Location
Jerusalem is a city with shops and businesses, hotels and restaurants, sports arenas, police stations, schools, hospitals, and everything else we might expect of a modern city, including effective governance, equitable urban planning, efficient trash collection, and proper law enforcement. This modern city is located in a dramatic landscape and enjoys an appealingly mild climate. It boasts traditional holy places, worldâclass museums, and modern sites of memory. It is a center of higher education and government, a national capital, and a popular magnet of religious pilgrimage and cultural tourism.
Jerusalem is located at 31.47 degrees latitude and 35.13 degrees longitude and nestled on the watershed of the central highlands of the southern Levant, in the Judean mountains. It is not mere fancy that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic lore refers to Jerusalem as the ânavel of the earth.â The place from which they believe the world was born connects the old continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Holy Land, a crossroads of water and land routes that facilitated a millennial exchange of goods and ideas between the early high urban civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean basin.
At an elevation of about 700 meters above sea level, the original city was surrounded by higher peaks and hence invisible from afar. Protected by natural glacis and fortifications, its perennial source of fresh water, the Gihon spring, accessible from within the walls, the city was thought of as impenetrable. The major ancient seaports and the Kingâs Highway were miles away. A city on the hill for a nation dwelling apart.
Jerusalem enjoys the advantages of the proximity of the Mediterranean to the west, the dry climate of the desert to the east, and reliable rainfalls in the winter due to its relative altitude. The summer is the dry season with an average of zero millimeters of precipitation. The relative humidity is highest in January (65%), which is the peak of the rainy season with an average of 128 millimeters of precipitation.1 Jerusalem is never as humid as the cities of the coastal plain and never as hot as it is in the desert to the east. When snow falls in Jerusalem it is a major event, as one can see from postcards sold to celebrate the unusual spectacle. It is, and always has been, a great place to visit or retire in.
Jerusalemâs dwellings and other structures used to be built so as to collect rainwater in cisterns, as well as to keep residents cool during the heat. The interiors of older houses boast shaded courtyards, lush with bougainvillea, that are invisible from the outside and accessible only through gates that could be closed overnight. In Roman times, when the city was retrofitted by King Herod and his successors to accommodate large numbers of international pilgrims offering vast quantities of animal sacrifices, a great amount of water was needed to keep the city clean. One still finds huge cisterns, now defunct, and the remains of ancient pools, aqueducts, and drainage systems built at various times to provide for the needs of the erstwhile temple city and its populations. UN climate specialists have been advocating for a revival of these cheap and efficient rainwaterâfed systems across the Middle East.
The Mount of Olives to the east of Jerusalem overlooks the Judean Desert with a gradual drop to the Dead Sea (422 meters or 1,385 feet below sea level). Since late antiquity, these hills have been dotted with secluded monasteries and dominated by migrating Bedouin and their herds of sheep and goats. If one follows the natural path of the Kidron Valley one can walk to Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world, near an oasis in the Wadi Araba/haâArava, an arid rift valley forged by the Jordan River, which now â diverted in the Galilee for the purpose of irrigation â is a mere trickle. If one continues along the western shores of the Dead Sea in the direction of the Gulf of Aqaba/Eilat (preferably in an airâconditioned bus or car) one passes the oasis of Ein Gedi, once famous for its date palms and coveted by Queen Cleopatra. Nearby are the ruins of Qumran, where an ancient sectarian library was found hidden in caves, and Masada, a mountain palace hewn out of the rock by the famously paranoid King Herod. This virtually inaccessible fortress served as the last bastion for the most fanatical among the ancient Jewish resistance fighters commanded by Eleazar ben Yair whose story of foolish heroism was immortalized by Josephus Flavius.2 Everything in and around Jerusalem breathes history.
To the west, a highway winding through the reforested Judean mountains leads to the plains along the Mediterranean coast. On the way to Tel Aviv one passes alâQastel, the former Crusader castle Beauverium, destroyed in 1191 by Sultan alâAdil shortly after the fall of Jerusalem to the Ayyubids. It was at this strategically located outlook that, in April 1948, Abd alâQadr alâHusayni, commander of the Palestinian forces in charge of the roads to Jerusalem and himself a prominent Jerusalemite, lost his life to Jewish paramilitary snipers during a reconnaissance mission in the runâup to the end of the British Mandate.3
Just a stoneâs throw to the south of Jerusalem is Bethlehem with its famous Church of the Nativity that, in a diplomatic victory for the Palestinian National Authorityâs bid for international recognition of Palestinian statehood, was adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a protected World Heritage site. If one continues on Route 60 in a southwesterly direction for another 20 km one reaches Hebron, also known as elâHalil, the city of Abraham, whom Muslims revere as the first âmonotheistâ (hanifa), Jews regard as the first Jew, and Christians consider the father of all believers. Hebron served as the capital of the first Judean monarchy, before King David conquered Jerusalem, and is the site of another great Herodian structure, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, built over the biblical Cave of Machpelah. Further south, on the cusp of the colorfully rugged Negev Desert one reaches ancient Nabatean Arad and, eventually, the Sinai Peninsula, an austere liminal space between African Egypt and the Western Asian Levant.
A mere 16 km north of Jerusalem is Ramallah, administrative center of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)4 in the West Bank, which is one of the two regions of Palestine (the other being Gaza) that the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1994 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) assigned to a future Palestinian state. Jerusalemâs place in any future settlement of the IsraeliâPalestinian conflict is complicated by the fact that the West Bank is no longer simply Arab territory and that Jerusalem and its surroundings have significantly changed since June 1967. Jerusalem is no longer a frontier city at the end of a narrow corridor surrounded on three sides by Arab territory. Instead, it increasingly resembles the territorial and symbolic center of the âgreater Israelâ first envisaged by Revisionist Zionists in the 1920s and actively pursued by Israeli governments since 1977, when the electorate first replaced the socialist parties that had dominated the country for the first 30 years of its existence with a coalition of nationalist and religious parties.
Jerusalem is nearly equidistant between Tel Aviv (64 km) â hub of Israelâs secular âfunâ culture, nerve center of its globalized highâtech economy, and a gem of 1920s Bauhaus architecture â and Amman (71 km), about the distance from Boston, Massachusetts, to Providence, Rhode Island (see Map 1). Amman is the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, released into independence in 1946 by the British and sustained by American and Saudi aid. Though the Hashemite Kingdom lost Jerusalem and the West Bank in June 1967, king and country remain vitally interested and involved in the fate of the Holy City.
The distance from Jerusalem to Damascus in the northeast is a mere 209 km, closer than Boston is to Augusta, the capital of Maine. From Jerusalem to Cairo it is about 418 km about the distance from Boston to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The cityâs relative proximity to the most important regional power centers explains why Jerusalem was rarely independent and commonly subject to changes due to shifts affecting the entire region, a ping pong ball in the political and military games played by the rulers of the more populous and strategically better located centers of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia in their millennial struggle for hegemony over the Levant. Today, as the seat of government of the only (officially unacknowledged) nuclear power in the Middle East, Jerusalem maintains security partnerships across a volatile region from which it was virtually cut off until 1977 when Egyptian president Anwar alâSadat made his famous visit to Jerusalem, breaking Israelâs isolation.
