The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

longer welcome. I took my wife with me to the east side only on a quick visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, leaving her back on the west side for my own, more thorough exploration of old shopping and tourist haunts. I was well-received by friends of years earlier, who, while cursing the Israelis, were also lamenting the fall in business since the start of the troubles of the day. Yet the streets and alley- ways of East Jerusalem were still bustling with pilgrim traffic, and there were no barriers keeping us from freely traveling to Bethlehem or any- where in Jerusalem. In my discus- sions with Israelis, they still held to the concept of a united Jerusalem for- ever Israeli, though more and more they would be glad to be rid of the rest of the territories, especially Gaza. How profoundly the atmosphere had changed by then was illustrated by an incident on one of my trips into the Christian Quarter during our visit. I had settled into a discussion with a shopkeeper I knew from the old days, intent on buying a camel-leather purse as a gift. We had started the ceremony of getting to a price by his ordering tea and my asking him about the health and whereabouts of every male member of his clan I knew of. As we talked, we both noticed a sud- den drop in the volume of the souk’s background noise, the chatter and calls which normally echo across the square by the Lutheran Church just east of the gate to the Holy Sepulchre com- pound. Glancing up, we stuck our heads through the clothes and leather goods hanging in front of his shop and saw a squad of Israeli border police filing into the square, all carrying staves. They must have been expect- ing trouble. Within a minute, my friend and I came to the price which would nor- mally have taken 20 minutes to nego- tiate, and I left with the purse, hus- tling away through an alley in the other direction as he slammed the metal door down in front of the store. During each of the past two years, I have traveled to Israel, alone now as a new widower, for extended stays, spending a few weeks on an archaeo- logical dig in the Galilee, then volun- teering for months at an interfaith museum in West Jerusalem. Our dig has been the only one staffed with for- eign volunteers, since American uni- versities are too frightened over liabil- ity issues to allow students to join in archaeological expeditions in the area. Our group of mostly retired Christians from the southern U.S. ends our dig at a Byzantine site with a few days in Jerusalem where the archaeologists take us to sites where we all have easy access, the usual tourists and foreign students having disappeared. Once my fellow American diggers leave, I remain as one of the few tourists in the Holy City. The Israelis give me a 90-day visa, usually unenforced for at least a month’s overstay. As I write this article in December 2002, the city is redividing itself. One morning, I walk back into the Old City, stop in stores I visited first in the hopeful days of 1967. The Palestinian owners or their sons greet me by name as if I had seen them the day before instead of 11 or even 20 years earlier. Over tea, we talk. One shop owner asks about my son, who came back on his own as a high-school stu- dent to dig and to hitchhike the coun- try and wander the Jerusalem byways for a couple of months in the mid- 1980s. My Palestinian friend remem- bers the day of my son’s baptism. Old friends becoming old men, we talk for hours over tea and coffee. Business is not just bad. It is nonexistent. The few trinkets I buy are his only sales of the day. Even though there has still been no terrorism targeting tourists or pil- grims in the Old City, Westerners have stop- ped coming. Many shops 62 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 As a Catholic raised on Thomistic Christology, the absurdities of U.S. policy toward Jerusalem had a Yossarian-like beauty for me. Above: a street scene in the Old City of Jerusalem. Below: the Church of St. John the Baptist, Ein Karem, Jerusalem.