A City Divided: Jerusalem 1949-1967

Following the War of Independence, Israelis faced economic hardship, Arab aggression, and life in a divided capital — nevertheless the western sections of the city thrived and developed.

On 30 June 1967, the first Friday after the official reunification of Jerusalem, Muslim and Christian Arabs — whom, respectively, Jordan had banned from the Dome of the Rock and the Aksa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Selpulchre — were permitted to worship freely in the Old City for the first time in 19 years and mingle with their coreligionists from the West Bank.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews had been converging on the Western Wall in the biggest pilgrimage since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.

Gone, writes historian Sir Martin Gilbert, were the STOP! DANGER! FRONTIER AHEAD! notices. 

Gone, too, were the 15-foot walls, barbed wire fencing, and mines that had blocked off through streets.

It's now been 47 years since the city was reunited — and memories of life during the 19 years when the city was divided, between the end of the War of Independence in 1949 and the 1967 Six Day War, seem to have faded.

The armistice between Israel and Jordan, signed on April 3, 1949, did not connote a political end to the conflict or an agreement about borders. This tentativeness left the city in limbo. Still, it didn't stop people from trying to carve out a sense of normalcy.  

Elections for the first Knesset had taken place in January 1949, with the parliament's opening session held on February 14 in the Jewish Agency building on King George Street. Soon thereafter the Knesset moved a few blocks further north along King George to Froumine House, a former bank.

Municipal elections were also held in 1949. The city's first mayor was Shlomo Zalman Shragai, a journalist with the Hebrew newspaper Hatsofeh, mouthpiece of the Orthodox Zionist Mizrachi Party. 

As a result of the fighting, Jerusalem had hemorrhaged population. The number of Jews dropped to 69,000 with many people leaving for opportunities in Tel Aviv. Fewer than 1,000 Christians remained and virtually no Muslims.

As the epicenter of Zionism, it was only fitting that, in August 1949, the remains of Binyamin Ze'ev (Theodor) Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, were reinterred at the Jerusalem military cemetery that now bears his name. Herzl, who died in 1904 at age 44, had been buried in Vienna.  

For ordinary Jerusalemites life in the divided city was both thrilling and hardscrabble.

Just before ushering in the Sabbath, on February 11, 1949, Moshe Sachs dashed off a letter to his parents in the States. He thanked them "loads!" for their latest package — canned milk, chicken, baby food, and bars of soap.

Sachs, an ordained Conservative rabbi, had come to Jerusalem after serving in the U.S. Army during WWII and wound up in the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish underground headed by Jewish Agency leader and Israel’s first premier David Ben-Gurion.

Though he worked for the semi-governmental Jewish Agency, Sachs’ salary didn't cover such "luxuries" as a stove, refrigerator, and washing machine. His letters home show how appreciative he was of the generosity of his parents who, bit-by-bit, shipped the appliances from the United States.

In a letter dated March 29, 1949 he wrote: "Last Shabbat, we took a long walk through Julian's Way [today King David Street]. It was the first time I'd been right in front of the King David hotel and the Jerusalem YMCA. The area had been secured in the fighting immediately after May 15, but civilians had been kept out until recent weeks. Now the area is again humming — with immigrants and families that are spreading out."

Water supplies were erratic. By being thrifty and drawing water from a cistern under the porch, the Sachs family had enough to meet most of its household and drinking needs.

"The electricity question was resolved only three weeks after we moved in [May 14, 1949]," he writes. Moshe found an electrician to wire his house and finally prevailed on the electric company to link them to the main line. Electricity costs were so dear that the family used kerosene for cooking and heating. People would line up to buy kerosene which was sold out of the back of a truck. There was one thing where they didn't stint on electricity: laundering the diapers in the washing machine.

But there was no money for furniture so the Sachs family ate off boxes and suitcases — and yet they regularly entertained.

Few people had telephones. When back in the US, Moshe's father had a heart attack he tried to keep up to date by relying on ham radio operators.

"Most people have no money for a telephone. A phone is a real luxury in Jerusalem; we do not have one," he wrote his folks. "Phones are scarce in Israel, so to keep down the demand there is a neat system which requires a non-refundable payment of a fair amount of money to have one… if you do scrape together the money for a phone, your monthly bill is relatively high."

There were not many stay-at-home moms in Jerusalem in those days. Women worked to help make ends meet though even then many folks were in the red. Workers could never count on getting paid on time. Luckily, corner grocery stores and butchers shops operated on credit for months on end.

Yet the atmosphere was far from glum.

