“any concession or abrogation of existing rights tended to become the thin end of a wedge before which other rights were apt to disintegrate. Chairs, they feared, would become wooden benches, wooden benches iron benches, iron benches fixed stone benches, with the corollary that covering from above against sun and rain and from the side against cold was equally a matter of humanity; so that the Waqf would one day find houses belonging to others erected against their wishes upon their own property. Such exaggerated suspicions had been for centuries at the root of most of the constantly recurring trouble between the various Christian rites at the Holy Sepulchre”.
The memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, New York: Van Rees Press, 1937, p. 420.
Tragic events in the Old City of Jerusalem are unfolding, after the attack perpetrated by three young Palestinians with Israeli citizenship from Umm al Fahm against 2 Israeli border guards from Druze origin. Meanwhile, reading the memoirs of sir Ronald Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, helps us to regain the historical path.
It is not by chance that I wanted to summarize what Jerusalem became in the last dozen of years as “a cruel city”. It is a cruel city. It became a cruel city. Not by the hand of God, or Gods, or faith. By the hand of politics.
