Shabbat in Jerusalem

I got word from Nablus that as it was their weekend I should stay in Jerusalem until Sunday; it would be rude to have a member of staff come and welcome me on their day off. Fair play, I thought; to be honest, I was glad. It would be good to have another couple of days to see this remarkable and infamous city. Trouble is, they take the Shabbat very seriously here. To quote an old phrase, they don’t fucking roll on Shabbat. The city is, for all intents and purposes, shut. Ah well; time to rest my legs and think for a while.

This, however, can be quite troublesome here in Jerusalem: no doubt this city is drenched in history and the site of numerous important historical events; but at the same time there is an almost Disney-like quality to certain aspects of it – crucially, many of the ‘sacred’ places are either probable forgeries or known replicas. I would not question the significance of the Al-Aqsa mosque and its Western Wall, or the timeless feel of the Old City, or even the pilgrimage people take along the Via Dolorosa, but it is difficult not to be cynical about monuments like the Garden Tomb (an alternative site to where Jesus may have been buried) or the Stone of Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The latter is meant to be the stone on which Jesus’ body was anointed before his burial, but in fact it's replica laid in 1810, and the evidence supporting the former’s claim to being Jesus’ burial site has been debunked - the ancient tombs found at the speculated site were shown to date to the 5^th century BCE – and the myth is most likely maintained as it is almost the only part of Jerusalem which Protestants have a claim to.

One of the primary causes of the trouble here in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories was observed by Robert M. Pirsig when he noted that:

[T]he doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

It is worth recalling at this point that the conflict in Palestine boils down to a dispute over real-estate, albeit over real-estate which is of religious significance, and by parties which are defined along religious lines. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 promised an independent state for the Jewish people in Palestine, and much of the justification for the placing of the future state of Israel in this region was because the vast majority of places mentioned in Jewish scripture could be found in what was Palestine. I do not want to tread the perilous waters of discussing the merits or shortcomings of the Balfour Declaration, but the significance placed on the veracity of the claims to the Holy Land are surely cheapened and sullied by the placing of suspicious Holy relics on supposedly sacred ground. To watch people touch their heads to a holy stone we know not to be genuine and to watch tourists listen in awe to a guide tell them how Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice at a place we know he can’t have done is to see people willingly fall for fallacies that do nothing but undermine the struggles and violence that have beset this land over the last century.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I asked which way the exit was from the Garden Tombs, the receptionist told me: “through the gift shop”.