436 days away from New York. I still cannot tell myself why we came back. We live in an environment that at times looks like a faded family album. Faces seem familiar as I drive by, older, aging, men and women in their forties. Last time I saw them I wasn’t yet sixteen. They seem to have never left, they are still here, the same faces older bodies.
As I walk the streets of Jerusalem, the city in which I grew up, my own children are experiencing the same smells; the ones I did not even like; a memory I keep wanting to go back and fix, knowing very well it is un-fixable. I wish I could feel easy with their presence in this place, feel pride in allowing them to shape their characters in the present. But it feels almost perverse to burden them with the weight of it all.
It is difficult to grasp its meaning on film. Here is an image. The entrance to the city. The new Calatrava bridge is out of frame. The bridge takes on its beauty once you get used to the awful architecture surrounding it. A grand new entrance into a “grand” city. It is not the only entrance, other entrances take on new forms too.
There is the entrance to the Jaffa Gate. I remember my father drinking coffee in one of the cafes overlooking the New City. Jaffa Gate was once the entrance into a city that remained a mystery to most jews. Was it an entrance in to The East, the Middle East? A final takeover. Throughout my entire childhood I never understood what really went on behind the gate, inside.
The newly built and highly praised, yet equally controversial Mamilla Mall now leads the tourist comfortably into the Gate. The entrance is clearly dominated by the agenda of City Hall, years of successful planning. Local Arab vendors are complaining about millions of shekels they have been fined for illegally selling in places they’ve been selling for tens of years. But the authorities are cleaning them out, controlling the image and claiming control. The Palestinian population of the city is encircled by Jewish settlements. The parks, the gardens that entice the tourists seem to be set up for this very purpose. Control the narrative of archeological sites, control the national parks, make it all appealing and disguise policy in the form of culture.
Nothing is as it appears. The Holyland complex that brought former mayor and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to trial is a landmark for my son. Who would have thought, when we first arrived I told him it ruined the city, he went ahead and remembered my words. A classmate of his lives in the penthouse. When he had a play-date he told his mother that I said the building ruined the landscape. The family, citizens of this democracy, wanted to buy a home in a Jewish neighborhood to the South, looking over the desert. When the French Jewish developer discovered that the family was Palestinian he refused the sale. The family decided not to go to court to face unpleasant neighbors. Instead they applied to live in the pariah Holyland at the height of the scandal, they were warmly accepted. I can’t argue, they have the best view of Jerusalem. On the terrace, my son thought he was back in New York.
06.10.2011 at 12:17 PM
…sempre cemento sul passato
cemento sui ricordi cemento sulle pietre cemento sul cemento.
A new alliance: culture and cement, for a more discreet ethnic cleansing.