Continuing the series in which our foreign correspondents write about their adopted cities, Nuala Haughey finds reminders of home in Israel.
I was born in Northern Ireland as the Troubles were erupting. Growing up, I imbibed the unspoken rules and political rituals of that deeply coded society, shrunken in my childhood years to the Co Armagh town of Lurgan.
The Protestants lived at the other end of the town, and asking someone their surname or what school they attended was a polite way of inquiring about their religion. I didn't know any Protestants until, aged 17, I got a summer job in a town-centre supermarket. You can still draw a line down the middle of Lurgan, tracing the invisible border that largely separates Protestants from Catholics.
Growing up in the North has served me well in my new home of Jerusalem, a contested city in a contested land where, just like my birthplace, politics are bedevilled by religion. While many particulars are different, and the divisions of identity politics bite much deeper here, the rules of the game are basically the same when it comes to negotiating an urban environment where two peoples with different national and religious identities rub shoulders in a mood of subdued antipathy.
The past weighs heavily on the present in this ancient and embattled city, where the Jews built their temple, Jesus was crucified and Muhammad ascended to heaven. The rituals of daily life are modulated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; within months of moving to Jerusalem I had drafted an internal political and danger map of the city, its invisible contours traced on the street grids in my mind's eye. Jews live on this side of the town, Palestinians on the other. Shalom, peace, is the greeting here, asalaam aleikum, peace, the greeting there.
I live only metres from the unmarked frontier that divides Arab east Jerusalem from Jewish west. Between 1948, when Israel was established, and 1967, this line was the ceasefire border separating Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem, which included the Old City, from Israeli-controlled west. Israel illegally annexed east Jerusalem after the Six Day War, in 1967, and has proclaimed the city its eternal and undivided capital. Palestinians dream of having the holy city as the capital of any future state of Palestine.
While Jerusalem has been one municipality since 1967, in reality life beats to the sound of two distinct drums.
My home is just inside the western, or Jewish, part of the city but overlooks the Old City in the east, the golden semicircle of the Dome of the Rock, Islam's third most sacred shrine, squatting above the rooftops like a sinking sun. The balcony of my second-floor apartment faces Damascus Gate, the grandest of the gates in the 16th-century crenellated walls that ring the vibrant and ancient Old City.
The district outside Damascus Gate is the hub of commercial life for the Arab residents of east Jerusalem. It is a bustling marketplace, taxi rank and meeting point. In this sector there is no threat of suicide bombs, for Palestinians will not detonate themselves among their own. The east of the city does not have the same range of cafes and eateries as the more sophisticated Jewish west, but nor do its restaurants have armed guards on their doors who ask visitors whether they are carrying weapons before searching their handbags.
Inside the gate, narrow streets of paved stone burnished by generations of footfalls are lined with shops and modest restaurants selling shwarma and hummus and fruit-and-vegetable stalls offering aubergines from Jericho and oranges from Jaffa. Sheep and cow carcasses hang outside butchers' shops, ready to have pieces hacked off and ground on the spot with onions, parsley and spices to make tasty meatballs or stuffing for vegetables. Boys pushing wooden carts stacked high with rounds of flat pitta bread jostle with shoppers, and old women in traditional embroidered dresses crouch down along the alleyways, their baskets filled with vine leaves, local olives and hand-tied bundles of mint and parsley that sell for about 20 cent each.
If I turn away from the Old City and head west it is only a short uphill stroll to Zion Square and Ben Yehuda Street, the secular heart of Jewish Jerusalem, the New City. Here Arab headscarves largely give way to the skullcaps, felt hats, beards and ringlets of religious Jews. Although the trendy shops and pavement cafés entice with their European pastries and cafés au lait, rarely would I linger in this part of the city, where commercial premises have often been targeted by Palestinian suicide bombers. Instead I seek out side streets, with their cute boutiques and shoe shops, exquisite jewellers and non-kosher butchers, which sell pork.
