In reviewing many of the new books on Jerusalem that have appeared in the past two years, as an Israeli, I expected to find a fair amount of myth-mongering, especially when I saw that several book jackets invoked Jerusalem 3000 - the Israeli celebrations of King David's establishing Jerusalem as his capital - celebrations denigrated by Palestinians and many Israelis for their slanting of history in service of Jewish claims to the city. But the authors were more balanced than the publicists. While several of these books use partisan language, referring to the "liberation of Jerusalem" in 1967 or describing it as "unified" under Israeli rule, all acknowledge a past that begins before King David and is broader than the annals of Jewish history.
In his new book City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem, quoted above, Meron Benvenisti notes that academics in Israel no longer respond to attempts to coopt their studies in support of nationalist claims. Such "liberation from the bonds of politically committed research" presumably takes time and the results are not seen immediately outside academic circles. This would explain the greater degree of polemic I found in some Palestinian contributions and why the more scholarly of the Israeli- or Jewish-authored books that I examined were, by and large, more even-handed than the more popular ones. Beyond looking for bias, I also scrutinized the books for what they had to say about solutions to the problems of sharing the city. I continue, then, with City of Stone.
The book opens with the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations and a tour of the Museum of the City of Jerusalem. Like visitors passing through the halls of the actual museum, we travel through eras and epochs in the city's long history, with Benvenisti as narrator explaining - sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes with understanding - how identity is constructed and legitimized through selective emphases and the development of symbols and ceremonies.

A Tribal Struggle

The Jews have no monopoly on myth-making in the city, of course, and thus a parallel addressing of Palestinian myth point by point would be extremely valuable. Benvenisti says mildly, "It is hard to estimate the extent to which the Palestinians themselves believe the Canaanite-Philistine myth [of their origins], and one hopes that this absurd attempt to give a historical basis to their claim to Jerusalem is simply a political argument that they themselves do not take seriously." One hopes - but later in his introductory chapter he tells us that "history may be written by victors, but the vanquished have not relinquished their version and are busy cultivating it." An example is the Museum of Islam on the Haram Al-Sharif (the Temple Mount), where, Benvenisti says, visitors seeking to learn the history of Jerusalem "will find no trace of Jews."1
After Benvenisti's initial chapter, history is treated thematically rather than strictly chronologically. His topics - which include Jerusalem's changing boundaries, its holy sites, the struggle for municipal control, and the saga of building and development that begins before recorded history - reveal how cartography, planning and construction, commerce, statistics, and, of course, politics and religion can be pressed into the service of ethno-partisan cause.
He suggests that model-builders exaggerate the global import of an unsolved Jerusalem problem. "Jerusalem's fame (and thus the obsession with its 'resolution') is due primarily to the fact that its conflict is being played out on a historical stage decked with powerful symbols and myths and pervaded with an air of sanctity. Take away Jesus, Muhammad, David, Jeremiah, Omar and Godfrey de Bouillon, and the preoccupation with Jerusalem shrinks to the level of a petty family quarrel among cousins vying for their inheritance" (p. 207). Here the author ties his familiar thesis that the nature of the struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians is essentially "tribal" to his thesis about the chances for resolution: "The conflict over Jerusalem is not so much a conflict as a condition ... typical [of] intercommunal conflict... Conditions have no solutions; there are just solutions to some of the problems they cause" (p. 223).

