Jerusalem: an insider’s guide

Despite biblical stories of visions and miracles, Jerusalem is a real city, says Andrew Sanger, albeit one unlike anywhere else on Earth. It’s also the perfect destination if you want to avoid the Christmas hullabaloo

As Highway 1 climbs into the hills of Judea and reaches the sign, ‘Welcome To Jerusalem’, even the most irreligious almost expect to see beams of light radiating from the tarmac.

So much high-flown rhetoric has been vented about Jerusalem – the city of gold, of dreams, of metaphor, allegory, symbol and mystical vision – that it can come as quite a surprise to see that it is, in fact, a real town, with regular folk living ordinary lives. No need for a golden chariot or winged horses: come by car, taxi or train, or on the number 405 bus.

The city

News reports about ‘Jewish West Jerusalem’ and ‘Occupied East Jerusalem’ wrongly suggest a city of two halves, maybe even maliciously hinting at a Berlin-style wall, or worse, an apartheid wall like the terrifying concrete and steel Peace Line that separates the warring communities in Belfast.

There’s nothing like that here. Everywhere is safe and you can travel freely anywhere in the city. But there is a head-spinning cultural diversity. East Jerusalem is an Arab district, rising just north of the Old City, with crowded streets and markets. Abutting it, the ultra-Orthodox religious neighbourhoods Mea Shearim and Beit Yisrael seem somehow even more exotic and intriguing. The rest of West Jerusalem – including busy streets, attractive squares, the animated pedestrian lanes of the city centre and a whole multitude of Jewish neighbourhoods beyond – fans out westwards from the Old City.

All the apparatus of the Israeli state is installed here in huge, majestic modern buildings: the Knesset or parliament; Yad Vashem, the national memorial to the Holocaust; and the great national treasures of the Israel Museum. All these, along with the main shopping streets and hectic city centre around Zion Square, the focal point of business and entertainment, are in so-called West Jerusalem.