It was more by curiosity than anything else he had agreed to make the trip to Seville to attend the World Council for Interreligious Reconciliation. The theme for the 23rd council was the reconciliation between Jews and Muslims, which to O’Connelly following his visit to Israel an impossible task, on the other hand for those who had made a career promoting peace it offered a lifetime occupation.
World Council for Interreligious Reconciliation had it roots in the efforts at reconciliation between the Church of England and the Vatican in the early 1950s. At the outset a committee had been formed of religious leaders and influential representatives of both faiths in the UK, including the Duke of Wessex, a member of the Royal Family. Over the years the role of the Council had expanded with the arrival of numerous Muslim and Hindu immigrants in the UK, and its entry into the European Union.
Historical differences between Anglicans and Roman Catholics had taken on less importance, becoming almost inconsequential in the eyes of the world as militant Islam emerged, nurtured by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
O’Connelly hoped it would give him the occasion of meeting with Alfred Mann, who was attending the Council as an observer, and discussing the problem of de Lussac, in addition it would provide him with background on the relations between the different religious factions embroiled in the Israeli-Arab conflict in a neutral territory.
The inaugural ceremony took place in the elaborate octagonal arabesque Hassan II Pavilion – built for the 1992 World Expo – situated a couple of kilometres from the city centre. The walls and balconies of the Pavilion were decorated with exotic woodwork and carved plaster. It overflowed with imams and rabbis from all over the world dressed in their colourful ceremonial costumes, from the Middle East, from Africa, Malaysia and Indonesia all listening intently to speeches given by the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem and the Minister of King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
The Pavilion was overflowing; it was too small to handle all the delegates together with the world’s press and television eager to hear the messages peace and hope. Amongst the spectators was a Palestinian delegation of religious leaders, close to the Hamas government, many of whom had never travelled outside their besieged, listening with amazement to the speeches of peace and brotherhood from their enemies seated almost within touching distance, and even worse seated alongside Palestine’s Arab allies exchanging niceties.
O’Connelly found it more than strange to see the two sworn enemies seated side by side, beard by beard, amongst religious representatives of Christianity in their soutanes and Hinduism in their turbans. He equally surprised to discover that many of the Israelis had to come to Seville to discover what their neighbours thought on the other side of the wall that divided their two peoples. Many rabbis openly admitted that they did not know their Palestinian counterparts and vice versa.
According to Benny Weinfeld’s information, from a source close to hard-line rabbis, the idea that the Temple site was anywhere other than on the middle of the Esplanade itself was totally excluded.
It was evident that there was no way Mann would jeopardise his trust to satisfy de Lussac's theories, it would be filed away to be forgotten, lost in the dusty files of his storeroom. Any alternative had been spelt out in clear terms by the hard-liners, who would ensure that Rosenstein and the Bertelsmann Foundations would pull the plug and his source of funding would dry up as quickly as the early morning dew in the Negev.
The more open and more secular Israeli community would have no such problem and even the New York publisher, who was in any case uninterested in De Lussac's work, would have seen it simply as another controversial Biblical related book, like so many others that could be found in book stores in New York or Tel-Aviv, good for stimulating discussion over cocktails and at dinner parties.
However, they did not take into account de Lussac's obsession or his pugnacity. He was a Jew, though he adhered to no particular group, he was not even a practising Jew, not even a lip service believer. His unique mission, a divine mission that had come to him in a dream, was to save the people of Israel from a catastrophic conflict that would result in another banishment of the Jews and the re-occupation of Jerusalem by the despised Muslims.
De Lussac had developed a fixation that was translated into his belief that a lasting peace could be achieved by means of a powerful factual and historical demonstration; there was no reason for the dispute between the Jews and the Muslims, because the Esplanade had never been the site of the Temple of the Jews, thus in a single stroke the bone of contention that had poisoned the relations between the two communities for 1,400 years would be removed.
As an archaeologist in the Holy Land he should have known better, but his narrow vision prevented him from knowing better, he was too fixed on his focal point. The fact was the Promised Land had been the theatre of conflict where men had fought and killed since the dawn of time, they had fought over land, grazing, water, in defence of their family, their tribe, their god, their religion, over power, against each others against invaders, for their own dreams of kingdoms and empires.
De Lussac’s suspicious instinct told him that Mann was avoiding him and his paranoia made him suspect he was the victim of a plot by Mann and his Orthodox Jewish rabbi friends from Jerusalem. He was not to far wrong and his blind obsession soon reached such a degree of desperation that he was willing to make a pact with the devil. In exchange for the publication of his work de Lussac compromised his short term loyalty by accepting the approach of a London publisher, owned by a Lebanese close to the Assad regime in Damascus.