Dismissing the Models

Benvenisti argues that when the various plans are stripped down to their essentials, there are three basic models - and he dismisses the utility of all of them. But such simplification does not take into account the possibility that a variant of a model may have the elements that make the larger concept viable.
Rather than drawing up models, Benvenisti advocates a process-oriented approach: a down-to-earth debate that grapples "with the exigencies of a changing reality, with no shortcuts via once-and-for-all solutions." Progress should be measured in terms of agreement on even "the pettiest of issues." Benvenisti, who fully understands Palestinian reservations about the Oslo accords, nonetheless credits them with the potential for a powerful enough dynamic to move toward agreed-upon goals.
While the reader of Benvenisti's often poetic narrative will be much the wiser, the scope of the book works against the in-depth storytelling that is Benvenisti at his best (exemplified in Jerusalem: The Torn City [1976], which covers the backdrop to the 1948 war through the dramatic changes of the post-1967 period). More detail is found in parts of Benvenisti's Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land, published in 1995, one year before City of Stone. The early chapter "City of Strife" contrasts images of Jerusalem: the idealized city versus its hard stone edges. Benvenisti looks to very recent history to portray the two directions in which Palestinians and Israelis, the intimate enemies, can proceed. The first cycle of violence fueled by tribal instinct is illustrated in the early part of the book by the events surrounding the massacres on Haram Al-Sharif in October 1990. In the second part, reconciliation is symbolized by the famous handshake between intimate enemies, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, on the White House lawn less than three years later.
More passages gripped me in this book than in City of Stone, perhaps precisely because there is more analysis. A few examples: Israel's Independence Day and Jerusalem Unification Day typifying the divide between two Israeli political cultures (p. 38); a revealing portrait of former mayor Teddy Kollek, for whom the Intifada was a personal insult that ravaged the myth of coexistence he needed to believe in (pp. 40-44); the fading Israeli perception of Arafat as demon: "Arafat drinking Israeli water, reading by light supplied by the Israel Electrical Corporation, and sending faxes through Israeli telephone lines is a domesticated Arafat" (pp. 224-25).
Benvenisti disparages latter-day solution-mongers early on, after a very concise rundown of previous ideas. His bottom line remains: "The problem is not a need for theoretical solutions, but the willingness of both sides to use the available plans as tools for resolving the conflict."

Frustrating for the Unfamiliar

Benvenisti engages and disengages from his subjects, seldom, if ever, writing "I," though he is a deeply involved member of one of the societies he studies and a deeply knowledgeable observer of both. On page 46 of Intimate Enemies he refers to a list of plans, "including this author's Borough plan." In City of Stone, he distances himself - the plan (whose antecedents date from the 1920s) is attributed to Teddy Kollek. Sometimes he speaks disparagingly of plans categorizing Jerusalem's problems in terms of holy places, municipal arrangements, and sovereignty (see City of Stone, p. 216). Two decades earlier, these were the divisions he employed as an organizing principle for presenting numerous plans in the appendix to The Torn City.
Benvenisti's distancing contributes to a pattern that will be a source of frustration for readers who are familiar with his subjects, but lack his encyclopedic knowledge: incidents, processes, and plans are often described without full identification. This is even more frustrating in Intimate Enemies, with its fuller accounting of events, than in City of Stone. Who is the speaker introduced by "As one Israeli general said"? Are East Talpiyot and Jabal Mukaber the neighborhoods discussed on page 277 Benvenisti mocks the policeman on the Haram who doesn't know the names of the spiritual leaders he calls "the Red Mufti" and "the Little Mufti," but we never learn what they should be called.
A dearth of documentation in both books is, likewise, maddening. On the rare occasions that a citation appears, it is not of the English translation if the original work is in Hebrew (for example, Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari's well-known Intifada [1989]). In Intimate Enemies, Benvenisti's own previous works are not even listed, while in City of Stone there is no indication as to which are not in English, and some of the years of publication are wrong.
With or without references, however, Benvenisti has no peer in explaining the background to present-day passions, attachments, and complexities characterizing the larger conflict, through the history of Jerusalem. His eloquence is at its peak in the final chapter of City of Stone, as he describes the fierce stratification of Jerusalem's communities - Jewish, Muslim and, especially, Christian sects - as reflected in the strict divisions of the city's burial grounds. The dead of countless conquests and conflicts, ancient and modern, their hopes and aspirations buried with them in two-dozen cemeteries, bear witness to a struggle over Jerusalem in which "there are no victors and no vanquished."

