The Quiet of War

 

If you knew this place you would know it is hardly possible to squeeze through the crowds, particularly as you approach that low open gateway on the right side of the photo. Go through that gateway, turn right down a few stairs, and in a minute you will be sailing through the Crusader-built entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This place is the main reason the whole world, particularly the Christians who make up over ¼th of the human population, comes here, to the Christian Quarter.

The large open archway on the left of the picture marks the Muristan, or I should say the rebuilt Muristan. The main center of life during the Crusader occupation (1099-1187 CE), it was simply allowed to fall into ruins after they left. Only in the late 19th century was it rebuilt to look more or less as it is today, often incorporating bits and pieces of the earlier ruins.  It is full of shops, especially shops with leather products (seeing this photo makes me smell the leather) along with felafel and shishlik restaurants. It’s likely to cost you 10 shekels a shot, but I still recommend the coffee with hel and loads of sugar, a lifesaver against fatigue. Not today, mind you, but in that future time when people will be around.

To me this photo tells it all. Pilgrimage tours to the holy city have screeched to a standstill. The hotels and shopkeepers are not the only victims of this war, as we know so well. The news is relentlessly invasive, and sometimes we simply must take refuge from it to try and heal the mental wounds inflicted, not on ourselves alone but on everyone. Peace be upon us, upon us all.

§   §   §

If you need more evidence of the emptiness of al-Quds aka the Old City today, just try watching some recent “Relaxing Walker” videos. Here is one that walks you through first the New and then the Old City.

If you would rather see the commercial areas of Gaza shortly before the latest conflict got started, go to the channel called Arab Ambience. Of course it looks very different these last two weeks. If you watch the news you already know. 

If you never heard the name “Muristan” before, try the Wiki entry.  Read the first parts of it at least and see the photos.

David Grossman, “Who will we be when we rise from the ashes? Are we capable of understanding that what has occurred here is too immense and too terrible to be viewed through stale paradigms?”