I don't like Jerusalem. For all its historical photo opportunities, it is an unpleasant city filled with more than its share of unpleasant people. Israeli soldiers loiter on every street corner, their machine guns slung lewdly across their chests. Fat European tourists waddle along the narrow streets to the mantra of their polyester-clad thighs rubbing together. Tacky shops sell Palestinian pottery decorated with menorahs or T- shirts bearing the slogan: "Don't worry Israel, America is behind you." Hassidic Jews scurry down the Dar el Wad, eyes down, always in a hurry-busy men with a purpose in life, which seems to involve knocking over anyone who gets in their way. Settlers from Brooklyn with their twangy American accents and shiny guns swagger through the Arab quarter, winding their way to a courtyard in the Sufi area to insert prayers between the stones of what they call the "little wailing wall"-and after they have gone the local Arab children come and pick them out.
The word "settler," implying as it does the making do with something that exists, is an odd description. These people have not come to make concessions -they have come to acquire. More land, more territory, more of the God-given right to relocate halfway across the world. Does God not balk at prayers made through the use of force? I suppose not-the settlers seem to be doing all right so far, occupying 80 per cent of what used to be Arab Jerusalem.
We are all guilty of a little cultural appropriation of the city. When I was growing up in Scotland, I joined an after-school club called the Scripture Union. Every member was given a stapled pamphlet with various shoddily printed tales from the Bible. Each week we attended, we were given a sticker to place beside the appropriate story. I remember the taste of the gum on my tongue as I licked picture after picture-the good Samaritan, the washing of Jesus's feet, the last supper. Somehow, I felt as if the pamphlet was like a book of tokens-entitling me to access to the real thing. A lifelong membership to the Jerusalem theme park.
My only real connection with the city is that my husband is a Palestinian whose family had lived in Jerusalem continuously for six centuries until they left in 1948. His father was raised in the Arab college founded by his grandfather, a building now part of the UN compound. They always thought they would go back when things quietened down, but were never allowed to. I am here for a few days visiting friends and doing some research for a book I am writing. I also plan to visit some of the relatives who still remain in the old city.
I walk through the Damascus gate and turn left, past the Arab women selling herbs, past the Via Dolorosa and the cotton souq until I come to a tiny plaque on a street corner bearing the family name-the name my children's teachers seem unable to pronounce. My husband could quite rightly feel a sense of belonging to this place. But perhaps not-the sign is almost obliterated with red paint, and when I later get lost and ask a shopkeeper where I can find the street, he shrugs.
Jerusalem is like a child's security blanket that everyone wants a piece of. The Arabs are still managing to hold on to a dirty little corner, but every day another room, another building, another corner is prised from their grasp, laundered, disinfected and repaired with tax-deductible US dollars, becoming part of the sterile modern fabric of Israel.
The Arab quarter is a slum. Beautiful 12th century Mamluk buildings are defaced with graffiti, their details obliterated with the black paint the Israelis used to cover the slogans written by the Palestinians during the intifada. To remove it would destroy the delicate fa?ade-so the Palestinian restorers leave it alone, hoping someone will eventually invent a method of removing it safely.
Rubbish lies in heaps, spilling into gutters, like an animal spraying its territory with a foul scent to keep intruders at bay. A friend of my husband offers to show me around some of the restoration projects undertaken by Al-Quds University. He leads me through the hammam (bath house) and into an ancient travellers' inn beyond. I ask him about the garbage and he tells me that the Arabs pay the same taxes as the Israelis but still do not get their rubbish cleared. Picking it up themselves seems a concept unheard of. In any case the Arabs have other things on their minds. It seems strange to think that this deprived, albeit most holy place, faces the same problems as other inner city areas-poverty, unemployment and drugs. A couple of girls were fighting over a bicycle and one called the other an Arabic insult I had not heard before-hashisheh-a dope smoker.
