenty years later, the pipe was still in place, ending at an old masonry chute from which water still leapt in an arc into a pool.  The pool has historically been plugged at night, then opened during the day, with each landowner entitled to the entire flow for a certain number of hours each week.  Most of Battir’s terraces have now been abandoned, however, and, instead of growing mint, villagers commute to work by minibuses ferrying them up Hasan Mustafa’s road.   

The terrace walls were intact, but the terrace beds were mostly in grass, with a few cabbages and some tough old orange, lemon, and olive trees.  A couple of Israeli security vehicles were parked on the other side of the track.  There used to be Palestinian villages over there, but after 1948 the Israelis extirpated them and covered the sites with pine forests. Like the meadow at Great Zimbabwe, the forests are attractive so long as you don’t know their history.  The popular JFK Peace Forest is only about a mile from Battir, for example. Talk about history written by the victors.

On the walk back up to the spring, I was surprised to see a French couple.   I shouldn’t have been, because Europeans in general are braver travelers than Americans.  Next to the pool, a restaurant with tables on a patio was closed.  Perhaps in summer it had customers willing to ignore the “dangerous to your lives” sign at the top of the hill.  Near the restaurant and the ever-gushing spring, I was also surprised to see a sturdy new sign with UNESCO’s World Heritage logo—two hands cupped together.  The sign said “Palestine Land of Olives and Vines. Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem. Battir.”  I had forgotten that UNESCO in 2011 admitted Palestine as a member state.  

When that happened, the United States topped funding UNESCO.  Arrears began accruing at the rate of about $80 million annually, or a fourth or fifth of UNESCO’s budget.  The Palestinian Authority was now free, however, to nominate places for the World Heritage list.  It nominated Battir, and in 2014 experts were called in for an evaluation.  This is standard practice.  For natural sites, the evaluations are made by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.  In the case of cultural sites, like Battir, the experts came from ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites. 

Very unusually and without explanation in their report, the ICOMOS experts did not visit Battir.   They noted, however, that most of Battir’s houses were recent and flat-roofed.  They also noted that most of Battir’s terraces had been abandoned. Their most damning observation was this:

the development of settlement near water sources is an almost universal phenomenon and the choice of the site of Battir village does not appear to be outstanding….  There is thus very little basis for determining why the Battir terraced landscape should be considered exceptional in the Mediterranean context or even in the Eastern Mediterranean context. 

On the face of it, this may seem plausible—official documents do have an aura of infallibility—but ICOMOS did not ask China in 1997 to choose between the old caravan towns of Pingyao and Lijiang.  Instead, both were added to the World Heritage list.  Why not?  The demand for such places is almost insatiable. Was the listing of Liverpool enough to fill some hypothetical quota for early industrial cities?   It was not, and New Lanark and Saltaire both joined the World Heritage list.  Yet here, in the heart of the Holy Land, where someone looking for a landscape evocative of the Bible would have a tough time finding a better example than Battir, the experts concluded that they did not “consider that the present nomination of Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines; Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir, Palestine, is unquestionably of Outstanding Universal Value.”   

Israel by this time had joined UNESCO, and it supported the ICOMOS experts.  So did UNESCO’s member-in-arrears.  Neither of them, however, had a vote.  The World Heritage Committee has twenty-one members elected on a rotating schedule of six-year terms.  The United States has not been a member for many years, and Israel has never been a member.   The Committee approved the nomination by a vote of eleven to three, with seven abstentions.  An Israeli representative attending the meeting as an observer called it “a dark day” for UNESCO, but Israeli environmentalists joined the Palestinians in celebration, chiefly because the government of Israel now announced that it planned to build at Battir not a concrete wall but only a 3.5-meter-high metal fence.  Five years later, when I came by, there wasn’t even that.  Patrol vehicles sat quietly down on the other side of the railroad track.  It was easy to imagine them sitting there daring somebody to just try crossing. 

Part 3. Hebron

Most of all, I wanted to visit Old Hebron. This may seem strange.  My 1906 Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria warns: “it is advisable to take a Guide, as the Muslims here are notorious for their fanaticism.”  Dig into older books and you may come across William Thomson, a pioneer among American missionaries to the Holy Land.  Visiting Hebron in the 1830s, Thomson estimated that Hebron had perhaps seven or eight thousand residents.  Ten percent were Jewish, he wrote, and the rest were Muslims “of a most bigoted and insolent character.”  

Such reputations get passed down through the generations because, as Antonio Canova complained, people see with their ears.  Yet in the 1990s I had had trouble in Old Hebron only once, when, because of persistent questioning, I was mistaken for a Jew attempting to buy property.  I was with a local architect that day, and he came to my defense.  Otherwise, my visits were always tranquil, and I came to believe that Old Hebron was the most interesting Muslim city in the world.  

