Vignettes From Jerusalem the Golden

by Andrew I. Killgore

Jerusalem Is A Golden Bowl; Full of Scorpions—Attributed to an American Consul early this century.

A young journalist whom I’ve never met asked me over the telephone recently, “Was Mrs. [Bertha Spafford] Vester an anti-Semite?” Mrs. Vester, born into a wealthy Chicago family and resident in Jerusalem from 1880, when she was two years old, until her death in 1971, was the dominant personality of the American Colony Hotel group and perhaps the most famous American in the Middle East for several decades.

How to answer? “You will have to consult her shade, but not according to my definition.” But I do know she resented the fact that a chapter in her book, Our Jerusalem, recounting Israeli brutality against Palestinians, had been deleted without her knowledge when it was published in London. And she found it impossible to understand the malice that led the Israeli Embassy in London to buy up all copies of even the truncated version from the publisher before it could be put on sale.

Do small vignettes from more than 35 years ago when I was U.S. consul in Jerusalem have any relevance today? How many of these dots, as it were, on a piece of paper would constitute even the dimmest portrait?

Yael Dayan

Yael Dayan, daughter of Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan, might make up several dots. For she could be likened to a flaming ember in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. Her life seemed an exciting drama both before and after the appearance of her racy autobiographical novel, New Face in the Mirror.

Yael was Dorothy Parker’s famous candle:

“My candle burns at both ends.
It will not last the night.
But ah my foes and ah my friends,
It gives a wondrous light.”

Rather than dissolute, however, Yael was glamorous, with her mass of red hair and her “French” personal style. In those days she seemed to symbolize an Israel liberated from fear after vanquishing the Arab enemy (in 1956) with ridiculous ease, and with all the old restraints on Jews, and women, gone forever.

This is the same Yael Dayan, now middle-aged and a liberal member of the Knesset, in whose face a hateful Jewish “settler” at Kiryat Arba near Hebron threw a cup of scalding tea because he feared and hated the former symbol. Is this the culmination of the journey of the Israelis, whom the Lord guided with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night on their exodus from Egypt?

International Military Observers

During my sojourn in Jerusalem the military officers came to the Holy City from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Belgium to observe and police the boundaries between Jew and Arab. Assigned to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), they arrived with stars in their eyes for Israel and profound empathy with the plight of the Jews, especially so soon after the Nazi holocaust.

Usually within two months, sometimes sooner, all of them changed as dramatically as the mood had changed in Ireland when Britain executed the leaders of a puny revolt against British rule, captured so unforgettably in William Butler Yeat’s magnificent poem, “Easter 1916.”

To the surprise and concern of these truce supervisors, their personal sympathies shifted from pro-Israel to pro-Arab, and especially pro-Palestinian. Each had seen with his own eyes a totally unexpected phenomenon, Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinians. And the common decency lurking in every human breast demanded sympathy for the Palestinian victims and resentment against the Israeli victimizers.

Important, too, although rarely voiced, was the knowledge that in 1948 the Israelis had assassinated the first U.N. mediator, Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte, because he had made recommendations on Palestinian refugees that the Israelis didn’t like. Since UNTSO officers almost always found Israel at fault in their reports about shooting incidents along the truce lines, in their minds lurked the fear that one of them might meet with an Israeli-engineered “accident.”

In my time, Israelis called the observers and others who sympathized with the Palestinians “pro-Palestinian.” Over the years this now relatively mild condemnation has been replaced, especially in the lexicon of American Zionists, by the epithet “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic.”

The truce observers are still there today, headquartered on Jerusalem’s Jabal Mukabber hill, the former seat of Britain’s High Commissioners to Palestine. Anyone betting that the contemporary observers are getting along any better with the Israelis than did their predecessors almost half a century ago would lose.

Was the original dream of Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism and ultimately of the State of Israel, almost achieved in 1967? His vision was of a Jewish state without Palestinians who, according to Herzl’s diaries, would be eased out of the Holy Land “discreetly.” Had Herzl been there right after the June War of 1967 he would have seen the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Old City of Jerusalem, with the precious-to-Jews Western or Wailing Wall, all in Jewish hands, with only 30,000 to 35,000 Palestinians living in the city.

But 30 years later the “disappearing” Palestinians of Jerusalem are 160,000, doubling in numbers every 14 years. And when the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan began this year, some 90,000 of them prayed at the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in the world for Muslims atop what the Jews call the Temple Mount.

Americans Knew Everything

The Palestinian side of the city was stunned for months after the October 1956 Suez War. No lights. No parties. A deep fear that Israel might seize the Old City and West Bank at any time. The tension could have been cut with a dull knife. My wife Marjorie and I decided to give a cocktail party, not knowing if anyone would come.

