LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Teddy Kollek : Jerusalem’s Lion in Winter Reflects Back Over His Life

Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s distinguished mayor, turns 80 this year, but you’d hardly know it watching him in action. At his desk at 7:30 a.m., Teddy--as he is known to one and all--puts in bone-wearying 12- to 14-hour days trying to solve the seemingly unsolvable problems of his unique and bruised city, whose holy places are sacred to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Friend to the famous, confidante to the locals, Teddy strives mightily in his Sisyphean task of reconciling the irreconcilable: Israeli Jews in West Jerusalem and Arab Palestinians in East Jerusalem, whose fate has been linked since Jerusalem was physically--but not emotionally--re-united by the 1967 War.

Growing up in Vienna, Kollek immigrated to Palestine in 1935, helped found Kibbutz Ein Gev in Galilee, worked with Allied intelligence in World War II and headed the undercover operation to buy arms during the 1948-49 Israeli War for Independence.

With the urging of his mentor, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, he was elected Jerusalem’s mayor in 1965, representing the moderate left. Despite Israel’s mounting shift to the political right, he was elected to his sixth consecutive term in 1989. Kollek, now a grandfather, remains married to his wife of 54 years, Tamar.

Usually dressed casually in an open-neck shirt, Teddy sat behind his desk wearing an elegant three-piece dark suit, immaculate white shirt and black tie--explaining he had attended two funerals earlier in his crowded day. After showing a visitor a group of teddy bears sent by admirers and his own collection of maps and prints of Jerusalem at various stages in its history, he poured glasses from a bottle of arak, the anise-flavored local liqueur. Then Kollek toted up the balance sheet of a lifetime of accomplishment and disappointment, impromptu thoughts of this lion in winter.

Question: You’ve been mayor of Jerusalem for more than 25 years. You’ve seen it divided, united--some might say divided again. You’ve seen good times and bad. What is the state of Jerusalem today and the outlook for the future?

Answer: Well, as it looks today, there is certainly a psychological division but no physical division. When we had a physical division and shooting across the border, it was worse than now. In between, we had a very good time with lots of activities. But even today I think that more has been left of the cooperative things than you would think.

We had a meeting (recently) of our senior Arab officials, about 150 of them. We have 1,500 Arab employees in the city, out of 5,000 personnel. They didn’t stay away from their jobs during a single strike. But they are worried--especially if they should have to leave the municipality. They have to feed families, they like their colleagues and they like the job.

I think you cannot solve the problems of Jerusalem without solving the problems in the country as a whole--and we are divided amongst ourselves on how to settle them . . . .

We’re going through a difficult time but I’m pretty confident. If you had prophesied--30 years ago, 50 years ago--you would have prophesied something worse than this. We are not very happy with the state of Israel. We had higher hopes. And not all these hopes came true, and we have disappointments. But if, let’s say in 1940 on the brink of the Holocaust, we would have been offered the state as it is today--with all the unpleasantness--we would have grabbed it with open arms and would have been very happy.

Q: How has the war affected your city?

A: Fortunately, Jerusalem has not yet been hit in any of the missile attacks and I certainly hope we do not have to go through what the people of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, or Haifa have experienced. On the positive side, our hotels and other businesses have had a mini-boom--as many Tel Avivians sought a temporary refuge from the screaming of the Scuds and the Patriots.

Q: The Palestinians have supported Saddam Hussein--how has this affected you and your city?

A: I believe we must try and understand the source of their identification with Saddam Hussein--as hurtful for us and as potentially tragic for them as it may be. I hope this war will end soon with a clear victory for America and her allies. We and the Palestinians will remain here. Neither of us will go away. Therefore, it is urgent that we Israelis be magnanimous and reach the sort of political solution which will resolve the tension.

Q: The intifada, the Palestinian uprising, is going into its fourth year. To what degree has that disrupted your hopes for a united and peaceful Jerusalem?

