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JULIAN BEINART: Anyway, I'd better
abbreviate all this stuff that I want to cover today.
The next three classes are going to cover
cases of very complex, but very direct,
relationships between social and spatial structure.
There is a literature largely from the left side
of the market on these issues.
I don't have time to go through much of this here.
You should read the required reading
for this class, Kevin Lynch's piece--
chapter on social and spatial structure relationships.
On the left, I would assume the argument--
that space is an active agent, that it involves conflict,
that it's political--
and this is an argument that is articulated very well
by Henri Lefebvre in the translation of his writing
into English.
David Harvey's first book, Social Justice In The City,
argues that, under capitalism, investment will never
stream towards the poorer sections of the society,
because capitalism has so many circuits of investment.
An object of capitalist investment
is always maximizing profit.
There are less attractive writings
by Manuel Castells in his pre-Berkeley stage, the book,
The Urban Question, and so on, and so on.
There's David Gordon's writing about the origins
of American suburbia as being the result of labor
friction in the central business area,
and the bosses wanting to move as far away from the workers as
possible.
And there are many histories of this kind.
Castells' piece, The Wild City, which
argues that suburbia is a form of advanced capitalist
investment in which you have to create markets
for prolific domestic goods, and suburbia
is an attractive avenue for this kind of market.
His writing is called The Wild City.
He claims the American city wild in the sense
that it obeys the consequences of market action
in a very obvious kind of way.
It's not hidden or transformed.
There's an enormous amount of writing.
There's this writing and from the center and the right.
In Sunday's New York Times, there's
a piece called "Suburban Disequilibrium."
I don't know if anybody looks at these things.
It simply says that suburbs are an equal, something
that one would presume to know.
And the reason suburbs are unequal are given,
and they haven't changed--
and not much has changed.
She cites examples of suburbs close together
in Los Angeles, where one house sells for $68 million.
And a few miles away, there's a suburb
of Mexican-American workers who can barely
afford to buy their house.
In teaching this material, I found over the years
that the material is very much stretched to large ideas
about economic science and social policy.
There's very little discussion of the meaning of place.
Donald Appleyard has written about that and some others--
what place means, what space means to people, and so on.
So I've decided to follow a different route
in dealing with this.
I've established a notion called "bipolarity"
and chosen cases where the conflict between various groups
in the city is very explicit and under different conditions.
So we will examine Johannesburg from its origins in 1876,
I think, to today, following a path of explicit racial policy.
South Africa invented or formalized racial policy
to an extent that no other country and no other state
in the world ever has.
So we should look at Johannesburg and what
this space of Johannesburg looks like as a result
of the enforcement of absolute inequities between White
and Black.
We should look at the colonial city.
We look at Delhi and New Delhi.
We look at the border between Mexico and the United States
and look at the polarity between country and city
in the development of Havana.
Today's class is really dealing with the mother
of all social complexities, and that's Jerusalem.
I want to do a case study on Jerusalem.
And just for those of you who haven't read the required
reading for today--
which is a long piece which I wrote after months of work,
and I'm so sad that you haven't read it--
I'll go through the very--
let me just explain what I've handed out to you.
After this, the map of the history
of Jerusalem, a simplified history, on the next page
is a drawing.
It's a drawing on a napkin by the head of the planning
section of MOPIC, the Palestinian organization
after the Oslo Accords, which I worked with for a while.
This was the depiction of the future of Jerusalem--
as one metropolitan area with the Jewish sect on the West,
and the Palestinian sect on the right,
and the historic center in the middle.
Below that is a letter, which is obvious,
pointing out the stupidity of some
of the writing on this issue.
So what I'm going to do is try to take you
through a history, which starts off
as a history, for a long time, a history
of religious consequence, and transforms much later
and in recent times, certainly in this century,
into a geopolitical conflict.
And we end up with the status quo.
Let's follow this map very briefly.
The origins of Jerusalem are, again, political.
For Palestinians, it talks about the Jebusites,
and the Canaanites, and the origins of the city
prior to 1,000 BC, which is the date
that the Davidian City, the City of David, argues its beginning.
David captures Jerusalem, according to this.
This is an Israeli map.
According to the Israeli history,
David bought the threshing fields on the Temple Mount
from the Jebusites for 15 shekels, the equivalent
amount of money.