Archeology, History, Art, Religion, Politics

Nitza Rosovsky's collection City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present, title notwithstanding, begins with archeologist Magen Broshi's survey of four millennia of history. Next, F.E. Peters focuses on the holy sites that hang "suspended like a sword over future negotiation." Later chapters in the section "The Heavenly City" look at aspects of pilgrimage and at Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Jerusalem, the latter chapters almost de rigueur for edited volumes, but well done.
Many chapters in the section "The City in Literature, Art, and Architecture" offer a strictly historical treatment, while others bring a more contemporary perspective. A chapter on maps and mapping, for example, ends for all practical purposes with the 19th century; a pity, when there is so much to say about political map-drawing in Jerusalem since. In contrast, the chapter "Geography and Geometry of Jerusalem" starts with early images of Jerusalem and continues to the modern period, with the works of Marc Chagall and Palestinian artists Taleb Dweik and Nabil Anani.
In the first of two historical chapters in the central section, "The Earthly City," Arthur Hertzberg shows how the fate of Jerusalem took a back seat in the priorities of the early Zionist movement and became central with a non-Zionist population influx. To redress an imbalance, I focus below on the second chapter since, with a single exception (the next book discussed), the other books reviewed here do not have Palestinian authors, though they may quote them.
Muhammad Muslih depicts the political as well as religious importance of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, but his real contribution lies in the survey of Palestinian conceptions of Jerusalem in this century, which he examines "as a prerequisite to finding a solution." Palestinian literary sources from 1917-1948 reveal a pluralistic city in. which diverse communities coexist. From 1948-67, Jerusalem's centrality was commonly demonstrated through the filter of Pan-Arab rather than Palestinian nationalist sentiment. He identifies four outlooks since 1967. Contemporary pluralists "tend to view Jerusalem as a city whose significance transcends a single community or state." The exclusivists aim to establish the primacy of Arab claims. In the third category, which overlaps the second, are the legalists; although much of the subject matter is documentary, Muslih says, "the spirit is markedly nationalist." The oppositionists, like the exclusivists, emphasize the primacy of Palestinian claims, out of conviction, but also "to use the emotional question of Jerusalem to undermine Arafat and the deal he struck with Israel."
Edward Said, a pluralist par excellence, is author of the keynote essay to Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process? a collection edited by Ghada Karmi and published for the International Campaign for Jerusalem.
There are important chapters in this volume (the Israeli and Jewish positions expressed here, it must be said, are hardly representative), and Said's is first and foremost among them. He minces no words in writing about what Israeli mythologies and the ability to promote them have meant for Palestinian lives. (He is equally scathing when it comes to the Palestinian Authority's record on Jerusalem.) He argues persuasively that, in order to press Arab-Palestinian claims to Jerusalem, the history of loss must be understood. Said repeatedly laments Israeli attempts to Judaize a multicultural city, and he advocates a jointly held capital that is true to its complex mixture of religions, histories and cultures. Neither the essay nor the book taken as a whole has a clear answer for how to pursue reconciliation, on one hand, and the redressing of grievance, on the other. However, projecting the positive and inclusive image of Jerusalem that Said champions will certainly go a long way.
Karen Armstrong, one of Jerusalem Today's authors, makes clear in Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths that she sees a human need for mythology. "[This book] is merely an attempt to find out what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have meant when they said the city is 'holy' to them ... This seems just as important as deciding who was in the city first and who, therefore, should own it, especially since the origins of Jerusalem are shrouded in obscurity."
She begins with these shrouded origins, bringing the insights of anthropology, as well as the evidence of archeology in pondering why this spot became sacred space. Jewish, Christian and Muslim history in the city is then treated consecutively - similar to the approach of Thames A. Idinopoulous's Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed (1991). The book's discourse is often quite Christian, with emphasis on the "duty of compassion." Presumably wishing to appear even-handed, Armstrong repeatedly offsets her judgments of Israel with criticism of Christian behavior, usually Western Christian behavior. This device leaves the city's Muslim residents as innocents by default (and has not been enough to mollify Jewish critics). Arguably, she draws a lot of conclusions for someone exploring her subject with the reader, but I appreciated reading scholarship that included a call for social justice.
"What can the history of Jerusalem teach us about the way forward?" she asks. She names often-heard suggestions for the future, but voices her reservation: "unless the underlying principles are clear, all these solutions remain utopian."

