The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

of us who would drive a motor pool car ourselves or, lacking one, grab an Israeli sherut (shared taxi), could make our way to the appropriate gov- ernment ministry in Jerusalem in little more than an hour. On a personal basis, U.S. embassy personnel in the late 1970s were free to travel in Jerusalem and the territo- ries without restriction by the embassy, the consulate general, or the Israeli government. My family and I would spend many a weekend poking around in the Old City, getting to know the shops where antiquity deal- ers could come up with coins or lamps, learning the shortcuts between the various quarters of the Old City, and spending time admiring the beau- ty of the Dome of the Rock, the solemnity of the Western Wall of the Temple, and the chaotic geography of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, all in the same day. There were few security issues to be concerned about, other than the occasional pickpocket preying on the crowds of tourists in the prosperous souks. In handling codels — who always wanted to go to Jerusalem — or senior administration official visits, there was a veritable litany of nuances that all new officers had to learn regarding U.S. policy on Jerusalem. Eventually I recorded some of them in a handbook (I wonder if it still exists somewhere?) for the embassy’s codel management in the city: • Jerusalem was one city; the U.S. government never recognized its 1948 division. Therefore we had just one consulate general in Jerusalem, not two, but it had two offices, one located on the east (Arab) side and one located on the west (Jewish) side. • The U.S. government did not recognize the 1967 Israeli annexa- tion of East Jerusalem, since that would prejudice negotiations on the status of the city. So in our treat- ment of official visitors, we treated Jerusalem de facto as two cities, even though nobody was ever quite sure where the dividing line was. In practice, we would accompany codels and their Israeli Foreign Ministry escorts to some parts of East Jerusalem (e.g., the Jewish Quarter), but not others. • At the same time, we did not say that Jerusalem was not the capital of Israel. Our embassy was in Tel Aviv as a matter of convenience until the legal status of Jerusalem was settled in negotiations among the parties concerned. After all, there was no requirement for any government to have its embassy in a country’s capital. For a Catholic raised on the pointillist angels of Thomistic Christology, the inherent contradic- tions and absurdities of the policy had a Yossarian-like beauty. End of the Good Old Days By the time of my next visit to Jerusalem in the late 1980s, when my late spouse and I traveled via Cyprus from our post in Saudi Arabia — jug- gling three passports each to keep our travel pages clean — the good days in the Old City were ending because of the violence of the first intifada. ConGen Jerusalem had already begun its policy of issuing travel warn- ings of possible violence in the Old City, and Israelis were becoming wary of shopping in places they were no F E N R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 By the late 1980s, I could see that the good days in the Old City were ending because of the violence of the first intifada.