In Foreign Parts: Snow business transforms Israel's divided city

Jerusalem came to a halt this week. The city that kept going even through the suicide bombs was brought to a standstill. Shops and restaurants closed. So did offices. The streets were deserted. The city hall even asked Jerusalemites to stay indoors to leave the roads clear for emergency vehicles. The reason for this extraordinary situation? Snow.

Jerusalem came to a halt this week. The city that kept going even through the suicide bombs was brought to a standstill. Shops and restaurants closed. So did offices. The streets were deserted. The city hall even asked Jerusalemites to stay indoors to leave the roads clear for emergency vehicles. The reason for this extraordinary situation? Snow.

I have watched with amazement the courage of the people here as they get on their regular bus to go to work when the day before people on a bus on the same route were killed by a suicide bomber. Every night, the restaurants and cafés are packed, although everyone here knows people have died in similar packed restaurants and cafés when a bomb goes off.

But the snow was a different matter. It started on Monday, at lunchtime. I was visiting the Jerusalem office of a highly respected international company. From the window you could see a few flakes of snow mingling with the rain. "Right, it's snowing," a senior executive said, poking his head inside the door. "I'm off home." And everyone left. By the evening, as the snow began to settle, the streets were empty. Taxis refused to venture out.

And on Tuesday we woke to a Jerusalem transformed. Huge drifts clung to the walls of the Old City. The golden Dome of the Rock had turned white. Beneath, a few Jewish worshippers struggled through the slush to pray at the Western, or Wailing, Wall. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, snow was billowing into the dark interior through the open door.

It blew slowly in through the gaps in the roofs of the deserted Old City souqs, catching the light as it fell. The fronds of the palm trees were bowed under heavy, white shrouds. It was like one of those television adverts for cars where the streets of some Mediterranean city are coated in ice. The scene had a hint of the surreal.

You could see why everyone was in such a hurry to get home. The city was completely unprepared. There were no snow ploughs. No one even put down grit. Those few people who ventured out in four-wheel-drives skidded through thick slush. Pedestrians had to wade through it, ankle-deep.

The main highway to Tel Aviv and to the rest of Israel was closed. The roads across the West Bank were blocked by heavy drifts. The city was all but snowed in.

At the five-star American Colony Hotel, the bar was slowly flooding with melt-water from snow outside. People sat drinking with their feet in puddles, or squelched across to the bar for refills. You would think Jerusalem would be better prepared for snow. After all, it is perched high in the hills, and it snows most years here, though not for many years has there been such a heavy fall.

But I suspect unpreparedness was not the only reason Jerusalem came to a standstill. This was not only an excuse to avoid work. I think there was something more to it, a chance for both sides, just for a few days, to forget the seemingly unending brutality of the conflict here. Most of the Palestinian cities of the West Bank are in the hills, like Jerusalem, and they were buried deep in snow as well. And the guns fell, if not completely silent, a lot quieter than usual.

In Jerusalem, suddenly everyone was having snowball fights, not just the children, but grown men and women as well. Jerusalem, with all the fears and suspicion of the conflict, an economy in ruins on both sides of the old 1967 border that used to divide the city, is not the most cheerful of places these days. But suddenly everyone was smiling, grinning from ear to ear at complete strangers.

In a few cases, Palestinians pelted Israelis, and Israelis chucked handfuls of freezing snow back. It was almost as if the snow was a sort of carnival for Jerusalem, a time when anything went and you could chuck a snow ball at just about anybody. Snowmen were sprouting all over the city. People were whizzing down the perilously steep hills on improvised snowboards.

As drivers began to venture back on to the roads, there were traffic jams at the best places to get a view of the white-covered city, the Mount of Olives, and Mount Scopus, where you could see the snowline end abruptly as the hills fell steeply and the desert of the Biblical Wilderness began.

When the last of the snow melted yesterday, Jerusalem returned to normal. A new government was sworn in on Thursday and politics was back on everyone's mind. But for a few days this week, Jerusalem forgot its troubles and had fun.