That’s a tall claim, and a surprising one in view of the city’s reputation, but most of the world’s majority-Muslim cities—Cairo and Istanbul, for example—have been Europeanized beyond recognition.  Others, including Tangiers and Old Lahore have retained an atmosphere of the exotic, but if you look beyond their old street networks and their intense street life, you’ll find that the buildings are mostly from the last century.  The cores of Aleppo and Sana’a are authentic, but wars have gravely damaged them.  The list of intact Muslim cities, in short, is short, which is why Old Hebron is precious.  One more point in Hebron’s favor: it has very few visitors.

Google Maps in its wisdom told me that to go to Hebron I must return from Battir to Jerusalem, then drive west before heading south through Israel.  Only then, at the last minute, I should dash east not to Hebron, which Google didn’t recognize as a destination, but to Kiryat Arba, the Bible’s name for Hebron and the name of a Jewish settlement established in 1968 just east of Hebron.

This was nonsense.  Route 60, the same road that took me from Jerusalem most of the way to Battir, continues for another fifteen miles to Hebron.  The northern half of the road, rebuilt to serve Israeli settlements, is better than most American highways.  The southern half is still the venerable Hebron Road, left over from the British era, two lanes, curvy, narrow, and with too much traffic for passing.  It was along this southern half of the Hebron Road that I now passed the al-Arroub refugee camp, the home of some ten thousand Palestinians.  They, or their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, have lived here since fleeing Israel in 1948.  With the passage of decades, tents have been replaced with homes of concrete packed together with almost no public space.  When I came by in the 1990s, the Israelis had erected a chain-link fence perhaps twenty feet high to protect vehicles on the highway from rocks thrown from the camp.  In 2019, the fence was leaning with age.

A few miles past the camp I came to a junction: straight ahead to Hebron or left onto a bypass around the city and also to Kiryat Arba.  I took that bypass, because I wanted to begin with Hebron’s tombs of the patriarchs, which are within walking distance of Kiryat Arba. These tombs are the place where, as the Bible puts it, Abraham “buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron….”  

I feigned disinterest at the entrance to Kiryat Arba, but there was no need: the guards ignored me. Kiryat Arba  has about 10,000 residents, roughly the same as the Al-Arroub refugee camp, but most of Kiryat Arba’s residents live in three-story apartment buildings separated from one another by buffers of greenery irrigated by driplines.  The place doesn’t seem verdant until you compare it with dry-as-dust Al-Arroub—or with Hebron or, for that matter, with any Palestinian settlement.

  I figured that I’d work my way to the west side of the settlement, then walk, but his proved unnecessary.  I went with the flow until I found myself at a deserted corner where a left turn headed in the direction I wanted.  I took it and found myself driving through a Palestinian ghost town for half a mile until the road took a sharp right turn and dropped me in a small parking lot smack in front of the tombs.  

The Arabic name for this place is the Haram el-Khalil, the “sanctuary of the Friend,” the friend being Abraham, who conversed with God.  El-Khalil is also the Arabic name of the city of Hebron.  The English name Hebron, as well as the Hebrew Hevron, both derive from a root with the same meaning.  What could be friendlier than a town called “the friend”? 

Hebron’s Haram el-Khalil is a miniature version of Jerusalem’s Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount, but where that one measures nine hundred feet by fifteen hundred, this one measures only one hundred by two hundred.  That’s smaller than an American football field, but football fields aren’t rimmed with Herodian walls fifty feet high and eight feet thick.  The lower seven courses are plain, each course adding about forty inches to the height of the wall.  Starting at a height of about twenty-five feet, another eight rows of refrigerator-sized blocks are stacked up with three-feet-wide pilasters formed by pushing every other block back perhaps ten inches.  In the fourteenth century, the Mamelukes, rulers of Syria and Egypt, added another eight feet or so and topped the wall with crenellations.  Their stones, though too heavy for any two men to lift, look puny compared to Herod’s.                                                 

Oddly, the wall was built without any opening, so the burial caves remained sequestered for a thousand years until the Crusaders arrived and, in a preview of European manners, cut an opening at the midpoint on the north side and built a church inside the east half of the enclosure.  Saladin in the twelfth century converted the church into the Ibrahimi or Abraham Mosque.  It’s been that way ever since. 