Scholars and Polemics

Those sensitive to language that indicates a pro-Israel orientation will certainly find it in the next few books, but they have much to recommend them. City of Hope: Jerusalem from Biblical to Modem Times by Mordechai Naor, written to "bring fruits of broad scholarship to a general readership" is touted as the first major publication to mark the beginning of the Jerusalem 3000 commemoration. The book begins with David, after a scant mention of Jebusite predecessors, and ends with a full-color reproduction of the Jerusalem Covenant that Israel's leaders signed in 1992, pledging loyalty to the city and resolving to maintain sovereignty over it. A very one-sided epilogue by Menachem Elon, former deputy president of Israel's Supreme Court, surveys traditional literature about Jerusalem and the laws concerning Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
These are elements that will surely alienate parts of a truly general readership. Yet despite the framing, the main text bears out the thesis that scholars do not lend their work to polemic. Its coffee-table book format notwithstanding, this volume is packed with information, including numerous tidbits that I found in none of the other books. Predictably, the post-1967 history is the most problematic, more in terms of what is not said (about the new neighborhoods, for example) than what is. The narrative would be choppy if not for the big, bold subheadings interspersed between every few paragraphs, but with this convention and the lavish illustration, the book is an easy read and the history of Jerusalem whirls by quickly. Each chapter opens with a very helpful detailed color map of the city during the time period covered.
The jacket of Hershel Shanks's Jerusalem: An Archeological Biography invokes Jerusalem 3000 and continues with breathless hype: the "account debunks many long-standing theories -Solomon's Stables were not built by Solomon, nor were they a stable, and the Garden of Gethsemane ... was not a garden but a cave." But here, too, there is more within than the cover indicates. First telling us that 3,000 years is only a little more than half of Jerusalem's life, Shanks reconstructs history through archeological findings, with a focus on the biblical period through the Byzantine era, when there were few sources other than the clues left behind in remains. The last few hundred years are summed up primarily by listing conquests, ending in 1967 when "Jerusalem was reunited under Israeli rule."
The lavishly illustrated book is clearly aimed at a lay audience. The author's chatty style, with frequent use of the first person, at times borders on the condescending. A glossary would have been appropriate, as the definitions of terminology are inconsistent. Shanks does provide a considerable service in supplying the background to controversies among scientists and archeologists that the lay person encounters with some regularity in the daily press.
Jerusalem: In 3000 Years was written, as well as compiled, by the late Nahum Tim Gidal, a documentary photographer of considerable renown. All text appears in English, French, and German. Many of the earlier illustrations (maps and engravings, as well as photographs) are from Gidal's own collection. All illustration is in black-and-white, lending the book a more somber appearance but losing nothing in conveying a history pictorially.
Unfortunately, despite graphic success, the book is seriously flawed. That it is largely a documentary of Jewish Jerusalem is legitimate enough, were it more clearly labeled as such. But it is marketed as a general Jerusalem photo-history. The text is not only lackluster but polemical - occasionally so early on, predictably more so after 1967, and outrageously so by the time the recent history is presented. The administration of Teddy Kollek is shown as an enlightened rule committed to developing both sides of the city, for example, and the Intifada is introduced by blaming poverty in Gaza exclusively on the Arab states. Such text seriously undermines the value of the photographs.