De Lussac had never before considered the plight of the Palestinians, beyond the political and ideological conflict that constantly made the headline news he read, they were far from his thoughts. He was oblivious to the fact that a great many of them were deprived of the basic human essentials such as a roof, a job, schooling; the most basic ingredients of family life. He saw the Palestinians in a historical context; to him they represented those who had usurped the right given by God to his chosen people, to worship him in the manner handed down to Abraham.
He had little time for the kind of religious dialogue spoke of God, of brotherly love and charity and more love and more God and words and endless words. Nor was he like certain intellectual European Jews who saw outspoken Palestinians as rabble rousers, or the kind of European Jew that the young Israelis, who bore arms and served death to a people who they realised also had rights, called Juifs de salon, and asked where all that brotherly love for the Palestinians was.
Mann’s assistant Cedric Delauny went about his high profile multi-tasking, dressed in an open neck, purposely unironed, white shirt, and black trousers. His head of carefully cultivated wild hair identified him as he ran from left to right, his left hand bunched with a wad of papers, his right clutching his cellphone, huddling with a Rabbi here or an Imam there, issuing an instruction, or flashing a ‘do not disturb’ glance at helpers – as much as to say I doing something important. Alfred Mann talked low and confidentially to Rosenstein, a man in his mid-thirties, his wife slightly to one side, her face already worn by the sun and years of intensive beauty treatment that resulted in a faded flat look.
The other members of Mann's small delegation were in a state of hyperactivity, each vying to outdo the other, young men in their twenties and early thirties, mostly without fixed employment after years of studies in everything from religious mediation to inter-community sociology, obscure and poorly paid subjects with few professional openings, enjoying a week in a first class hotel in Seville, as helpers and all expenses paid.
The current Lord Wessex, honorary president of the World Council for Interreligious Reconciliation, an inbreed though otherwise sincere though weak individual, had a guru, Pastor ‘Sonny’ Ford, a fiery preacher and leader of the Texan Congregationalist Church. Pastor ‘Sonny’ Ford had not hesitated to mix business with religion to finance his church, inventing a clever method of communication designed to promote harmonious relations in communities that he had adroitly
extended to business and institutional organisations.
The pastor’s method had the huge advantage of requiring an almost non-existent operating structure that was cleverly marketed to businesses and institutional bodies, having either had money to burn or were desperate to solve their often insoluble organisational problems. It worked. It contributed not only to his church but also the pastor’s fine sailing boat moored at the Portland Marina in the Gulf of Maine and a sprawling ranch in Montana where he played out his imaginary Clint Eastwood style role, changing however, the laconic to garrulous.
As for Sunday church service in his Texas parish or his Sunday evening TV show, Pastor ‘Sonny’ Ford exchanged his Stetson and cowboy boots for the more sober attire of a pastor the his Marlborough voice remained unchanged.
Discussions ranged from perceived insults to Islam perpetrated by writers and newspaper, described by one rabbi, who though he believed in free speech, as a desecration of a great religion whilst condemning the Iranian Mullah’s attitude to Jews and the holocaust.
O’Connelly was bewildered by the amazing kaleidoscope of religious politics, there were Indonesians, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Iranians, Americans, Egyptians, Russians, Senegalese, Malians, Europeans from every state of the Union and of course Israelis and Palestinians. There was however little religious fervour, confrontation was lurking in certain meeting rooms of the hotel.
As it was far from evident that he would get to talk seriously to Mann about de Lussac he decided to escaped to the nearby historic city centre. Outside of the heavily guarded hotel there was a shuttle service laid on for the delegates and O’Connelly was the last passenger in one about to leave. The passengers looked like the Three Kings multiplied by four or five. He took the last seat next to the only other person dressed in civvies who greeted him with a smile and introduced himself: ‘Benny Weinfeld, I’m with Ha’aretz’. He was a journalist and Ha’aretz was the leading Israeli daily newspaper.
The shuttle headed across the bridge to the historic centre of the city where the delegates wanted to discover the city that had been the home to the Moors of Andalusia, where according to legend and folklore it had been a haven of peace and learning, and where the faithful of the three great religions of the Book coexisted in harmony and understanding.
‘So you are going to visit the heart of Andalusia,’ said Benny somewhat cynically.
‘Yes, whilst I’m here I might as well do a little research work.’
‘Research work?’
‘Yes, I’m a writer.’