Here, as conveyed in Sir Martin Gilbert's Jerusalem in the 20^th Century, is how Benjamin Ferencz, a Hungarian-born American lawyer and a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, found Jerusalem in 1950:

"Everyone seemed so full of hope and enthusiasm… that a new era was dawning for them. And the children were all so beautiful and the source of so much pride to all and not merely to the parents. The Jews I knew back home were all lawyers, doctors or businessmen, and here I saw workers in the streets, cleaning and digging ditches, and Jews from Yemen and other faraway places that had no connection to Brooklyn or the Bronx."

Gilbert also recounts the experiences of Mary Clawson, a Californian whose husband was an adviser to the Israeli government. She evokes the ambiance of the city in a 1953 letter home:

"Almost everyone looked poor; I did not see a single woman wearing hose, and the men wore no neckties; I must say I think the lack of hose and neckties were both excellent ideas. There seemed to be an astounding number of good bookstores around.

"We have no ration cards yet. So no coffee, eggs, meat, margarine, sugar, soap, etc. The neighbors have been unbelievably helpful and friendly and given or loaned us precious rationed things to eke out our meals, though I have been eating a huge amount of plentiful bread. I have never met so many people I like in so brief a time."

Food was indeed a problem for the entire country.

About half the city's food supply needed to be trucked over rudimentary roads up to the capital.

In January 1954, having now resided in Jerusalem for seven months, Mary Clawson wrote home describing how hard it was to make ends meet:

"There is no money for a car; the food budget needs constant watching and scrimping, and no dining out; there is not enough money for clothes; there is money for very few gifts; few, if any face creams, and hand lotions; no smoking or drinking and not much money for charity. There is no money… for household furniture and repairs; no items for upkeep of a garden, if you like to garden; much less is there any money left for the hobbies many Americans especially at this [her husband's] job level, consider in the category of essentials."

If anything, life in the Arab sector of divided Jerusalem was even harsher.

Other than demolishing the Jewish Quarter and dozens of synagogues in the Old City, desecrating Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, and formally annexing east Jerusalem in December 1948, the Hashemite Kingdom made little constructive investment in the city. 

On July 27, 1953, King Hussein announced that Jerusalem would be his "alternative capital" though he remained in Amman most of the time.

Israelis responded to Arab rejectionism and intimidation by carrying on with their lives and by building the area of Jerusalem they did control.

Unable to use its historic Mount Scopus campus because it was encircled by Jordanian-controlled territory, the church-owned Terra Sancta compound in central Jerusalem became the main Hebrew University site, with classes also held at dozens of locations around the city until, in 1958, the new Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram was inaugurated.

Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus was similarly off limits, so a new hospital was constructed on the hills overlooking Ein Kerem and opened in 1961. The hospital became a reality thanks to the generosity of thousands of American Jewish "Hadassah ladies" who helped raise the funds for its construction.

Terra Sancta

Large-scale manufacturing never took root in Jerusalem though small industry did find a niche in such outlying neighborhoods as Givat Shaul. The Binyanei Ha'uma (People’s Congress) convention center, begun in 1950, was fully completed in 1963. And in 1958, Heichal Shlomo was completed to be the seat of the two chief rabbis. Ben-Yehuda Street became the heart of the business district, and nearby Mahane Yehuda continued to thrive as the city’s fresh produce market.

Tourism became an important element in the city's economy and a number of new hotels were constructed.

Some tourists passed through west Jerusalem on their way to the Arab side. In 1958, Rev. John Keppel, his wife Mildred and their two children Daniel and Mark visited the Holy Land. Rev. Keppel was on his way to his new congregation in Indianapolis after three years of missionary work for the Disciples of Christ in Falkirk Scotland.

The family flew to Lod Airport outside Tel Aviv via Athens. Dan was about 10 at the time. The Keppels would have crossed the Mandelbaum Gate checkpoint into the Jordanian side. From there they toured the Old City, the River Jordan, and the Dead Sea before heading to visit an orphanage in Jordanian-held Bethlehem.

Dan, now a financial consultant in New Jersey, showed me some of the slides his parents took of the visit. There is a forlorn photograph of the Western Wall and a striking interior shot of the Temple Mount or the Dome of the Rock.

Back on the Jewish side of town, another journalist, Gershom Agron, the founder of the English-language Palestine Post — later the Jerusalem Post — became mayor in 1955. Agron was a Labor Party stalwart and the newspaper was its English-language mouthpiece. Even as mayor, Agron insisted on reviewing the Post's daily editorial before the newspaper went to press, according to Jerusalem Post veteran staffer Alexander Zveilli. When Agron died in office in 1959 another laborite, Mordechai Ish-Shalom, led the city until 1965.

All the while, the menace of Arab snipers and infiltrators was never far away.

Jerusalem was surrounded on the north, east, and south by enemy territory — with a narrow makeshift corridor to the west that connected the city to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain. 

Refugee camps known as ma'abarot housed Jews from Morocco, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen who had come to Israel with practically nothing. In Jerusalem, the camps were often situated just within the Israeli side of the armistice line, along Hebron Road in the outlying Talpiot neighborhood and other places. These areas usually took the brunt of random Arab violence.

