The Pen and the Olive Branch
Posted: 4th September 2026
Israel’s Ben-Gvir stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, performing prayers and calling for a Jewish temple on the site –– following a Zionist playbook David Hirst already documented fifty years ago.
Analyzing the use of architecture to remake the city into what its new rulers called an “emphatically Jewish one,” he wrote about the destruction of centuries-old Muslim sites, Israeli leaders fantasizing about building a synagogue between Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, and the development of the Wailing Wall to foster a sense of nationhood and identity.
In the Summer of 1974, Hirst wrote “nothing could disguise the fundamental truth: here, more poignantly than anywhere else, Israeli gain was necessarily Arab loss.”
Scroll down to read a passage from Rush to Annexation: Israel in Jerusalem, included in The Pen and the Olive Branch.
THE PEN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH
Reporting the Middle East
DAVID HIRST
Edited by
JANICK GOLD and CHARLES GLASS
Introduction by
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY
PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY—Edward Said
“A brilliant analytical mind.”
—Robert Fisk
“One of the most respected journalists of his generation, recognised by his peers as an eminently meticulous chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs.”
—The National
In April 1920, Arabs and Jews were killed in the first major clash in Jerusalem. Later that month, the Palestine mandate was formally assigned to Britain, and shortly afterward the British military administrator received a letter from Weizmann’s deputy proclaiming that the Wall was a “possession of the Jews throughout the world.” Continuous friction during the early years of the mandate came to a climax in August 1929 when the Zionists, exasperated by the Arabs’ opposition and the support their case had received from the mandatory authorities, made the Wall the scene of a crude and chauvinistic show of force. Several hundred “Haluzim,” rugged pioneer youth from the agricultural settlements, invaded Jerusalem, and paraded in front of the Wall, disturbing some of their own, truly devout, Jewish brethren, spoiling for a fight with the Arabs, singing the Jewish national anthem and shouting “the Wall is ours.” This stupid provocation was all that was needed, that tension-filled summer, to trigger off the bloodiest communal strife the mandate had known. Before it was over sixty-seven Orthodox Jews had been massacred in Hebron, innocent victims of Zionist quite as much as Arab fanaticism. In the wake of these disorders an International Commission of Inquiry was despatched to Palestine to investigate the whole complex tangle of rights and claims at the Wailing Wall. It ruled essentially in the Arabs’ favour. Its verdict became law in Palestine, and, accepted by the League of Nations, it could be said to represent the will of the international community.
* * *
Four days after, General Dayan, standing at the most sacred of Jewish shrines, declared his respect for all Holy Places, Israeli bulldozers demolished his words, the verdict of the international commission, and seven hundred years of Muslim history. The main, indeed the only, real symbol of Jerusalem’s Jewishness is the Wailing Wall. The Israelis are a people fascinated by the traces of their Jewish past; amateur archaeologists, from General Dayan down, abound. It was to be expected that they would dignify the remnants of their temples with a proper, spacious foreground, making of it a national-religious shrine worthy of the name. The “doubtful Moghreb community” which jostled up against it would have to go, and go it did. No sooner had the guns fallen silent than, on June 11, the inhabitants of the quarter, beneficiaries of the ancient endowment that Saladin’s son had founded, were turned out of their homes at a few minutes’ notice. Of their belongings many rescued only what they could carry. A thousand people, or 129 families, were scattered in the adjacent lanes and streets, in a nearby market, an unfinished school or any other spot they could find. Later they were to find refuge “with compensation” in neighbouring villages.
The process of making Jerusalem into what one Minister subsequently described as an “emphatically Jewish city” had begun. And as it did, the mood of religious exaltation, occasioned by the taking of this city in a victory so swift and complete it seemed like a miraculous deliverance, spread among the people.
[….]