A: It has interrupted that, but it didn’t come entirely unexpected. When it came, it was a stronger reaction than I had expected. But I knew that the Palestinians couldn’t take this lying down. In fact, the other day I had a meeting with one of the outstanding public figures amongst the Palestinians--Faisel Husseini.

I have said that we never would have had an agreement with the Egyptians if they hadn’t a feeling they had a successful role when they came across the Suez Canal. That afterward it ended in a victory for us doesn’t matter. They thought they had a great victory, an uplifting moment. And Faisel Husseini said that Palestinians feel strong today. They didn’t before. This gives him the inner possibility to meet and to discuss. So I think this is not a feeling only of his: They stood up, they showed their courage, they didn’t give in. This created a lot of very strong feelings on their side. You had these cases of revenge on their part, on our part. But I think it also gave them a feeling that they can sit down and argue on a different basis, not only as a defeated group but as a people who stood up for their own interests.

If their support for Saddam Hussein turns out as badly as I suspect it will, then it remains to be seen what that will do to the feeling of strength they had before the war began.

Q: Did the intifada, from your point of view, throw a monkey wrench into your plans for an expanded, better Jerusalem?

A: We have gone ahead with all the physical things. We have a little museum here in the (Old City) citadel we opened a year ago in the midst of the intifada. We had Arab schoolchildren come there, as well as Jewish and Israeli, and all the others. We went on with all our plans. There was an argument among our people who said, “If there is shooting or stone throwing in an area, why don’t you cut out the water, or stop building?” We decided that we wouldn’t do that. We are a city. They are taxpayers. The ones who create the trouble are certainly in the minority--some would say a very small minority. . . . We have an obligation toward all the inhabitants and we carry it out.

Q: How has the violence of the intifada damaged life or the mood of Jerusalem?

A: It has certainly curtailed, to some extent, tourism, because people are afraid to come here. Now you have the additional fear of their being caught in a war, so even fewer people come. It’s more than unpleasant to walk into empty hotel rooms and hotel lobbies. You have stones thrown in certain streets. People don’t like to drive through because there are stones thrown or Molotov cocktails or cars being burned. There is a tension--and it isn’t as it is seen on CNN every evening, but it exists.

Q: In your meeting with Faisel Husseini, he went so far as to mention a possible division of the sovereignty of Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish sides with an overall municipality. What was your response?

A: My response was negative. But the suggestion wasn’t made for the first time by him. The very same suggestion was made to me by (Egypt’s) President Sadat during his visit here. And I have thought it through carefully. I think the first principle is that this must remain one city. When it was divided, because of the division, we were a little village. We were very backward. You couldn’t go back to that. And if you have two capitals within one city, you will soon have two legislatures: That means two police forces, that means two courts, that means a dividing line, a customs barrier. The wall will go up in no time. It was a miserable city when it was divided.

I personally think that eventually--after quite some time--the Palestinians will have their country. I don’t know whether that country will be in Jordan or part of the West Bank, or what. Theirs is a growing nationalism that, in a sense, is a mirror reflection of our nationalism, and they’ll have their land and their country, their state and their capital. But the Palestinians never until recently said they wanted their capital in Jerusalem.

They were here for 1,300-odd years and they never made their capital here. They had many chances for this, certainly under the Arabs, under the Turks. Recently they could have had the capital in the other half of Jerusalem, which the Jordanians ruled. They never demanded this. So all their explanations that their capital must be in Jerusalem--I think don’t hold water.

I think what holds water is that this is a holy city for them. We have done something which I believe isn’t fully appreciated. For 2,000 years, we have dreamt about this country, and we have dreamt about the Temple and the Temple Mount. We came back during an unprovoked war--a war that they started. Their army collapsed and withdrew--and we took the Temple Mount, but we didn’t take it over. A soldier had put a flag up on the Temple Mount and Gen. Dayan took it down six hours later. The Cabinet decided that the Temple Mount would be run only by the Muslims. And this after we had found out that they had destroyed 58 synagogues in the Old City. I don’t think you will find an example like this in history.