And in order to unify the spread out of Jewish tribes,
he built the first--
he was a lover, and a poet, and a general,
and according to strict Hebrew law,
was not able to build a temple.
So his son, Solomon, was the author of the first temple.
I'll show you a drawing, by Corbusier
of the tribal environment, which the Jews, and most people,
established at the time.
And the drawing shows the temple as the first physical presence
in a city.
Seeing that the religious city for a long time
just depended on a religious infrastructure,
it's clear that the first temple--
this temple exists for about 500 years, during which time
the Middle East undergoes sieges and invasions.
The most significant invasion is by Nebuchadnezzar
in the 6th Century.
This has enormous consequences historically,
and I tend to exaggerate some of them.
Nebuchadnezzar came from the world's greatest city
at the time, Babylon, the most advanced city of all.
Instead of killing the Jews, he took them back with him
as prisoners and allowed the Jews to establish themselves
in Babylon in a relatively free manner.
Why he did that, which was very contrary
to social international behavior at the time, I don't know.
What happened was significant for the Jews.
Not having a temple, not having priests,
you must understand the organization
of the social structure around the temple.
The temple was run by priests.
There was no democracy in religion.
You took what the priests gave you,
and the priests were monitors of the Holy of the Holies.
If you look at the plans putated for the first temple,
you will see that structure.
The Jews didn't have temples.
They either had to give up their religion
or convert to some other pagan religion.
Having been the first monoethicists of all, having--
monotheism was founded in Jerusalem.
Nobody quite knows how.
But the idea that many gods were dysfunctional,
and that the single God, an invisible single God,
was the proper course for religious faith.
So the Jews prayed in houses and in schools--
wherever they could.
This type substitution was an extraordinary idea.
In the history of the Church, I found a reference
to saying that this was the beginning
of the idea of the church free of the rule
of plutocratic priests.
People could indulge in a critical examination
of their faith together as a group.
In fact, the conflict towards the end
of the Jewish reign in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus
was very much a conflict between the priests
of the Second Temple and the Pharisees,
who were advocating--
beginning to advocate the democratic religion
in the form of the synagogue.
So the synagogue emerges in primitive form
in the exile of a Jewish group from the temple.
There's a second phenomenon which
occurs during this period.
In the Judeo-Christian Bible, there
are seven chapters devoted to Ezekiel.
Who was Ezekiel?
What role did he play in the--
you should know these things.
You all are Christians, or Muslims,
or any other form of religion.
You know nothing about your own religion?
Maybe you're all pagans, which would be refreshing, I suppose.
AUDIENCE: He was a Catholic?
JULIAN BEINART: Well, Ezekiel had a dream.
He was a prophet.
He had a dream that God and he encountered each other,
and he had instructions to devise a new temple.
There are six chapters in your Bible on Ezekiel's dimensions
for this new temple.
Imagine dreaming of a temple when you're in exile
and designing it in your mind as a text.
Anyway, strange things happen.
Ezekiel's temple, as I'll show you in the slides,
has been redrawn and reimagined from these dimensions
over time.
The Jews return, and the third significance
of the stay in Babylon, the Jewish Talmud,
the Book of Laws, has two versions,
the Palestinian version--
at least the Jerusalem version and the Babylonian version.
The Babylonian version is considered
to be the preferred version.
So the Jews in exile established a culture,
which they brought back to Jerusalem having been freed,
and Israel read the Bible to the people for the first time.
And according to the text, they wept.
So the beginning of the idea that religion
is a democratic phenomenon is my explanation
for the problem of Jesus.
I've a rather eccentric version of the story.
What happened is we jump 500 years,
and Herod goes and rebuilds the temple.
He builds an enormous temple-- bigger than before.
The priests, again, are in control.
They control power.
They control the artifact of religion.
They control property.
They control everything in the city.
Along comes a Jew, a radical Jew--
has another vision of the world.
Jesus doesn't threaten the Romans very much.
The Romans are used to dealing with whatever in the empire,
with infidels.
They just lock them up or cut their heads off--
very explicit rules.
[INAUDIBLE] in a rather difficult situation.
The priests are more threatened by Jesus than other Romans.
The priests, therefore, connive with the Romans
to execute Jesus.
The notion of execution of your son
occurs in the Judeo-Christian Bible before, and although it
wasn't legal, the idea of passing your son
on as a gift, the use of blood.
22,000 oxen were killed in the dedication
of the Temple of Solomon.
