Jerusalem is at war – with itself. In this city Judaism, Christianity, and Islam fought their defining battles. Here, in this century, two nations have declared themselves. Israelis and Palestinians both claim the city as their capital.

Rival prophets, warring nations. The war for Jerusalem has multiple fronts. At the edge, between forests to the west dropping precipitously to the Mediterranean Sea and deserts to the east stretching throughout the Arab world, lies a stone city creased by deep valleys. In reality, it is just a small, slightly dusty provincial town, cut of gray and pink stone, astride a small mountain range. But its air is seeded with pine pollen, the powder of bone, and memory. This last bends the light and makes the city a luminous medium of dream and nightmare.

The city is a central stake, a battleground, an ineffable symbol, not just to those who live within it, but to peoples and powers around the world. The conflicts that consume it reverberate in Washington, Rome, and Jeddah. And conversely even the smallest geopolitical shifts can shake its streets.

The contest between these larger nations and religions shows itself in Jerusalem, not just as ideology, but as life, in the daily struggles between the city's neighborhoods, which consider each other alien and dangerous zones. The city threatens always, everywhere, to crack into pieces or explode; yet it seems to grow inexorably, driven by the very forces that would tear it apart. And one must never forget that Jerusalem is also just a place whose residents must make do.