COLUMN ONE : A Fading Vision in Holy City : For a quarter-century, Mayor Kollek sought a Jerusalem where disparate groups could live in mutual respect. Now he’s helpless as the Israeli government thwarts goals.

JERUSALEM — The old saying that you can’t fight City Hall has been turned on its head in this divided and tense capital of religious and political extremes. Teddy Kollek, perhaps the world’s best known mayor, is finding that his own City Hall can’t fight.

Kollek, one of the last grand figures of Zionism, clings to a vision of a united city of disparate groups living in separate but equal communities in mutual respect. But while he looks on, the vision is being shoved aside by a competing central government policy: ensuring the supremacy of one group over another.

The mayor can do little about it. At the age of 80, as he nears the end of six terms and more than a quarter-century in office, Kollek the voice of reason is becoming Jeremiah the voice of doom.

“It’s a dangerous situation,” he said in a recent interview. “This is a city where everyone has the same rights. If some Israelis try to behave as if the Arabs are inferior, then it’s immoral.”

On Christmas Day, Kollek took the unusual step of leading a march into the Jerusalem suburb of Silwan to protest the takeover of Arab housing by government-backed Jewish nationalists.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, through the aggressive hand of Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, has embarked on a campaign to alter the makeup of city neighborhoods. The integration is strictly one-way: Jewish groups will be implanted in Arab communities to show that “Jews can live anywhere” even if Arabs cannot.

More than just a squabble over block-busting, the relentless campaign in effect undermines the goals of Kollek’s whole career. Equal rights under Jewish rule, even in an atmosphere of hostility, was his guiding philosophy. With only two years left in what probably is his last term in office, the post-Kollek era is already under way.

Broadly, Jerusalem has become the latest battleground in the war over Israel’s yet-unformed identity and a left-right struggle over the nature of the country. Forty-three years into statehood, is Israel a settled, liberal nation of equal rights for all? Or does it still see itself as a struggling and besieged community of Jews compelled to battle Arabs for every inch of earth under its feet?

Or, as rightists in government see it, does the very presence of Arabs somehow debase the Israeli claim to the city, to the land, to existence?

“Silwan is a test case,” advised Yaron Ezrahi, who marched along with Kollek. “For the extreme right, this is just an extension of the independence war. For leftists, that war is over and it is time for conciliation.”

Conciliation has been the theme of Kollek’s career, and he has doggedly practiced pragmatic rule in a city that, through history, has been torn by ethnic and religious rivalries. With his eye on nuts-and-bolts improvement, he was often criticized for overlooking the deeper desires of the city’s 150,000 Palestinian residents--who, in the words of one Israeli observer, want national rights, not just better sewers. About 350,000 Israelis live in Jerusalem.

On the other hand, if the political conflict is ever resolved, even Palestinians might prefer to keep “Teddy,” as he is universally known. During a face-to-face meeting last year, Faisal Husseini, the moderate Palestinian leader, told Kollek that if Palestinians get to set up their capital in Jerusalem alongside Israel’s, the Arabs might favor Kollek for mayor.

Kollek’s role as a conciliator seems out of sync with the public personality of the man himself. The native Viennese can be sharp-tongued--he called the Silwan settlers “dastardly”--and often hectoring. He has repeatedly scolded the Palestinians for refusing half steps to improving their lot. “You never work hard at details,” he once told a veteran Palestinian leader.

He frequently dozes off at public meetings, yet despite his advanced age, rightists shied away from seriously challenging him in the 1989 city elections. He is still a magnet for generous donations to the city. A fund has collected $250 million over the years of his stewardship. In May, well-wishers showered him with compliments and American donors with $2 million for Jerusalem. “The ode of praise to Teddy Kollek never ends,” wrote columnist Hirsh Goodman in the Jerusalem Report magazine.

His fund-raising skills were honed earlier in his career, when in the 1950s, he helped organize the first Israel Bonds drive in the United States and was a key negotiator in efforts to get the first American aid for the new nation.

Kollek was a protege of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, having worked, in Britain during World War II, with the future leader in the Jewish Agency. This group was responsible for arranging immigration to what was then known as Palestine. He also worked with Allied intelligence services during the war, helping them to contact Jewish underground groups and to aid Jews escaping from Nazi persecution.

