Jerusalem. The Biography

Belorussian-born manufacturers of stockings whose sturdy home had become a Haganah stronghold that was blown up by the Arab Legion in 1948. The Mandelbaum checkpoint stood on its ruins.
    Through these mined and barbed barriers the Jewish teenager Amos Oz and the Palestinian child Sari Nusseibeh, the son of Anwar, were living close to each other. Later Oz and Nusseibeh, both fine writers and opponents of fanatacism, became friends. ‘Islam’, wrote Nusseibeh, ‘was no different for families like ours than I would learn later that Judaism was for Amos Oz a couple of hundred feet away, just beyond No-Man’s-Land.’ The boys watched as a new influx of immigrants changed Jerusalem yet again. The Arabs, particularly Iraq, had avenged themselves on their own Jewish communities: 600,000 of them now migrated to Israel. But it was the survivors of the ultra-Orthodox sects known as the Haredim (Awestruck) who changed the look of Jerusalem, bringing with them the culture and clothes of seventeenth-century Mitteleuropa and a faith in mystical and joyous prayer. ‘Hardly a day would go by’, recalled Sari Nusseibeh, ‘when I didn’t spy into the streets beyond No-Man’s-Land’ and there in Mea Shearim, ‘I saw blackclad men. Sometimes the bearded creatures looked back at me.’ Who were they, he wondered?
    The Haredim were split between those who embraced Zionism and the many, such as the Toldot Haron of Mea Shearim, who were devoutly anti-Zionist. They believed that only God could restore the Temple. These introspective, rigid and ritualistic sects were divided between Hasidics and Lithuanians, all speaking Yiddish. The Hasidim are in turn divided into many sects originating from seven principal ‘courts’, each ruled by a dynasty descended from a miracle-working rabbi known as the
admor
(an acronym deriving from ‘Our Master Teacher and Rabbi’). Their costumes and the arcane differences between sects contributed to the complexity of Israeli Jerusalem. *
    The Israelis built a modern capital in Western Jerusalem, * which was an uneasy blend of secular and religious. ‘Israel was socialist and secular,’ recalls George Weidenfeld, ‘high society was in Tel Aviv but Jerusalem revolved around the old Jerusalem of the rabbis, the German intellectuals of Rehavia who discussed art and politics after dinner in the kitchen and the Israeli elite of senior civil servants and generals like Moshe Dayan.’ While the Haredim lived their separate lives, secular Jews like Weidenfeld dined out at the smartest restaurant in Jerusalem – Fink’s, with its non-kosher goulash and sausages. Amos Oz felt uneasy in this kaleidoscopic city, with its peculiar mix of restored antiquities and modern ruins. ‘Can one ever feel at home in Jerusalem, I wonder, even if one lives here for a century?’ he asked in his novel
My Michael
. ‘If you turn your head you can see in the midst of all this building a rocky field. Olive trees. A barren wilderness. Herds grazing around the newly built prime minister’s office.’ Oz left Jerusalem, but Sari Nusseibeh stayed.
    On 23 May 1961, Ben-Gurion summoned one of his young aides, Yitzhak Yaacovy, into his office. The prime minister looked up at Yaacovy: ‘Do you know who Adolf Eichmann is?’
    ‘No,’ replied Yaacovy.
    ‘He is the man who organized the Holocaust, killed your family and deported you to Auschwitz,’ replied Ben-Gurion, who knew that Yaacovy, child of Orthodox Hungarian parents, had been sent to the death-camp by SS-Obersturmbannführer Eichmann in 1944. There he had survived the selection of those allowed to live as slave labourers and those to be gassed at once by SS Dr Josef Mengele himself, perhaps because of his blond hair and blue eyes. Afterwards he emigrated to Israel, fought and was wounded in the War of Independence and settled in Jerusalem where he worked in the prime minister’s office.
    ‘Today,’ Ben-Gurion went on, ‘you will take a car to the Knesset and you will sit as my guest and watch me announce that we have brought Eichmann to stand trial in Jerusalem.’
    The Israeli secret service Mossad had kidnapped Eichmann from his hiding-place in Argentina, and in April his trial started in a courthouse in downtown Jerusalem. He was hanged in Ramla prison.
    On the other side of the border, King Hussein called the city his ‘second capital’, but his regime was too precarious to risk moving the real capital from Amman. The Holy City was effectively demoted to