City of Stone

"Well now we might go to Meron Benvenisti’s City of Stone: the Hidden History of Jerusalem . Meron is a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a scholar of international calibre, but what makes his book so wonderful is that he has not only lived his whole life in Jerusalem, but his father was one of the original extrem socialist kibbutzians – you know in the years before Israel was actually created – with incredibly idealistic notions of what this Israel might be and with visions of how to share power and resources with the Palestinians. Meron came out of this wonderfully intellectual left wing tradition and his whole life, literally, is the history of his country. He was born just a few years before 1948 and in addition he was deputy mayor of Jerusalem through the critical years, the 70’s, when the city was recovering from its partition status. Partition began in 1948 and ended in 1967 with the 6 day war, when Israeli forces surprised everyone and pushed back against the combined Arab forces to take back what they had lost and then some: including Jerusalem which they then departitioned. So here’s Meron with this incredible personal history, this direct insight as a policy maker and politician in Jerusalem, and his specific mandate as deputy mayor was for the Arab population. He was being asked to understand their needs, understand their frustrations, and develop municipal policy accordingly. And he did that brilliantly until he became so jaded by the whole thing that he resumed his career as a scholar without affiliation. He never accepted a permanent university post. His book City of Stone is, in my opinion, the definitive story of modern Jerusalem, not because it takes one side or another side, or even both sides. It’s because of the way it describes how this place which for so many people was so important became such a sink of hatred and violence and ignorance and a refuge for so many hawkish people. It’s amazing. When you go and you see the squalor inside the walled city of Jerusalem, the most sacred city in the world. When you see the consequences of this incredibly bigoted anti-Arab policy. When you see the filth and the decrepitude of the living conditions of the Arab residents of whom there are fewer and fewer every day, you just can’t believe it. Benvenisti does such an amazing job. He’s the best writer on this list. You couldn’t learn more about this city from a humanistic point of view than by reading Benvenisti’s book. Well he rejects the view that there’s any neutral ground in these situations. So anyone who comes in claiming some professional objectivity, saying, ‘I’m a doctor, an engineer, an urban planner’ – fill in the blank – ‘I’m not prejudiced one way or another’. That’s just bullshit. Everybody is assigned a partisan role whether they assign it to themselves or not. So the mud he’s talking about is just the shifting political ground in which any coping strategy must be planted. There’s no soap box that gets you above that. Everybody’s just slogging through the shit. The best you can do is to identify problems as they occur and not let them lead to their worst iterations. Most authors don’t want to be sullied by these problems. They want to talk about them yet remove themselves. That’s why Benvenisti’s book is so amazing and that’s why I say he has this particular voice, as opposed to Donald Horowitz’s Ethnic Groups in Conflict , which is a different sort of book altogether. That’s right, and he also has a lot of important information under his thumb. But just look at the title. I mean Ethnic Groups in Conflict. To look down at so many millions of people, billions, and make them small. The guy’s good. It’s an important book. But I put it on my list because it’s so crucial to remain aware of the problems that arise from the arrogance of that perceived remove. That you can gaze on the situation from a great height. Horowitz is a pretty thoughtful guy but you put him next to Benvenisti and you almost can’t open his book anymore. He’s a top down guy who’s saying that these conflicts, all these conflicts, could have been avoided if somehow, way back, the leadership could have been more honest, or had a broader view, and if the international community had acted more appropriately and energetically to intervene. He talks about the USA and the UN and the Prime Minister of the UK. The problem is that he basically believes that the results are still on the shoulders of these people. I’m the last person to say that irresponsible policy is irrelevant, but there’s so little texture or complexity built into his analysis because he’s so eager to assume that once the sin of omission or commission is committed by the powerful then ethnic conflict was the inevitable bi-product. That’s one way to read it, but it wouldn’t be mine. One of the problems with Horowitz is that, in spite of his subtextual analysis, which is pretty good, he still accepts ethnic conflict as ethnic conflict. I don’t accept ethnic conflict as fundamentally ethnic. Well I think it’s usually something much more ordinary, something less exotic. I think if you look carefully, which we tried to do with the five cities we examined, you see unfair allocation of resources. Essentially a Marxist dilemma. You see people of all different ethnicities in the working class who are being mistreated and exploited. And before their grievances can crystallize into a push back against the owners – the owner’s class as I very crudely understand it – they were beaten to the punch by those same owners that were making life disproportionately hard for them. And I think it would be fair to say that the ethnic component was provoked on purpose and by design by the people who stood to lose a lot through a class based confrontation. Yes. And it’s not at all original, it’s all borrowed. But what I found most interesting in my research was that [Marxist/economic] reinterpretation of ethnic conflict. And there are people who have spent their whole careers critiquing the ethnic paradigm and doing it very beautifully and thoughtfully. So I’d like to finish up with just two more authors. First Diana Markides, who wrote this wonderful thesis, which landed up becoming a book on the true origins of the Cyprus problem, which are not what they are claimed as being. She’s a Cypriote, born and bred into that world, and a highly trained scholar. Her book is totally obscure. I’m quite positive you couldn’t find it on Amazon, and it’s brilliant. And Morris is something quite different. His book is a survey book of urban form. It would seem to have nothing to do at all with divided cities, except that he shows that cities have always been paranoid, security obsessed places and walls and cities have always gone hand in hand. Not walls within cities of course but walls around cities. That’s the earliest form of city. Morris provides the deep, deep background of how cities have always fundamentally been about a fortress mentality – and there’s just a slight tweak on that to get us to divided cities. And then there’s Markides, the opposite of Morris’s world view, who goes deep, deep, deep into one particular scenario, into one place. Morris’s book is graphically beautiful. It’s just plan after plan of cities from the earliest known archaeological remains of any city anywhere – prehistory – through to the renaissance. When he says urban form that’s exactly what he means. The first city nuclei were castle keeps. As the community was attacked it became tiresome to run inside the keep and so they just decided to just stay inside the walls. So walls and paranoia and security. He doesn’t assess it, he just lets us watch it."