The whole idea of giving something to God as a gift--
if you were poor, you brought a chicken to the temple
to the priest.
If you were wealthy, you brought a cow, an ox.
If you were very wealthy, good Lord knows,
you donated your son.
The story of Abraham and Isaac is that same version
of that gift giving.
The supreme gift is the gift of your son.
And the Jesus story is archetypally
the story of God donating his son, again,
for the improvement of the world.
Christianity is based on many mythical stories, which
emanated from the history of Jerusalem,
and is the second monotheistic religion to emerge out
of the city.
Muhammad is born in 570 BC.
He fights his battles in Mecca and Medina,
spreads the idea of Islam as the third great monotheistic
religion through the Arabian Peninsula,
and soon afterwards, Jerusalem is invaded
by the first Arab group.
Significantly, the Christians had chosen
a site for the great church.
Constantine's mother, Helena, from Istanbul
or Constantinople, drifted down to Jerusalem,
and he's supposed to have selected the site where
Jesus was killed.
On the basis of that information,
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built
and is still in existence today, having been destroyed
seven times and rebuilt.
The Arabs arrive in Jerusalem.
They're the newcomers.
They asked the Christian bishop about sites
for their own mosque.
The Temple Mount, which had been the site of the Jewish temple,
had been raised by the Romans, and there was nothing left.
For 500 years, the Temple Mount was
a rubbish dump of old parts of buildings and so on.
The Christians wanted nothing to do with it.
In fact, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was usually
under the Roman city, entered from The Cardo on the West,
at least on the East, was closed.
And you now enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
only from the South.
On the East now, there's the best candy store
in Jerusalem on The Cardo.
So although the Temple Mount, which is only two--
to use their phrase--
two-arrow lengths, bow lengths, away
from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
the Islamic penetrators thought that the mythological origins
of the use of the Temple Mount were sufficient for them
to follow the Jewish tradition of the destroyed temple.
So they rebuilt the Temple Mount in about 100 years
after Mohammad's birth and built the two buildings
which are still there today--
The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.
In my writing, I go through the detailed history
of the idea of resilience, how under these occupations
each religion plays around with the idea of permanence.
The Christians in the Holy Sepulcher
never really agree on the fundamentals
of the Christian faith.
Whilst they may agree on the fundamentals,
they don't agree on its application.
So 70% of the Holy Sepulcher is still under Greek Christian.
The poor African Ethiopian Christians live on the roof
and are only allowed to enter the major tabernacle
by a small staircase.
As one of the writers writes, "They're
all divided by faith," or something of this kind.
So you have a notion of the three major religions having,
in the case of the Christians, an artifact which
houses divided aspects of the religion.
There are fires.
They are people killed.
There are all kinds of disjunctions
between these groups, but Christianity survives.
On the Islamic front, you have the church,
the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa mosque, which survive
to this day unblemished.
In 1099, the Crusaders, under the pressure
from the popes of Europe, attempt
to restore Christianity.
Instead of dismant-- they are absolutely
ruthless to the degree that they kill everybody in their sight.
They kill Muslims and Jews.
And in the blood of their boots, they
walk to the Holy Sepulcher and pray.
There's always this kind of interesting biblical thing,
which I focus on also, that the interpretation of God
is always ambiguous.
God is always punishing people for doing the wrong things,
but he's also forgiving, if you come to terms with him--
or her, depending on what you believe.
So the Crusaders behave in this apparently bifocal way.
They destroy everybody whom they see in their sight violently,
and at the same time, they go and sing hymns in their church.
There may be parallels in contemporary violence as well.
I don't know if it's a born-in instinct in humankind,
that you modify your behavior in two distinct ways
according to your belief system.
The Jews have lost two temples.
They now are in exile.
They take with them books.
That's the only property they have.
There's writers-- Herschel, the American Jewish liberal
theological rabbi, Mitchell [INAUDIBLE] did his PhD
at MIT--
write about the idea of the Jewish book
as the significant property of memory.
They argue that, in fact, they are--
I think it's Herschel that talks about the Jewish religion
as being a religion of the architecture of time.
If you look at the layout of a text in the Mishnah,
you'll see a body of writing.
And on the sides are Talmudic interpretations
by rabbis over time.
So the truth is never absolute in this one sense--
that it's always open to discussion.
