Venturing Outside the Walls of the Old City

We began our third day in Jerusalem with a visit to the City of David. This statement is bound to cause some confusion: isn’t Jerusalem the City of David, and consequently weren’t we there already? In fact, despite its name, Jerusalem’s Old City is a more recent settlement than the original city – King David’s Jerusalem – which overlapped but did not exactly coincide with it. If you venture just outside the walls of the Old City on its south side, you can pay a few shekels to see the archaeological remains of a portion of David’s city, including Warren’s Shaft, Hezekiah’s tunnel, and the Pool of Siloam (Shiloach in Hebrew).

When Jerusalem was a Canaanite city, Warren’s Shaft provided its inhabitants with secure access during times of siege to water from the nearby Gihon Spring. The shaft is said in the Bible to have been used by David to sneak into Jerusalem and conquer the Canaanites from inside their own city. But apparently this clever feat wasn’t enough to give David title to the shaft. That honor instead went to Charles Warren, the man who rediscovered the shaft in the nineteenth century before going on to head the London Metropolitan Police during Jack the Ripper’s infamous crime spree. Apparently Mr. Warren was better at finding fissures than murderers.

Here is solid archaeological evidence that the ancient Canaanites preferred Coke over Pepsi.

Hezekiah’s tunnel also provided Jerusalem with water from the Gihon Spring when the city was under siege. Surely you remember Hezekiah. He was the thirteenth king of Judah. The Book of Isaiah mentions his tunnel in chapter 22. Why Warren’s Shaft wasn’t good enough for Hezekiah is a mystery to me, but Hezekiah’s own tunnel remains in good working order 2,700 years later. I waded about knee-deep into it, but A. and I decided against going the whole length because we weren’t properly clothed and equipped. Being supporters of the Jewish Labor Committee, we wondered whether the workmen who dug the tunnel had been unionized and whether Hezekiah had paid them the prevailing wage.

Finally, the Pool of Siloam is the place where Hezekiah’s tunnel brings the water. The pool is mentioned in Isaiah 8:6, it is where Solomon was anointed king, and Jesus is said to have done some healing here. (The Gospels do not record whether the beneficiary had health insurance, but apocryphal sources say his HMO refused to cover the treatment because it hadn’t been authorized in advance.) Mark Twain mentions in passing that he and his traveling companions dismounted from their horses and drank from the Pool of Siloam during their 1867 visit to Jerusalem. “The pool,” he wrote, “is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear stream of water runs, that comes from under Jerusalem somewhere, … and reaches this place by way of a tunnel of heavy masonry.” “Oriental women came down [to the pool] in their old Oriental way,” he adds, “and carried off jars of the water on their heads, just as they did three thousand years ago, and just as they will do fifty thousand years hence if any of them are still left on earth.” I can’t comment with any certainty on the accuracy of this prediction; A. and I skipped the pool because we were hot and tired from climbing up and down outdoors in the sun. However, Mark Twain might be surprised to learn how well the women of Jerusalem have accommodated themselves to indoor plumbing.

Leaving the ancient ruins of David’s city behind, A. and I returned to Mount Scopus in time for me to teach my afternoon class. But in the evening, we took a bus back into Jerusalem to have a drink at the King David Hotel. On the way to the hotel, we took a stroll through Mishkenot Sha-ananim (“Peaceful Habitation” in Hebrew), the first Jewish residential quarter established outside the walls of the Old City. British-Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore built the settlement in the 1850s, but Mark Twain doesn’t mention it in The Innocents Abroad. Perhaps it was too new to interest him and his traveling companions. When it was built, people were still too afraid of bandits and wild animals to live outside the walls of the Old City, and many of the people who bought homes in Montefiore’s new neighborhood refused to stay there overnight. In 1866, the year before Mark Twain’s visit, a deadly cholera epidemic swept through the Old City and changed their minds.

The most notable feature of the neighborhood was the windmill that Montefiore built to provide jobs for Jerusalem’s burgeoning Jewish population and produce cheap flour for the city’s poor. During the British Mandate, the British blew off the top of the windmill (the Jews jokingly dubbed it “Operation Don Quixote”), but it has since been restored and turned into a museum.

Eventually, we reached our destination, the luxurious King David Hotel.

The King David is one of the most famous landmarks in Jerusalem. Its main claim to fame is that an armed Jewish underground organization called the Etzel bombed it in 1946, killing ninety-one people and injuring another forty-five. This act of terrorism committed by Jews in their struggle for independence is sometimes compared to Palestinian terrorism today, with the implication that the movements employed the same methods for the same goals and are thus morally equivalent. I do not condone the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel. However, this analogy strikes me as misleading for several reasons. First, it is important to recall that the offices of the British military command in Palestine and the British Criminal Investigation Division occupied an entire wing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Thus, the bombing was primarily aimed at the British government and military in Palestine, not civilians. Second, the Etzel sought to avoid civilian casualties by warning the British in advance of the bombing. In fact, according to Menachem Begin, the Etzel issued not one but three warnings: it made telephone calls to the King David Hotel, the French Consulate, and the Palestine Post. The call to the hotel was received but ignored; the British official who refused to evacuate the building reportedly said, “we don’t take orders from the Jews.” (Although the British denied receiving the warning, a British Member of Parliament introduced new evidence in 1979 that the warning had in fact been received and ignored.) Third, the bombing horrified the rest of the Zionist movement, which swiftly, publicly, and unequivocally condemned it. David Ben-Gurion even went so far as to urge Jews in Palestine to turn in members of the Etzel to the British authorities, and the Haganah actively foiled a subsequent Etzel plan to bomb the British police headquarters in Tel Aviv. In all three of these respects, it seems to me, the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel was quite different from contemporary Palestinian terrorism. In contrast to the Etzel’s operation, Palestinian terrorism has primarily targeted civilians, struck without warning, and is widely lauded rather than condemned among Palestinians. (True, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority issued pro forma condemnations from time to time for public relations purposes, but the involvement of the PA and its officials in terrorist activities during the second intifada has been well documented.)

This post has taken a very serious turn, but I’ll close with a bit of levity. The King David Hotel’s other claim to fame is that it appeared several times in the 1960 film Exodus, which starred Paul Newman as the heroic and dashing Ari Ben Canaan. Newman’s character was one of the good guys, a leader of the Haganah, not a member of the Etzel. Here I am borrowing a cigarette from A., drinking a gin and tonic, and trying my best to emulate Paul Newman in the scene where his character has a drink with the American nurse Kitty Fremont on the balcony of the King David Hotel.

I couldn't help but think that Mark Twain, who so appreciated a good cigar (he once said “If I cannot smoke in heaven, I shall not go”) would have found the King David Hotel much to his liking. Unfortunately for him, it didn't open until 1931.

I can’t close without mentioning a superb little family-run Ethiopian restaurant called Megenana at Jaffa Street 17, not far from the Jaffa Gate to the Old City, where A. and I had dinner after our drinks at the King David. The restaurant is tiny but inexpensive, the couple who run it are very nice, and the food is kosher (despite the restaurant lacking rabbinical certification) and delicious. I highly recommend it.