Everyone came. Even people we hadn’t invited. Our total annual U.S. government entertainment allowance was spent on that one party. The social season opened up and tension eased. Moral of the story? Palestinians, like most Middle Easterners believed that the Americans knew everything and understood everything. If the U.S. consul in Jerusalem gave a party, it meant everything was okay. At least for a while.

Mrs. Vester figured in the Marilyn-had-a-laugh story. Jerusalem’s American grande dame was at the Long Island, New York home of a wealthy Mrs. Longfellow, who headed a fund-raising group to aid Vester’s Jerusalem charities.

Before dinner, Mrs. Vester found herself talking to a beautiful young woman to whom she had not been introduced. Finally Mrs. Vester said apologetically, “I’m sorry, my dear, but what is your name?” “Marilyn Monroe,” answered the stunning younger woman before breaking into peals of laughter when she realized that despite all of Hollywood’s hype, there still was at least one American who didn’t recognize either her face or name.

When Mrs. Vester told the story on returning to Jerusalem, no one knew why Marilyn Monroe had been present. Perhaps it was while she was married to New York playwright Arthur Miller. But the story demonstrated not just that Hollywood was a distant constellation from Jerusalem, but that many even worldly residents of the holy city regarded it as the center of the world.

Separated Friends

During my time in Jerusalem I was asked frequently on the Old City (Palestinian) side, whether I knew one or another particular Israeli. “We were good friends,” my Palestinian interlocutors would explain. Similarly, on the Jewish side someone might say, “I was a friend of [a named Palestinian]. If you see him, tell him hello for me.”

The district officer for Israeli Jerusalem had a variation. “[A named Palestinian] now lives in Beirut. Would you put a note, unsealed, of course, in your diplomatic pouch from me to him? We were great friends.” This approach was repeated perhaps a dozen times over two years.

Each time I said I’d think about it. Each time I eventually said no. Even the most innocent exception to the strictly-for-business diplomatic pouch rule could have subjected me to trouble with the State Department if the Israeli had revealed my indiscretion.

Probably my Israeli friend—and we really were fond of each other—had no such thought in mind. I shall never know. But poisonous suspicions and fear of blackmail were an integral part of the Jerusalem atmosphere then—and today.

In 1956 in Jerusalem David Horowitz, president of the Bank of Israel, briefed journalists, diplomats and foreign visitors on Israel's economy. By 1960, he said, Israel would be self-sufficient. No more foreign aid would be needed. Francois Dickman, an economist who later became U.S. ambassador to the UAE and to Kuwait, expressed skepticism.

Horowitz looked directly at Dickman and repeated his four years prediction. Now, more than 10 times four years later, the U.S. provides Israel $5.8 billion a year in grants and loan guarantees.

No Safety in Numbers

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and greatest prime minister, was prime minister while I was in Jerusalem. One of his notable public remarks was that Israel would be safe when its (Jewish) population reached four million. Ben-Gurion’s purpose was to encourage aliyah, Jewish immigration to Israel, and to warn of danger to Israel if it fell too far behind the Arabs in the demographic race.

Syria at the time had perhaps five million inhabitants, and it was from Damascus that Saladin in 1187 launched his successful assault on Jerusalem. Today Syria’s population is 15 million. Israel still had not reached four million by the time of Ben-Gurion’s death in 1973. And it’s unlikely even today that Israel has four million permanent Jewish residents. Israel has always looked askance at Syria.

If Ben-Gurion were alive today he would not be happy to read the Population Reference Bureau chart on my office wall which says Israel’s population doubles in 47 years, while Syria’s doubles in 19 years.

The Muslim cemetery on Mamilla Road, the largest in Palestine, lay just across the street from the American Consulate and consul general’s residence in Jewish Jerusalem. Mamilla Road now is named Gershon Agron Road after a former Jewish mayor of Jerusalem. The cemetery now is Liberty Park. The Israelis charge that when Jordan occupied East Jerusalem, Jewish graves were “desecreated.” I sometimes wonder what happened to the 15,000 Muslim graves that were there in my time, but not now.

Resolving the “Jewish Problem”

Israel, the Jewish state envisaged by Herzl, would resolve what in the 19th century was called the “Jewish problem.” As it turned out, the “problem” seems to be solving itself in the United States instead. While Russian Jews come in a steady stream directly to the U.S., an additional 60,000 Israelis also come each year to the U.S., where more than Ben-Gurion’s four million Jews already make their homes. These silent thousands are settling the Arab-Israeli problem peacefully, while the politicians still wrangle.