Susan Goodman

Do you know where the Augusta Victoria Hospital is?” asks my taxi driver as we drive through that invisible veil which separates east and west Jerusalem. It is my first journey out of my Jerusalem, where I now live having taken a one-way aliya ticket to Israel from England just five months ago.

Even with west and east, we live in a city which has been a unified whole since 1967. And indeed these Arabs have the status of being residents of Israel. Not citizens like Israeli Arabs but something a little less, being able to vote in municipal but not national elections. They have Israeli ID cards and are found sharing the same bureaucratic rites of passage as the rest of us who have to negotiate our way through the strata of Israeli officialdom.

I’m rather surprised by my taxi driver’s question because he agreed to take me to this Arab hospital in east Jerusalem so he surely he knows where it is. Well, we’ve just driven past the Damascus Gate and the scenery has changed.

I feel a certain tinge of anxiety. Are we really going to stop in this sea of unfamiliarity (hostility?) and ask the way? I’m especially baffled by my taxi driver’s question because I discovered in the first part of my journey that actually he is an Arab!

“Haven’t you been to the Augusta Victoria Hospital before?” I ask slightly nervously. “No,” he replies. I bring the issue out into the open. “Do you know where it is?”

He laughs a laugh of reassurance, recognising the confusion he has caused. He explains “I only asked you, because I wanted to point out.” and he waves a hand toward the skyline, “that the hospital is very close to Mount Scopus, you know, the Hebrew University.”

“Yes?” I reply questioningly, knowing that I haven’t yet got the point he is trying to make.

I consulted Martin Gilbert’s book Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City, for a richer historical perspective. The hospital had been erected on land given to Kaiser Wilhelm II by the Sultan when the German Kaiser had visited Jerusalem in 1848.

At that time Jerusalem was a squalid, overcrowded city that had spilled out of the old walls onto surrounding hills. Its population of 45,300 included 28,000 Jews; 8,700 Christian Arabs; 8,600 Muslim Arabs. A population that had increased nine-fold in just sixty years. Herzl laid out before the Kaiser his vision of a clean and modernised New Jerusalem. “The Mount of Olives,” Muhammad, my taxi driver sweeps his hand across the scene in front of us. A steep, empty road takes us to the gate of the hospital and then along the short drive to the front of the hospital. I wander in and look for an appropriate sign.

No security guards, no inspection of the taxi, no stirring the contents of my handbag. In a small office in the Augusta Victoria, I am introduced to a group of taciturn Arab women. Within half an hour we will be joking together. This is the first English lesson of a series of 12 that I am giving this lively bunch of women. They belong to a support group for women with breast cancer and are going off to an international conference in the summer.