book

I Am Jerusalem

John N. Tleel

2000, Old City, Jerusalem

288 pages

Available at the Educational Bookshop, Salah ed Din St., Jerusalem

A remarkable record of Jerusalem’s modern history told by a unique character who experienced them, his uniqueness is shown through his humanistic writing, his honesty in painting an intricate picture of Jerusalem and its complexities. Written in an exciting manner of people’s stories with the shadow of political history makes one recollect or reminisce the old days of Jerusalem—the joyful and miserable ones. Tleel talks about the “unchangeable Jerusalem [that] has decided to change, for a change.. Jerusalem develops and undergoes changes daily on what I call the superficial level only, but its fundamental and characteristic foundations, rules and issues remain the same and never change and probably never will change.. Sometimes this transformation is real but most of the time we think that it is a transformation.”

Even outside the Old City Walls you can sense what no other city can give you-but living inside the Old City enclosed by its walls only then can you really start to love Jerusalem. Along its narrow streets you begin to feel its force. You are changed by its shrines and holy places, you are baptized into Jerusalem; and it is not easry to be a Jerusalemite. A thorny path runs alongside its joys.

In brief, this is my story, the 4000 year-old story of the Holy City of Jerusalem, Tleel says. I am the uninterupted history of Jeruslaem. I am the Walls of Jerusalem. From the time of Patriarch Abraham passing through Byzantian era, to Patriarch Sophronios the Rum who handed Jerusalem to Caliph ‘Omar ibn el-Khattab through the time when “the Ottomans occupied me for 400 years..in 1917 the British troops who entered Jerusalem distributed sugar-candies and chocolates. When they left in 1948 they spread bitterness and bequeathed chaos. With a move of 50 meters I became a Palestinian refugee inside the Old City…I became a battlefield. In 1967 the oppressive Israeli occupation of arab Jerusaem began. Jerusalem became physically united, but mentally a schizophrenic city.”