It may be true that for the Jews Jerusalem is unique, but the Arabs have a sense of history too. Their sentimental attachment to the city, less intense perhaps, is nonetheless profound. In the Jerusalem of the Israelis, Arabs, as Muslims, cannot but see the most poignant evidence of their own decline. True, the two great mosques, al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, still summon the faithful to prayer, but from below, the confused murmur of the Jewish worshippers, swaying and chanting at the vastly enlarged Wailing Wall, disturbs the once exclusive sanctity of the Muslim shrines, while thousands of Jewish visitors, forbidden down the centuries, daily invade the sacred precincts themselves. If the Haram al-Sharif is a symbol for Islam, it is becoming a hollow one, the ghostly shell of the past ironically mocked by the new and alien reality pressing around it.
Yet if the destruction of the Magharibah were all, if, after this act, which though premeditated, was carried out in the moment of victory, the Israelis really did live up to their high-minded claim, it would be less difficult for the Palestinians, in some grand reconciliation of the future, to accept the result as a new status quo. But it is not all. The subtle erosion of the status quo—both physical and jurisdictional—continued by stealthy and devious means.
How can the Israelis claim—to take the jurisdictional violations—that “the custodial traditions of each denomination are being meticulously upheld” when they flout the authority of the Supreme Muslim Council as they do? If it protests too forcefully, they resort to deportation—the fate of its former President Abdul Hamid al-Sayigh. If it protests more gently they simply ignore it—since 1967 the Council has despatched scores of letters to the authorities who, evidently having a guilty loathing of putting themselves in writing, did not deign to send a single reply. In effect, it is the Israeli government, not the Council, which controls the Haram. According to Yehoshafat Palmon, adviser to the Mayor on Arab affairs, everything is done “in full agreement” with the Council. When I pointed out that one of Israel’s first acts after the 1967 war was to send ten soldiers to seize the keys of the Magharibah gate, enforcing access on Israel’s, not the Council’s, terms, he sarcastically replied: “Maybe it was twelve soldiers.” Despite continued opposition from the Council, Israelis have continued to control the Magharibah gate while, as a sop, the Council maintains a pathetically pointless presence at the others. How can they claim to uphold the “custodial traditions” when they deport the head of the Muslim Court, the Qadi, or Judge, of Jerusalem, once an office of great power and prestige, and replace him with their own puppet, the Qadi of Jaffa, Tawfiq Mahmud Asaliya, a man of little education and less esteem.
As for the physical violations of the status quo, Israeli religious leaders make no secret of their ambition to push ahead with those. The immediate post-war fantasies about the construction of a synagogue between al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock subsided, but the men of God regularly proclaimed no less an ambition than to expose two full sides of the Haram al-Sharif, from the south-west corner, near the existing Wailing Wall, all the way to the Gate of the Tribes in the north-east. Along this entire three-quarters of a kilometre length are the religious endowments, schools, courts, hospices—not to mention hundreds of Arabs living in them—which any great place of worship and pilgrimage gathers about itself. They are the accretions of centuries, an organic growth, one with the Noble Sanctuary itself. To remove them would be a maiming, a severance of the mosques from their natural environment.
After demolishing the Magharibah Quarter, the authorities inserted an item in the Jerusalem Post about the need to “clear” eighty-two metres of the Wailing Wall, and then, ignoring the protests of the Muslim Council, they began archaeological excavations to investigate the Wall’s southern reaches. Cracks appeared in historic buildings—the Fakhriyah Hospice, ancient residence of the Mufti of the Shafi sect, and an adjoining mosque—together with fourteen houses traditionally reserved for Haram officials. The inhabitants were ordered out, and the Fakhriyah went the way of the Magharibah two months before. Shortly afterwards, the Israelis turned their attention northwards. They used the pretext of bombs discovered in the vicinity of the Chain Gate—bombs which, local Arabs believe, the Israelis planted themselves—to confiscate all the property, including the ancient al-Tankiziyah School, on the northern side of the Wailing Wall compound.