Jerusalem. The Biography

a‘provincial town with barbed-wire in the centre’. Nonetheless, Hash-emite Jerusalem regained some of its old charm. The king’s brother, Prince Muhammad, governed the West Bank. He had just married the beautiful sixteen-year-old Palestinian: Firyal al-Rashid, ‘We spent six months of the year in Jerusalem,’ remembers Princess Firyal, ‘in the most delightful small villa that had belonged to the Dajanis, but my husband spent most of his time negotiating with the Christians, trying to make peace between the warring Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians!’
    King Hussein appointed Anwar Nusseibeh as governor and custodian of the Sanctuaries. The Nusseibehs were more prominent than they had been for many centuries: Anwar at times served as Jordanian defence minister, his brother Hazem as foreign minister. All of the Families had lost their money and their olive groves, but many continued to live in their villas in Sheikh Jarrah. Anwar Nusseibeh now lived opposite the American Colony in an old-style villa with ‘Persian carpets, gold-embossed academic degrees, crystal decanters for after-dinner drinks and dozens of tennis trophies’. Nusseibeh had to practise ‘a tolerant ecumenicalism’, praying at al-Aqsa every Friday and every Easter leading his whole family to join ‘the high clergy in robes holding golden crosses to circle the Holy Sepulchre three times’, as his son Sari recalled. ‘My brothers and I liked this [Easter celebration] the most because the Christian girls were the prettiest in town.’ But the Temple Mount itself was quiet. ‘There were few Muslim visitors to the Haram,’ noticed Oleg Grabar, the pre-eminent scholar of Jerusalem, who started to explore the city during those years.
    Sari Nusseibeh investigated the Old City, ‘full of smug shopkeepers with their golden pocketwatches, old women hawking wares, whirling dervishes’ and cafés resonating ‘with the bubbling sound of people smoking water pipes’. Jordanian Jerusalem was, observed Eugene Bird, the US vice-consul, a tiny world: ‘I’ve never seen such a small big town before. The eligible society restricted it to about 150 people.’ Some of the Families embraced tourism: the Husseinis opened Orient House as a hotel. The white-haired Bertha Spafford converted her American Colony into a luxury hotel and the brooch-wearing grande dame herself became one of the sights of the city, having known everybody from Jemal Pasha to Lawrence of Arabia: she even featured twice on the British television show
This is Your Life
. Katy Antonius had returned and set up an orphanage in the Old City and, in her home, ‘an upscale restaurant-cum-salon’ named Katakeet after a local gossip column. She was ‘something out Eliot’s
Cocktail Party
’, wrote the US vice-consul; ‘she’s gossipy and thoroughly affected’. Always in ‘the latest fashions and a string of pearls,black hair cut fairly short’ with ‘a distinctive white streak’, she was, thought the vice-consul’s son, the writer Kai Bird, ‘part dragon-lady and part-flirt’. But she had not lost her political anger, remarking: ‘Before the Jewish State, I knew many Jews in Jerusalem. Now I will slap the face of any Arab friend who tries to trade with a Jew. We lost the first round; we haven’t lost the war.’
    The Great Powers had always backed their own sects so it was no surprise that the Cold War was waged furtively beneath the robes and behind the altars of Jerusalem ‘as ardently as in the back alleys of Berlin’, that other divided city. US Vice-Consul Bird advised the CIA to contribute $80,000 to repair the golden onion-domes of Grand Duke Sergei’s Church of Mary Magdalene. If the CIA did not pay, the KGB just might. Russian Orthodoxy was divided between the CIA-backed Church based in New York and the KGB-backed Soviet version in Moscow. The Jordanians, staunch American allies, gave their Russian churches to the anti-Communist Church, while the Israelis, remembering that Stalin had been the first to recognize their new state, granted their Russian properties to the Soviets, who set up a mission in west Jerusalem led by a ‘priest’, actually a KGB colonel who had formerly been an adviser to North Korea.
    In a backwater still dominated by ‘Husseinis, Nashashibis, Islamic scholars and Christian bishops, if you could ignore No-Man’s-Land and the refugee camps,’ wrote Sari Nusseibeh, ‘it was as if nothing had ever happened’. Yet nothing was the same