Suchergebnisse

Encyclopedias of psychology cite a type of religious psychosis known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, which can be triggered by a visit to the city. Symptoms can include bellowing liturgical songs, delivering moralistic sermons and an intensified concern with cleanliness and ritual purity. Though similar reactions have been recorded at other holy cities, notably Rome and Mecca, Jerusalem holds the record for this psychopathology. From the point of view of any normal urban logic, however, the city itself appears crazier still. Its boundaries extend far beyond its core population centres, encompassing dozens of villages, barren hilltops, orchards and tracts of desert, as well as new-build suburbs with scant relation to the historical city; in the north, they stretch up, like a long middle finger, nearly to Ramallah, to take in the old Qalandia airport, some 10 kilometres from the Old City walls, and bulge down almost to Bethlehem in the south. But if the cityscape of Jerusalem has no decipherable urban logic, what rationality has shaped its growth? In Benvenistis view, it all started from the post-1967 municipal borders and the famous principle of maximum square kilometres of land and minimum number of Arabs. There is much to be said for this hypothesis; but we will have to begin a little earlier than that. Adapted from the source document.

Based on field research conducted by the author in 2008, the book consists of a careful examination of graffiti written on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the Israel-built "separation wall"; and interviews with people about the graffiti. This shows how different sides of the conflict view the conflict itself and details the various ways that graffiti can represent political strife.

IF IMPLEMENTED SUCCESSFULLY, THE PEACE ACCORD BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS WILL VINDICATE THOSE WHO BELIEVED THAT NEITHER DECLARATIONS, NOR SETTLEMENTS, NOR LAND SEIZURES WOULD TRANSFORM THE WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP INTO PERMANENT PARTS OF THE JEWISH STATE. THIS ARTICLE SUGGESTS THAT ALTHOUGH NOW THE THOUGHT MAY SEEM UNIMAGINABLE, THE SAME PRINCIPLE APPLIES TO EXPANDED EAST JERUSALEM. IT ARGUES THAT OPENING THE PROBLEM OF JERUSALEM UP TO RATIONAL DISCUSSION IS NOW CRUCIAL. THE FETISH OF "UNITED JERUSALEM" IS ONLY ONE OF PARTS OF THE ISRAELI "NATIONAL CONSENSUS" THAT HAS NOT YET SUCCUMBED TO THE WEIGHT OF FACT AND CIRCUMSTANCE. THE ARTICLE CONCLUDES THAT FOR BOTH JEWS AND ARABS, REDEFINING JERUSALEM CAN EASE THE PAIN OF SHARING IT.

The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.