The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

Christian sects towards one another at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other sites such as the nearby Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As a practicing Catholic, my views were listened to patiently in informal chats at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in those days as I tried to explain the spiritual calculus of indulgences asso- ciated with pilgrimages and relics from my long-ago-memorized cate- chism. (The nuns would have been proud.) I did note that the one time I was barred from worship in a Christian church in the Holy Land was by an Israeli soldier at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I was carrying my newborn son to have him blessed at the Tomb, and the sol- dier stopped me, mistaking me for an Israeli, saying in Hebrew, “You should not go in there with a crying baby. This is a Christian holy place and Israelis have been disturbing the peace with their loud talking and crying babies.” I took the crucifix on the chain from under my shirt and showed it to him, and we had a good laugh together as he waved me inside the church. Change in the Air On returning to Embassy Tel Aviv in early 1977 for what would become a four- and-a-half-year sec- ond tour, I found that the road to Jerusalem had become much easier, though the embassy’s methods of working in the city had changed since 1969. Or perhaps I just had become much more aware of U.S. policy concerning Jerusalem since I devoted much of my second tour as an embassy officer in Jerusalem to assignments as eco- nomic officer and as a control officer for codels and White House visits. In 1967, West Jerusalem was an Israeli outpost in the Judean Hills, connected to the rest of the country by a winding, narrow, two-lane road which detoured around the deadly battlefield of the Israeli 1948 defeat at Latrun and labored tortuously over the ridge near Kastel. The drive, if you got stuck behind a truck after the Bab-el-Wad entrance to the Judean Hills near Latrun, could take over two hours from the embassy on Tel Aviv’s seafront. By 1977, there was a new, double-lane highway, and those 60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 A restored plaza in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, with a ruined synagogue in the background. Looking down from a rooftop in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, into an Old City shopping area.