The Message, page 13
I now understood what Nasser meant by a “tourist center dedicated to biblical times.” And I recognized the fragile triumphalism here, the desperate need to assert royal lineage and great ancestral deeds. And I could not help but wonder if this triumphalism was born out of refutation—out of a need to prove that one’s people are not “animals” who have “ruined every country they ever entered.” I’d seen it all my life in the invocations of great kingdoms and ancient empires—a search for provenance and noble roots. It was the oddest thing—the conqueror still conquered by Niggerology. And now Zionism had moved into a dark third act wherein noble roots must yield noble privilege.
A day earlier, I toured a settlement and saw something that appeared drawn from the world of Mad Max. At the boundary of this settlement, every thirty feet or so, I would see a guard dog rise, growl, and loudly bark. I looked closer and saw a leash attached to each of these dogs. The leashes extended perhaps ten feet up, where they met, at a perpendicular angle, a master cord stretched across the space. The effect was a kind of fencing, a wall made of guard dogs. I felt myself in the presence of a terrible chimera—a wall of hell hounds that seemed to me drawn from my Montgomery nightmares.
There was something insecure about that chimera too, about whoever had engineered it. To construct what amounts to a wall of devouring, you must be really afraid of something. Maybe that’s what happens when annihilation is no longer speculative but a fact of national and personal history. That’s the easy answer. The more disturbing one is that this wall represented nothing new, that it was no more spectacular than the rituals of lynching, that the mob too was insecure, that its rituals too spoke to white men’s violent impotence. And oddly enough, I had the same feeling as I left the City of David—that I was in the presence of a violent impotence. It all felt so fake. And beholding the redemption of Eretz Israel, the ostensible homecoming of an ancient people, announced in 3D projection and accessed via zip line, I could not escape the feeling of being in the presence of a poorly wrought fairy tale and an enormous con. I was in the land that Uris so adored, where the New Jew “spits in the eye of the Arab hordes.” But the very violence and force that emanated even from the City of David spoke to the disquiet and fear that resided somewhere deep inside Israel. The state doth protest too much. It occurred to me that if Jewish national honor had indeed been redeemed, the Israelis themselves did not quite believe it.
We left the complex and walked toward the Old City proper. To the east I could see a number of buildings rising on the hillside. Some of these buildings had eyes painted on them, peering down on the City of David. In the Old City we met Alon Arad, an archaeologist with the NGO Emek Shaveh, and Amy Cohen, a local housing activist. If this strikes you as an odd combination, you are forgiven—it struck me the same way. I had given some acquaintances a rough outline of my interests, and they’d pulled together a list of people I should see and in what order. I gave myself over to that list without question—it’s not like I had any basis to disagree. That was how I came to the City of David. It was recommended that I see this “archaeological amusement park” alone first, and then tour both the Old City and the City of David again in the company of professionals.
It was sage advice. This was the second time I visited the Old City. Previously, I had entered as a Muslim, through the Lion’s Gate, and my guides were Muslim or Arab, which reduced my access but expanded my understanding of the city’s invisible borders. Now, I came through the Jaffa Gate—the way most foreign, non-Muslim tourists arrive. The difference was palpable, and as in Tel Aviv, as I wended my way through a crush of happy tourists and crossed through joyous bar mitzvah parties, I felt as though I were in another country.
After lunch, we walked back out through a tunnel guarded by a checkpoint. The guards looked at my passport and eyed me warily before letting us pass. After we were through, Amy explained that Palestinians were generally turned away at that checkpoint. After the checkpoint, we reached a plaza, and from a distance I saw a line of worshippers standing before the Western Wall, believed to date back to the time of Herod some two thousand years ago, which borders the Temple Mount. Looking out on the plaza, filled with worshippers and tourists, I understood that I was standing in a place meant to inspire reverence and solemnity. But by then I knew how easily such feelings could be transformed into a casus belli. And I also knew, by then, that the Western Wall as I now saw it, with its sprawling plaza, evidenced that transformation.
In 1967, when the IDF conquered East Jerusalem and the Old City, Israel rejoiced. “We have returned to the holiest of our places,” General Moshe Dayan told Life magazine. “Never to depart from it again.” No place was more holy than the Western Wall, that relic of an era when the Jewish kings of old ruled over the Old City. For centuries, Jewish worshippers had negotiated their rights to pray at the Western Wall with the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem, who venerated Aqsa, which abutted the Wall. Jerusalem’s new rulers imagined a broad plaza where the faithful could worship en masse. But there was a familiar problem—someone was already there. In 1193, Malik Al-Afdal, son of Saladin, scourge of the Crusaders, deeded a parcel of land in front of the Wall to worshippers and Islamic scholars from North Africa or the Maghreb.
