Reading Response: April 25

I said this in my last post about Armstrong: Jerusalem (the book) is a maelstrom of historical detail, to the end of illustrating how these details matter to those who contend with each other over the fate, over the meaning of Jerusalem (the city). Yes, those details are important in and of themselves (not to quote Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but yeah, that might apply, too), but my one of my main points of contention with Armstrong is that she seems to miss that these details are precisely the weapons each side uses against the other.

That said (again), let me hit some highlights of chapters 14-18, and the whole book overall.

First, I think Armstrong has really hit on something when she identifies building as a political act. She didn't bring this up until, oh, maybe the Roman period or thereabouts, but the last 1000 years' worth of history have really hammered this point home. As an aside, it's rare that you can say about a city "well, for most of its history this didn't matter, but over the past 1000 years or so, this new thing was important."

Anyway, destruction is obviously a political act. As Norman Schwarzkopf pointed out in 1991, armies are made to "kill people and break things." And in the course of killing people, the things that are often broken are the buildings and urban spaces where the people live. On this topic, Stephen Graham's Cities, War, and Terrorism is a brilliant book. In his Introduction and chapter "Cities as Strategic Sites: Place Annihilation and Urban Geopolitics," Graham points out how for most of history, cities and civilians were not spared from the ravages of war, and instead were the targets of warfare. Only for a brief period of "civilized" warfare did armies try to minimize damage to civilians and cities. For more on the topic, and specific to Israel/Palestine, his chapter in the same book titled "Constructing Urbicide by Bulldozer in the Occupied Territories," is very compelling.

So anyway, armies conquer and break things, particularly the cities that are the targets/objects of conquests. Many times when this happens, buildings are--necessarily--destroyed. When a conquering army destroys the holy places, government offices, and/or walls of a city, it's obviously a political act--the erasure from history (and the city) of any notion of resistance to the conqueror. We can have no idea how many civilizations once existed, because many conquerors obliterated any record of their conquered foes. Similarly, as in Egypt, often the successes and achievements of past regimes are erased from history (in ancient Egypt, pharaohs would sometimes chisel from monuments the cartouches of predecessors, and put their own names instead).

But the notion that construction, rather than destruction, is a political act--well, not that that's novel among social scientists, but it's worth pointing out in a history, and it's of paramount importance in Israel/Palestine, and especially in Jerusalem. Constructing something is not only an establishment of a group's presence in the city, but it's also a claiming of space. And particularly where space is at a premium--within a walled city, proximate to holy sites--claiming space is not just a political act, it is an aggressively political act.

I wish that Armstrong would've taken a few pages out of each chapter to apply some social theory. She applies (or tries to apply) psychological concepts, and uses a lot of religious/theological theory, but some social theory would've been helpful. Most particularly, especially in the right historical frame (say, the last 300 years), she could've taken some time to examine Western notions of property ownership, and/or Eurocentric ideas of territory and territoriality. Because a lot of what she's talking about is ground that has been trod by social scientists (particularly, geographers) for a long time now: the notion that property must be improved to be rightfully owned. This is prominent in Locke, but it traces back to Grotius (late 16th - early 17th century philosopher). In short, if you don't make land more productive, you essentially lose your right to it. This isn't just a quaint historical notion: it survives in present-day American residential zoning (e.g., if you put a fence up on the wrong side of your property line, on your neighbor's property, and your neighbor doesn't contest this, after a set amount of time--usually something like seven or eight years--you can legally claim that property is yours).

This idea is how colonial powers justified their appropriations of land and the incorporation of territory into their empires. As Rashid Khalidi has pointed out, the Zionist settlers imagined Ottoman Palestine as "a land with no people for a people with no land." How did this come to be? Well, yes, as Armstrong has pointed out, the decline of the Ottoman empire ran concomitant with a decline in the economy and population of Jerusalem. But more importantly, the indigenous people in Ottoman Palestine were largely pastoralists, moving their livestock over large areas. What sedentary agriculture there was, was largely olive tree groves--which didn't require active maintenance or irrigation. So, when Zionist settlers arrived, they saw a land that was "sparsely populated" and not being utilized to its capacity. They formed their kibbutzim, and "made the desert bloom." By investing time and capital in the land, through irrigation systems and sedentarized agriculture (complete with permanent housing and infrastructure), the immigrants were thus improving the land, giving them claim to it that superseded any Arab claims. After all, the reasoning went, if the Arabs really owned and valued the land, they would have improved it long ago. They're just squatters, scraping a living off of land they don't own (and therefore don't have the right to improve, either).

