Tribute to a Civil leader
Keeping in line with the stories below and ones that seem to be crossing my path a lot today, here’s another article about the enduring value of civility and dignity. George Weigel reflects on the leadership of the man who served as mayor of Jerusalem for nearly three decades, and the legacy he leaves.
Babylonians, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, Persians, Romans, Saracens, and Seleucids each ruled Jerusalem, in their turn, as conquerors. From 1965 until 1993, Teddy Kollek governed Jerusalem as a trustee. Living at the epicenter of a region caught in the cruel web of violence, Teddy embodied civility, decency, and tolerance.
He was a proud Israeli, who in his youth had run guns and done intelligence work for David Ben-Gurion; as Mayor of Jerusalem, he conducted himself as a servant of people of all faiths, determined to maintain free access to the city’s holy places for all who wished to worship there.
That is the diciest of commodities there still, the determination to maintain free access to the holy places of Jersualem, with goodwill towards all.
Teddy, in response to renewed calls for some sort of international oversight, created a non-governmental body: the Jerusalem Committee, an eclectic gathering of lawyers, statesmen, academics, theologians, and architects from all over the world — all dedicated to religious freedom, all committed to an open and undivided Jerusalem, and all invited by Teddy to “congratulate us when we get it right, and correct us when we get it wrong 
Events there go back and forth between the two continually. Between my two visits there at the end of 2000 and again at the end of 2005, the huge concrete and barbed wire wall went up between Jerusalem and the Palestinian territory. Getting to and from the holy sites is still protected, but just much more so.
Jerusalem is hardly an oasis of tranquillity today. But it is a far more tranquil place — and a far more beautiful place, and a far more open place — than it would have been absent the tough love lavished on it for decades by Teddy Kollek. This great and good man, who was the human antithesis of the brute who died seventy-two hours before him [Saddam Hussein], embodied the promise that Jerusalem might one day be in reality what it has long been inspiration: the city of peace. Gathered to the fathers, may he rest in peace.
I remember a merchant in the marketplace there asking me, on our way through its crowded walkway, to pray for the peace of Jersualem. That will require the peace of the region, and Palestinians are far from that right now with the infighting of rival parties. If leaders there can put the goal of peaceful co-existence ahead of the goal of battling and winning, the inspiration may become a reality. Will it ever happen…