THE DARK AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
David Pryce-Jones recalls the subterranean
passage that is cause, and metaphor, in Jerusalem's latest crisis
ARABS and Israelis will make peace one day, though nobody can be sure how or when. Even when they do, though, Jerusalem will retain its potential to divide. What to Jews is the site of the ancient Temple Mount, with its surviving Western Wall, to Muslims is the sacred Haram as-Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque on it. Pales- tinian and Israeli nationalism alike have a secular core, but both are programmed and fanaticised by the very different com- ponent of religious faith. Jewish settlers on the West Bank and their supporters claim that Arabs are pre- venting them from obeying the word of God, while many Palestinians counter- claim that Islam dictates their relationship with Jews. These people see themselves as rational, but the other side as irrational and capable of utter villainy the moment anything touches upon their faith. Deliber- ate provocation is in fact now limited to fundamentalists, but even quite low-level disputes tend to acquire a religious dimen- sion. As a result, bloodshed has priority over compromise time and again.
A permanent mechanism exists to prop- agate the prior and certain assumption of the other side's bad faith, namely the grapevine, and everyone on the West Bank or in Gaza is at its mercy. Some story goes around about the latest horrible injury to the faith. The human imagination is usually triumphing over humdrum reali- ty. At the level of fact, the story may well be nonsense, but at the level of metaphor, it is true, a complete and even mythic cast- ing of the popular subconscious. Israeli settlers are well served by the media, but their mindset propagates stereotypes and prejudice. Under a system of despotism like Yasser Arafat's mini-state, with cen- sorship and press control, truth is anyhow a commodity to be traded. More than an unofficial system of communication, the Palestinian grapevine protects identity. Its efficacy in all respects was proved last week. The opening of a tunnel is a very low-level dispute indeed, but nonetheless enough to leave 70 people dead, and over 1,500 wounded.
Jerusalem is honeycombed with tunnels dating back to far antiquity. Some were water conduits, others passages whose purpose is long lost. In the Ottoman era, archaeologists and engineers first began systematic explorations. To the Ottoman `Can I borrow the walking-frame tonight, Dad?' authorities at the time (and according to Edward Said today) these first surveyors and Orientalists had devious Christian or imperialist ambitions. The British of the Mandate were hardly less wary than their predecessors. A small change in 1929 in arrangements for Jewish worship at the Wall led to one of the bloodiest riots of the period.
Uniting Jerusalem under their rule after the 1967 war, the Israelis immediately cleared away a hundred or more old houses from the so-called Moroccan Quarter up against the Western Wall. In the place of the former picturesque semi-ruin, a mod- ern plaza was designed to accommodate thousands of people at their prayers. The grapevine responded accordingly. It became axiomatic for the Arabs that some- how the Jews would set about destroying the two mosques on top of the Hararn, in order to rebuild their Temple there. In August 1969 a deranged man did in fact set fire to the al-Aqsa mosque but he was a Protestant Australian. And there are Jew- ish extremists who get themselves arrested precisely for planning attacks on the mosques for these supposedly religious ends.
After the 1967 war, Benjamin Mazar, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University, was permitted to dig in the open ground to the south and the west of the Temple Mount. Born in 1906, a pupil of Eduard Meyer and Delbrllck, a col- league of W.F. Albright, Mazar represent- ed the great tradition of German biblical and classical scholarship. His grizzled head had a shock of white hair, Ben Gurion style. When he showed me round his exca- vation, the war of 1973 was still in progress. He was not someone to waste words. No doubt he had hoped to reveal the founda- tions of King David's city, and was disap- pointed to have come up with the remains of an Umayyid palace. At the southern wall of today's Haram, the entrances of the Double and Triple Gates had been blocked up long ago. Tunnels did indeed run below under the Al-Aqsa mosque, Mazar said, one from the Double Gate and two from the Triple Gate. Their existence had been previously unknown. He also led me to other dead-ends, equally walled up. The then Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Sa'ad ud-din Alami, had no doubt that Mazar's excavation was a Jewish plot to harm Islam. In his former office I found Anwar Khatib, previously the Jordanian governor, holding court with a dozen nota- bles, all of whom agreed with the Mufti — in all likelihood this was the root of the grapevine.
The resident architect and engineer of the Haram, Ibrahim Daqqaq, worked in a fine vaulted room near the al-Aqsa. Young and intelligent, he was busy repairing the mad Australian's damage. Mazar was a scholar beyond reproach, he conceded, and it was fitting that he had succeeded only in substantiating the historic Arab presence. From the Arab side, he said, the tunnels had been filled in, to keep out fanatics. It was from him that I first heard about yet another tunnel, extending from the West- ern Wall to the north away from the Haram, running instead below old and splendid buildings from the Mameluke days.
This is the tunnel at the eye of the pre- sent violence. Its few hundred yards have long since been accessible. A new door has been opened at its far end, issuing onto the Via Dolorosa with the Stations of the Cross, well inside the Old City. If anyone ought to take offence, it is the Christians whose devotions are further exposed to tourism.
The mention of tunnelling was enough to revive on the grapevine the instant response that the Jews were again up to anti-Islamic tricks. It is impossible to know whether a master-hand was in fact trans- mitting instructions. Perhaps it is true, as some Israeli spokesmen allege, that Yasser Arafat whipped up a confrontation to boost his flagging credentials as a nation- alist leader. If so, it would have been sounder to pick on an obvious Israeli fail- ure to implement the Oslo Accords.
Israel is committed to evacuating the West Bank towns, and has done so except in the case of Hebron, where occupation has already stretched out six months beyond the agreed date. The Jews of Hebron were massacred in the 1929 riots, and settlers now living in the town centre see themselves as responding to that atrocity. Pulling out would be a significant pointer to future intentions on the whole question of Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The issue goes to the heart of Israeli security, and public opinion is implacably split on it. Charges of treason are in the air. Like its Labour predecessor, the govern- ment keeps its options open by delaying taking any firm decision.
And perhaps it is true, as other Israeli spokesmen allege, that Arafat lost control. Mostly former PLO members, largely undisciplined and untrained, the Arafat police appear to have acted without co- ordination, firing on Israelis or restraining their own people as the spirit moved them. Even on his Lilliputian scale, Arafat is a dictator with a poor record: no civil rights, no real democracy, no free press. To quite a large number of Palestinians, he seems to have committed himself to do the Israelis' dirty work for insufficient reward. The Islamic fundamentalists offer the prospect of a new uprising or intifada fought to the end. They are great artists of the grapevine. The Oslo Accords gave both Arafat and Israpl short-term benefits. In the approach to the scheduled 'final status' talks, howev- er, neither party has been able to prevent its extremists from upping the stakes by means of violence in order to have their own exclusive way. High-level meetings in Washington or elsewhere are only ceremo- nial. For Palestinians, the image of a tunnel has the power to encapsulate a collective fear that they are holding on to what the Israelis are undermining. The further image of a suicide bomber encapsulates a collective Israeli hope never to compro- mise. Metaphor rules, and will continue to do so until prosaic facts break it down.
'I'd have had children if I could have been sure they'd be human.'
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