DAY 1 Arriving in Jerusalem on a Saturday is disorienting. It’s Shabbat, and there is an eerie quietness around the city’s yellow-white Jerusalem stone buildings (by decree all construction has to have this exterior, and exceptions are very rare). Our driver tries to take advantage of this traffic-less day, and whiz around the main sights. But up ahead, roads into Mea She’arim are blockaded—the neighbourhood houses the city’s Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and they maintain Shabbat’s ritual injunctions by, among other things, disallowing vehicles.
In the hotel, the only food on offer is cold, and to indulge cravings for felafel, by the postcards’ reckoning, ‘‘Israel’s national food’’, we must catch a cab to the Old City’s Arab neighbourhoods. By glimpsing the areas open for business, a very rough idea can be had of the parts of the city that were under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967, when the Israeli army fought their way to Temple Mount and razed inhabitation around its Western Wall—Judaism’s holiest place after the destruction, millennia ago, of the First and Second Temples—to create a piazza.
Stalls and restaurants around Damascus Gate, for centuries the main entrance to the city, still carry an air of Eid festivities. In the near distance glistens the golden Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount, under which Jews believe are buried remains of their Temples. Scriptures state that this is where the earth to mould Adam and Eve was found, and the rock is where Abraham agreed to sacrifice his son. The Dome, along with Al-Aqsa at the other end of the Mount, is Islam’s third holiest site and marks the spot from where, Muslims believe, Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven.
At Damascus Gate, families are out for an early meal, and little girls carry shiny new Chinese-made Barbie lookalikes while the boys hold their toy machineguns with one hand and finish their food with the other. The attendants are too stretched to organise the cardamom/Turkish coffee that ends meals across communities and territories here. They point us to the souk, and wandering gingerly into the Old City, it comes as a surprise how close is the matted dome of the Church of Holy Sepulchre, where Christians mark the place where Jesus was crucified.
Night falls early in this part of the world, and by 6 pm it’s dark. Shabbat’s ended, and the drive goes past continuously busy shopfronts on roads that defined the Green Line that divided the city into East and West till ’67. The hotel has sprung to life, and the lady at the bookshop says she moved to Israel after finishing university in Pennsylvania. When did you decide to move, I ask? ‘‘Three thousand years ago, honey.’’

... contd.