Most often, the snipers took up positions at Arab Abu Tor and fired at Jewish Abu Tor and on the Jordanian-held Old City walls, aiming at Musrara. Arabs in Jabel Mukaber also directed their fire at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, situated east of Talpiot on the southern edge of Jerusalem’s armistice line and overlooking Bethlehem. In 1956, for instance, five people attending an archeological conference at Ramat Rachel, were killed by Arab marksmen. Among the killed was a dentist, Rudolph Rudberg, who'd reached Palestine in 1938 from Germany and had become president of the Israel Dental Association.

Arab infiltrators all too often crossed from the Jordanian-held territories to rape or kill. Many victims were children or teenagers.

And still, the Jews kept building. The Van Leer Institute, a combination of think tank and foundation was established in 1959. Nearby, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities opened up shop in 1961. The Beit Ha'am cultural center went up and served as the improvised venue for the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

A foreign ministry building never got built and instead its offices were housed — and remained so until relatively recently — in a warren of prefabricated one-story huts near the entrance of town. But the Israel Museum — home of the Shrine of the Book which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls — was established in 1965 thanks to a grant by the Anglo-Jewish Rothschild family. Reform Judaism built a branch of Hebrew Union College overlooking the inaccessible Old City. And the Knesset, finally, convened in its own building at Givat Ram on August 30, 1966.

The divided city lacked the vibrancy of today's united Jerusalem. There were few restaurants and not much to do at night, but there were sidewalk cafes. Mercifully, the orchestra came to town; so did the theatre. In fact, the cornerstone for the Jerusalem Theater was laid in 1964. Plans to construct an official residence for the president of Israel went forward.

The legendary Teddy Kollek, who had been Labor Party prime minister David Ben-Gurion's right-hand man became mayor in 1965. His City Hall office was just 150 yards from the armistice line.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, Kollek's mayoralty saw the reunification of the city. His tenure would span 28 years and he would help build many of the amenities that we Jerusalemites nowadays take for granted in a city that's history-rich but remains cash-poor.

Kollek had a knack for raising money from abroad. He created the Jerusalem Foundation and identified donors who were as generous as they were wealthy to fund parks, museums, and promenades in the new united Jerusalem.  

The 1967 Six Day War in Jerusalem lasted from Monday morning  June 5, 1967 to Wednesday afternoon. On June 28, 1967 the Knesset amended the law of 1950, which proclaimed Jerusalem as Israel's capital, to reflect the newly defined municipal boundaries. Nevertheless, from that Wednesday afternoon when the IDF recaptured the Old City, there have been those who have begrudged the Jews their unified Jerusalem.

During the recent 2014 summer disturbances, a key target of Arab rioters was the light rail station and line in the Shu'afat Arab neighborhood in north Jerusalem. Though Arab residents of Shu'afat and Beit Hanina have benefited greatly from the state-of-the-art light rail service, to the rioters the tracks and stations symbolized the unity of the city — and, moreover, the possibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence under Jewish sovereignty.

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I Remember When...

Rivka Reiner, 70 

The Jerusalem I grew up in was a small town. The running joke when I was in college was that the best thing about Jerusalem was the bus to Tel Aviv.

There were few outlying neighborhoods. Everything was pretty concentrated. Bus services were provided by the now-defunct Hamekasher company which went out of business in 1967. 

My Jerusalem was an intimate place. My father was a rabbinical scholar, a dean at a Talmudic academy near where we lived. Mother was a housewife. We were two girls and three boys. Life was simple. No one told us not to speak with strangers. Strangers could be counted on to help. People lived modestly in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. There really wasn't much choice.

I attended the Horev Girls School on Strauss Street. When the weather was bad we'd take a bus. But that was an extravagance. I remember we always had the same driver. He actually got to know us by name.

Naturally, my parents could not afford a car. Very few people owned automobiles.

We had no telephone. In the event of an emergency one of our neighbors who was a physician — actually it was Prof. Ehrenfeld who taught at the medical school — had a telephone. My parents were on a waiting list for a phone and only got one after I was married at age 24.

The hardest economic times were during the 1950s. Though even in the 1960s life had few frills. We ate plenty of vegetables but seldom had any fruit. My father once went on a fundraising trip to London. When he came home he brought an apple which was served on the plane. We were thrilled and the entire family shared it.

Chocolate was also rare.

I remember that when my youngest brother was born, my parents got a washing machine which meant my mother didn't have to wash the diapers by hand. Of course, it was very expensive. I also remember that much earlier we got a refrigerator that was Israeli made.

Mom baked in an aluminum wonder pot – a si’ir peh-leh in Hebrew – on the stove top. We didn't have an oven.

