Cheryl Blackerby

Jerusalem Inn Attracts Journalists, Actors

By Cheryl Blackerby

The Palm Beach Daily News (Dec. 14, 2013) 

JERUSALEM — Sometimes things don’t go your way. You just have to accept this fact of life and carry on. And this was one of those nights.

I was squeezed in the back seats of a sherut, a shared taxi, with a big New Yorker in a suit and a young Israeli couple, all of us on our way from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem.

Tired and grungy, I wanted a shower and a bed after the long, crowded flight from New York. Not too much to ask.

But a mile from my hotel in East Jerusalem, the driver pulled to the side of the road, and told me a public bus had been attacked by people throwing Molotov cocktails. The incident had happened earlier in the evening near the hotel, and he said he wasn’t going to go near it.

No apologies, just get out and start walking.

It was 10 at night with no chance of getting a city taxi or bus. So I set out with my backpack, sirens screaming in the distance. But East Jerusalem stays up late, and small grocery stores, sidewalk vegetable and fruit vendors were open and there were plenty of people, including families on the streets.

A chill in the air put some spring in my steps and soon I was at The American Colony Hotel, gratefully walking across the stone floors of the lobby, which felt like an oasis of calm and civility with its 19th-century arched ceilings, Arabic tiles on the walls and a peaceful garden sheltered by mulberry trees beyond glass doors.

The doorman grabbed my backpack, asked if I had eaten, and led me to the Arabesque restaurant and a table covered in a white tablecloth. He told me he would alert the desk I had arrived. The tenor of the evening suddenly took a nice turn.

Across the room, TV newswoman Diane Sawyer sat with a small group eating a late dinner. A couple of TV cameramen, their shirts streaked with dust, were at another table, their equipment piled high next to their table. In the Cellar Bar, set in the hotel’s former 19th-century dairy, international journalists socialized and caught up on local news.

Later, I was finally in bed, in my safe haven looking up at the high Ottoman-style ceiling painted blue with gold stars that gleamed in the moonlight. Heaven.

I woke up to the Muslim call to prayer just before dawn. The muezzin’s booming call on loudspeakers reached every corner and bedroom of East Jerusalem: “As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm,” he said as part of his recitation. Translation: Prayer is better than sleep. Not this morning, and his melodious chant lulled me back to sleep.

On a dozen trips here, including one month-long backpack trek when I walked from one village to the next, I’ve stayed in luxury hotels, a hostel used by the Israeli Defense Forces in Be’er Sheba, kibbutzim in Galilee and Masada, Christian guesthouses in Jerusalem, and $20-inns in the West Bank.

But the American Colony is so much more than an overnight stop. It’s a neutral place in terms of geography — on the “seam line,” the border between Israel and the West Bank and the dividing line between the city’s Arab and Jewish sections.

It’s a place where journalists and politicians, Israelis and Palestinians, hawks and doves can meet and mingle, and leave the country’s turbulent politics outside the manicured gardens.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators secretly met in Room 16 in 1992 and drafted parts of what would become the Oslo Peace Accords, signed 20 years ago this year.

Owned neither by Arabs nor Jews, but by Americans, Brits and Swedes, the hotel has attracted heads of state, diplomats, foreign correspondents, actors and writers, including Jimmy Carter, Ted Turner, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, Barbara Walters, Mikhail Gorbachev, Natalie Portman, Sir Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Graham Greene and John Steinbeck.

British novelist John le Carré wrote one of his books here, and Peter Ustinov filmed much of the Agatha Christie mystery Appointment With Death at the hotel.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair occupied rooms on the fourth floor of the hotel for five years. He stayed one week each month as Mideast envoy of the Diplomatic Quartet, established by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia in 2002 to mediate the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He moved from the hotel to a nearby building last year.

The grand American Colony was originally a palace for a pasha and his four wives. It was bought by Americans Horatio and Anna Spafford, devout Christians from Chicago, who moved to Jerusalem in 1881 after the deaths of their four young daughters in a shipwreck. They and 16 other members of their church, who moved with them, called themselves the Overcomers.

They were well-known for philanthropic work in local Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities. The American Colony opened as a hotel in the 1950s, and is still owned by descendants of the founding community.

I remember the trip, where I had to walk to the hotel, fondly especially after learning no one was hurt on the bus. On my last visit to the hotel, I arrived from the West Bank in a taxi from the Allenby Bridge on the Israeli border with Jordan.

There were no ugly incidents this time, and I went straight to bed under gold stars and a blue sky.

Details

The American Colony: The hotel has a modern building and a historic main building. Personally, I like the old building’s rooms with arched and painted ceilings, stone floors and antique furniture.

Rates, including breakfast, range from $300 to $955. No two rooms are the same.

Visit americancolony.com or e-mail reserv@amcol.co.il