A Century in Jerusalem

The next books treat more limited blocks of Jerusalem's long history. Martin Gilbert's Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century relies heavily on the accounts of eyewitnesses, many of them Protestant expatriates and other visitors from English-speaking countries. The prejudices and biases of the writers and their times are blatant, enabling the reader to easily discern the filters through which they see events. As the century proceeds, the biases become more subtle and English-language sources bringing a Jewish perspective are more abundant, resulting in less balance, despite the author's clear attempt to be even-handed.
Gilbert, an eminent historian, bears the title "Commander of the British Empire," so it perhaps should be no surprise that British rule appears quite enlightened. The first hint otherwise comes in a reference on page 127 to the Collective Punishment Ordinance. The beginnings of Palestinian nationalism are shown as far back as 1917. As the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates during the 1920s, it is faintly gratifying to read amidst the horror stories accounts of individuals from each community saving members of the other. An intriguing reference to the activism of Palestinian women during these years mentions three by name (Matil Moghanam, Zlikha Shihabi and Zahiya Nashashibi), but there is no citation for those seeking to know more (p. 127).
In the coverage of the 1940s in particular, a preponderance of Jewish human-interest sources biases the portrayal of the drama. I am not aware of many English-language sources on the Arab side that the author could have relied upon, but an ideal one would have been Hala Sakakini's Jerusalem and I (Jordan: Economic Press, 1990), a memoir that includes the story of the Sakakinis' flight from their beloved home in the Katamon neighborhood.
Gilbert does well by Palestinian nationalism at the close of the war, demonstrating that "Palestinians never gave up their desire for some form of independence from Jordan" (p. 247). While description of the 1967 war reflects Israeli perception, King Hussein's dilemmas are presented sympathetically, and the depiction of the two-year post-war period includes Anwar Nusseibeh's perspectives along with Teddy Kollek's. For anticipating the 21st century, other books may be better, but Gilbert provides an enjoyable and informative read on the past 100 years.
Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, the US-based authors of To Rule Jerusalem, spent 20 years interviewing Jerusalemites and their neighbors in a series of visits. Their ambitious volume runs to almost 500 pages of text. The space devoted to communities not described elsewhere is a virtue of this book. We see the origins of ultra-Orthodox dynasties and the tensions between the haredi world and the Zionist culture surrounding it; the rifts in Israeli culture that led to the formation of the Shas party; the complicated relations between local and diaspora Palestinians; the sometimes converging, sometimes diverging Palestinian and Jordanian interests, and much more, as background to understanding the individuals introduced in the book. At times, the fact that we do not have an insider's view of any of the communities actually becomes a strength.
The authors, professors of religious studies and sociology, treat us to such passages as "Islam, like Judaism, is a political religion, a faith meant to be conjoined with power" (p. 347) and draw cogent parallels between Jewish and Muslim zealots. What the authors are not is historians, and though the book is extensively researched, the methodology seems questionable. Relying heavily on interviews, they present a great deal of anecdotal information without the means of evaluating it. When, for example, a wedding celebration is disrupted by Muslim Brothers who disapprove of socializing between men and women, is this a common occurrence or an aberration? Moreover, while myriad citations accompany a text that is not based on interviews, the sources are not always wisely chosen (reporting on Palestinian internal violence would be more credible using the data of Palestinian human-rights groups rather than the Israeli daily press).
In terms of plans for the future, this book is strong on Palestinian and Israeli initiatives alike, official and unofficial. Friedland and Hecht themselves seem to advocate, or at least predict, a future Jerusalem as a federal metropolitan district, with a central Israeli government devolving to the Palestinians authority to share in ruling the city.

Images

Rochelle Furstenberg's collection, Images of Jerusalem: City of David in Modern Hebrew Literature, is a study guide published by the women's Zionist organization Hadassah; its selections of works by well-known Israeli authors reveal perceptions of the city as well as providing good reading material. A larger collection is The Jerusalem Anthology: A Literary Guide, compiled by Reuven Hammer. The sources - exclusively Jewish - range from biblical selections to contemporary speculations about the future. Alongside Teddy Kollek's articulation of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem is A.B. Yehoshua's appraisal, first published in 1981: "The city must remain united from a human point of view, but diversified from the point of view of sovereignty ... the solution must be an organic one, coming from within through a process of patience and goodwill." With literature an important mirror of culture and attitudes, it is a pity that there is no similar compendium in English on the Palestinian side.
Solutions are the sole concern of Whither Jerusalem? Proposals and Positions Concerning the Future of Jerusalem by Moshe Hirsch, Ruth Lapidoth and Deborah Housen-Couriel. In this updated version of a Hebrew volume published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the Hebrew University researchers provide an introduction to the legal status of the city and detail 55 proposals from early in the century to the present. The identical format for each proposal provides date, source, historical background and identity of the authors. When applicable, particulars are categorized under the headings of "national aspirations," "holy places," and "municipal administration." Some comparison of similarities and differences between the plans follows, but with its detailed lexicon of terms and selected bibliography, the book is primarily useful - very useful - as a reference book.
The historical focus of Jerusalem: In the Shadow of Heaven is the narrowest of all the books reviewed here. With all the photographs contemporary, a few inclusions taken as recently as 1994 actually make the book seem dated. Despite studied neutrality, the editorial frame of reference comes across as Israeli, but with occasional hints of critique, such as the description of the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz as an "outspoken critic of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories."
Despite oversimplifications and inaccuracies in labeling the pictures, there is some lovely poetic text in the introduction: "The history of Jerusalem is a history of zealous dreams and righteous bloodshed. Over and over again, the city and its people have been swept away - cleansed in the name of the empire and religion, in the words of the Second Book of Kings, as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. Memories, however, have not been washed away in the successive waves of conquest. Instead, they have accumulated, layer on layer, like the city's crumbling stones."