When I was in high school there was a choice of five movie theatres — I liked the Smadar and the nearby café on the same block.

There were lots of cafes — and they were not expensive. Different cafes for different types. Atara on Ben Yehuda was for the movers and shakers. 

My father never went to any café, firstly because he was strictly Orthodox and it seemed frivolous and also because it just wasn't his lifestyle.

Of course, we had no television. There wasn't any.

I began working as a secretary at the medical school in Ein Kerem where the new Hadassah Hospital campus was located. To get there, I'd take a bus from near my house to a hitchhiking post and wait for someone driving to the campus. People would routinely stop and give others a lift which for some reason was called a 'tramp'. Most people got to work by tramp.

 This piece was first published in Israel My Glory

Promise Betrayed - Jerusalem Under British Rule 1917 - 1948

Ordinary residents benefited from the veneer of civility that Britain brought to the Holy City even as London betrayed its solemn promise to establish a national home for the Jews.

In 1917, during World War I, the British captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks and governed it from December 1917 until May 1948 when, depleted and detested by Jews and Arabs alike, they withdrew.

British rule altered the city — aesthetically, politically, and culturally.

In a little over three decades, the British shaped the architecture of the city, permanently influenced its hue — ordering that all building exteriors be uniformly finished in Jerusalem stone, which ranges from gentle pink to off-white — introduced radio, advanced public health and sanitation, established a currency, and issued postage stamps.

Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem 

Since Mecca and Medina outrank Jerusalem in Islam, the city had been treated as a backwater by the Ottomans. As Christians, however, the British venerated it, also bestowing it with a veneer of modernity and Western civilization.

Had you observed Jerusalem evolve from Ottoman to British rule, perhaps the first thing you'd have noticed was the increase in population. Hardship during World War I had driven out many of the city 45,000 Jews. By 1922 the trend began to reverse. Of the 62,578 souls living in Jerusalem, the Jewish population had inched back up to 33,971. There were 14,699 Christians and 13,413 Muslims, along with 495 others.

Jerusalem also began to develop a skyline. The Hebrew University was officially opened on Mount Scopus, then north of the city, in 1925. The centrally located YMCA (planned by Empire State Building architect Arthur Louis Harmon) opened in 1935. It melded Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and neo-Moorish styles. Across the street, on what was then Julian's Way, stood the King David Hotel — with its European exterior and Levantine interior — which had opened in 1931. The Arab-built Palace Hotel, another architectural gem, built in 1929 was several blocks away.

Hebrew University Inauguration Ceremony,  April 1925

The General Post Office and the Anglo-Palestine Bank went up side-by-side on Jaffa Street in the late 1930s.The already established outdoor Mahane Yehuda Market further west on Jaffa Street had expanded. So, too, the ultra-Orthodox Me'ah She'arim district, within comfortable Sabbath walking distance of the Old City. Various other neighborhoods began dotting the city's hillsides. Romema, near the entrance of town, was founded in 1921. That same year Rehavia was founded and became home to the city's professional and academic classes. On a southern hill, the garden suburb of Arnona came into being in 1931.

Other small neighborhoods catering to various populations sprang up in the vicinity of the Train Station whose single track, built by French contractors for the Ottomans, linked the city to the Mediterranean coast and beyond. The British improved both the track and the station house. Nearby, sprang up the mixed Christian and Muslim neighborhood of Bak'a and "colonies" for Greek and Armenian Christians.

In 1920, on land expropriated from the northern Jewish suburb of Atarot, the British even opened an airfield.

Materially, life was getting better day by day.

By 1928, electricity had become readily available. The city had a reservoir — though lacked an infrastructure for efficient water distribution. The British also made headway in solving that perennial problem and, by 1935, had drawn a pipeline that delivered drinking water up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. Many people still continued to use rooftop cisterns to capture rainwater.

And the population continued to increase so that by 1931 there were 51,222 Jews, 19,894 Muslims and 19,335 Christians.

Modern media, too, came to Jerusalem. The Palestine Broadcasting Service went on air in 1936. The English-language Palestine Post appeared in 1931. Haaretz, printed in Hebrew since 1918, was brought up to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv daily. The father of modern Hebrew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had launched the fledgling Hebrew press back in Ottoman days.

The radio studios were in Jerusalem, while the transmitter was in Ramallah just north of the city. The service broadcast in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The Jews grumbled that less than 30 percent of air time was devoted to Hebrew programming — and that included classical music. Radio certainly caught on. By 1946 there were 60,000 radio set licenses issued — 80 percent purchased by Jews.

In the political realm, try as they might, the British proved to be serial fumblers.  

A few weeks before Jerusalem fell to them, on November 2, 1917, Her Majesty's Government issued the Balfour Declaration promising to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The post-WWI international powers adopted this promise at the 1920 San Remo conference. And in 1922, the League of Nations codified the Balfour Declaration, expressly granting Britain the "Palestine Mandate" so that they could create "a national homeland for the Jews."