By the time Dayan arrived in the Old City, the eight-hundred-year-old Moroccan Quarter, as it came to be known, was housing 108 families living on roughly three city blocks. Journalist Abdallah Schleifer described the quarter as “a pleasant and architecturally distinct quarter of freshly whitewashed roof terraces, gardens, and neat unattached houses built in North African style several hundred years ago to house Moroccan soldiers garrisoning Jerusalem for the Ottomans.” This description stood in sharp contrast with that of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who, in an appeal to Lord Balfour for custody of the Quarter, described it as a collection of “miserable cottages and derelict buildings.” Weizmann offered to purchase the Quarter but was rebuffed, as all subsequent efforts were. But what could not be bought could be captured by the sword. “The day after the Old City fell,” wrote Teddy Kollek, then mayor of Jerusalem, “it also became clear to me that something had to be done about the small slum houses that crowded close to the Western Wall.”
As early as 1887, Baron Edmond de Rothschild had proposed purchasing and leveling the quarter to create a plaza for worshippers. Three days after the Old City fell, Rothschild’s vision quickly became a reality when Israeli bulldozers razed the quarter. One hundred thirty-five homes were demolished and 650 people rendered homeless. At least one woman was crushed after remaining inside her home. “People felt depressed because these houses weren’t just their property, but also the property of their ancestors, from 800 years ago—or more,” a resident later remembered. “They told us to take everything as fast as possible because we didn’t have time…. Some people took their stuff like crazies and just stormed out of their houses. In an unbelievable way. It was ‘quick, quick—haul your things and get out, yalla, quickly quickly.’…They didn’t let anyone stay. They emptied the entire neighborhood in a heartbeat.”
The nominal reason for destroying the Moroccan Quarter was want of space for Jewish worshippers. But just as the Zionists sought to bolster their own title deed, the annihilation of the Moroccan Quarter allowed for the destruction of any competing claim. There was a brute literalism to this process, a direct connection between the murky, symbolic claims of ancestry and the very real and exclusive claims being made on Palestinian land. And that process is ongoing. The City of David presents its aims as educational—connecting people, through a mix of archaeology and tourism, with the Jewish past. In fact, its designs are deeper. It is run by a private settler organization that was given custody of the dig site by the state. Our visit took place on the eighth day of my trip, and by then I knew enough to understand that the prime purpose of any “settler organization” was to push Palestinians out and to move Jewish Israelis in.
One method of effecting this was to declare a piece of land to be an archaeological site, thus allowing the state to assert an interest in how that site is used. In Area C, where Nasser and all Palestinians are subject to Israeli rule, state interests can mean outright eviction. Here in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians have “residency”—not citizenship—eviction is more complicated. So while the state declaring your home an archaeological site may not lead to outright eviction, it does allow for excavation in front of—or tunneling directly beneath—your home. And in the case of the City of David, it also allows for flooding your neighborhood with tourists hopped up on tales of religious jingoism, primed to regard you as an occupier of their God-given land. The aim, Alon explained, was to create a “correlation between Jewish heritage and ownership” and to birth a generation who could not imagine anything other than complete Jewish rule over Eretz Israel. As I stood there watching the worshippers, Alon pointed to what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient wall. Standing there, amid all that remained of the Moroccan Quarter, amid a lost world, I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past—for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa—which I could not help but feel being evoked here.
When we walked back out, away from the ghosts of the Mughrabi Quarter, we headed back to the City of David. On this second trip I noticed something that I had missed the first time: that just a short walk from the main dig was a small residential neighborhood with houses lining one side of the street. Some of those homes flew Israeli flags and some didn’t. This was still East Jerusalem—occupied territory. The Israeli flags proudly announced that this territory was being actively colonized. And thinking back on Alon’s explanation, I understood that this space had a story that was not inert or ancient; it was alive, and it was being used to promote what I could now see as a slow but constant ethnic cleanse.
Everywhere I went that week, in the Occupied Territories, in East Jerusalem, in Haifa, and in the stories told by Palestinians and even by Israelis, I felt that the state had one message to the Palestinians within its borders. The message was: “You’d really be better off somewhere else.” Sometimes, the message was conveyed brutally, as when Nasser and his family were driven out of their home. But here in Jerusalem, the tactics were more subtle. The City of David simply made it extremely uncomfortable for Palestinians to be here. I thought back to my visit to Columbia, South Carolina, and all the monuments to the enslavers and advocates of Jim Crow. I thought of how the Confederate flag had once flown over the State House. I thought of the kind of people who came to see those monuments, who thought the flag to be important. And then I imagined the state that ruled over me and my family importing all of that to my very front door.
And what I was seeing here seemed about as credible as the history behind those Confederate memorials. The City of David employed a sheen of ancient provenance and archaeological science, but it was still unclear to me whether this had ever been a city or had ever been ruled by a king named David.
“Is this the City of David?” I asked Alon.
“It is an Iron Age city from two hundred years later than King David’s reign,” he said.
“So he’s basically dead by the time this—”
Alon interrupted, “I don’t think he ever lived.”