‘A historian?’
‘No,’ he laughed, ‘fiction, I’m a novelist, ex-journalist as a matter of fact.’
‘Well I hope you’re making more money than me!’
‘That I don’t know.’
‘So that’s why you are interested in the conference.’
O’Connelly hesitated, he was not sure what Weinfeld meant. The shuttle stopped in a large square and the passengers got down.
‘Shall we do this together,’ asked Weinfeld. ‘I’ve never been here before, and besides I don’t want to be involved in the fancy dress ball,’ he said with a disrespectful nod towards the other visitors who have divided into two or three groups of like affinities and were consulting a city maps.
‘Why not,’ said O’Connelly, Benny seemed friendly enough and apparently not very convinced by the religious aspect of the conference.
They headed into the old town pleased to escape the pressure cooker atmosphere of the conference.
‘I’m surprised by those Israeli rabbis present, they are not very representative.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I expected a more open mixture. All those I’ve seen so far are hard-liners.’
Benny a hardened journalist, shuttling between Tel-Aviv and New York, the two greatest Jewish cities. His business was news, he worked to a deadline, he was in Seville for a story, not a rehash of the rabbis’ discourse – so familiar to the paper’s readers in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. He wanted hard news about the Palestinians, news gleaned on Hamas policies in Gaza.
They found the cathedral, but it was not yet open and Benny suggested they take a beer at one of the many terrace bars. Shlomo had seen it all, he preferred to watch the passers by and talk as he enjoyed his beer.
‘So you’re writing a book about Jerusalem?’
O’Connelly was careful, as an ex-journalist himself he new that whatever he said could be found in the pages of the next edition of Benny’s paper.
‘Yes, the setting is in Jerusalem, so I’m trying to get some background about the Temple Mount situation.’
‘Between the Jews and Muslims,’ Benny said helping him.
‘In a nutshell that’s it.’
‘The problem with our country is religion, we have too many fanatics, on both sides, you can see it at the conference, they have a tremendous influence and they stop our country functioning as a normal state.’
O’Connelly was surprised by his frankness, his attitude to his religion. He knew relatively little about Jewish thinking, or more specifically the thinking of Israeli Jews.
‘Israel is not like Paris or London where religions plays little or no role.’
‘I can’t say, but there seems to be quite a few French Jews moving to Israel today.’
‘They see things differently when they arrive in Israel and discover everyday life, where everybody is Jewish, with a large minority, all Arab. It’s not at all Paris, where they see themselves as a threatened minority, defending themselves against real or imaginary threats from those around them. Constantly worried like Finkelkraut about the growing Muslim population in France, seeing it as a reason for immigration to Israel, forgetting of course the daily difficulties they would have there, you know language, Hebrew is not easy to learn to read and write proficiently at thirty or forty, then there is the question of jobs, living standards, military service, competition from other powerful immigrant communities like the Russians, not forgetting other forms of prejudice that exists like in every country.’
‘Prejudice?’
‘Yes, you know power is mostly in the hands of the Ashkenazi, many of the French are Sephardic.’
‘So.’
‘They don’t always get on together. They also forget we are totally surrounded by Arabs. Today many French Jews lived in and around Tel-Aviv, where they appreciated the good life, many of these are retired people, people who have made money, they don’t have to work, their families come to see them, and when they see them sunning themselves and drinking in the cafés in the sunshine they think its paradise, which it’s not!’
‘So what about the Esplanade, do you believe the Temple stood on the Esplanade?’
‘Who knows? Personally I’m not very religious, the truth is for archaeologists. But religious forces are extremely power even fanatical. Today, it’s a political not a religious problem, of course religion is used as an argument. We Jews believe Jerusalem is our city, even myself, although I am not religious it seems clear to me and most people that we were here before anybody else as far as can be remembered. The Muslims however, want to prove at any price Jerusalem is the City of Mohamed, who only came here in a dream according to the Koran. Of course the Arabs captured the city, but that does not mean it’s their forever. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks and British captured Jerusalem at one time or another, today its ours again.’
‘So you are a little nationalist after all,’ O’Connelly said gently mocking him.
‘Yes, but I am also realistic, if anybody wants it, it will be over our dead bodies!’
‘Okay, forgetting about dead bodies, what’s your opinion about archaeology and archaeologists in Jerusalem today?’
‘It’s the same – it depends who is financing them. I tend to believe independent archaeologists, not those financed by extremists or hard-liners, the trouble is that objective archaeologists can play into the hands of the Waqf and Muslims in ge
neral, many of us Jews are objective and I’m sorry to say it is not the case of most Muslims believers.’
