A palace befiting the ruler of the land
By Danny Rubinstein
Ha’aretz, Israel
Dec 24 2006
Among the casualties of the recent war in Lebanon were four UN
observers stationed in the village of Khiam, north of Metula. They were
killed in an Israel Defense Forces bombing raid, and the government
of Israel apologized for their deaths. Their names now appear at the
bottom of a memorial plaque in the small garden at the entrance to
the High Commissioner’s Residence in Jerusalem. First on the list
is the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who was assassinated
by members of the Lehi underground in Jerusalem in September 1948,
toward the end of the War of Independence.
This small memorial plaque is one of the first things that catch the
eye as you pass through the entrance gate, which resembles the tower
of an ancient fortress. There is no entrance gate like it in the whole
country. If you are looking for an impressive government building
in Israel, the place to look is not in the government compound in
Jerusalem or in the Kirya in Tel Aviv, but in southeast Jerusalem.
The British High Commissioner to Palestine had a home ("Armon
Hanatziv") that was built in 1933 on what is known as the Hill of
Evil Counsel. The name comes from a Christian tradition that the high
priest Caiaphas lived here in the days of the Second Temple, and the
decision to turn Jesus over to the Romans was reached at his house.
Although the High Commissioner’s Residence was visible from nearly
everywhere in Jerusalem, and could be pointed out by one and all,
very few people were ever inside. When the last British High
Commissioner, Sir Allen Cunningham, left in 1948, the Mandatory
government transferred the building to the International Red Cross,
which cared for wounded and POWs on both sides. When the war was over,
the Red Cross gave the keys to the UN – a solution agreed upon by
Israel and Jordan. Since then, the palace and adjacent buildings have
been the headquarters and offices of the UN units sent to the region.
The first occupants were UN observers called in to supervise the
Armistice Agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and the Arab
countries. Then came units stationed in the Golan, Sinai and Lebanon.
Architect David Kroyanker, who has spent years documenting historical
buildings in Jerusalem and overseeing their preservation, devoted
many pages of his book on architecture in Jerusalem during the British
Mandate to Armon Hanatziv. He writes about the "extraordinary location
of the building and its architectural features, interior design and
carefully tended gardens, which fit so well the majestic lifestyle of
the four high commissioners who lived and worked here from 1933." The
parties and receptions they held in this building were famous all
over the country.
The handsome palace and its surroundings inspired many authors.
Israeli novelist Amos Oz describes the building and the aristocratic
parties that took place here in his book "The Hill of Evil Counsel."
In "Ir Even u-Shamayim" ("City of Stone and Sky") Yehuda Haezrachi
writes that he envied the high commissioner "who took over the most
fantastic piece of real estate in the world … and built himself a
palace there. Every morning when he opens his eyes and looks out the
window, he sees the most glorious and sacred landscape in the whole
world, as if it belonged to him."
No one who visited the residence in its heyday could ignore the
ballroom, with its grand fireplace decorated with colorful ceramic
tiles made by a famous Armenian tile maker. The parquet floor, the
crystal chandeliers, the paintings of British royalty on the walls,
the gallery where the orchestra sat – they were all the talk of town,
in Arab and Jewish society.
Long before my visit to the palace, I had read about Yehuda Leib
Magnes’ experience at a party in the ballroom in the 1930s, when
the first high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, lived there. At
the party Magnes met a well-known Arab personality in those days,
Khalil al-Sakakini (Abu-Sari).
Magnes, a Reform rabbi and self-proclaimed pacifist from the United
States, was the chancellor, and later the first president, of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (from 1925 until his death in 1948).
He was known, among other things, for his support for a binational
state in Palestine, and his efforts to reach an understanding between
Jews and Arabs. Magnes’ views angered the rightists of his time and
led to many disputes with David Ben-Gurion and the leadership of the
Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community in Palestine).
Sakakini, with whom he conversed at Wauchope’s party, was one of the
country’s leading Arab educators, linguists and authors. Sakakini
was a prominent member of the Greek Orthodox Christian community,
but often found himself at odds with the Greek Orthodox clergy. The
diaries he kept from World War I until he was forced to leave his home
in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood in 1948 are considered among the
most fascinating Palestinian records of the time.
So it was only natural for Magnes to ask Sakakini his opinion, as an
Arab nationalist, of his moderate stance and support of a compromise
in the shape of a binational state. Instead of an answer, Sakakini
had a little story for him: Once there was an Arab riding a donkey
in the desert. Along the way, he met a man trudging through the sand
and asked if the fellow wanted a ride. The man happily accepted. After
riding for a while, the man asked: Isn’t it too heavy a load for your
donkey? The owner of the donkey reassured him that everything was
fine. After another little while, the man remarked: Our donkey is
barely moving. At that point, the owner stopped the donkey and told
the man to get off. Why? Asked the man. Because the first time you
said "your donkey," and the second time you said "our donkey." The
third time you’ll probably say "my donkey." Magnes needed no further
explanation.
