A Walking Guide to the Heart of a City

In Nazareth an excavation of the ancient city lies underneath the ground. One can walk some of the old streets on Plexiglas platforms or descend into the ruins.

Just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem excavations commence in the Arab town of Silwan, believed now to be the actual ancient city of David, his capital. Under this pretext Arab families are evicted from their homes, expelled from the land.

What is a city but: the gathering together of people in geographic proximity. In order to create: energy, synergy, vital communication created by the closeness of bodies and the layering of history on top of history.

A city has multiple definitions and in this case every street has three different names. So how do you find directions from one place to another?

In the old city of Nablus, the historic soap factories—its primary industry—were reduced to rubble in the siege during the second uprising.

You want to believe a city is real: that Abraham and Jacob and Isaac and others really are buried in the holy building in Hebron, called a mosque by some, synagogue by others.

But if they are buried there at all, they are in a cave beneath, inaccessible. What are revered by the worshipers are only cenotaphs, constructed recently, relatively speaking.

And the conflicts of the past erupt in the present moment.

The museum of tolerance is being built on top of a Muslim graveyard. The graves are disturbed.

City ruptured: Hebron. A cut across the middle of it rendered as “Zone C,” under control of the Israeli military. Sidewalk with a green stripe down it to clarify on which side the Arabs must stay.

For their own safety, it is said.

In Hebron we see two boys, probably around seventeen or eighteen years old, bumping chests. They exchange words in English.

One, dressed in blue pants and a red shirt, says, “I was born in this city. You can’t tell me what to do.” The other, dressed in army fatigues and a flak jacket says, “Get out of here or I’ll beat you up.” He shoves the other boy back. “Go ahead,” says the other. “Do what you want to do. See what happens.”

Later our guide takes us across the line down one of the alleys to show us a house in which a blind Palestinian woman still lived. Her door is bolted from the outside, and she must knock for the soldiers to permit her to exit.

A young Jewish man sees us. He tells the soldiers to arrest our guide. We are across the line in a street reserved for Jews.

“I am lucky you are here,” says the guide. “Usually they throw stones at me.” The soldiers approach, calling our guide’s name.

We cluster around him tightly and move back to the main street. The soldiers try to maneuver their way into our group but we huddle closer. I press against our guide. He puts his arm on my shoulder and we walk on.

While on the side of the school building in Nablus is spray painted: “The University of Hip-Hop.” And “Existence is Resistance.”

What do you have when your historic buildings are leveled and factories destroyed? Nablus emptied out by war. Hip-hop floods the streets, and the children dance a scintillating mixture of breakdancing and dabka.

And Hebron emptied out. By ancient history. When one says, “It’s ancient history,” one usually means something is “irrelevant.” But in Hebron, all the lost children return. Some after millennia or some after only a few decades, but in any case violence is paid with violence and all deaths are used to keep score.

In the fighting of 1948 and later in 1967 most of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is leveled, including the Rabbi Nissan BakSynagogue, which stood over it for years and years.

When the Israeli army fights its way to the Western Wall, its immediate action is to level the Moroccan Quarter that abuts it. They complete the action before the ceasefire is signed. Does one leveling always equal another?

Though still a part of the Occupied Territories according to international law, and not part of the United Nations-recognized State of Israel, over the next ten years the old city is effectively annexed to Israel and is surrounded by new settlements, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank.

How is a city occupied? You can’t tell when you wander the streets of the Muslim Quarter, filled with vendors hawking, worshipers going to and from the mosques, workers, tourists, students.

Jerusalem hovers in space, so strangely removed from itself and its life as a city you can nearly see through it. Though each stone and surface may have its ancient history it does not feel like an actual city existing in the world; it seems instead a representative of itself.

A cipher for a city that really doesn’t exist anymore. Every angle of Jerusalem seems to exclude every other. Rather than being a whole and vibrant unit of human expression it fragments and shatters. Such vision, refracted, broken, splinters the actual place itself.

People came to the Mediterranean shore searching for a lost nation, but how do you put pieces together again unless you embrace the real earth and the people who lived there, the joy of it, the sun love of it?

Or the old city of Jaffa, one of the most ancient cities in the world, disappeared into semiotics, emptied out of its population during the British period, absorbed eventually by the urban sprawl of Tel Aviv, and now turned into a little artists’ village for Israeli artists and craftsmen.

From the Arab neighborhoods to the east where they were relocated, they still watch.

In the hills above Ein Hud, an unrecognized village of those who once lived there hovers.

Ghosts follow the ancient routes of their cities wherever they find themselves, in a strange town, transplanted, dreaming at night of the other strangers who live in the house that was once their house, stir their coffee with spoons that were once the spoons of others.

Some Palestinians keep the keys to their old houses that their parents or grandparents left behind. As did the Jews of Toledo and Cordoba once.

Jerusalem, once dreamed of over an eternity of exile, can be a tiring experience—it is entrapped by all of history—the many narratives of history, the songs of it, the claims of it, its prayers, paintings, poems, its lies.

How can such a city truly live again? A city cannot be “unified” by armies or states, only by the people who live inside it.