‘But if the Temple was proved to be at one site of another would it not help to resolve the conflict?’
‘I don’t think so, even if the foundations of the Temple were discovered with the Ark of the Covenant the Palestinians would reject it.’
‘What about the presence of the Palestinians at the Congress, aren’t they more open minded?’
‘You’re joking, haven’t you seen them bunched together, they have little in common other Muslim delegations who in any case are in the larger majority from non-Arab countries, from Africa, Asia, Europe and even the USA, who are not directly involved in the problems of the Palestinians and the Middle East in general, in any case the only give lip service to inter-religious cooperation with the Jews, whilst the Palestinians are in total conflict with Israel.’
‘You say there are few Arab delegations.’
‘Few of any importance, where are the founders of Islam, the Saudis, who are here Dervishes very nice but most Muslims don’t even consider them as Muslims.’
‘It’s not evident to non-specialists.’
‘Ah, now you’ve got it! The media and the public can’t make the difference between who is important and who isn’t important, it’s a huge charade. I’m sorry to say your friend Mann is involved or manipulated by the hard-liners, like Rabbi Weizger, who was originally from Manchester but now leads an extremist religious group in Jerusalem.
I don’t want to run down these good doers like Cannon White and scholars like Rabbi Steiner who is specialist in comparative religious studies in Manchester, but they have little or no influence on peace between Israel and Palestine, the only thing that counts is politics and power.’
O’Connelly seemed disappointed.
‘Look Patrick, the hard line rabbis and politicians will stop at absolutely nothing to prevent anyone, whoever they are and whatever the proof they have, from conclusively demonstrating the Temple stood anywhere but on the Esplanade. When you come to Israel the next time.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Absolutely, when you next come to Israel I’ll help you with some introductions to people both archaeologists and specialists who can help you.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘One other thing be careful of what you say to Ruth.’
‘Oh!’
‘Yes, never mind why, just be careful.’
Ruth Klein was a wizen New Yorker, a non-practising Jew, though a fervent support of the Jewish homeland, she worked as a writer for Mann’s trust, handling all confidential and key documents. Unfortunately for Mann not all of his team were loyal followers, Klein was the hard-liners’ mole, diligently copying all documents relating to the trusts general policy and especially communications with the imams to Jerusalem. She had one weakness however; she needed a bottle to keep her company each night and not a hot water bottle.
As Mann’s real intentions finally penetrated de Lussac’s mind he became enraged, he was fifteen thousand kilometres from Paris in Phnom Penh with a cybercafé as his only means of contact with the outside. His bouts of malaria did not help with the onset of the rainy season.
Unknown to him, Jean-Louis Claudel gave O’Connelly a day by day account of de Lussac’s ravings and his wanderings in the city’s lesser respectable bars for expatriates. He told his story to anyone prepared to listen; a year lost, betrayal, ingratitude, frustration, manipulation.
He had told Claudel that his entire savings had been swallowed by the years he had spent writing his work; all that remained was the small apartment on rue Montbelliard, which in fact belong to him and his sister who was with him in Cambodia. Out of concern for her and his lowly salary prevented him from flying to Paris to vent his rage.
The implications were extraordinarily complex and Alfred Mann had understood that from the very start. His goal was to stop the publication of ‘The Temple’ at any price.
For the influential Israeli hard-liners religious extremists it was an open the door to Palestinians’ claims to Jerusalem. For the Catholic Church the assault on the Bible was an indirect attack on the Church in a time when post-Christianity was the religion of the day, they needed the wealth of the developed nations, not just the weight of the disinherited. For the Muslims it was a justification for Holy War endorsing their claim to the Haram esh-Sharif.
The goal of the Congress was to win over moderate Muslims with speeches preaching peace, dialogue and brotherhood. The presence of the important Palestinian delegation was to demonstrate the all embracing legitimacy of the Congress to the apparently more moderate Fattah, playing them off against the democratically elected Hamas government.
The Palestinians were entering a grave crisis with its non-functional government, isolation, a dramatic budget crisis and even worse food shortages. Discussing the names of the Prophet with Indonesian or African imams in the presence rabbis whatever their tendency was low on their scale of priorities.
O’Connelly found an ally in Eva Guttmann, a Swiss woman, who had worked for Mann in Zurich. She had naively signed a $400,000 bank guarantee, backed by her house on the Lake, to help Mann out of one of his never ending financial crises, now the bank was now calling in the long overdue loan that Mann had no intention of paying.
28
Caesarea