It's also that the Jews took upon themselves--
and Freud himself, who at one time thought about going
to live in Jerusalem--
says that the Jews preoccupied themselves
with avoiding pictorial imagery.
You cannot decorate the synagogue.
The text has to be absolutely pure.
Jews didn't become architects.
They were never in a power position in exile
for thousands of years--
well, not thousands of years.
Peter Eisenman and his--
Frank Gehry are Jewish.
And I suppose that we've made up for that lost time.
But the Jewish presence after 70 AD
was in exile until the slow return of the Jews
in the Ottoman period, which lasted from about 1500 to 1917.
I hope you're following all of these detailed stories.
But in a sense, it's only by looking
at the detailed side of the stories
that you really get a good idea of the complexity
of the situation.
To say Arab--
I mean, of the 3,000 years of the history of Jerusalem,
1,200 years would be under the Israelites or the Jews,
and 1,200 years under the Arabs or Islam.
Whatever that means, the rest is divided amongst the Christians
and the Romans.
Jerusalem was, in the first place,
not a particularly important city.
It was too steep.
The main circulation path was to the West
along the Mediterranean.
Jerusalem was the last connector between the coastal plain
and the endless desert, which stretched all the way to India.
The Dead Sea close to Jerusalem was the lowest point on Earth.
So there was-- I'll show you a slide indicating
this division, geographical division, on which Jerusalem
sits.
Alexander the Great visited Jerusalem.
This was an enormous victory for the Jews.
Many Jews, including my son, are named Alexander
because of that tradition.
His first name is Peter, but his second name is Alexander.
I named him after the Russian giants rather
and Jewish heroes.
So Zionism, as a phenomenon, occurs in Europe
as a consequence of the marginalization of Jews
in Central Europe and all the way to England and France,
the disposition of Jewish land.
The Jews, under one of the early I
think 12th century English kings, had to wear labels
marking them as Jews--
the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
I mean, it's a long history which precedes the Holocaust.
And Jewish reaction to persecution and punishment
took the form of a biblical notion of "next year
in Jerusalem."
In the Jewish Passover service, there
is this phrase, "next year, in Jerusalem."
The Jewish Passover, unlike the Christian Easter,
is not dedicated very much to a religious idea,
but related to the escape under Moses from Egypt and God
parting the Red Sea to allow the Jews to escape.
How true that story is, whether Freud claims that Moses was,
in fact, an Egyptian who had learned about it.
Well, anyway, there are too many stories.
When you get all of these people having
been involved in this dialogue, on this multilogue,
you have many stories.
The Ottoman Empire chooses to take the wrong side in the 1418
war, and the British take over Jerusalem.
They maintain Jerusalem as a mandate
until 1948, when the War of Independence
and the Jewish state of Israel was founded 70 years ago now.
East Jerusalem belongs to Jordan, West Jerusalem,
to Israel.
1967, there's another war.
This time, the Jews expel Jordan from East Jerusalem,
and in fact, annex the West Bank to a united Israel.
The United Nations proposes that Jerusalem
be an international city.
They actually have a diagram of the form of Jerusalem
as an international city.
Neither side, neither Arab nor Jewish politics,
accept that as a resolution.
The Jews start, after the Oslo Accords, which presumably
sets out that there would be an independent Palestinian state,
and talks about the '67 boundary lines
and zones for the future states.
Israel politics, a combination of religious pressure
and all kinds of other internal Israeli social issues,
promote the expansion program, which
now has reached 300,000 settlers living
on land, which is East of the partition line set by the Oslo
Accords.
Many American presidents, since Harry Truman I think,
have objected to Israeli settlement expansion,
with no results whatsoever.
The status quo, at the end of all of my long story of 3,000
years, is a situation in which Jerusalem
is claimed by Israel to be the unique capital of Israel.
Although, as you will read in my letter,
many of the previous Israeli presidents
have looked for alternative sites
to Jerusalem, at least for the capital of Israel, including
Ben-Gurion's choice of coordinate in the Negev.
At present, the Palestinian position
is a slightly more complex position,
but they would like to share Jerusalem
as the capital of their state as well.
So you have a notion, which I don't think exists anywhere
else in the world, where one city is
the capital of two countries.
You get St. Louis, Missouri and St. Louis, Kansas City.
You have divisions in other parts of the world,
but you have no claim for a city as being
the capital of two states.
In fact, the notion of two states is now under discussion.
