If you had Jerusalem Syndrome, your Solomon hands would fear your Jesus hair
Jerusalem As ever, the great disappointment of Jerusalem is the lack of swivel-eyed loons wandering around believing themselves to be Jesus. Or Solomon or David or Mohammed. Or Elvis, even. You come to Jerusalem, you want to see Jerusalem Syndrome. Isn’t that part of the deal? It’s like Amsterdam without the drugs, or London without the Beefeaters. Where are the portly men from Idaho I was promised, standing on upturned dustbins and preaching hellfire in the nude?
Read up on Jerusalem Syndrome, only a little, and you might start to feel you are going that way yourself. According to an analysis in the British Journal of Psychology, back in 2000, clinical Stage One of Type III Jerusalem Syndrome (discrete, unconfounded by previous psychopathology) is ‘anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension’. This is worrying news. The first step towards becoming Jesus is becoming Woody Allen.
Remember, this is Jerusalem. This is a city where the pedestrian crossings all operate in two unconnected stages, so that if you glance at the wrong sign, you’ll get mown down by a family of 13 bearded Hassidim in an SUV. Half the population is terrified of the other half, the cats are those really flat-headed, staring ones, and the people in charge of everything are teenage girls with machine guns. And they say that nervousness is the first step towards a mental illness? I’m here for three days. By the time you read this, I could be John the Baptist.
Stage Two is ‘declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone’. As in me yesterday, saying, ‘It’s fine, you stay by the pool, I’m going to find some naked men from Idaho.’ Stage Three is ‘obsession with taking baths and showers’ and ‘compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting’. I have taken four showers in the last 24 hours, thanks to sweat, chlorine and sun cream, and it’s my first time in flipflops in about seven months.
Stage Four is ‘preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white’. Now, I’m no expert on matters psychological, but my hunch is that this is the stage worth flagging up. Stages Five and Six just involve marching about and singing, which is a popular pastime in these parts, anyway. Albeit not usually in togas. Stage Seven is the sermon. Apparently you get a handful of these guys every year. Add on the Type Is and Type IIs (who are already nuts, but come to Jerusalem to find their metier) and you could be approaching triple figures. And yet they seem to have joined the teeming cohorts of things that everybody claims can be found in Israel, which the tourist almost never sees, such as terrorists, and serenity, and self-governing Palestinians.
It is barely a week since Hossam Dwayyat went on the rampage in a bulldozer about half a mile away from where I am writing this, before being shot, point-blank, in the head. Back home, the big story is whether or not the Beeb should have shown his death. Here, his death is already forgotten. Now the debate is whether or not they should knock down his family’s house.
If one steps away from the obvious position (something along the lines of, ‘Of course you shouldn’t knock down his family’s house, you lunatic’), this becomes a very tricky question to answer. Dwayyat was a Palestinian, but he was the sort of Palestinian that Israel prefers not to think of as Palestinian, in that he lived in East Jerusalem, barely two unhindered miles from where I sit. He had an Israeli ID card and freedom of movement around the country. Punitive house demolition was all the rage until 2005 (when some genius at Hebrew University declared it ‘counterproductive’) but it happened in Gaza or the West Bank, where Israeli law does not apply. Dwayyat’s own views aside, Israel considers East Jerusalem to be part of Israel. Knocking down his house would suggest otherwise.
It is almost a rabbinical debate, completely detached from the business of taking a house, just over there, where people live, and reducing it to rubble. Jewish Israelis tend not to go over there. Most seem to consider it dangerous even to enter the Old City. Even if one ignores the occupied territories, everybody in this country has places they will not go. Secular Israelis avoid Arab districts. The ultra-Orthodox shudder at the thought of licentious Tel Aviv. In the shadow of the Wailing Wall, I watched newly enrolled teenage soldiers saluting the Israeli flag while, ahead of them, the men in black hats rocked and prayed. None of them will ever have been 30 feet away, up on to the leafy, Islamic calm of the Temple Mount.
Everywhere you go, you come across somebody else who refuses to go wherever you have just been. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a few years ago, a monk sparked a riot by sitting on the wrong part of the roof.
Say what you like about the Orangemen’s troublesome practice of marching through Catholic bits of Northern Ireland, but at least they are showing an interest. Everything here is clamped down and segmented, wilfully Bantustanned. If you really had Jerusalem Syndrome, your Solomon hands would be afraid to touch your Jesus hair or your Mohammed beard. You’d be a mess. You’d be all shook up.
Much to my dismay, I have yet to be interrogated on this trip to Israel. Last time I was here, perhaps because we took a couple of internal flights, it happened quite a lot. ‘Why are you where? Where are you from? How long have you known each other? What are your plans for the future?’ All this, usually, from a heavily armed 16-year-old girl. It feels like therapy, in a way; a sudden enforced bout of circular self-analysis. Plus, it also reminds you that however attractive these gun-toting Lolitas look today, they will eventually turn into your great aunt.
It also reinforces the notion of the chillingly efficient Israeli security services. A suspect notion, suddenly. According to the Guardian, Sacha Baron Cohen has been in Jerusalem recently, shooting part of his new film. This is basically going to be the same as his old film, but with Bruno, a gay Austrian fashionista, instead of Borat or Ali G. ‘Vat ees zee connection between a political movement and food?’ Bruno asks a bemused former Mossad agent, who really should learn to check people out on Google. ‘Vy Hummus?’
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