The Crusaders excluded Jews and Muslims from their church, but Saladin, who took over in 1187, opened the doors to all.  The Mameluke Sultan Baibars in 1260 decided that the Crusaders had had the right idea, and he reverted to their policy, with the predictable adjustment that this time only Muslims would now be admitted.  For the next seven centuries, Jews and Christians were permitted no more than a peek through a crack in the eastern wall of the Haram.   That was the policy until one night during the Six Day War in 1967, when the chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces arrived in a lone jeep, found the doors closed, and forced them open with a chain attached to the back of his jeep.  Other Israelis followed in later days, and the viewing crack was soon plugged with cement.  Still, when I came by in 2019, a man was leaning against the wall.  At specified times he could have entered the mosque and prayed inside, but he chose instead to find a cranny in the cement into which he could insert a prayer on a slip of paper.   

The Mamelukes added a mosque adjacent to the north side of the Haram so the north wall of the old enclosure became and remains the new mosque’s south wall.  To enter the Ibrahimi Mosque, you have to pass through this new mosque, the Jawaliyah Mosque.  (Its doors were the ones forced open by the IDF rabbi.)  The Mamelukes tried to make the approach impressive by adding a wall parallel to the west side of the Haram.  The new wall, perhaps a dozen feet high, creates a corridor leading up a long flight of low stairs, but visitors are more likely to reach out a right hand and touch Herod’s blocks.  At the top of the steps, there is a door under a pointed arch of red and white blocks.  Here you enter the Jawaliyah and turn right.                    

I hurried through the Jawaliyah until I came to a door opening to the right.  Perhaps ten pairs of shoes were placed here.  I didn’t understand that I was about to pass through the entrance cut by the Crusaders.  Straight ahead, inside the Ibrahimi Mosque, I saw a hexagonal structure with a window barred by a heavy iron grate.  If I could read Arabic, I would have understood that this was the cenotaph of Sarah.  Behind it, but hidden from view at this point, was the octagonal cenotaph of Abraham. 

I turned the only way possible, to the left, and continued through a doorway into the main hall of the church-turned-mosque.  It was a large room with two centrally positioned rectangular cenotaphs, belonging, as I worked out later, to Rebecca and Isaac.  The Crusader’s altar was now the mihrab, or prayer niche.  It pointed southeasterly, not toward Mecca.  A door far to the right led to another room, this one with the octagonal cenotaph of Abraham.  It was lined up precisely with Sarah’s so the two occupied the central space of the haram. Through a window there I saw the final pair of cenotaphs, for Jacob and Leah.  All six had been added in the fourteenth century by Tankiz, for a time the Mameluke sultan’s viceroy in Syria.  This was the same Tankiz who had built Jerusalem’s cotton market with its elegant pocket doors, but, as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.  Perceived as a rival to the sultan, Tankiz was hauled off to Egypt and in 1340 executed.  (That must be the coldest word in the English language.)

Tankiz had overseen the construction of the cenotaphs because visitors had recently been excluded from the burial caves, but two centuries earlier, in about 1150, Benjamin of Tudela wrote that visitors who paid a fee got a peek at six tombs, one of which was labelled: “This is the grave of Abraham.”  It’s not clear if Benjamin saw the graves himself or merely reported what he had been told, but in 1326 Ibn Batutah came to Hebron.  In his Travels we read that "you may descend by solidly built marble steps, leading to a narrow passage, and this opens into a chamber paved with marble.  Here are the cenotaphs of the three tombs.  They say that the bodies lie immediately adjacent beneath, and hereby was originally the passage down to the blessed cave.  At the present time, however, this passage is closed.  To the first chamber I myself descended many times."

Few people since Ibn Batutah have gotten even that far.  At age 15, the future King George V came by, accompanied by his brother and their tutor, the clergyman John Neale Dalton.  Dalton ghosted the princes’ journal, published as The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship “Bacchante,” 1879-1882.  In it, Dalton explains that Victoria had requested that her sons be granted special access in Hebron.  Orders had duly come from Istanbul.  The Turkish administrator in Jerusalem promised that “every hole and corner, every passage and door, should be opened and explored.”  Still, there were limits.  Dalton wrote

         …of the great cave which exists beneath the floor of the church.  This was not entered by us, because it was found that the only known entrances are three…  existing in the floor of the church itself.  These are never now opened, and could only be reached by breaking up the flags of the flooring, a proceeding which would have been regarded as a desecration of the sanctuary by the Moslem custodians.  

Dalton seems to have overlooked two heavy brass grates in the floor of the mosque.  They cap circular shafts eleven inches in diameter.  In 1968, General Moshe Dayan saw them.  None of the soldiers with him were slim enough to fit through the shafts, so Dayan asked the twelve-year-old daughter of a Shin Bet officer if she was willing.  In Living with the Bible, Dayan writes that Michal Arbel “was unafraid not only of ghosts and spirits—their existence was not proven, she said—but also of snakes and scorpions, which were a very real danger.”  

