Two reasons made John Ennis pleased to be in Tel-Aviv, firstly he always enjoyed the pleasure of Europe’s eastern most Mediterranean city, and secondly, by one of those chance meetings often experienced by frequent travellers, he had met one of his oldest friends, Pat O’Connelly, in the lobby of the Sheraton.
After their initial surprise, Ennis, a reporter with the International Herald Tribune for Middle East affairs, explained he was covering a visit of Condelezza Rice on the lastest events in Gaza following attacks and counter attacks at the border and the Hamas threatening Israeli towns its Kassam rockets. Ennis, far from being a Biblical specialist, was extremely knowledgeable on modern Near Eastern history and O’Connelly described to him the reasons for his visit.
Late that evening after dinner, Laura made an excuse to return to the room leaving the two old friends together, both of whom then wandered down to the seafront and sat on the low beach wall, the promenade was practically deserted. The temperature must have been around 26°C, the luminosity of the night was intense with an almost full moon reflecting off the still sea, a couple of kilometres to the south were the soft lights of Jaffa, it was an almost dreamlike evening. O’Connelly would have like to seize the moment, make time stand still, but it slipped slowly through his helpless fingers like smooth water.
‘Tell me something about the history of modern Israel.’
‘The history of Israel is very different from all other countries Pat, for several reasons, one because of the most unique book in the history of man, the Bible, two because of the language of the Jews, Hebrew, which against all odds has survived as a written and spoken language, and finally because of the Jews themselves, who have survived the longest and most unrelenting persecution against a single people in all history, more than two thousand years.’
‘And its religion?’
‘Of course, that’s the linkage between the three reasons I just mentioned.’
‘How can you explain that?’
‘What?’
‘The persecution.’
‘Why, that’s rather complicated, but in a nutshell it’s probably linked to the fact that it was the first great monotheist religion, a factor of great importance. I’m speaking objectively, leaving aside religion and belief. Then there is the fact that Israel lay at a strategic crossroad between Egypt and the great early civilizations to the north, the Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians, then later the west, Greece and Rome.’
‘Which brought Israel into contact with the exterior.’
‘Right. If it had been at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula history would have been different.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘No, invasion and conflict was the order of the day over 1,500 years of history before Christ.’
‘Was Christ a catalyst?’
‘Yes and no. But the conflict with Rome did coincide with the appearance of the Christian religion. Jerusalem was a hotbed of revolution around the time of Christ, different from other parts of the Empire where the real fault lines between civilizations lay.’
‘Revolution?’
‘Yes, Judaism contained an ideology, and still does, look at the state of Israel, but it was more than a religion, but it was not and is still not a proselytic ideology. The Jews were defending a way of life, against the occupiers, a situation that is not so different from that of today, but the tables are turned, they are the occupiers.’
‘Let’s see if we can get something to drink,’ said looking at his watch.
‘There’s something open?’
‘Sure there’s loads of bars on Hayarkon Street.’
They crossed the boulevard and made their way across a parking lot to Hayarkon, where they found a bar that was not noisy and ordered a couple of large beers.
‘So the Romans were the oppressors.’
‘Yes, but the Jews were also in constant conflict amongst themselves, different sects as well as the constant internal struggle for power following the death of Herod.’
‘Sects like at Masada?’
‘That’s right plus the fact the country had been divided into three parts by the Romans after Herod.’
‘And that’s where Jesus Christ came into the picture.’
‘Yes, he was also a revolutionary, against the strict rules of traditional Judaism at the epoch. He succeeded not because he was a prophet, but because the new religion was adopted by the Roman Empire and the Byzantines.’
O’Connelly looked around him a little alarmed, but saw that the other late nighters were too deeply involved in their own conversation to be paying any attention to a couple of very unremarkable tourists.
‘Then six hundred years later came Mohammed with another religion. Making three, Judaism plus two offshoots, Christianity and Islam.’
‘Yes. It’s funny if you think back to the time when we were kids, brought up as Catholics, we knew little about the Jews, but we did not like them and we knew nothing about the Mohammedans, except in history, Khartoum and Lord Kitchener fighting of wild fanatics, or the Crusades.’
‘Rightly or wrongly I rejected religion when I was about sixteen, so I’m not very well up on the details of religions.’
‘I can understand that, but don’t forget that Christianity was founded by a Jew and the base of Christianity is the Bible, that is Old and New Testaments. And when Christianity became the religion of Rome, it became the keystone of Western civilisation.’
‘Of course, so how does Islam fit in with that?’
‘Islam grew out of Judaism or more precisely from the Judaic form of monotheism, borrowing a considerable number of elements from it.’
‘Such as?’
‘Abraham...Jerusalem, for example, not forgetting Jesus, who is considered as a prophet in Islam, though not for the Jews.’
He looked puzzled, ‘Abraham?’
‘Yes the Muslims consider him as the father of Islam.’
‘And Jerusalem?’
‘Well Mohammed rose into heaven from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.’
‘So that explains these endless disputes.’
‘You could say that.’
‘So how does the Temple come into it?’
‘In very simple terms Abraham spoke with God on Mount Moriah and an alliance was formed between God and the people of Judah. This was called the covenant, which was kept in an Ark in his tent, that is until the first Temple was built by Solomon in the 10th century BC.’
‘So it sat in his tent for a thousand years.’
‘If you like,’ he laughed and looked around for a waiter.
The television at the end of the bar showed a group of Palestinians burning a synagogue in Gaza.