This is an important bit of history and theory that certainly applies. And I think it makes a lot clearer the politicization of construction in the region. Building a new structure--be it a religious site or a marketplace or an apartment complex--is not just political because it establishes "facts on the ground," but because it establishes (and/or reinforces) a claim to that land that abrogates previous claims.

Next point about Armstrong, particularly in 14-18. She really pins the blame on the Crusaders. She even goes so far--in the Israel chapter, I think, or maybe Zion?--to say that the Crusades "broke" relations between the three great monotheisms. I don't dispute that the Crusades did a lot of long-term damage; a lot of very deep wounds were cut during this period. But during the Ottoman period--particularly during Suleiman's rule--relations were pretty good. Yes, there were undercurrents of hostility, and lingering grudges, but if things had kept up the way they were going during Suleiman's reign, perhaps those hostilities and grudges would've smoothed themselves out and healed over time.

And honestly, the British really bolluxed things up during the Mandate. Particularly in the wake of WWII, they were unwilling to say 'no' to the Israeli proto-state. And the bombing of the King David Hotel seemed to just give the British another reason to wash their hands of the Mandate, instead of doing something to solve the growing dispute. And then, particularly after 1967, the US took Britain's place as the power that contributed to the problem, rather than to the solution (for example, compare the US response to the Suez Crisis with the US response to the Six Days War, or the Yom Kippur War).

So yeah, the Crusades were a brutal period and established some dysfunctional relations between the three faiths. But to lay everything at the feet of the Crusades is not only too simple, but it absolves modern powers from their roles in creating and exacerbating the dispute.

This post is turning into a book, so I'll be brief with my two remaining points.

Third, the little people get left out of Armstrong's history. This is pretty much a necessity in any broad history of ancient times and even antiquity--accounts of quotidian life by the commoners are unlikely to survive hundreds or thousands of years. Instead, we get lists of rulers, conquerors, and priests. I understand this. But records from the Crusade on are pretty good--especially so from the Arab Islamic Empire, and the literally dozens of famous social scientists and travelers who chronicled the world (e.g., Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, etc.). This is one thing the Living Jerusalem project "gets" that Armstrong (as well as historians like Bernard Lewis) misses: people live in these histories. Armstrong goes to great lengths telling us about how Jews, Christians, and Muslims contended over sites like the Holy Sepulcher or the "Upper Room," but she simplifies the opinions of all these groups into a monolithic stance. Surely the common folk who lived in the city didn't all think the same way and hold the same opinions about these disputes--disputes that often involved mainly the wealthy & powerful.

Not only are the opinions of these unheard lives important, but their lives themselves are important. The intro video for the Living Jerusalem project tells more about the history and impact of the Israel/Palestine dispute in the story of the two bakers, than Armstrong does in Chapters 17 & 18.

Which brings me to my fourth (and final, for this post) point: Armstrong seems to have run out of gas by Chapter 16. The 20th century has seen more "history," more bloodshed and conflict, more danger and potential ruin, than previous centuries. The complexities of politics and dispute in the 20th century are deeper and more tightly imbricated than those of previous periods, because they carry the baggage of these periods, as well as contemporary issues. Armstrong does a lot of short-handing and eliding of very important events. For example, the 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan War gets a couple sentences, despite it provoking the OPEC boycott--which itself broke the world economy and prompted a restructuring that we're still feeling today--and damn near causing World War III. And let's not forget that the 1973 war pushed Israel to the brink of destruction, and there was the real threat that the IDF would nuke Cairo and/or Amman as a desperation measure. All that absolutely is germane to discussions of Jerusalem today--if only because military solutions are off the table, simply because of the threat Israel's military (and nuclear weapons) pose to Arab countries.

I also think Armstrong missed out on discussing more implications and fallout of the Camp David Accords, and though she was writing too early to really see the ramp-up of settlement activity in the West Bank during the Oslo period, she did touch on settlements, and this again would've been a great opportunity for her to employ some social theory and discuss the potential problems on the wind.

Like Armstrong, I started this post strong and verbose, and then ran out of gas and short-handed my last few points. I guess it's a hazard of writing about Jerusalem, eh?