There's a new, relatively new, movement,
which argues for the existence of a single state, which
would alleviate the problem of the settlements,
but deny Zionist ambitions.
Because demographically, the Jewish position
is more vulnerable demographically.
This two-state solution, which the United States
and most liberal politicians support,
is for there to be an independent Palestinian state.
The Palestinians wish to go back to the 1967 boundary.
They'll have to be some compromise.
God knows how that compromise is going
to be worked out between the size of the settlement
population and the emaciated, fragmented--
you can see in the last map in your handout,
just in the case of the periphery of Jerusalem,
how much this land has become parcelized and fragmented
rather than unified.
My son's book, which tackles this problem much more
eloquently than I can, argues that for a Palestinian state,
which is liberal and not imposing military law
onto the Palestinians in the West Bank,
and so on, and so on, is probably
the most coherent liberal position
on the subject at the moment.
The future of Jerusalem may well be never resolved.
It may be the result of too much history and too much mythology.
Mythology becomes history at a certain point.
Let me give you an example.
Christians, at Easter today, celebrate the way of the cross.
They carry the cross symbolically
from the praetorium where Jesus was housed
to where he was crucified.
The site of the crucifixion is not absolutely clear,
but most people now assume it to be somewhere around where
the sepulcher is.
One of the stations of the cross, station number
I don't know what--
number seven, I'm not sure exactly--
it's called the Ecce Homo station.
That's where the Roman Legion commander pointed down to Jesus
and said, ecce homo--
look at that man, look at this man in a derisive manner--
carrying the cross.
In fact, history proves that to be absolutely nonsense,
but a complete myth.
Archeologists say that the Ecce Homo Arch was only built long
after Jesus' death and didn't exist at the time of Jesus.
So the other conflations of reality,
the Jews are near the citadel of David
have the site of David's tomb, above which Christians
claim the Last Supper of Jesus with his followers took place.
It is now the site of the Dormitian Abbey, which is
where Mary was supposedly died.
[ITALIAN] Mary--
[ITALIAN] being the Italian word to sleep--
Dormitian Abbey.
So you have a vertical.
As the history of this city has grown and layered
upon each other, physically you have Jewish David
at the bottom.
Jesus is next on top, and the Ottoman Empire and Mary's
memory on the top.
What do you do about a place like this?
You fossilize it.
In my letter, in The New Republic,
I say that it's not only a religious city.
It's an everyday city in which people go to school.
People have transportation problems.
The Jews have just built a light rail system.
It's a political city.
It never was the capital of any of the country's Arab countries
that conquered Jerusalem.
I'll show you a slide of Jerusalem
only being the capital of the Crusader
empire and the Jewish empire.
What justification that makes for arguing that Jerusalem
should be the unique capital of Israel is for you to decide.
This is the most--
I mean, I can give you many detailed stories and versions
of any of these events.
For instance, in a religious environment of this kind,
it's amazing how frequently people
build on the sites of previous religious institutions.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is
built on the site of the Roman temple of Aphrodite.
When the Crusaders capture Jerusalem in 1099,
they go, they march, to the Dome of the Rock
and the Al-Aqsa mosque.
And instead of putting them down,
they put a Christian flag on top of the Dome of the Rock
and called the Temple of Dominus.
And the Al-Aqsa mosque becomes Temple Salomonis.
Al-Aqsa mosque has its foundations
in Solomon's temple stables.
It is constantly-- its roof is constantly--
its lead roof is constantly having to be repaired,
because its foundations are so unstable.
This is the city which is built.
I write in the last part of my writing
on Louis Kahn's Hurva synagogue.
Well, if you haven't read it, I'm
not going to tell you the story of Louis Kahn's interpretation
of how you build in Jerusalem, his theory of ruins.
So today, the Islam has two permanent monuments, ways,
people can pray.
The Jews don't have any.
They pray in the open air.
The holiest presence is in the Western Wall,
which is eroding in ancestry.
And the Christians still have the desecrated holy place
of the Sepulcher, Christ's passion--
the location of Christ's passion.
And such is an abbreviated story of Jerusalem.
Now, what do you do?
I worked for the Palestinian side.
I worked not for the Israeli government,
but for the mayor of Jerusalem over time.
So my investment in this city is more than just
knowing its history, which I only know partially.
The history of religion is so extensive
that to understand it all--
I don't even understand who Gabriel was.