Collections

While the recent trade books are largely authored by Jews, Israeli and otherwise, and outside observers, Palestinians are better represented in locally produced publications of the past two years. Most of the publications are collections; an exception is seen in three contributions from PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs). In Sami F. Musallam's The Struggle for Jerusalem: A Programme of Action for Peace, the first chapter, "The Sermon on Jihad" (Arafat's controversial 1994 speech at a Johannesburg mosque), aims to justify to skeptics the course embarked on by the PLO in Madrid. The next chapters recount the battle over institutions in Jerusalem, in particular, Orient House, and recount the tensions between Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. For explication of what lies behind the positions of the Vatican, the Hashemites, Israel, and others on Jerusalem, Friedland's To Rule Jerusalem is far more enlightening, but the chronological presentation of statements and documents in The Struggle for jerusalem does tell a story.
Musallam's ideas on how to proceed toward the future, introduced early in the book, are detailed in the final chapter, which is called, somewhat paradoxically, "The Battle for Jerusalem: A Programme of Action for Peace." In fact, most chapters are titled "The Battle for Jerusalem," with the subtitle changing each time. At a program I attended to hear the writer, respondent Rana Nashashibi, a well-known Palestinian activist, questioned this pattern and whether a human aspect was not lost in the book's emphasis on the struggle for power. "How do we see Jerusalem?" she asked, calling for an ideology. Musallam, in reply, admitted he had not concentrated his thinking on how he would like life in East Jerusalem to look. There are, however, several positive, proactive suggestions in the "Programme for Peace," many calling for changes in the way the Palestinian Authority operates.
Sadly, what Musallam sees as essential in terms of Israeli acknowledgments of injustice, he is not likely to get. Palestinians need and deserve admission and action from Israelis, and I believe the author is correct that this would lead to a psychological breakthrough. And Palestinian acknowledgment of Israeli attachment to the city is needed as well, and could have the same effect. A lack of understanding is blatant in the ending, which calls Jerusalem the cultural and religious center of Palestinian life - in contrast to Tel Aviv, the center of Israeli life.
PASSIA's Documentation on Jerusalem (no author or editor is given), is packed with texts that show the background to the conflict. Statements, documents, position papers, and resolutions articulate the claims of the interested parties - including the Arab states, the European Community and the United Nations - and their objections to the claims of others. This extremely useful reference book is rounded out by an index, a very up-to-¬date selected bibliography, a historical chronology emphasizing Palestinian experience under occupation, and a set of maps.
The third PASSIA publication is a monograph in English and Arabic: The Judaization of Jerusalem: Israeli Policies Since 1967, by Allison B. Hodgkins, which reports on actions and policies to consolidate Israeli hegemony. The recent improvement in the English of PASSIA's bilingual publications has not been emulated by Shu'un Tanmawiyyeh, a quarterly journal on Palestinian development issued by the Arab Thought Forum. A special issue, "Jerusalem: Capital of Palestine" (vol. 5, nos. 2&3; Winter 1995-96) has a 55-page section in English with six complete articles and summaries of five others. Unfortunately, the value of the contributions taken from Arabic is marred by poor translation and a plethora of distracting typographical errors. Readers dependent on the English text will gain the most from articles by outside observers Anne Latendresse and Michael Dumper.
This journal's special issue, "Our Jerusalem" (Palestine-Israel Journal vol. II, no. 2), was in a sense a response to Jerusalem 3000, its varied articles by Palestinians and Jews collectively comprising an affirmation that the city can be shared. A similar tone is evident in publications from the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and IPCRI (the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information). At the end of 1996, the Truman Institute, together with the Center for the Study of International Relations of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), published Brussels and Jerusalem: From Conflict to Solution. Editors Joel Kotek, Simone Susskind and Steven Kaplan bring together papers on Brussels, on Jerusalem and on comparative perspectives, in an effort to see how the Brussels model may be applicable to Jerusalem's problems. All of the contributors on Jerusalem are residents of the city. The Truman Institute has two more collections in the works, one edited by Ifrah Zilberman on Palestinian society and politics in Jerusalem since 1967, and another in cooperation with the Palestine Consultancy Group, edited by professors Moshe Ma'oz and Sari Nusseibeh.
The latest IPCRI publication on Jerusalem is Negotiating the Future: Vision and Realpolitik in the Quest for a Jerusalem of Peace, edited (and with sections authored) by this writer in the wake of seminars in 1996. In the first part, 23 individuals respond to the challenge of offering visions for the future of Jerusalem. Some share plans or aspirations; others concentrate on the struggles that keep the vision at bay. The second part contains the proceedings of mock negotiations on Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis. IPCRI, too, has a book underway that looks at the Brussels connection.
The Status of Jerusalem in the Eyes of Israeli Jews, a collaborative research report by Israel's Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research (co-¬investigators Elihu Katz and Shlomit Levy) and the Center for International and Security Studies of the University of Maryland (co-investigator Jerome M. Segal), is available in two versions: a 154-page study with 140 pages of appendix tables and a 90-page collection of excerpts and key tables, both published in January 1997. The findings are an important background for understanding where Israeli public opinion is most flexible. A new companion study of Palestinian attitudes by Segal and Nader Izzat Sa'id includes an essay by Segal on the implications of both studies.
So many legends and traditions adhere to Jerusalem that almost any medium that conveys information serves to shatter a misconception or two of the reader's. Even when they do not consciously set out to counter mythologizing, these books expand the reader's horizons beyond the slogans that often characterize discourse on the city. It is to be hoped that more Palestinians will join the chroniclers of Jerusalem, sharing the facts and fictions that give rise to their longings for the city. The works that form Western consciousness about Jerusalem and consciousness among the two peoples need to reflect both narratives and a multiplicity of voices. (A similar point is made by Edward Said in Jerusalem Today.) With understanding as a foundation, the stones mined from the metaphorical quarry of Jerusalem history could be used at last for building a future.

