In an interview on Divided Cities

You’ve also said that one of the reasons very little statistical work of this kind has been carried out is the reluctance of various governments to thoroughly understand the consequences of their own urban partitions. But what’s your 4th book?

Well now we might go to Meron Benvenisti’s City of Stone: the Hidden History of Jerusalem. Meron is a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a scholar of international calibre, but what makes his book so wonderful is that he has not only lived his whole life in Jerusalem, but his father was one of the original extrem socialist kibbutzians - you know in the years before Israel was actually created - with incredibly idealistic notions of what this Israel might be and with visions of how to share power and resources with the Palestinians. Meron came out of this wonderfully intellectual left wing tradition and his whole life, literally, is the history of his country. He was born just a few years before 1948 and in addition he was deputy mayor of Jerusalem through the critical years, the 70’s, when the city was recovering from its partition status. Partition began in 1948 and ended in 1967 with the 6 day war, when Israeli forces surprised everyone and pushed back against the combined Arab forces to take back what they had lost and then some: including Jerusalem which they then departitioned. So here’s Meron with this incredible personal history, this direct insight as a policy maker and politician in Jerusalem, and his specific mandate as deputy mayor was for the Arab population. He was being asked to understand their needs, understand their frustrations, and develop municipal policy accordingly. And he did that brilliantly until he became so jaded by the whole thing that he resumed his career as a scholar without affiliation. He never accepted a permanent university post. His book City of Stone is, in my opinion, the definitive story of modern Jerusalem, not because it takes one side or another side, or even both sides. It's because of the way it describes how this place which for so many people was so important became such a sink of hatred and violence and ignorance and a refuge for so many hawkish people.

I met an icon painter once in Moscow who told me that Jerusalem was the centre of the world. And I assume that’s why there is so much violence there. Because so many different sorts of people think it’s the centre of their world.

It’s amazing. When you go and you see the squalor inside the walled city of Jerusalem, the most sacred city in the world. When you see the consequences of this incredibly bigoted anti-Arab policy. When you see the filth and the decrepitude of the living conditions of the Arab residents of whom there are fewer and fewer every day, you just can’t believe it. Benvenisti does such an amazing job. He’s the best writer on this list. You couldn’t learn more about this city from a humanistic point of view than by reading Benvenisti’s book.

Benvenisti doesn’t actually think there’s a solution to the problem in Jerusalem or between Israel and the Palestinian state in general. He says what’s needed is a process oriented approach ‘planted firmly in the mud’. What does he mean by that?

Well he rejects the view that there’s any neutral ground in these situations. So anyone who comes in claiming some professional objectivity, saying, ‘I’m a doctor, an engineer, an urban planner’ – fill in the blank – ‘I’m not prejudiced one way or another’. That’s just bullshit. Everybody is assigned a partisan role whether they assign it to themselves or not. So the mud he’s talking about is just the shifting political ground in which any coping strategy must be planted. There’s no soap box that gets you above that. Everybody’s just slogging through the shit. The best you can do is to identify problems as they occur and not let them lead to their worst iterations.

You call Benvenisti the ‘narrative voice of the native scholar’…

Most authors don’t want to be sullied by these problems. They want to talk about them yet remove themselves. That’s why Benvenisti’s book is so amazing and that’s why I say he has this particular voice, as opposed to Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict, which is a different sort of book altogether.

‘The mile high voice of the external political scientist’. But his book, like Benvenisti’s, is also published by Berkley University Press.

That’s right, and he also has a lot of important information under his thumb. But just look at the title. I mean Ethnic Groups in Conflict. To look down at so many millions of people, billions, and make them small. The guy's good. It’s an important book. But I put it on my list because it’s so crucial to remain aware of the problems that arise from the arrogance of that perceived remove. That you can gaze on the situation from a great height. Horowitz is a pretty thoughtful guy but you put him next to Benvenisti and you almost can’t open his book anymore. He’s a top down guy who’s saying that these conflicts, all these conflicts, could have been avoided if somehow, way back, the leadership could have been more honest, or had a broader view, and if the international community had acted more appropriately and energetically to intervene. He talks about the USA and the UN and the Prime Minister of the UK. The problem is that he basically believes that the results are still on the shoulders of these people. I’m the last person to say that irresponsible policy is irrelevant, but there’s so little texture or complexity built into his analysis because he’s so eager to assume that once the sin of omission or commission is committed by the powerful then ethnic conflict was the inevitable bi-product. That’s one way to read it, but it wouldn’t be mine.