Q: About the Temple Mount, what do you feel about the incident of Oct. 8 (when 20 Arabs were killed by Israeli police)?

A: It was the greatest tragedy that has happened to us during these 23 years and I am sure that it happened and will throw its shadow, but I am sure that nobody wanted this, neither they nor us.

Q: It’s often said that as mayor you are a pragmatist rather than an ideologue or an idealist. Is that true and, if so, how is this reflected in the way you run the city ?

A: If we’ve been talking about the reunification of the city in 1967, let me take our approach to the Arab population as an example. Well, when the city fell together, we, of course, took care of everyday things. We provided water they didn’t have, milk for the children, and so on. We tried to create conditions that aren’t normally the conditions after a conquest. We gave them the choice to remain Jordanians or to become Israelis. Very few became Israelis, though we expected that from the beginning. But we gave them that choice. We kept their school system working under their curriculum . . . . We allowed them to cross into Arab countries with which we were at war and where we couldn’t go--also not very customary under similar circumstances. And the main thing--we left them the Temple Mount.

Q: You’ve spent a lot of time trying to sort out problems with the Arabs. What about the problems you have with the various Christian sects?

A: You see, there is one basic problem: This is a unique city; we have no examples which we can follow. We must try and find new ways. We are now repairing a church that belongs to a very venerable and old Christian domination--the Syrian Orthodox--which was neglected. They still pray and also speak--the older generations--in Aramaic, which goes back about 2,000 years and in which some of the holy books of the Jews are written. Now, we have spent well over a million shekels--over half-a-million dollars--to repair their church because it was falling to bits. So it’s an example of pragmatism.

The controversies here among Christian churches now go very peacefully--though historically people were even killed over matters of ritual precedence. The Christians aren’t very happy: They feel that they are in the middle of the conflict between the Muslims and the Jews, and they don’t know how to get out of it.

Q: What do you consider your greatest accomplishment as mayor?

A: My greatest accomplishment I still have to obtain. It is a stronger-based relation between various groups. It takes some time. I don’t know what happens, let’s say in Los Angeles, between the great variety of groups you have--maybe even more than we. But in Los Angeles, on the whole, people will say: “Our children or our grandchildren will speak English, and they will be part of a general community.” But here it isn’t so.

For instance, the Armenians have remained Armenians for 1,500 years and they speak Armenian among themselves, and they look at Armenia--whether it’s Soviet Armenia or Turkish Armenia--and suffer badly if there is an earthquake there or a fight between them and the Azerbaijanis. And the same is true of others here. You have sects that will last for a very long time, who for centuries preserved their identity. And therefore we have to develop--and we have developed to some extent--relations where there is a neighborly relationship, though basically not one culture. We have to find new forms here. In some ways we have found them--and in some ways we haven’t.

Q: We’ve been talking about Jerusalem. Do you have any thoughts about possible ways to settle the general Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab conflict?

A: You cannot settle the Jerusalem conflict without settling the general conflict. And only if you have a general solution . . . will you be able to come to some conclusions here. Until then, you can only try not to create additional problems and additional difficulties here. When I saw Mr. Husseini, my purpose was to show that--despite all of these differences--we could still meet and talk about things in a civilized way, and I think that we have achieved. This government hasn’t asked me for my opinion, so I don’t want to talk about it.

Q: What, looking back, has been your greatest disappointment, not so much as mayor but in a broader sense?

A: Well, we are all dreaming about an Israel that would be an example of a good state, of a just society, and I think we haven’t made that. We are left only with the idea, which was maybe too presumptuous, but anyway we lived with this. We were somehow encouraged in this by, for example, a book like “Exodus”: Everybody there is a hero. So people expected us--everybody--to be a hero. And we haven’t made that, and it’s a disappointment. Maybe it could never of happened. But I think that we could still have built a better society than we did. I can understand the Arabs extremely well, but the fact that their permanent attacks on us made our people more belligerent and cruder is a great disappointment. But you can’t give up on this, you have to continue working on it.