The girl had a camera and took pictures, but they revealed little more than a small circular room, a passage and some upward stairs blocked by a massive stone.  Nobody since then has seen even that much, except possibly a few settlers from Kiryat Arba who claim that in 1981 they found the other side of the stone block that had stopped the girl  It was in the floor of an adjoining building, and at night, with the Haram’s Muslim guards asleep, they say that they pried the block loose, found the stairs, and went down to the circular room.  They say they felt a draft coming from between the blocks of the stone floor, and so they pried up some of those blocks and found a passage leading down to one cave and then another.  They found pottery, they say, and bones, and they published photographs as proof.  Noam Arnon, one of the men in the group, has published an account of the event.  I knew none of this at the time of my visit and wonder now if I would have followed in their footsteps if I knew I could get away with it. Talk about tip-toeing.

After a few minutes I left the Haram.  The Old City lies immediately to its west, and I planned to stroll along its one through street, Al Qasaba, literally the windpipe or throat.  The metaphor suggests that this is the only street in Old Hebron through which a breeze can blow, but the word has been anglicized as casbah, and its meaning has shifted to indicating the old part of any Muslim city, especially in North Africa.  The French had a large part in this, creating within the city government of Casablanca, for example, an Association of Business and Tourism.  Its blue-and-white metal signs still point out recommended walking routes for tourists visiting the old city, Casa’s casbah.  

Old Hebron does not have such tourist amenities, and I don’t think I ever heard the anglicized version of Al Qasaba spoken there. I did invariably get lost, however, whenever I wandered away from Al Qasaba.  That’s because the lanes branching off it are as irregular as the veins on the back of my hand.  Unlike blood veins, Hebron’s lanes often end at a heavy door at the entrance to one of the city’s characteristic courtyard houses.  These houses are made of stone, their walls a thick sandwich of blocks with rubble in between.  The lanes leading to these houses often pass through archways and tunnels passing under or between other houses, which is why Hebronites themselves often refer to the Old City as Al- Qanatir, “the arches.”  The whole place, I should mention, is very compact, say six hundred feet by twelve hundred, and on a map Old Hebron is almost lost in modern Hebron, a city of over two hundred thousand.  The Old City, in short, is a tiny pit in a fat plum.  I suspect that it’s possible, or nearly possible, to cross the pit by scampering over rooftops and never touching the ground.

The houses of Al-Qanatir were mostly built about 1500 for extended families.  They usually have three stories around a courtyard completely hidden from public view.  The layout varies from house to house, but staircases, always of stone, are in the courtyard, so residents and visitors have to stay alert, especially when the stones are wet or icy.  Parking a car at your front door is impossible, another explanation for why homeowners able to afford new homes abandoned Old Hebron fifty years ago and left their ancestral properties to renters who moved into what became a residential slum of great character.

In its wildness, its unpredictability, its growing-like-a-treeness, Old Hebron reminds me of a place where I lived in San Francisco as a child.  Anyone who knows Parkmerced (or its Los Angeles look-alike, Park La Brea) will find this comparison bizarre, because Parkmerced is a rental project with thousands of garden apartments built in the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which planned it to a fare-thee-well.  

Each garden apartment had its own private patio, and each patio opened onto a communal lawn with flower beds and trees shared by a dozen neighbors.  My parents, who remembered me nearly getting killed chasing a ball into a street in the Richmond District, liked Parkmerced because the garden apartments, fused in a line or terrace, formed a barrier between play spaces and streets, but my friends and I usually ignored the play spaces and played instead on what we called “The Hill.”  On the south margin of the development, and covering perhaps two or three acres, this was simply a descending slope of dunes covered with a visually impenetrable thicket of acacias perhaps twenty feet high.  

The planners thought of it as stabilized wasteland, though I see now that the acacia forest has been replaced by rows of houses along what is mindlessly called Summit Drive.  In our time and at our hands, with our cap guns at the ready, The Hill was a maze of trails, dug forts, and lookouts where we laid wait for each other or for imaginary enemies.  When I say that Old Hebron reminds me of Parkmerced, I mean that instead of ducking The Hill’s acacia branches, in Hebron I ducked stone blocks protruding from idiosyncratic stairways and rustic archs.  John Ruskin would have loved Old Hebron.

