Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City by Andrew Lawler

Author:Andrew Lawler [Lawler, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Religion, Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9780385546850
Google: uAs1zgEACAAJ
Amazon: 0385546858
Goodreads: 57004605
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2021-11-01T22:00:00+00:00

On a hot afternoon on September 4, 1995, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stood beneath a tent adjacent to an archaeological excavation to launch the celebration that was Kollek’s brainchild. The site was at the base of the ridge that Jews now called the City of David. For Palestinians, this was the Silwan suburb of Wadi Hilweh, or “beautiful valley.” The gentle fields of cauliflower and grazing land of Warren’s and Bliss’s day had given way to concrete houses and dusty streets. Security was tight as Israeli forces patrolled the roofs of nearby Arab homes.

“Three thousand years of history look down upon us today in the city from whose stones the ancient Jewish nation sprang,” Rabin said that day. He also praised the 1967 capture of the Temple Mount, which loomed just to the north, “liberated from the yoke of strangers.” That comment, ignoring more than thirteen centuries of Muslim control of the platform, was bound to infuriate Palestinians who saw the Jews as the interlopers. Later that evening, a fireworks display and laser show lit up the sky.

The event, which took place amid tense peace negotiations, was seen as more politics than history by Palestinians and foreign ambassadors, including U.S. ambassador Martin Indyk, who steered clear of the celebration. “They glorify occupation,” said Faisal Husseini, the senior Palestinian Authority official in the city. “Jerusalem was not built three thousand, but five thousand years ago. The recent occupation is trying to celebrate the old one.”

Kenyon’s and Shiloh’s Bronze Age discoveries, made close to where Rabin spoke, had provided Palestinians with their own origin story, one predating that of the Jews. Husseini declared himself descended from the Jebusites—“the ones who came before King David.” They were, he added, “the original landlords” of Jerusalem. “Our forefathers, the Canaanites and Jebusites, built the cities and planted the land,” said Arafat.

Five days after Rabin’s speech, Benjamin Mazar died; his old nemesis, Rabbi Yehuda Getz, had passed away just three weeks before. The two men represented the bitter divide between Israeli religious and secular nationalists. The rapidly shifting political reality would soon bring these two feuding parties into closer alignment.

On September 28, Rabin and Arafat agreed to a plan to elect Palestinian Authority leaders and set up the authority’s autonomous areas in the West Bank, including Jericho. The Israeli prime minister predicted an era of peace was at hand. That era proved as elusive as that of David. A month later, a twenty-five-year-old religious Zionist who feared Rabin would give away Israel’s “biblical heritage” shot and killed the seventy-three-year-old former general. At his funeral in Jerusalem, attended by both King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a grieving Clinton called him a “martyr for peace.” The assassination marked an abrupt turning point for Clinton, Israel, Palestine, the peace talks, and Jerusalem.

Following Rabin’s death, Palestinians overwhelmingly chose Yasser Arafat as the first president of the newly created Palestinian Authority. Radical Muslims quickly moved to derail the peace talks by launching a wave of missile and suicide attacks.

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