As soon as they arrived in Jerusalem, however, the British got wobbly. Their default policy stance was to placate the Arabs who viscerally opposed creating a national Jewish homeland anywhere in the Middle East.

On September 16, 1922, the British divided Mandatory Palestine into two administrative areas with 77 percent earmarked for the Arabs. The space for a Jewish national home became dramatically smaller. It would not be until 1946 that the bigger eastern chunk of territory officially become known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan

With the appointment of Ronald Storrs as Jerusalem's military governor in 1917, the die had been cast. Thoroughly unsympathetic to the Zionist cause, he made sure that the city's Jewish majority was not reflected in the distribution of municipal power.

Storrs organized a municipal council and appointed an equal number of representatives from the various communities. Later, the British arranged elections for a 12-member council evenly divided between Christians, Muslims and Jews based on a dozen constituencies. The Jewish majority notwithstanding, and even though Jews comprised most of the taxpayers, the British always appointed a Muslim mayor, and two deputy mayors, one Jewish and one Christian.

As Jerusalem's Jewish population got bigger, British efforts to appease Arab rage invariably fell short.

During Passover 1920, the city's Arabs rioted, killing five Jews, wounding hundreds, and looting property. This was one in a seemingly relentless series of "intifadas" that has now stretched nearly 100 years.

Anything could set off the Arabs. Typically, it was an unfounded rumor that the Jews planned to destroy the Dome of the Rock or the Aksa Mosque, Muslim holy places atop the Temple Mount.

Things went from bad to worse. In 1921, the British appointed Hajj Amin al Husseini to be the mufti, or spiritual leader, of the Palestinian Arab Muslims. He would remain at the epicenter of anti-Zionist incitement until he fled to Hitler's Berlin during World War II.

With the mufti leading the way, Arab violence became a toxic reality of life in Jerusalem. In 1925 the spark was a general strike. In 1926, it was a protest against the French presence in Syria. In 1928, the installation of a flimsy partition at the Western Wall to separate Orthodox Jewish men and women during the Yom Kippur prayer service was the catalyst. In August 1929, some of the most gruesome and sadistic Arab rioting enveloped Hebron, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. The spark? Jews had brought chairs to the Western Wall for use by elderly and infirm worshippers during Yom Kippur services. A week of countrywide rioting left 116 dead.

Sharing environs with the Arabs became too dangerous. Jewish shop owners began abandoning the Old City.

In 1933, in a variation on a theme, the Arabs rioted, this time targeting the British as much as the Jews. In 1936, the mufti instigated yet more rioting – this time under the auspices of the Arab Higher Committee.

In an attempt to mollify the Arabs, the British took one measure after another that backtracked on the Balfour Declaration. The British government’s Peel Commission of 1936 recommended dividing the remaining western Palestine into two states. But the Arabs rejected any territorial compromise with the Jews — even though they would get the bulk of the land.

At some point, most likely in 1937, you could no longer think of the Arab violence as rioting. Organized gangs bombed public transport and shot at vehicles along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road.

And still, Jerusalem retained its Jewish majority.

Finally, in May 1939, only months before World War II would engulf Europe's Jews, Britain officially reneged on the Balfour Declaration. London issued a so-called White Paper closing the gates of Palestine to Jews and barring land purchases by Jews.

After that, British authorities dropped even the pretense that Jewish interests were of any concern. They kept the doors to Palestine locked solid throughout the Holocaust leaving Europe's Jews no haven. Still, the two main Zionist camps led by David Ben-Gurion and Ze'ev Jabotinsky supported Britain's war effort. Only in February 1944, with the Allied victory assured, did the Irgun under Menachem Begin kickoff its campaign to throw the British out of Palestine with an attack on the immigration offices in Jerusalem. The small Freedom Fighters for Israel (the Stern Group) had fought the British throughout WWII.

In 1944, meanwhile, Jerusalem's Muslim mayor died in office but — under Arab pressure — the British did not allow his Jewish deputy to succeed him, even though Jews were a 61 percent majority.

The Second World War ended in May 1945. But Jerusalem found no peace. The followers of Jabotinsky embarked on a guerilla campaign to throw the British out of Palestine. 

Finally, in November 1947, the UN decided that with the exhausted British quitting the Jews and Arabs should divide eastern Palestine into two states. The Arabs rejected the compromise; the Jews reluctantly accepted.

Open warfare between Arab marauders and Jewish self-defense forces became a feature of daily life. Jerusalem neighborhoods were divided by barbed wire to protect residents from attack. In February 1948, the Palestine Post building was bombed and in April 1948, 77 Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital members were murdered when a convoy to Mount Scopus was attacked.

