WA LTER LAQUEUR
4S
time. (His impressions of the United States were published a few years
ago by the University of Chicago Press in A
Russian Looks at America:
The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in
r857.) But the man who
had found something noteworthy and impressive in every place he had
ever visited, from the reading room of the British Museum to the cam–
pus of Harvard College to the Great Pyramids, had nothing good to say
about Jerusalem and preferred to keep his impressions to himself, or
confined to comments in his letters to his family.
Jerusalem had the good fortune to have a mayor of genius for about
twenty years after
1967;
under Teddy Kollek, a great deal was done to
clean up the city and beautify it. But since then the city has been going
steadily downhill. Demographic trends (the growth of the ultra-Orthodox
population) which seem determined to turn Jerusalem into one big
ghetto have greatly contributed to this development. At the same time
Jerusalem with its narrow lanes has become a giant traffic jam during
most hours of the day and some of the night.
It
is not too much to say
that what with the Israeli wanderlust, many Tel Avivians know their
way around Paris and London better than they do Jerusalem. Despite all
the money invested by the Israeli government, the Israeli element in the
city has not increased, and the Arab percentage of the population is
slowly growing. In fact, there is a steady Jewish exodus from the city on
the part of the secular, mainly because the Orthodox are waging a
relentless campaign to remodel the city in their image. And since the
Orthodox have six to eight children on average, their political influence
is constantly growing. Paradoxically, young Orthodox families are also
leaving the city because the rents are too high. And so Jerusalem is again
coming down in the world after the great clean-up under Kollek; it is a
city for visitors and pilgrims but not (with the exception of a few oases,
including Talbiyeh) a particularly enjoyable place to live. And it remains
a riddle why this holy city, which is in such an unholy mess, should
remain the main bone of contention on the road to peace.
Whether Edward Said has a legal right to that house in Talbiyeh, I do
not know. He certainly would have every right to fight for the Palestin–
ian cause even if he had been born in Outer Mongolia and had never
even visited Jerusalem or attended school there. In a recent aside, Mr.
Barak said that had he been born an Arab, he might well have become a
terrorist; this statement caused indignation among some circles in Israel,
but it is no more than the truth. Whether an advocate of this cause liv–
ing in relative luxury and security in ew York has the moral right to
oppose the Oslo accord and the peace process-to fight, so to speak, to
the last Palestinian from a safe distance-is yet another question. Said