The difficulties the Arab population faces are well documented if not well advertised. Building permits for Arab projects are hard to come by and out of the 39,000 homes built on expropriated Palestinian land since 1967 not one has been built for the Arabs. Perhaps it is in the Israelis' interest to make the Palestinians look like shiftless peasants happy to live in their own squalor. Poverty is not photogenic. Unless the poor are on television, preferably starving, sympathy is not the first emotion that attaches to them.
My guide leaves me and I walk down through the souqs to the Bab al-Silsila, braving the sullen stares or cheeky taunts of the Arab shopkeepers. Eventually I find the house I have come to visit sandwiched between two Hebrew seminaries, one of which was family property until the Israelis took it ten years ago. I ring the bell and wait while an old, stooped man drags himself down the tortuous stone steps. Two other faces, their skin like blistered naan bread, appear behind him. When I introduce myself the blank, milky look in their eyes clears and they draw me inside joyfully. They kiss me, pat me and explain my genealogy to the old man who has already forgotten who I am and insists on speaking to me in French. Three octogenarians, their spines hunched, who have not left the old city for decades.
The flat is beautiful but basic. Numerous small rooms open onto a courtyard. The sitting room is furnished like a doctor's waiting room, without the magazines. Plastic chairs hug the walls at orderly intervals with a melamine table in the centre and a free-standing electric radiator. Apart from a few faded family photographs there are no ornaments to soften the whitewashed walls. I drink sweet tea from little glasses and show my own collection of photographs; all the great-nephews and nieces they may never see. The plumbing is rudimentary and the bathroom a minimalist dream-the shower no more than a little drain in the corner. However, there are not many places where you can stand in your shower and look at the Wailing Wall-the window opens right above it.
On the way back to my hotel a young Arab throws a stone that hits me smartly on the back of the neck. I turn to challenge him then realise that, with his aim, my face could be the next target, so I walk away quickly, contenting myself with a Glaswegian curse which I hope he does not mistake for Hebrew.
I am taken to the airport in a car kindly provided for me by a friend, driven by a Palestinian from east Jerusalem. In retrospect a taxi would have been easier. We are stopped three times-the first time at an army checkpoint, the second at the entrance to the airport. Here my luggage is searched and tagged but not before a minibus full of Palestinians are similarly detained. We drive on to the departure gate. The moment I step from the car the security guards pick me up. "Do you know this man?" they ask. I explain that he is just a driver who has been asked to bring me to the airport. I hear them asking him in Arabic where my husband is, who I am, where did he collect me from. Meanwhile I am taken aside and questioned: "Why do your children have Muslim names? Why are you married to a Muslim? Why does he allow you to travel alone? Who have you seen in Israel? Have you spoken to any Palestinians? Could you write down the names of every Palestinian you have spoken to? Why have you seen so many men while you have been here? Why did you visit your husband's family? Can you write down the dates that you saw them?"
I am then taken to another part of the airport and my luggage is emptied into plastic boxes. Everything is taken away for X-ray. The woman next to me, an old Palestinian in traditional dress, is also having her suitcases searched. I watch her painstakingly unload numerous old lemonade bottles now full of homemade pickles, plastic bags of cheese, yoghurt pots full of olives, all soon to be irradiated. Yet another guard, the fourth since entering the airport, asks me why I am travelling with three cameras. Then she asks me to give a demonstration of how each one works and takes them away.
Eventually everything is returned to me and I pack my belongings while the security guard watches. I have gone beyond the point of embarrassment so I do not care about the two pairs of bloodstained knickers I ram in beside the box of Tampax. When I finish, she asks me to follow her. Scenes of body searches involving rubber gloves race through my head, but she only leads me to the check-in desk-right to the top of the queue, then at immigration she leaves me. Have a nice trip she calls. By this point I feel it safe to show enough insolence not to answer her.
I walk into the duty free shop and wander around trying to find something to spend my last shekels on. I am looking at mud from the Dead Sea wondering if I should purchase a bit of the homeland to take back with me. An Israeli shop assistant comes up and begins to tell me what a good product this is. I do not answer. She tries again. Do you speak English she asks. Yes, I say, without lifting my eyes from the bar of soap I am examining, I speak English but I'd just rather not speak to you-if that's all right.