His father had been a Zionist, and the young Kollek joined Zionist youth groups in Austria. He left for Israel in 1935 and helped found a kibbutz.

Since he was first elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, Kollek has developed a kind of neighborhood-rule system of dealing with community leaders directly. This is a style he inherited from the city’s previous rulers, particularly the Turks, who treated religious and ethnic communities individually.

He opposes giving part of the city to the Palestinians as their capital, contending that the Arabs have only religious rights to the city, not national rights.

It is a position that, in the end, has made it impossible for him to fully win the trust of the Palestinians--who, while agreeing that the city should not be physically divided, insist that Jerusalem can hold two capitals.

In the last elections, the Arabs stayed away from the polls. Kollek was elected mayor anyway, with especially broad support from secular Jerusalemites, but also from voters across the political spectrum who have come to view him as an institution.

Making the city normal--or at least appear normal--has been one of his main goals. Tulip gardens are so profuse that Dutch horticulturists named a strain of the flower after him. He laid out parks and promenades and built libraries, museums and, most recently, a soccer stadium.

However, Kollek’s municipal designs have been buffeted by a pair of community revolts. Observant Jews who live here have bristled at Kollek’s efforts to make the Holy City entertaining. Strict Orthodox residents threw stones at Friday night moviegoers in a protest against what they termed desecration of the Sabbath. Still, the movies and restaurants stayed open and are a source of pride for Kollek.

The growing religious community, which makes up about 20% of the population, also clashed on occasion with more secular residents over the flow of Friday night and Saturday automobile traffic. Recently, the opening of a new highway that skirts the edge of a religious neighborhood set off a spate of stone-throwing protests. Police suppression and a high roadside wall cooled things down.

Kollek insists that, overall, the city is livable for religious and secular residents alike. “There has been progress,” Kollek said. “There is less secular-religious strife than before.”

The four-year Palestinian revolt against Israeli rule presented an even more fundamental challenge. Violence and fear of unrest redrew the city’s boundaries and made a mockery of Kollek’s often expressed description of the city as eternally unified.

Arab neighborhoods took part in the daily afternoon protest strikes that shut down business throughout the eastern half of the city. For a time, the rhythm of violence lagged behind the pace on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but gradually the characteristic cycle of revolt and repression took hold in Arab neighborhoods--stone-throwing, car burnings, police shootings and curfews.

The city became divided physically and psychologically. Israelis carefully avoided Palestinian neighborhoods for fear of stonings. Arabs moved warily in Jewish neighborhoods, vulnerable to harassment. Incidents of stabbings of Jews by Arabs raised the temperature while intrusive tactics of Jewish militants incensed Arab residents.

In October, 1990, Jerusalem experienced its worst violence in more than two decades. Police killed 19 Muslims at Al Aqsa mosque who had gathered to resist a threatened march into the compound by a Jewish group committed to expelling the Muslims from the enclosure. The Jews said the area, which they call the Temple Mount, should by right be the home of a reconstructed temple to replace the ancient shrines built by Solomon and Herod.

Kollek had predicted catastrophe if attempts to demonstrate on the mount persisted. After the shootings, he called the incident “the greatest tragedy that fell on this city” during all his years as mayor of united Jerusalem.

Now come the government plans to alter the demographics in Arab neighborhoods. The first indication that the Shamir government was bent on changing the status quo occurred just before Easter, 1990, when a religious group took over a largely abandoned hospice in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.

The government put up money to purchase the lease on a house from an Armenian tenant who had been renting the building from the Greek Orthodox Church. Police sprayed tear gas into a protest demonstration led by the Greek Orthodox patriarch, setting off mayhem in the Old City.

The dispute over the building’s ownership is in court, but the settlers were permitted to stay on. In the Muslim quarter, houses were taken over by the government on behalf of nationalist yeshivas, or Jewish religious schools, on the grounds that Jews had the right to live anywhere in the city. However, Arabs had been forbidden by court order to reclaim property in the Jewish Quarter, which was refurbished after Israel took the Old City from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War.

The campaign to break the homogeneity of Arab neighborhoods moved outside the Old City when the government began exercising its legal control over buildings whose owners had fled or were absent during the 1967 war. The buildings have long been held in trust and often occupied by Arab tenants, but Sharon has now begun to turn them over to settler groups.

“This is now a trend,” said Kollek with unaccustomed resignation.