The 1990s were an ideal time to explore Al-Qanatir, because Saudi money was paying for a top-to-bottom renovation.  The lanes, which had been paved with asphalt in Jordanian times, were dug up.   For the first time ever, water mains and sewers were installed and buried.  The lanes were then repaved, this time with flagstones.  The novelty of street lighting appeared in the archways and tunnels.  The houses were open to curious eyes, too, because the occupants had been told to vacate, with the understanding that they could return once the homes had been fitted, free of charge, with plumbing and electricity.  Embedding pipes and wires in the walls was impractical, so the lines were instead stapled onto the walls, then covered with a thin layer of concrete, creating a wall under which the pipes and wires rippled and bulged like the muscles under the hide of a water buffalo.    I remember one architect, a lifelong resident of Hebron, muttering about ignorant contractors who sometimes used Portland cement for this task.  It was a mistake, because Portland cement is impervious to water and inevitably cracks as the water forces its way out.  Proper builders, he said, used cement made of lime, which allows water to evaporate.  

I don’t mean to suggest that Hebron in these years was peaceful.  The Saudis were spending money not only and perhaps not even primarily to protect the old city but, instead, to resist Jewish expansion.  Every Palestinian knew the names of the three modern apartment buildings that had already been completed in the Old City—Beit Hadassah, Beit Romano, and Avraham Avinu—and I heard that Jewish buyers, eager to expand in the old city, would learn of an empty courtyard house, find the owner, and hand him a blank check.  Some of the owners were said to take the money and, of necessity, run for their lives.  Others declined, either from principle or because they didn’t want to run.  Squads of Israeli soldiers were always in the neighborhood, and they were tense.

Chain-link fencing covered the section of Al-Qasaba passing next to Avraham Avinu.  Palestinians said the wire protected them from rocks thrown by Avraham Avino’s residents.  I never rang the doorbell there to ask residents for their version, but then I never actually saw anyone to ask.  If I had found someone, I assume I would have been told that there had been a Jewish quarter in Hebron until riots in 1929 and that Avraham Avinu’s residents were only coming home.  The name Avraham Avinu, after all, means no less than “Our father Abraham.”  His tomb is a few hundred yards down Al-Qasaba.      

The Palestinians fought with the weapons they had.  In 2012 those weapons included nominating what the Palestinian Authority called “Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town” for World Heritage status. 

In due course, ICOMOS evaluated the proposal.  Once again, the experts did not visit Hebron and once again, as at Battir, they recommended that the nomination be rejected. “Hebron’s ahwash’s [courtyard] typology is not unique in the Arab and Islamic world.  Asymmetrical urban structures characterized most Mediterranean traditional urban fabric until the late 19th Century.”  Translation: there was no need to put Hebron on the list, because Fez and Marrakesh are already there.  By the same logic, there is no reason for Siena to be on the list, because Florence is already there.  Of course, Siena is on the list, along with Florence, Assisi, Ferrara, Genoa, Mantua, Naples, Palermo, Pienza, Rome, San Gimignano, Venice, Verona, and Vicenza.  If only there were that many intact, traditional Muslim cities to protect.  

Once again, as at Battir, the World Heritage Committee overruled its experts and this time approved the nomination twelve to three, with six abstentions.  Nicky Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, called this vote the “last straw.”  Presumably with the approval of the president she served, the United States now withdrew for a second time from UNESCO.   Israel’s prime minister, whose country also announced its withdrawal, praised the American action as “brave” and “moral.”  

 Would she or her president have known that in 1872 the United States created at Yellowstone the world’s first national park, that fifty years later the United States created the world’s first national park service, and that fifty years after that the United States became the first country in the world to protect and preserve wilderness areas?

I don’t bet, but I’d make an exception in this case and bet that the answer is of course not, not unless those facts were staring at them in a teleprompter.  Why would they know or care that the Antiquities Act of 1906 gave the president the power to proclaim national monuments and that Theodore Roosevelt relied on that authority to protect Arizona’s Gila Cliff Dwellings.  In 1933 the Historic American Buildings Survey began compiling architectural drawings of important American buildings, and in 1949 the United States Congress chartered the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns and operates a small number of historic buildings, including most famously the Farnsworth House designed by Mies van der Rohe.

By the 1970s about half the buildings recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey had been demolished in the name of progress.  Nudged by his wife, Lyndon Johnson in 1965 convened a White House conference called Beauty for America.  Almost immediately, it was followed by a meeting at Wyoming’s Jackson Lake Lodge.  There, Russell Train, head of the Conservation Foundation, proposed the creation of a Council of Ecological Advisors.  

Would Ambassador Hailey or the president she served remember Russell Train or what he did?  Russell Train was a Rockefeller Republican to the bone.  His father was Herbert Hoover’s naval attaché, which explains how train as a boy had breakfasted in the White House with President and Mrs. Hoover.  Train went on to Princeton, spent five years as an Army officer, and graduated from Columbia Law School.  He got married in St. John’s, the church facing the White House, joined the staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, and at thirty-eight became a judge on the U.S. Tax Court.  