The figure is in some story somewhere.
I mean, the books about the Last Supper,
which talk about the tradition of eating together
and what that means, the book's about the killing
of your first son--
remember the one of the plagues that the Egyptians or God cast
on the Egyptians for the persecution of the Jews
was the killing of the first son.
That's why the baby Moses was hidden in the reeds.
We can go on and on, and on and on, and on.
Religion is a business which produces lots of myths,
and realities, and interpretations to keep
itself going.
OK, we should look at some of these pictures
so you get a better idea of what this place looks like.
The options are simple.
This is the present Israeli option for Jerusalem.
If this is Palestine and this is Israel,
Jerusalem has a secure border on its East side.
This is a metropolitan city, as indicated
in the drawing of the Palestinian planner
with the central.
The problem of what happens on a boundary between two
countries in terms of security and customs
isn't answered by one.
You have to dispense with it.
You can only dispense with that if you
have secure relationship.
The European Union has dispensed with passports
by virtue of an assumption that there is no reason
to maintain fortified borders any longer between France
and Belgium, for instance.
But can you conceive of this being a solution in relation
to two pretty hostile entities?
How are you going to deal with security in a unified city--
small details?
The historic site has--
if an Iraqi wishes to visit the Dome of the Rock,
he or she has to penetrate some kind of a line,
or presumably there is line which
has to be penetrated at all.
This is a position where Palestine
encircles Jerusalem in the counterpoint to this proposal.
Are there any other possibilities?
What do you think at the back there?
AUDIENCE: Possibility for what?
JULIAN BEINART: Hmm?
AUDIENCE: Possibility for what?
JULIAN BEINART: For the future of Jerusalem,
given either one or--
given a one-state solution, there's no problem.
It's the capital of a single state.
But if it's the--
another solution is a version of number 1--
that the Ramallah, the United States, and the European Union
give a billion dollars to the Palestinians
to build a new capital.
AUDIENCE: It's not a question of where other people want
them to put the capital.
[INAUDIBLE] for Israel the same.
There's two sides of Jerusalem.
JULIAN BEINART: I understand.
AUDIENCE: There is a place to divide it.
There is a divide, without there being a political division.
There is a community that's divided.
The problem is that it's the issue of security
and whether everybody from--
what the Palestinians can control
who comes right up to the edge of the Israeli side
or the Jewish side.
That's the problem.
JULIAN BEINART: I understand.
What I'm concluding is that there is no solution
and that this will just perpetuate itself in history,
causing bloodshed as blood accompanies this history
of Jerusalem for 2,000, 3,000 years.
That it'll just continue to be--
it is too intoxicated a site by the virtue of the three
major religions in the world.
Forgive me if I leave the others out.
And to use Aldo Rossi's term, "The locus
is such that it is irresolvable."
It's a bleak future for both Palestine and Israel.
Maybe there's a solution which doesn't include Jerusalem.
This is the one which I'm indicating here,
where East Jerusalem is a suburb of another state,
of a city in another state, but that's
a far-fetched resolution.
There's the West versus the East,
the countries of Palestine versus Israel, the race Arab
versus Hebrew, language Hebrew versus Arabic, religion Islam
and Christianity versus Judaism, Israel's relationship
with the West, with Palestine's association
with the Middle East and the Arab world,
Israel's preoccupation with Western and industrial growth,
Palestine's developing economy in agriculture
and in technical industry, the Jewish background
of the Holocaust and the Arab treatment of Jews
in Arab countries, Palestine's heritage of colonialism,
exploitation, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.
You just travel the world of imagery.
It's cheaper.
Jerusalem, like so many parts of this world, [INAUDIBLE]
is exactly the same, topological structure.
It's built on folded plains causing
valleys, and hillsides, and different kinds of notions
of development.
This is a more or less contemporary imagery.
This is the old city here.
This is the mosque, Al-Aqsa mosque, and that's
the Dome of the Rock.
This is the Western Wall.
This is Jewish expansion from the 19th century onward,
westward, Beit HaKarem, and all the way
to the Jewish Israeli museum, the Jewish capital parliament
buildings, and further westwards.
Next.
Jerusalem lying on watershed between the coastal plain
on the West and the endless desert on the right.
Next.
David's building of the city on the south.
The city was always defensible on the south
more easily than it was in the north.