Food, sometimes water, too, became scarce. Convoys bringing supplies up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain were attacked by Arab guerrillas.

Jerusalem went into the War of Independence already partly divided — the Old City, for all practical purposes, was in Arab hands.

Jewish life behind the Old City walls had become untenable and the last remaining Jews — mostly Orthodox elderly people — were evacuated on May 27, 1948, on the eve of the city's fall to the Arabs.

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Hilda Salomon Ferder Goldberg, 83 

Where: Her living room, Jerusalem. 

My father was assigned to be the American Express bureau chief in Palestine and my parents arrived, from England, in 1929 — just in time for the Arab riots.

Mummy told me that in those days she kept a pot of boiling oil on the stovetop. She'd been advised to pour the oil down on any mob that tried to storm the building.

The American Express offices were situated just inside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City. My father always carried a gun and kept another in his desk drawer.

He had Jewish and Arab employees.

The bookkeeper was a man named Aaron Bloch. He went on to marry a girl named Dora. When she was already a grandmother, she was murdered by Idi Amin's soldiers in Uganda in retaliation for Israel’s Entebbe rescue on July 4, 1976.

My parents lived on King George Street, not far from where the Great Synagogue now stands.

It was me, my parents, and my brother and sister.

I was born in 1931 in Palestine at Sharei Tzedek Hospital which was then on Jaffa Road.

I attended an English-language girls school – Evelina De Rothschild. In many ways it was a typical British girl's school. We wore uniforms and hats. And we also had Jewish religious studies. My parents sent me there because the language of instruction was English and they could speak to the teachers and principal in English. The school was then in Musrara near the Old City.

It was the first school for girls in Jerusalem and was paid for by the British Jewish banker Lionel Nathan de Rothschild. A few years ago, when I moved back to Israel, we had a school reunion party and many of the "old girls" turned out.

Outside of class, we spoke to one another in Hebrew but inside only in English.

The school had a rule: because of Arab-Jewish tensions, the girls could not participate in extracurricular activities outside the school compound.

It was an exciting time. As my father was the head of American Express, he mixed with the business and political elite of Jerusalem including the [first high commissioner for Palestine] Sir Herbert Samuel.

Even we children enjoyed visits to Government House — on the Hill of Evil Counsel.

There was a store frequented by ex-pats called Spinneys near the Russian Compound. I remember what a treat it was to go there. My parents would buy kippers [smoked fish] that had been delivered from London.

Every Friday, my mother made steak and kidney pie – kosher, of course!

There were three movie houses in Jerusalem: the Edison, Eden, and Zion. As a special treat, in 1937 I think, my mother took me out of school and we went to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  — in Technicolor — which had arrived in Palestine. 

Every day an Arab milkman delivered our order on a donkey.

There were not many cars in Jerusalem but daddy had a Dodge and an Arab driver. When daddy went through the Arab areas, the driver wore a ṭarbūsh [Turkish hat] and otherwise no hat at all.

Because of his position, we also had a telephone. I remember the number to this day: 5360.

Water shortages affected everyone. My mother had to recycle bath water to wash the floors. We had electricity though there were often outages.

Then, in 1948, daddy was re-assigned to Cairo. We remained there until 1950 when it became too dangerous and we moved back to England.

This article first appeared in Israel My Glory

Please cite both this blog and Israel My Glory magazine if quoted. 

Letter to an American Friend -- What You Need to Understand About the 2015 Israeli Elections --Two Days After

The New York Times seems to be having a hissy fit because of the Netanyahu victory. Tom Friedman, the Times editorial, Roger Cohen, Jodi Rudoren subtle tendentious coverage…

Yawn. One article I saw claimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "frank admission that he would never agree to a Palestinian state" justified the PLO's continuing push to have the international community unilaterally hand them everything they want -- without having to negotiate with Israel.

What Netanyahu actually said was: "I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel."

That's not a repudiation of his Bar-Ilan speech. It is simply facing the facts on the ground. It is verbalizing the obvious. (Albeit for partisan purposes to win an election.)

The Palestinians refused to reach a deal with Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. They are not about to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. They are not about to de-militarize. They are not about to give up on the "right of return."

And, you know something, Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog could have done no better with the Palestinians than Barak or Olmert.

What about the actual election results?

Let's go over them. The number in parenthesis reflects seats in the current Knesset.

Netanyahu/Likud 30 (18)

Bennett/Jewish Home Party 8 (13)

Israel Beiteinu/ Lieberman 6 (12)

TOTAL HAWKS: 44 (43) +1

------------------------------

Lapid/Yesh Atid 11 (19)

Kahlon/Kulunu  10 (0)

TOTAL CENTER: 21 (19) -2

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Herzog /Labor24 (15+6=21)

Galon/Meretz 4 (6)

TOTAL DOVES: 28 (27) +1

---------------------------------

Deri/Shas 7  (11)

Litzman/UTJ 7  (7)

TOTAL ULTRA ORTHODOX HAREDIM: 14 (18) -4

 --------------------------------------------

TOTAL ARABS: 14 (4+4+3=11) +3

(they ran as one party though in practice they will re-divide)

That changes everything…

Substantively, the elections change almost nothing. The ideological camps control roughly the same number of seats.