Some 30 years after that party and the encounter between Magnes and
Sakakini, I was able to see inside the High Commissioner’s Residence.
It was on June 5, 1967, the first day of the Six-Day War. I was
a reserve soldier in a Jerusalem reconnaissance unit led by Yossi
Langotsky, and we were the first to cross the cease-fire line into the
Jordanian-controlled West Bank. It was around noon, and the Jordanian
army had just seized the palace, which was in a UN demilitarized zone.
There had been heavy gunfire and shelling that day. Two Jordanian
gunner jeeps were burning in the small plaza in front of the palace.
My unit broke through the main gate. Inside, the building was full of
thick, suffocating smoke and the acrid smell of burning carpets. We
were told to head straight for the second floor and set up a machine
gun on the windowsill facing the garden, because the Jordanians were
expected to launch a counter attack from this direction.
My army buddy, filmmaker Yitzhak (Zeppel) Yeshurun, and I went into one
of the rooms facing north and placed the gun in the window. But there
were no Jordanian soldiers in the garden, and there was no attack.
I looked around the room. On a marble shelf near the window was a model
ship that held a wonderful collection of pipes. Some were carved from
ivory and others from a fine, dark wood. From the furnishings I could
tell it was the office and living quarters of a very high-ranking
person. Unable to resist temptation, I slipped one of the ivory pipes
into my pocket as a souvenir.
Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me, and a youngish man with black
hair and a black mustache climbed out from under a bed in the corner
of the room. He mumbled something in Arabic and English, and held
up his arms in surrender. We took him downstairs to the smoke-filled
ground floor. Suddenly he raced over to a tall uniformed man with a
chest full of medals who had just come down the hall. Identifying him
was no problem, as his picture was pretty much everywhere in those
days. The man was Major-General Odd Bull, chief of the UN observer
force in Palestine. The room we had been in was Bull’s room, and the
young Arab was his assistant.
In later years, I became friends with Abu-Anton Siniora, who told
me that he was one of six Palestinians from East Jerusalem who had
worked at the palace in 1967, in the service of the UN. On the day
the fighting erupted, they had showed up for work as usual. When
the building came under fire, they hid in the cellar with the UN
observers. After the observers were evacuated, the Arabs were taken
prisoner by the IDF and released a few days later.
Meeting General Bull was a thrilling moment for me personally. I had
been working in public relations at the Prime Minister’s Office, and
I had just landed a job as a journalist with the Davar newspaper.
Here was an opportunity for me to carry out a historic task – to
urge this top-ranking UN official to judge us fairly, because the
Jordanians were the ones who started the war by seizing the palace,
and we Israelis had no choice but to respond to this aggressive act.
The general, it seems, was not overly impressed by my speech. He cut me
off in the middle and asked to see my commander. We walked through a
few rooms and corridors together, and then I introduced Bull to Yossi
Langotsky. Yossi, who was busy organizing the soldiers and barking
orders, threw me a look, as if to say: "You and your clever tricks,"
I left in a hurry.
Eventually, my unit left the palace, moving toward a Jordanian army
post stationed nearby. Again there was shelling and gunfire. Bullets
whizzed between the branches of the pine trees. A shell landed near our
jeep, and a piece of shrapnel smashed Zeppel’s canteen and scratched
his face. It must be a punishment for pinching that pipe, I thought to
myself. Mumbling about how I wanted to return home in the same shape I
was in when I left, I took out the pipe, which felt like it was burning
a hole in my pocket, and flung it into a far corner of the garden.
A few days ago, the chief of public relations at the UN headquarters in
Jerusalem, Christopher Gunness (formerly a senior BBC correspondent),
allowed me to visit the compound. The building has been used as a
military facility for years now. It is no longer a governor’s palace,
and the sprawling gardens around it are terribly neglected. Even so,
it is hard not to be awed by the beauty of the place. The leading
architect of the British in Palestine, Austen Harrison, sat with the
heads of the Mandatory government and thought long and hard over every
detail: the stonework, the windows, the balconies, the entrances, the
synthesis of Eastern and Western architectural elements, the amazing
tower and the meticulously planned gardens. All these bear out David
Kroyanker’s theory that those who built such a government complex,
stretching over 56 dunams, intended to stay in Palestine for a long
time. That the British Empire would bid farewell to Palestine within
15 years of the building’s completion was clearly far from their minds.
The view from the palace, slightly obscured by the large grove of
trees that rings the compound, is extraordinary – from the edge of
the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab leading up
to the suburbs of Amman; to the Old City, with its ancient walls and
quarters and the Temple Mount in the north; to the top of Herodion
fortress, east of Bethlehem, in the south; and onward to the homes
of the new Jewish neighborhood built over the trenches dug by the
Jordanians in 1967. The name of the neighborhood is East Talpiot,
but to many it is still Armon Hanatziv.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress