The Dirty Aussie - The Daily Happenings Of The Dirty Aussie

Jerusalem City

Jerusalem city has been a kind of hardship-Disneyland for hundreds of years, unlike other Middle Eastern cities where tourism is relatively new.

Tourists come to Jerusalem not to relax or out of mere interest: they come hoping for a “broadening” experience. In fact, it is socially illuminating to watch pyres of burning tyres, to discover that Palestinians in East Jerusalem can’t give you street directions for the western part of the city (only a short walking distance away), and to feel the full force of fundamentalism in the Jewish dietary rules, so that every West Jerusalem restaurant with its strictly Kosher menu astonished. But this kind of social illumination is not what the tourists want: most have come for some soul repair.

However Jerusalem is more than one quarter Moslem, Israel as a whole is 81 percent Jewish, 14 per cent Moslem and three per cent Christian. The elegant Ethiopians (who are Coptic Christians, descendants of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon) show a strong presence, and, surprisingly, the rich, genial Armenians (also Christian) control the most beautiful quarter of the Old City.

Though a tourist has plenty of leisure time to fill (the museums and historic sights, though plentiful, open at erratic hours), most of the tourists I chatted to wanted to know where they “should go”. I pointed them to the American Colony Hotel in the Palestinian part of Jerusalem, which is raffish and usually full of young men who belong to television crews; or to the strangely imperious YMCA in King David Street, where well-dressed waifs order wine by the glass. There is also a two-block-long “tourist catchments area” in Salomon Street where, among shops selling things to take home, tourists sit under cafe canopies and pretend they are in Italy.

For persons who didn’t grow up with arbitrary rules like “fish on Friday”, the overbearing religious injunctions in Jerusalem are an affront. If you arrived at 6am on a Saturday morning, it was sabbat, which meant that from sundown on the previous Friday until sundown again - about 8.30pm on this Saturday - I could neither catch a bus from the airport nor find a shop open to feed me.

If there are too many crises in Jerusalem, and too much gambling with self-definition, there are also wonderful distractions. Most parts of the city have a lovely smell - half floral, half incense. And the smell of coffee is more pervasive here than anywhere else, even Italy. The coffee is invariably strong and bracing, but the Palestinian coffee, mixed with the spice cardamom is a revelation.

The music is exactly what holiday music should be (including “Zorba The Greek”). Throbbing Arab songs are available on $5 cassettes in the Palestinian part of the city. This kind of music always sounds a bit phony once you have brought it home, but it works in a Jerusalem coffee bar.

What Jerusalem does better than any other holiday hole with sunshine and gunfire is lock you into history. In Jerusalem the spice is not picturesque, grotty low-life, but a grotty “low” history. Blood dripped on the ground almost everywhere and you don’t need a lot of education or guidebooks to feel how much this small city has mattered.

But find your own reasons to go to Jerusalem. Although the city has been war-torn and muddled in its multiculturalism for centuries, only recently does one have a sense of change - a sense of foreboding or hope, depending on the prickling of your thumbs. If you weren’t in Berlin when the Wall fell, being in Jerusalem now should give you the same sense of being on the edge of something historically important.

If you drive a classy car into some areas, stones will be thrown at you. Your handbag will be searched a dozen times each day and your allegiance to the Jewish side or the Palestinian side will swing, depending on the last soldier to search you. If you meet a rich gentleman drinking good champagne, you will discover he is a grave-digger or a washer of dead bodies: their income is three times the average Israeli income (about $7400 a month) and they love to spend money. If you are a Western growing middle-aged, socially adept and self-assured, the cure is a couple of weeks in the world’s most cynical city, Jerusalem.