The Romans invaded from the north.
This is a set of reconstruction of Solomon's Temple
over the centuries.
Next.
Corbusier's sketch of the Holy of the Holies
under the nomadic tent.
The whole idea of the temple is creating
an audience of people in the community in the foreground,
but no penetration of the building itself.
Jesus inherits temple.
He said to exonerate-- not attacked,
but assaulted the sellers of goods in the foreground
of the temple.
At a certain point he says, the temple
will be destroyed after my death.
He says to his associates, from then onwards,
you won't need a temple.
My body will be your temple.
Here, you have a religious substitution
of the image of the body, the mass.
In Catholicism, the use of the wafer to eat something
refers to the actual consumption of the symbolic consumption
of a body.
The wine stands for blood.
These primitive and primeval relationships.
Next.
God is the architect.
Augustine, on the right, is seeing God,
envisioning a second city up in the sky.
For Jews, it was the second--
the ethereal Jerusalem is about 10 miles up.
For Arabs, it's about 15 miles up.
Next.
Reversionary construction of these Ezekiel's temple
from the six, seven chapters.
I didn't go into this, and I think
we'll leave it for the moment.
It was the notion of the invention of heaven.
For the Jews, it seemed to me that early
on the God with Yahweh, heaven was above,
but dead human beings were not part of the territory that
should be taken account of.
Priests wore gloves when dealing with dead human beings,
like animals.
Next.
Here, it's temple reconstruction.
The great battle, the invasion, of the Romans
and the slaughter of the Jews.
Next.
The only map of Jerusalem, this is in Jordan
in a place called Madaba, near Aman.
This is a mosaic floor in a church in Madaba showing
the Roman construction of The Cardo, The East-West
Cardo, and the Decumanus from the Jaffa Gate
running right angles.
Next.
This is the Ecce Homo Arch.
We're looking at a map of Jerusalem
at the time of the death of Christ.
You will see the connection from the praetorium.
So here, it's praetorium at the top of the Temple Mount
diagram along the way of the cross, all the way to Golgotha,
to the Golgotha hill, and the putative passion of Christ.
This is [INAUDIBLE],, this way of the cross
is a ritualistic celebration carried out
each Easter in Jerusalem by thousands of pilgrims
from all over the world.
Next.
The temple of Aphrodite prior to the establishment
of the church.
The original establishment of the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher has various religious components,
but it connects to The Cardo on the extreme right.
Next.
Here is a version of it after the Arab presence.
The entrance now is on the south here,
and its connection to The Cardo is truncated and stopped.
These are various components of the Christian story.
Next.
The Christian faiths do not trust access
to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
and for centuries have endured the Nusaybah family,
an Israeli Islamic family, with the keys.
Here is the entrance to the south.
Next.
Here's the roof.
A Christian priest living on the roof of the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher in semi-exile, and here
is an Easter night celebration on the roof.
Next.
The establishment, first establishment,
of the Dome of the Rock, the circular purple building,
and the Al-Aqsa mosque on the south,
and the many institutions leaving
this part of the holy city to be the Jewish quarter.
The Basilica of Holy Zion--
slowly there's something about the Armenian quarter
and the Christian quarter to develop further to the north.
Next.
The Dome of the Rock, that Al-Aqsa mosque--
next.
The Crusader period for a relatively short time,
the [LATIN],, the baptistery, the Temple Salomonis,
the previous Al-Aqsa mosque, not destroyed but maintained,
only Christianized in a simple way--
all the Christian institutions which
grow up under the Crusader.
St. James Cathedral, the Greek hopice, the Syrian monastery,
the church of St. Martin, St. John the Baptist,
the Hospitaliers quarter, the building
of the largest hospital in the world
at that time in the Muristan district,
largely part of the Christianic beneficence.
Next.
The retaking of the city under Arab Islamic circumstances
by Saladin, rebuilding of the walls,
the wall's rebuilt in 1131, 1191 to 1213, all of the schools
and community places as a result of the Islamicization
of this space.
1917, Jerusalem prior, at the time of the British invasion.
Next.
I mentioned the example of the [INAUDIBLE],,
the layering of David's tomb, the Dormitian Abbey,
and the [INAUDIBLE] Caiaphas, one of the agents
in the death of Jesus.
But the Last Supper takes place there as well.
Here is the Dormitian Abbey, which
has these three layers of vertical space belonging
to different religions.