Strolling on nearby Jaffa Road, the main thoroughfare of the west of the city, I often catch myself tensing up when a bus draws alongside. I brace myself even though I know I am probably at greater risk of being run over by a bus than of being blown up near one.
Even when the sun shines, as it often does, it is difficult to relax here. My ears are always cocked, awaiting the wailing of ambulance sirens that follows suicide blasts and calls me to my unsavoury professional duty. Although I stand apart from this conflict, the intensity of the baggage that Jerusalem and its inhabitants carry can be oppressive. The sight of people being questioned at roadblocks by Israeli police just because they are Arabs offends my sensibilities. And although I am accustomed to seeing off-duty teenage soldiers in hipster jeans and T-shirts with automatic weapons casually draped across their shoulders, it still unnerves me.
There is much to enjoy about the place, however, and not only for believers who nourish their faith by visiting its plethora of sacred buildings, tombs and shrines. Jerusalem lies in the Judean hills, and there is no end of enticing vistas of olive groves and distant villages, as well as the gilded domes and towers of the Old City's churches, synagogues and mosques, its ramparts, rooftops and ruins. The city's buildings are constructed exclusively with local white limestone, which, chameleon-like, takes on hues from milky white to yellow-orange and rose pink under the changing sunlight.
The sounds of its religious solemnities rise ceaselessly: the call to prayer from the Muslim muezzins, the toll of Christian church bells, the mumbled prayers of Jews at the Western or Wailing Wall and the blast of the weekly siren that heralds the onset of sabbath. For all Jerusalem's flaws it would be impossible for a visitor not be awed by the city's history and charmed by its beauty and presence.
As Teddy Kollek, a former mayor of Jerusalem, once told the late British poet W. H. Auden, it would be a wonderful place were it not for the wars and the orthodox of all faiths, their squabbles and riots. Where have I heard that before?
Three things I miss about Ireland
Hillwalking I crave Sunday outings to the lush and damp Wicklow countryside.
Saturdays The dreary silence of the sabbath - or shabbat, as Israeli Jews call it - in west Jerusalem, when shops and restaurants close and streets empty, reminds me of grim, interminable Sundays growing up in the North. I miss the Saturday ritual of meeting friends for coffee in Dublin or pottering around the shops and food markets.
Benign conversations Chatting about the Luas, the weather, the price of a pint. Every discussion here starts and ends with politics, and even superficial conversations can become minefields.
Three must-dos if you're in Jerusalem
Take in the panoramic view of the Old City from the Mount of Olives, which rises above Jerusalem on its eastern flank. The view from the promenade on the mount of the vast stone esplanade of Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, should not be missed. The site offers a great view of the octagonal exterior and gilded roof of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock, perhaps the most magnificent building in Jerusalem, which is currently out of bounds to non-Muslims. Tradition holds that this glittering shrine encloses the sacred rock on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac and from which the Prophet Muhammad rose to heaven. The plaza is known to Jews as Temple Mount, the site of the destroyed First and Second Temples.
Linger over a drink or a meal in the courtyard of the famed American Colony Hotel, in heart of Arab east Jerusalem, amid lemon trees, fountains and chirping birds. The five-star hotel has long been the haunt of journalists and writers, diplomats and spies. The non-kosher food is overpriced and the service can be slow, but the charming oriental decor makes it a gem of a venue, not to mention the city's only top-class Arab hotel. It also has a great bookshop, where you are likely to bump into visiting celebrities and writers, and a jewellery and gift shop run by an Irish woman.
Spend a day at the Israel Museum and sculpture garden. This modern, purpose-built amenity on a nicely landscaped site close to the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, has fine historical and art collections, as well as the reconstructed original interiors of old synagogues from Italy, India and elsewhere. The Shrine of the Book, an adjacent pot-shaped building housing the Dead Sea Scrolls, is the centrepiece.
Thursday: David Orr on Delhi