Endnote

1. A Palestinian source scorning all the myths can be found in Azmi Bishara's remarks on the common roots of Jewish, Christian and Muslim tales of origin, in "Jerusalem: Perspectives towards a Political Settlement," a post-conference collection published by New Outlook in 1993, which has meanwhile been discontinued.

Books Reviewed

2. Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). $30.00. Chaia Beckerman (ed.), Negotiating the Future: Vision and Realpolitik in the Quest for a Jerusalem of Peace Gerusalem: IPCRI, 1996).
3. Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). $24.45.
4. Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
5. David Cohen and Lee Liberman (eds.), Jerusalem in the Shadow of Heaven (San Francisco: Collins, 1996). $35.00. Documentation on Jerusalem (Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1997).
6. Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, To Rule Jerusalem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). $39.95.
7. Rochelle Furstenberg and Carol Diament (eds.), Images of Jerusalem: City of David in Modem
8. Hebrew Literature (New York: Hadassah, 1995).
9. Nahum Tim Gidal, Jerusalem: In 3000 Years (Cologne: Konemann, 1996).
10. Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century (London: Chatto & Wind us, 1996). £20. Reuven Hammer, The Jerusalem Anthology: A Literary Guide (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996). $17.95, traveler's edition.
11. Moshe Hirsch, Ruth Lapidoth and Deborah Housen-Couriel, Whither Jen/salem? Proposals and Positions Concerning the Future of Jerusalem (The Hague: Martinue Nijhoff, 1995). Available in Israel through the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.
12. Allison B. Hodgkins, The Judaization of Jerusalem: Israeli Policies Since 1967 (Jerusalem: PASSlA, 1996).
13. Ghada Karmi (ed.), Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process? (London: Ithaca Press, 1996).
14. Elihu Katz, Shlomit Levy, and Jerome M. Segal, The Status of Jerusalem in the Eyes of Israeli Jews (Jerusalem: Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research, 1997). Available in Israel through IPCRI. NIS 10.
15. Joel Kotek, Simone Susskind and Steven Kaplan, Brussels and Jerusalem: From Conflict to Solution (Jerusalem: The Truman Institute, 1996). $9.00/NIS 25.
16. Sami Musallam, The Struggle for Jerusalem: A Programme of Action for Peace (Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1996).
17. Mordechai Naor, City of Hope: Jerusalem from Biblical to Modem Times (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, Yediot Achronot-Chemed Books, 1996).
18. Nitza Rosovsky (ed.), City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). $39.95.
19. Hershel Shanks, Jerusalem: All Archeological Biography (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1995). $50.00.