He said this in the matter-of-fact way befitting his profession—swatting away the kind of myth a layperson would take as history. Archaeology was interpretive, Alon explained. You find four walls, and you call it a room—and if you are predisposed to believe that you are in the seat of an ancient kingdom, then why can’t it be the throne room? We walked on until we reached an outdoor welcoming area, where Alon pointed me toward a plaque engraved in the wall. The plaque bore the flag of the United States and the name of one of its former ambassadors to Israel. I moved closer to read the inscription: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked,” read the plaque. “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.”
Here Alon abandoned his clinical disposition and raised his voice. The City of David “managed to get so mainstream that the American ambassador comes here and declares that this place is part of the glorious heritage of the United States of America abroad,” he said. “Now there is an American heritage abroad. It’s usually cemeteries in Normandy. Yeah, that’s American heritage abroad. City of David is not. And when you talk about white supremacy and when you talk about how things look here, this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers found each other as a perfect match. Their mindset is the same. They do other things, but their mindset is the same—”
I interrupted Alon: “I gotta take a second. Let me just sit down.”
I walked away and found a seat in the shade, away from everyone. At this moment, all that I had seen across the days began to avalanche—the cave evictions, the massacre in Hebron, the monuments to genocide, the checkpoints, the wall of devouring, and so much more. Those who question Israel, who question what has been done with the moral badge of the Holocaust, are often pointed in the direction of the great evils done across the world. We are told that it is suspicious that, among all the ostensibly amoral states, we would single out Israel—as though the relationship between America and Israel is not itself singular. But the plaque was clear: “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation come from Jerusalem.” This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.
We left the City of David and descended into a valley where more excavation was in process—a search for the ancient Pool of Siloam where, it is said, Jesus once healed the blind. In search of the pool, the City of David, along with the Israeli government, seized and destroyed the orchard of a Palestinian family. Evidence of the pool’s existence and miraculous powers had yet to emerge. But to focus on the facts of the story is to miss the whole point of the City of David. As one of its officials told a reporter, the tourists here are “looking to hear some nice stories. They don’t want to go to a lecture from some professor.” Pressed on the historical accuracy of the City of David’s very name, the official was unmoved. “We’ve yet to find a sign saying ‘Welcome to King David’s palace.’ Maybe that will be discovered, maybe not.”
* * *
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I got back to the hotel that afternoon exhausted as usual—so exhausted, in fact, that I didn’t even see the man standing at the hotel’s front door. Or maybe I did see him and did not quite register his role until he blocked my path. “Are you a guest here?” he asked. He addressed me with a kind of well-mannered hostility—like an English inspector who keeps calling his suspect “sir.” I was fixated on the gun holstered on his hip. I reached into my pocket, flashed my key card, and walked inside. I moved through the lobby, shook, and got to my room as fast as I could.
I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel. There are aspects I found familiar—the light-skinned Palestinians who speak of “passing,” the Black and Arab Jews whose stories could have been staged in Atlanta instead of Tel Aviv. But for most of my time there, I felt like I was outside the crosshairs. The attitude in that hotel, for instance, was less “Nigger get out” and more “What the fuck are you doing here?” They were right. The hotel was very nice. But knowing how it had been gotten, knowing how it was secured, knowing the gigantic Dream that had drawn most of its guests, and knowing how I had imagined that there could be some break from it all, some comfort amid an active ethnic cleanse, an active colonization, I could only ask myself, What the fuck am I doing here?
In some sense, my trip to the Land of Palestine was a journey backward toward that instinct I’d lost, an ancestral gift I’d forgotten. The gift is not in the blood but in the stories, the axioms, the experiences garnered from centuries of living on the outskirts of a dubious democracy. When I went off to become a professional writer, I was brimming with my own skepticism—not of the country but of the gift, which seemed so diffuse and random, a kind of folk wisdom that stood in abeyance of the empirical. Perhaps the most important fact in this skepticism was that I had no living models. The few Black writers working at the journals and magazines I read seemed bent on putting as much distance between themselves and Black people as possible. That wasn’t me. If I was skeptical of the gift, I was never skeptical of the people. I came to think of my trade—long-form magazine or new journalism—as a kind of scientific process that, when correctly applied, must necessarily reveal the truth. And for a time I saw the practitioner of that science as an individual, as singular, as standing alone, applying the process, searching for truth. And then I found myself in newsrooms where, for the first time in my life, I was often an only, in newsrooms with no Black editors. I thought I could stand apart, but looking back, I see that the parts of my thinking that were most reinforced were those that most dovetailed with those around me, and the parts that were hardest to hold were those that did not. I wrote a lot of stuff I came to regret—a lot of smart-ass contrarianism, a lot of mean prose—in the young rush to get into the paper or magazine. And even after I matured, I found that my old instincts had not. I became a better technical writer, but my sense of the world was stunted. There were no Palestinian writers or editors around me. But there were many writers, editors, and publishers who believed in the nobility of Zionism and had little regard for, or simply could not see, its victims.