Something then clicked, and Train decided that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life trapped in the minutia of tax law.  He made two safaris to East Africa and came home describing Africa as “the land of the soul.”  Train quit the court and through several august social connections became president of the Conservation Foundation.  (That Foundation was absorbed in 1990 into the American branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature, which Train in later years would also head.)  

It was from this perch at the Conservation Foundation that Train at the Jackson Lake Lodge proposed the Council of Ecological Advisors.  Train also began working that year with Joseph L. Fisher, the long-serving head of Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank focused on the economic analysis of natural resources.  Fisher asked Train to join a committee Fisher was chairing for the Johnson White House.  In its report submitted in 1966 at a White House Conference on International Cooperation, the committee wrote that “certain scenic, historic, and natural resources are part of man’s heritage, and… their survival is a matter of major concern to all.”  On more than one occasion, Russell Train would say that if any man deserved to be called the father of the World Heritage program it was Joe Fisher.

A year later, while still the head of the Conservation Foundation, Train spoke at a conference in Amsterdam and urged the “launching of an international cooperative effort that brings together in a unified program a common concern for both man’s natural heritage and his cultural heritage.”  Train was never charismatic, but his timing was perfect.   Hoping to placate environmentalists furious about the nomination of a real-estate developer to be Secretary of the Interior, Richard Nixon nominated Train as Undersecretary.

The appointment of Walter Hickel as Secretary made perfect sense for a president who had no interest in the environment-, but nobody ever accused Richard Nixon of being stupid, and he knew that the environment was popular with voters and on the first day of 1970 was happy to sign the National Environmental Policy Act.  The legislation created a Council on Environmental Quality, a name of course choing Train’s speech five years earlier calling for a Council of Ecological Advisors.

Train lobbied hard and became the CEQ’s first chair.  He got the job and in that role oversaw the preparation of Nixon’s 1971 Environmental Message.  It includes these words: “as the United States approaches the centennial celebration in 1972 of the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, it would be appropriate to mark this historic event by a new international initiative….  It would be fitting by 1972 for the nations of the world to agree to the principle that there are certain areas of such unique worldwide value that they should be treated as part of the heritage of all mankind and accorded special recognition as a part of a World Heritage Trust.”  

And so it was.  The United States proposed the Trust at a United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which met in Stockholm in 1972.  The motion carried unanimously.  Later that year and with American participation, UNESCO worked out the text of the Convention.  A year later, the United States became the first nation to ratify its membership in the program, which, by the Convention’s terms, would come into force after twenty countries had done so.  That happened in 1975, and the first dozen world heritage sites, including Yellowstone, were approved at a World Heritage Committee meeting held in Washington in 1978.  Since then, the number of “State Parties” has risen to one hundred ninety-four, minus the two recent quitters.  

It’s just as well that Train died in 2012 and missed the second withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO.   He had left government in 1977 with the election of Jimmy Carter and in 2004 departed from his lifelong party loyalty and voted for John Kerry.  He wrote that the United States had been “extremely weak in its support of the World Heritage Program” and he lamented that the money the United States contributed to the program was “a piddling amount for the nation to put up in support of what was, after all, a U.S. initiative.” 

It’s a depressing story, and for me at Hebron in 2019 there was still more bad news, because Old Hebron had been placed not only on the World Heritage List but on UNESCO’s list of endangered World Heritage sites.   Sana’a and Aleppo were already on it.  I was about to find out why Hebron had joined them.

I remembered Al Qasaba from the 1990s, when it had been a crowded pedestrian lane full of merchants and customers.  Vegetable sellers had huge, bright-red radishes.  The heads and necks of butchered camels hung from hooks. Men at treadle-operated sewing machines sewed sheepskin cloaks with the fleece-side out, perhaps because winters in Hebron are not as bitter as in Transylvania.   I did buy a heavy mortar and pestle lathed on the spot from a solid brass tube.  The mortar is too heavy to be very convenient and decades later still has a metallic scent. 

  I assumed that I would again wander through the Old City and find it restocked with families welcomed back to the renovated courtyard houses.  Instead, on leaving the Haram I found Al Qasaba blocked off.   I decided to walk along the street skirting the Old City’s south side.   Depending on who’s talking, this is either King David or Shuhada Street, the street of the martyrs. The street had been tense but crowded in the 1990s, with squads of Israeli soldiers, armed and nervous.  Now the street was deserted.   Stacks of concrete blocks closed the several lanes leading into the old city: each block, about a cubic meter, weighs over two tons, and they were stacked ten feet high.  A sign in English explained that Israel had closed the street for security reasons and that Palestinians enjoyed a bustling new Hebron farther west.  