Next.
The final subdivision of the Holy City into four sectors,
the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa mosque,
penetrating into the Jewish sector with the Dung Gate.
That's this gate.
The Golden Gate, which is not open any longer
to the Islamic section, which has
the Damascus Gate on the north as its major entrance.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
and the Christian sector, and the Armenian sector here.
The Jaffa Gate leads to--
is the prime-- if you extend these lines,
the Jaffa Gate extends to the Mediterranean.
The Dung Gate extends down to Egypt.
The Damascus Gate extends upwards to Syria,
and this closed Golden Gate potentially extends eastwards
to Iraq.
Next.
The contemporary city on the left,
the coexistence of tall skyscrapers
on the west in the Jewish city.
Next.
The British occupation, the McLean Plan,
it's not very clear, but it's an attempt
to recognize the western part, the Jewish part, and developing
it according to a garden city model.
The Arab side is left gray for reasons I don't understand.
Restricted building and open space--
extraordinary plan.
And the United Nations' plan, which encloses a larger area
than the municipality, and it encloses Bethlehem [INAUDIBLE]
on the east, including Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew University
on the northeast--
rejected by both sides.
Next.
Jerusalem's rulers from 587--
that's Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon to 1967 AD--
showing that Jerusalem had consequence at a distance.
The 1967 dividing of the city in the east and west
with a boundary between the two.
Next.
The boundary taken over and a map showing--
map by protagonists of the Arab cause,
arguing that the Jews have always
tried to locate settlements in a pattern which causes the city
not to be unified.
Next.
Louis Kahn's-- one of the Louis Kahn's great buildings,
which he never built, and his very interesting interpretation
of the use of ruins in a city of--
could you just turn on those lights, please?
When you have the intersection of religion, politics,
geography, and history, you cannot do anything.
It's frozen.
I don't know of a situation which has managed to overcome--
maybe Belgian.
I suppose in Europe at least the elimination
of obstacles towards the creation of a plane
of general acceptance.
And the European Union is perhaps
the most modern example of the breaking down of barriers.
The barriers are still between Algiers and Paris.
It's between the hinterland of countries, Turkey
and the European Union, sending migrant labor back and forth.
But this is a phenomenon which is not
easily applied to Jerusalem.
In the case of Johannesburg, you will
see the absence of religion.
It is purely a question of race.
Once you eliminate region and you only deal with race,
you find it easier to resolve, even although South Africa
has struggled into the post-apartheid democracy.
It took enormous resources, and time, and bloodshed.
And Johannesburg is an artifact of race, and so on.
So we look at these others in a slightly different light
than Jerusalem.
But Jerusalem is the great metaphysical city of the world.
It's the most important metaphysical presence.
What that means, meaning-wise, is difficult to say.
They are parts where you tread and walk softly and slowly,
because you have a history of associations
with that particular place.
And these associations are carefully vivid.
There have been Palestinian riots
around the archaeology of certain regions
in the olden city.
Somebody one day will try to excavate under the Holy Mount
to see if the Holies of Holy is still there.
Steven Spielberg's probably likely to do the movie.
Although, he's done a movie which is similar.
Anyway, any thoughts about all of this?
Complexity is an easy evasion.
You know, wherever I go around the world hearing people talk
about cities, the modern interpretation
is they're too complex to have theories about them.
And no city is more complex than Jerusalem.
No city has been the site of three major religions.
No city has been the site of 3,000 years of invasion
and succession, resilience and the building
up of history and myths.
You should go and visit it.
That's all I can recommend.
See if you can make any sense of it.
You've lived in Jerusalem, haven't you?
AUDIENCE: I never lived in Jerusalem.
JULIAN BEINART: You never--
AUDIENCE: I've been there hundreds of times,
but never [INAUDIBLE] for more than one night.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
The first immigrant Zionists saw Jerusalem
as an old-fashioned historically-bound city.
And [INAUDIBLE] chose to make Tel Aviv the capital,
or Haifa the capital facing the Mediterranean,
or in the case of Ben-Gurion, the new city of [INAUDIBLE]..
It's Chaim Weizmann who found Jerusalem
to be archaic and medieval, and the new Jewish Zionist spirit
was in favor of novelty and social equity, and some
of the things which it hasn't been able to perpetuate.
OK, we'll do Johannesburg on Thursday
and see if there's any comparison.