The plans for Silwan--which clings to the sides of a steep valley beneath the southern Old City walls--are the most ambitious of the projects so far. In an echo of the case of chronic Temple Mount envy, a settlers’ group called El Ad has painted its campaign in religious shades. Members say they are reclaiming the City of David, the site of Jerusalem under the shepherd king.

The government has rented the properties to the settlers for rock-bottom prices and brought in soldiers to protect the homesteaders from enraged Arab residents.

For Kollek, it amounts to a land grab. “Even if it’s legal, it’s not clever,” he said.

“I suggest that if Jews want to make a point that they can live everywhere, they move into Mea Shearim,” he suggested, half tongue-in-cheek. Mea Shearim is a close-knit community of strictly religious Jews.

The Silwan issue has brought forward competing notions of Zionist goals. It has also exposed a weakness in the liberal Zionist position that tries to balance the supreme right of the Jews to live in the Holy Land with the rights of the Arabs who also live there.

Kollek, for example, insists that, as the capital of Israel, Jerusalem must have a Jewish majority to ensure Israeli control. Right-wingers take the logic a step further: Arab geographical continuity, even in the close quarters of Jerusalem, must be broken up to ensure Jewish dominance of the city.

Kollek himself, in a heated response to the stabbing of a Jew in the Old City, once stated with unusual militancy that “an increased Jewish presence in all parts of the city will make clear to the assassins our determination in the struggle for a united Jewish capital.”

In cooler moments, Kollek maintains that Israeli sovereignty in the city rests partly on the quality of its treatment of Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, who live there, even if they have rejected Israeli citizenship. He is fond of comparing his own era with the conditions of East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967.

“Look at all the building permits we have granted for churches in the city,” he said, motioning to his secretary to get out a list. “Jordan never did that.

“Even if it is true that Jews have the right to live everywhere, the same can be said for Arabs,” he remarked in the recent interview. “We have to live together, but not necessarily in the same neighborhoods.”

Kollek’s power to act is limited by the relative weakness of the city government in relation to the state. Municipal representatives form a minority on planning councils, and in the case of developments of 200 units or less, plans need not be presented to the City Council at all.

That leaves Kollek with only a voice and a placard. On Christmas Day in Silwan, he stood with a sign that read, “Undivided Jerusalem Can’t Be Crushed.”

A coalition of Jewish residents issued a statement supporting him and attacking “fanatics who would realize their exclusive messianic dreams at the expense of the lives and happiness of others.”

“We will resist any private or public scheme to systematically eradicate non-Jewish communities, evict their citizens and take their houses by devious means and the use of force,” they said.

The next day, the El Ad settlers’ group announced plans to move into more houses and to eventually set up a community of 200 families in Silwan. Sharon, in a written answer to a legal challenge of the takeovers, said, “It is the policy of the government of Israel to encourage Jews to live in Jerusalem.

“Jews,” he added, “have a firm tie to the City of David and the area around it. There is no dense Arab population.”

Jerusalem: Faith and Violence

VITAL STATISTICS: Population of about 350,000 Israelis, 150,000 Palestinians. Holy to three faiths, site of Judaism’s Western Wall, Christianity’s Church of Holy Sepulcher, Islam’s Dome of Rock and Al Aqsa mosque.

HISTORY: Conquered around 1000 BC by King David, who made it Jewish center. City plundered by Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece; regained by Jews in 165 BC. Ruled by Roman, Byzantine empires. British took control in 1917; Zionists started Jews’ migration to Palestine. Jews, Arabs fought in 1948 war, ending with Israel a nation and Jerusalem divided. After 1967 war, Israel took eastern half of the city from Jordan.

POLITICS: Israelis call city their undivided, eternal capital. Palestinians want to share it as capital of a new state in West Bank, Gaza Strip. Arab Jerusalemites participated in Palestinian uprising that began in West Bank, Gaza. Right-wing government is campaigning to move Jews into neighborhoods heavily populated by Arabs.

Profile: Teddy Kollek

Position: Mayor of Jerusalem.

Birthplace: Vienna, May 27, 1911.

Background: Moved to Israel in 1935. After Israeli independence, was recruited into government work by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Diplomat in United States in 1950s. First elected mayor in 1965.

Quote: “Even if it is true that Jews have the right to live everywhere, the same can be said for Arabs.”