Free Yasmine by Eli Amir Page B

after the capture of the village of Deir Yassin by the Irgun and the carnage that followed. Mount Scopus was cut off, and the British governor agreed that Jewish guards could accompany the medical convoy. In the afternoon the news came that everyone in that convoy, seventy-eight men and women, had been massacred in Sheikh Jarrah. The bodies of twenty-two of them were never found. That’s the story in a nutshell,” he concluded. “We kill them and they kill us, and the world looks on as if it’s a madhouse.”
    When we reached Mount Scopus, the regular outpost commander, known as the king of the mountain, showed us around the hospital, the university buildings, the national library and the pine woods. I was part of a unit of soldiers who were specialists in all sorts of things and was personally responsible for wireless communications, but we were all ostensibly hospital workers. This was army life from a different world – a bit like a prison, since there was no going in or out, but we enjoyed a very comfortable existence during the month we were there. I still remember the smell of baking bread and the excellent meals, worthy of a high-class restaurant, cooked for us by an older reservist who in civilian life was the chef of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. In fact, we were so isolated I was able to make friends with Ghadir, a shepherd girl from the other side of the border, but that’s another story.
    In our limited free time we were offered educational courses by the team of experts from the National Library and the hospital, academics who maintained the laboratories and facilities of the Hebrew University on the Mount. I especially enjoyed the lectures on the history of Jerusalem by Professor Meir Shadmi, the renowned scholar of Islam and an amiable elderly man with a Ben-Gurion-style mane, a boyish grin and prominent teeth. Being a child of the mass immigration of the 1950s, without any formal education, I was self-concious about knowing so little. By day I had worked for a living and at night I attended a school for working boys. It was thanks to the school and its dedicated teachers that I was able to matriculate, but my general knowledge was inevitably as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Now Shadmi, this eloquent professor, a modest, friendly scholar, happily shared his vast knowledge with anyone who took an interest. Till then I had known next to nothingabout Jerusalem. In Baghdad my mother had told us some stories, but they were naive and nostalgic tales that could not instil in me the sense of the city’s holiness, the way it is felt by a religious Jew who prays to it three times a day, or by one who grows up in its alleyways.
    That time on Mount Scopus – Jebel Sacobos in Arabic – Shadmi talked about Jerusalem as a poet speaks of his beloved. He told us that her stones are singing, that she is bathed in a soft, caressing golden light. He described the great Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, the foundation stone from which Mohammed rose to heaven on his steed al-Burak, and of course the Temple Mount’s history, and our holy Western Wall, and the numerous synagogues and famous religious schools. But after lavishing praise on the ancient city through the ages, he concluded on a sober note: “Here were born the spiritual creations of the prophets and sages, kings and poets, who lived in Jerusalem and endowed it with extraordinary grace, and made it into a messianic city which, like a magnet, draws the madmen of this world and its would-be saviours, and everyone prays and their prayers are not answered, and they call on the Messiah and he does not come.”
    With the help of the field-glasses of the Intelligence unit on the roof of the hospital, he showed us the city within the walls. I saw houses crushed together, balcony touching balcony, roof adjoining roof, like an overturned sieve sheltering the city, pierced here and there by minarets and church steeples, interspersed by some green