I came to a manned turnstile just beyond Beit Hadassah and asked an Israeli policeman if I could pass.  He nodded but warned that I could not come back without a passport.  I rarely carry it, but on this day it was in my breast pocket.  

I found Al-Qasaba almost deserted, with only one merchant open for business.    He said he had once had a store in Israel.  That had come to an end, and he had returned to Hebron and rented space from another shopkeeper who had given up.  There were no other customers in sight, so I wasn’t taking too much of his time.  The chain-link fence still roofed Al-Qasaba near Avraham Avinu, and there still seemed to be nobody in that building, as though it was a place holder, not anyone’s home.

One officer stationed in Hebron had been very blunt: “…if you’re [a Palestinian] with money, you won’t live there.  Why should you?  The army takes over your house regularly, there are roadblocks… Why should you [stay]?”  Another Israeli officer says, “There are things I heard from a few officers that I think the army is not really concealing.  They call it, ‘to increase the sense of persecution.’  It means that the basic assumption [is] that the more a military force enters some homes in the middle of the night, or a specific house, it will generate among the family, or [among] those whose homes you entered, a fear of being caught or of [the army] finding who-knows-what at your place.”  A sergeant says: “…we had to do once a day or two a patrol in the Palestinian neighborhoods, even if they’re as quiet as can be, just to give them the feeling that we control them…  I remember even asking my Platoon Commander why we’re doing what we’re doing now.  And he says to demonstrate presence, to show deterrence, to show the Palestinians there’s someone ruling over them.”  I should add that these quotations come from a Israeli NGO called Breaking the Silence.

Supporters of Israel will say that the Palestinian tragedy is entirely the fault of the Palestinians themselves and that Israel only does what it must to survive.  There’s not a lot of flexibility in that position, not a lot of empathy for the Palestinians or appreciation of what occupation does to occupiers.  At the same times, I remember a Palestinian who told me in the 1990s that he had fathered many sons in the hope that they would kill many Jews.  He was a literature professor, and he spoke in a sweet-tempered tone of voice as we walked through his small fruit orchard.  He reminds me even now that there are conflicts that have no solution, or at least no happy solution.  That’s a hard lesson for Americans.  

The painstakingly renewed residential lanes I had wandered through twenty years earlier were now impassible with trash.  Five hundred otherwise homeless people were said to live in the Old City, but I couldn’t find them.  I couldn’t even get to the front doors of the old city’s houses.  Walking through Al Qanatir end to end, I saw not a single child. 

A Portfolio of Possible Illustrations

Photo 1.  Wiesbaden

Photo 2. Dessau

Photo 3.  The Bauhaus style in Tel Aviv

Photo 4.  Pinsker 23, Tel Aviv

      Photo 5.  The Sadovsky House, Rothschild Avenue

Photo 6.  HaYarkon 96, Tel Aviv

Photo 7. Backyard of a house in Neve Tzedek

                                 Photo 8.  The setting of the Neve Tzedek Tower

Photo 9.  Western side of Jerusalem’s Old City wall

Photo 10.  Ruined nave of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Photo 11.  Doorway to Jerusalem’s cotton market

Photo 12.  The cotton market

Photo 13.  St Andrew’s Memorial Church

      Photo 14. One of Solomon’s Pools

Photo 15. Artas, with greenhouses and an expanding Bethlehem

Photo 16. Constantine’s floor under Justinian’s, in the nave of the Church of the Nativity

Photo 17.  The Bethlehem side of the Separation Barrier

Photo 18.  The Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad and abandoned terraces at Battir

Photo 19.  Battir’s pool, upper terraces, and recent houses

Photo 20.  World Heritage sign atop the Battir Spring

                                             Photo 21.  The Haram el-Khalil

                            Photo 22.  Stairs leading to the Jawaliyah Mosque

Photo 23.  The Ibrahimi Mosque, with the peaked cenotaphs of Rebecca and Isaac

Photo 26.  Vegetable seller in Hebron, mid-1990s

Photo 24. Detail of a courtyard house in the 1990s

Photo 27.  Hebron: a residential lane after renovation.

Photo 28.  Hebron: staircase with water-damage.

Photo 28.  Checkpoint at one entrance to Old Hebron

Photo 29.  Al Qasaba near Avraham Avinu, 2019

Photo 29.  Residential lane in the old city, 2019

                                     Sources of Quotations

“there’s no power on earth that can stop them”, quoted by Coby Ben-Simhon in Haaretz, April 6, 2008.

“it was not a state party to the Convention”, “Report of the Rapporteur,” UNESCO World Heritage Committee, First Extraordinary Session, Paris, 10 and 11 September 1981.