When will the new government be formed?

With any luck after Passover. More probably around Shavuot.

So why are the NYTimes and the White House in mourning?

 Here too, all but one major viewspaper (the one owned by Sheldon Adelson) and all the nightly views shows (sadly, there are no news programs anymore) are also in shock and with depressed anchors pulling their hair out. Even the adorable Yonit Levi

(if every dove looked like her, mamamia…)

Anyway, seeing them so downtrodden raised my spirits.  Except for Yonit, I mean.

Yes, but what about the peace process?

 One of Netanyahu's many weaknesses is that he is not skillful at giving the Americans and Europeans the sense of illusion of momentum they crave. He does not know how to deal with the supercilious Barack Obama.  But neither does Harry Reid.

As far as pulling back to the 1949 Armistice Lines – give or take – which is what the Obama administration is pushing for – that's not going to happen.

Why?

 Because territory and strategic depth matter STUPID. They matter a great deal in today's Middle East. A Palestinian state within walking distance of Tel Aviv makes the Jewish state too vulnerable. It means a couple of mortars can shut down our only airport. Hamas is already ensconced in Gaza. The Islamic State in nipping at Syria. God knows what will happen in Jordan. The PLO is weak and corrupt. How long they could hold Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) if the IDF did not control the Jordan Valley is anyone's guess. And the PLO itself is not just thuggish but is itself a danger to us.

Obama says he will reevaluate the peace process with Israel.

You mean like Gerald Ford did when he was president? That comes with the territory. No Israeli leader can cave to pressure that would have us pullback to the 1949 lines (a/k/a/ the 1967 boundaries).

It can't be that there is no difference between Netanyahu and Herzog.

Oh, there are plenty of differences. But on those you care about, the so-called peace process and on Iran's quest for nukes the two are on the same page. Though you'd not know it from the tone and spin.

Herzog would have let Livni spin with Mahmoud Abbas – there would have been lots of meetings and plenty of momentum. But when push comes to shove our minimum needs are well beyond anything the Palestinians can meet. Maybe that will change one day, who knows.

Right now, the Israeli center knows that the Palestinians remain committed to Israel's destruction. They are engaged in a zero sum game. The difference between Hamas and the PLO is purely over tactics

So you must be thrilled that Netanyahu won.

 Look, in Israel politics is a non-Zero sum game. I would have wanted to clip Netanyahu's wings and force him to form a broad national unity government.

I voted for Moshe Kahlon so I didn't have to vote for either Livni/Herzog or Netanyahu.

But now Netanyahu will be even more insufferable and arrogant. He is great at getting elected – he's a terrible manager of daily affairs.

You are painting a picture of a fragmented society

Yeah, but in this age of new media and hyper pluralism no more so than the US.

The prime minister did not win anything close to a majority – not in the popular vote and not in number of Knesset seats (30 out of 120). In Jerusalem, Likud captured 24 percent of the vote. In Tel Aviv, to take it from a different angle, Labor got just 34 percent.

Herzog says he will stay and lead the opposition.

That's unfortunate – that he won't consider forming a national unity government – but neither will Netanyahu. Maybe after Passover they may reconsider. Unlikely. As a result, we face the "international community," the Palestinian enemy, the Iranian enemy (I'll stop with the enemies) without any chance of building a national consensus. Not to mention this means badly needed electoral reform is still off the agenda. And Obama can continue to demonize Bibi (I wish he'd leave that to me).

Any good news?

Yes. Avigdor Lieberman has lost much of his influence. Eli Yishai and the unpleasant chauvinists he ran with did not get into the Knesset.

But lots of Arabs did…   

Three more than last time. I have no problem with that. That's representative government. The Arabs will accomplish little, though, if they reject coalition-building with the Zionist parties. If they poison the atmosphere than all the social issues we could make common cause on will be pushed aside… Also, the Arabs are divided between Islamists and nationalists and there are plenty of personal animosities just like among the Jews….

Let me get this straight – you're NOT worried about Obama?

I am very worried about Obama. For the most part, Washington protected Jerusalem from the tyrannical majority not just in the General Assembly but in the Security Council too. 
Obama will now probably threaten to let us hang alone. He will encourage the Palestinians to use the UN against us.

If Netanyahu can start being clever, he can out maneuver Obama – not with crass appeals to the Republicans but with smart statecraft and diplomacy.

Anything else?