‘Look at that,’ said Ennis.
‘What about it!’
‘Without an explanation viewers would think the conflict is about religion, you know the nature of God and all that, like your friend, Alfred Mann, he thinks peace is about religion, understanding the other, that's a lot of shit! And even worse he connives with religious extremists in helping them to believe the present day problems of Israel and Palestine are the fault of Europeans in general.’
‘Oh!’ said O’Connelly.
‘There’ll never be peace as long as the Jews are here.’
‘That sounds a bit racist?’
‘No, but unfortunately it's a fact, why do you think the Jews have had so many problems throughout history, the Pharaohs, the Assyrians, Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, Mohammed, the Spanish, the Ottomans, the British, Germans and now Arabs and Muslims in general?’
‘Fuck knows,’ said O’Connelly. With his friend Ennis it often ended up like that, an argument. He felt tired he had enough for the day. The waiter finally appeared and he asked for the check.
‘Had enough then?’
‘Yeah, so tell me.’
‘What?’
‘What you were saying about the Jews.’
‘In a nutshell they’re impossible, nice but impossible, they w
ant to be different, it's up to them, but whatever they do they can’t live on an island, and that's not going to be settled by a lot of imams and rabbis sitting down together and talking about Andalusia.’
They two friends had practically lost contact after their university years until they met again in Paris at a cocktail reception for the inauguration of an Asian fine antiques exhibition. O’Connelly then a journalist and newly arrived in Paris was lost amongst the aloof Parisian fine art crowd when he overheard English being spoken. He immediately recognised Ennis engaged in small talk with a wealthy Lebanese, whom he had met at a press conference in the Syrian Embassy a few weeks previously.
The Lebanese recognised him and was about to introduce O’Connelly, when he discovered the two were old friends. After several glasses of Champagne and talk of Paris, the Middle East and the latest Palestinian crisis they managed to slip off. It was in the early hours when they finally quit each other after having dined together and hit a good number of bars. O’Connelly and Ennis had first met at boarding school near Dublin and then gone on to university in Dublin and London.
They left the bar and slowly made their way back to the hotel continuing their discussion.
‘Tell me John, what do you know about the history of recent archaeological finds in Jerusalem?’
‘The latest archaeological finds? I’m not a specialist, but from press reports I’ve read there’s a Jewish ritual bath from the time of Herod’s Temple, and a piece of wall from the First Temple period, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC.’
‘Who were the archaeologists?’
‘The digs were sponsored by Elad, that’s an ultranationalist group.’
‘The guide book says that there is a tunnel that can be visited?’
‘Yes, there’s a tunnel, near the Wall, it ends in the Muslim Quarter.’
‘Can you visit it?’
‘I believe it’s possible, though it’s been the source of quite a considerable source of controversy.’
‘Controversy?’
‘Back in 1996, a rumour went around that the tunnel was part of a plot against the Muslims, it ended up in riots and gun battles between Palestinian security forces and Israeli forces, eighty people were killed.’
‘That’s some controversy!’
‘There’s been a lot of underground structures discovered. During the 19th century the Palestine Survey Fund carried out excavations over a long period of time, they discovered the vestiges of underground tunnels and galleries in the Kidron Valley connected to the Gihon Spring. That work came to an end with the World War Two. After the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, continued work at three other sites in the Old City, in the hope of discovering evidence from the Roman period, but little was discovered.’
Ennis continued by explaining how in the seventies, the Israeli authorities undertook excavations alongside the west wall where a stone sewage conduit was discovered, then in the eighties the Hebrew University carried out excavations in the hope of finding evidence of ancient occupation of the city, but all they turned up were details relating to the Stone Age period, which had little to do with Jewish history.
The Western Wall, he said it had nothing to do with Temple itself, it was in fact part of the foundation of the walls built by Herod to form the platform, now the Esplanade.
More recent excavations between the Western Wall and the south-western corner of the Esplanade uncovered a ten metre wide street paved with large flagstones, lined with shops dating from Roman times. It runs parallel to the Western Wall along the Tyropoeon Valley, between the Temple Mount and the western hill.
Near the end of the street protruding from the wall were the remains of what is called Robinson’s Arch, which had once projected out from the Western Wall high above and over the street, on the other side of which were the remains of its supporting pier. The arch had been the continuation of an access stairway that led up from the street to the Temple Mount. It had been destroyed by the Romans and had collapsed covering the street with huge blocks of masonry.
‘What’s interesting is one of the stones found amongst the debris covering the street had an inscription in Hebrew that says ‘to the trumpeting place’. A place where a trumpet announced the Sabbath…that is before the destruction of the Temple. Then there’s the ramp, leads up to the Triple Gate, now it’s closed, under repair. A temporary wooden structure was set up for visitors’ access to the Esplanade during the repair works.’
‘That’s what all the controversy has been about.’
‘Yes, another of the Wafq’s ploys to prevent excavation works.’
‘A pity.’
‘Below it outside of the walls is a garden with the remains of excavation work, called the Ophel Archaeological Park.’
‘Yes we visited it, apparently the first settlement goes back several thousand years with twenty five layers of ruins, unfortunately all buildings that go back to the Roman times were destroyed in 70AD. There were two gates in the south wall during the Second Temple period, known as the Huldah Gates, leading into tunnels through which people could pass on their way to the Temple Mount.’
‘Though nobody knowns whether the Temple actually stood there or not!’
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Menorah Press