Daily Pioneer , New Delhi, India
Sept 13 2009

Faith and hope in Jerusalem

Kanchan Gupta

It must have been a strange, if not bemusing, sight for the faithful
shrouded in ultra-orthodox gloomy black, the tourists in khaki cargo
shorts and fluorescent tees clicking furiously with their spanking new
digital cameras, and the Israeli soldiers armed with menacing Uzis
ready to shoot from the hip at the slightest hint of trouble and ask
questions later, as I approached the Wailing Wall, the Hakotel
Hama’aravi, the holiest site for Jews, in the walled city of Old
Jerusalem. But if the faithful were taken aback by a kurta-pajama clad
Indian, a knitted kippah firmly in place, approaching the Western
Wall, or what remains of the Second Temple built by Herod the Great,
they did not bat an eyelid. Nor did the soldiers take note of this
departure from the routine although remote-controlled cameras,
monitored from an unseen chamber near the Temple Mount, must have
swiftly zeroed in on me, recording every move, every gesture. My
`jihadi’ beard would not have gone un-noticed. The tourists may have
been amused, but I wouldn’t know how many bothered to record it to
show relatives and friends back home.

In photographs the Wailing Wall looks towering; in real life it is
awesome. The surface of the gigantic stone blocks has been smoothened
by the passage of time. The repeated caressing of history’s gnarled
relic, the touch of millions of palms of worshippers seeking
forgiveness over hundreds of years, has imparted a dull gloss to the
sand stone. Blades of wild grass peek hesitantly from the cracks and
crevices on the wall stuffed with tightly folded slips of
paper. Visitors scrawl prayers, pen their wishes or seek penance on
scraps of paper and then stuff them into the cracks and
crevices. Miraculously, they don’t fall out. Faith and ritual have
common denominators across seas and lands.

An elderly rabbi gently guides me to the Wailing Wall, explains the
traditional wish-making ritual, and asks, `What would you like to wish
for?’ What could I wish for? Peace in the world? Naah, I would rather
let President Barack Hussein Obama deal with that. Peace with
Pakistan? My former editor Vinod Mehta is already on the job. Peace in
the Holy Land? Not a bad idea, but why waste a wish on something
that’s not going to come true? So, there I stood below the Temple
Mount, my pocket notebook open on my palm, my pen uncapped,
desperately trying to think of something which, if it were to come
true, would fetch joy and happiness to others. It would be easy to ask
for something for myself ‘ may the bank lose my car loan papers ‘ but
that would be a belittling and not a humbling experience. After a
while I settled on wishing Iran would never get around to actually
putting together a nuclear bomb as that would be catastrophic not only
for Judea but
also Samara and the Arab lands beyond. The energy of a million suns
has the power to annihilate all living beings but it lacks the
intelligence to distinguish an Israeli from a Palestinian, an Arab
from a Jew, a Sunni from a Shia. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be
thrilled by the thought of pressing the trigger and re-enacting the
Holocaust, but there’s no reason to allow him the macabre pleasure of
mass slaughter.

Having scribbled my wish I tore the page from my pocket notebook,
folded and placed it in a crevice, gingerly pushing it deep
inside. It’s unlikely my wish will come true ‘ faith cannot triumph
over failed diplomacy and bogus sanctions; it can at best heal inner
wounds and foster hope till reality hits you in the face. This doesn’t
upset me a great deal: I have been hit in the face once too often to
let my hopes soar too high. But just in case Iran abandons the path to
destruction I can always claim Mr Obama alone didn’t have a role to
play. Which, of course, won’t happen. Iran will go ahead and make the
Bomb and scare the daylights out of everybody, including us. It’s bad
enough that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal; it will be infinitely
worse to have two nuclear-armed neighbours, both irrevocably wedded to
radical Islam albeit of varying shades and with different goals. We
will have no other option but to accept the reality. But will Israel
accept it too? Indeed, will Israel wait for Iran to acquire the Bomb?
Or will it launch a pre-emptive strike, similar to that on Iraq’s
Osirak nuclear reactor in the summer of 1971?

Later that night, I return to Old Jerusalem and enter the walled city
through the Jaffa Gate. The dimly lit cobbled streets wear a desolate
look, the raucous clamour of the day has given way to a certain
stillness. I turn into the Armenian quarter where music wafts from a
cafe. The Armenian quarter is the smallest of the four quarters in Old
Jerusalem, which is divided among Jews, Christians, Muslims and
Armenians in neat, well-demarcated blocks. The Armenian families which
now reside there trace their ancestry to the original pilgrims who
came to the ancient city. Most of the Armenians have migrated out of
Jerusalem and Israel over the years; strangely, their population has
declined since 1967 when East Jerusalem was liberated from Jordanian
occupation by Israeli troops, but that could be because migration has
become easier since the 1970s. Many of the old Armenian families are
believed to have gone back to Armenia after the Soviet Union’s
collapse in a sort of reverse migration, retracing the roots of their
ancestors. Apocryphal stories are told of how shells that fell in the
Armenian quarter during the Six-Day War did not explode, thus sparing
this part of the walled city of destruction and death. At one end of
the lane the Armenian flag flutters atop a pole, rising above leaning
apartments.

Ravenously hungry, I order a shoarma-stuffed falafal with Turkish
coffee. The falafal tastes heavenly, the shoarma melts in the mouth,
the coffee scalds my tongue. The shisha arrives and I puff away late
into the night, unmindful of the gathering gloom and the darkness that
descends as lights are switched off in homes. In the cafe, some of us
linger on, unwilling to leave so soon. The flaxen haired young woman
at the counter, jabbering away in Armenian to a friend on her cell
phone, slides another CD into the music system. That’s her way of
letting us know she was in no hurry to pack up for the night. More
coffee is ordered, freshly lit shisha is handed around, the dying
embers of some are stoked to life.

It’s a starlit summer night. From this vantage point Jerusalem looks
at peace with itself and the world. But it’s a deceptive peace. In
Gaza, the Hamas plots its next move. In West Bank, Abu Mazen worries
whether Fatah will stand by him. As for Israelis, they live on faith
and hope. And an unwavering determination to overcome all odds, no
matter how high they are stacked, against them.

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