Yeah. Wish us luck. It's gonna be a bumpy ride until 2016 and bumpier still if Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton replace Obama in the White House.

Stay in touch.

Mr. Netanyahu Goes to Washington

What do you make of the retired generals who say Benjamin Netanyahu is jeopardizing relations with Washington?

I say a plague on both your houses.

This group of dovish retired Israel military and intelligence officers organized under the rubric of Commanders for Israel's Security has denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for damaging relations with the United States.

And no doubt he and his ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer have. Either out of ineptitude or hubris they've managed to take the spotlight off Iran and shine it brightly (and unflatteringly) on Netanyahu. And they've managed to give wobbly Jewish liberals yet another excuse to take sides against Israel.

The ex-officers said that Netanyahu's address to Congress on Tuesday, against Obama administration efforts to cut a nuclear deal with Iran, would do nothing to slow down Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

Well, that's pretty obvious. A president can enter into an agreement of this kind without the advise and consent of Congress.

So you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with IDF armored corps ex-general, Amnon Reshef, founder of Commanders for Israel's Security?

I just happen to agree with him on this one point. 

By the way, I'm curious about who handles his public relations and who stands behind the people who are arranging his publicity.

Anyway, in November, Reshef told the Yediot Aharanot viewspaper that he was "absolutely" convinced it was possible to establish a Palestinian state that posed no threat to Israeli security -- with the support of the Arab countries  -- if Netanyahu were willing to be "courageous."

That's a pretty delusional claim. 

A pullback practically to the 1949 Armistice Lines? Now? When the countries surrounding us are wracked by instability? When the Palestinian polity is divided between Hamas and the PLO? Or "worse" and "worser." When every previous Israeli pullout led to a poorer security outcome than the status quo? When the "moderate" PLO remains committed to the principle that Jews have no legitimate place anywhere in the region…

Amiram Levin, a former Mossad officer who was also Netanyahu's commander in an IDF special forces unit, said that the mullahs in Iran were glad to see a rift develop between the Obama administration and Jerusalem. "Iran wants Netanyahu's speech. They understand that it will weaken Israel's bipartisan bond with the United States."

I certainly don't disagree. Though since the generals knew their statement would not persuade Netanyahu to scuttle the Washington trip – aren't they also feeding into Iran's desires?

"It's hard for me to speak out against Bibi," Levin said using Netanyahu's nickname. "I was his commander. I recruited him. I taught him how to navigate and I'm telling him now: 'Bibi, you've made an error in navigation. The objective ought to be Tehran, not Washington,'" the Hebrew-language tabloid Ma'ariv reported.

Look, history shows that many of those who know Bibi up close and personal, who worked for him, have, on the whole come to despise him.

In the March 17 elections, Bibi is running against Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett both of whom were once close aides. He's not known to engender loyalty.

Another ex-general, Giora Rom said Jerusalem should not be "fighting" President Barack Obama. "There are more suitable ways to deal with the Iranian agreement being worked on rather than going to Congress like this," the WPost reported.

That horse has left the barn.

It's basically too late.

No American administration-- and certainly not Obama's-- is going to go to war against Iran in order to stop them from developing an atom bomb. See North Korea as a precedent. 

The tragedy of the George W. Bush administration is that by going to war with Iraq it not only unleashed the Pandora's Box of sectarian Muslim-on-Muslim bloodletting, de-stabilized the Arab nation-state system, set the stage for the so-called Arab Spring, but that the Iraq war secured Iran as a regional powerbroker.

Netanyahu should apologize to Congress for egging Bush on in those days though he was not in office and Ehud Olmert was. The unintended consequences of the Iraq war have proved to be disastrous all around.

And if Netanyahu really believed Israel faced an immediate, existential danger – why talk, talk, talk? I don't recall Menachem Begin blustering before ordering the air-force to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor. Obviously, every Israeli premier since Rabin (in his second term) will have to answer to history for letting Iran get this far.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon defended Netanyahu's decision to go ahead with the speech. "There is a huge gap between how we see things and how the Americans see them. We could capitulate and grovel, but this is a historic moment – and if we don't act correctly, history will judge us badly."

I like Ya'alon but I doubt his political instincts. I think he meant "how Obama's administration sees them."

Wait. Are you saying, though, that 180 Israeli generals, ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet are wrong to be "dovish" as you so dismissively label them?

As prime minister's former Israeli generals have been willing to take risks for peace. Yitzhak Rabin signed the catastrophic 1993 Oslo Accords which brought Yasser Arafat out of Tunisian exile and established him as head of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Ariel Sharon uprooted 21 Israeli settlements and pulled IDF forces out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. [mea culpa, I supported what he did at the time.] And the feckless Ehud Barak offered to turn over the Golan Heights to Syria when he was prime minister in 1999.

So much for the prescience of ex-generals.