Layers of Changing Space in Jerusalem: View From a Hilltop

Abstract

The space around me is Jerusalem?my city for over twenty years, since I moved here my hometown, Tel Aviv, after returning my studies in Paris. All these years, still a pilgrim in Jerusalem, I have been exploring its unique space. Breathtakingly beautiful, always surprising, un containable, and constantly changing: the changing light of the four winds of its slopes between desert and lush vegetation, the changing seasons, the changing years of rain or drought, and the changing history?imprinted on its landscape. During the last ten years, Jerusalem's space has become the focus of my writing Snapshots} a novel?whose narrator, the woman architect liana Tzuriel, is planning a Monument, or rather an Anti-Monument for Peace in Jerusalem. liana's fictional project is located in a real place: on the high est hilltop of Jerusalem, The Mount of the Evil Counsel. It is seven minutes drive my apartment, just outside downtown; yet, it stays as a foreign enclave, belonging to another space and time. A bare hilltop, covered with rocks, thistles, wild herbs, broken glass. From time to time a herd of sheep, led by an Arab shepherd, crosses it. On its slope, next to the remains of a Jordanian outpost, stands the ritual bath of the nearby Jewish neighbor hood, and on the very top of the hill erupts the communication antenna of the U.N. forces, stationed at the Governor's House, a relic the British Mandate. A desolate hilltop that dominates an incomparable panoramic view of three hundred and sixty degrees. A space intensely layered? topographically, ethnically, politically and textually.2 The hilltop's name, The Mount of Evil Counsel, is a quote the New Testament, and look ing northwards it faces the Holy Sepulcher with Jesus' grave. To this hilltop Abraham and Isaac, with the young men and the donkey who accompanied them, arrived after three days walk, and watched from afar Mount