“there is no promotion after Jerusalem”, Ronald Storrs, Orientations, 1937, p. 446.

“the shops were filled with ordure”, ibid., p. 315.

“eighty thousand officers bearing battle trumpets”, Gittin 57a: 22-23.

“the choice of the site of Battir villge does not appear to be outstanding”, Advisory Body Evaluation (ICOMOS), No. 1492, 2014, n.p.

“a dark day”, quoted by Abby Zimit in Ecologist, 25 June, 2014.

“Muslims here are notorious for their fanaticism”, Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria, 1906, p. 113.

“Hebron is renowned for its blown glass”, Cook’s Traveller’s Handbook to Palestine, 1934, p. 195.

“in the field of Machpelah”, Genesis 23: 19 (King James Version).

“This is the grave of Abraham”, Marcus Nathan Adler, trans., The Itinerary of  Benjamin of Tudela, 1969, p. 25.

“you may descend by solidly built marble steps”, Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems, 1890, p. 319.

“of the great cave which exists beneath the floor”, John Neale Dalton, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’ 1879-1882, 1886, volume 2, p. 601.

“unafraid not only of ghosts and spirits”, Moshe Dayan, Living with the Bible, 1978, p. 46.

  “brave” and “moral”, Eli Rosenberg and Carol Morello in The Washington Post, October 12,     2017.

“Certain scenic, historic, and natural resources,” Russell Train, “Remarks of the Honourable Russell E Train, World Heritage Convention, 30th Anniversary, Venice, Italy, 2002” online at whc.unesco.org/archive/websites/venice2002/speeches/pdf/train.pdf

“launching of an international cooperative effort…” Russell Train, “Remarks of the Honourable Russell E Train, World Heritage Convention, 30th Anniversary, Venice, Italy, 2002” online at whc.unesco.org/archive/websites/venice2002/speeches/pdf/train.pdf

“As the United States approaches the centennial…” Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress Proposing the 1971 Environmental Program,” online at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-proposing-the-1971-environmental-program

“a piddling amount,” Russell E. Train, Politics, Pollution, and Pandas, 2003, p. 143

“The army takes over your house regularly”, breakingthesilence.org.il

“not been able to fully evaluate whether the property unquestionably justifies”, UNESCO Advisory Body Evaluation (ICOMOS), 2017, “Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town (Palestine) No. 1565, n.p.

                                                         Further Reading

Tel Aviv

Nahoum Cohen, Bauhaus Tel Aviv, 2003

Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-1941, 1963

Claudia Stein, White City Tel Aviv, 2016

Claudia Stein, Tel Aviv Walks, 2018

Jerusalem 

Alan Crawford, C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist, 2005.

James Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 1998.

Ronald Storrs, Orientations, 1937.

In or Near Bethlehem 

Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission, 1946.

Hilma Granqvist, Portrait of a Palestinian Village, 1981.

Henry Kendall, Village Development in Palestine, 1949.

Andreas F. Kuntz, “The Story of Hasan Mustafa as Part of Today’s Narrative,” Diyar’s Seventh International Conference, 2013.

Thomas Lambie, A Doctor’s Great Commission, 1954.

UNESCO Advisory Body Evaluation (ICOMOS), Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines—Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir (Palestine) No 1492, 2014.

David Ussishkin, “Archaeological Soundings at Betar, Bar-Kochba’s Last Stronghold” in Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv, 1993, pp. 66-97.

Hebron

Marcus Nathan Adler, trans., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 1969

Moshe Dayan, Living with the Bible, 1978.

John Neale Dalton, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’ 1879-1882, 1886.

J. Brooks Flippen, Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism, 2006.

H. A. R. Gibb and Charles Fraser Beckingham, eds., The Travels of Ibn Battuta, five volumes, 1958-2000.

David M. Jacobson, “The Plan of the Ancient Haram El-Khalil in Hebron,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 1981.

Nancy Miller, “Patriarchal Burial Site Explored for First Time in 700 Years” in Biblical Archaeology Review, 1985.

Victor Nygren, Capital of Resistance: Occupied Hebron as Heterotopia, Social Anthropology thesis, Stockholm University, 2014.

Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems, 1890.

W. M. Thomson, The Land and the Book, 1859.

Louis-Hugues Vincent, Hébron, Le Haram el-Khalîl, Sepulture des Patriarches, 1923.

UNESCO Advisory Body Evaluation (ICOMOS), Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town (Palestine) No 1565, 2017.

Breaking the Silence [NGO], Occupying Hebron: Soldiers Testimonies from Hebron 2011-2017, online at breakingthesilence.org.il