Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Colonial Room With a View

Crossposted from Haaretz

The British High Commissioner?s headquarters in Jerusalem, now the seat of the UN. Image by Aviad Barness

Standing in the sunken garden at the bottom of the former British High Commissioner’s headquarters in Armon Hanatziv, a neighborhood in southeast Jerusalem, it’s easy to imagine the cocktail parties once held here by British Mandate officials. Members of Arab and Jewish high society would gather with them under the arched portico, which overlooks both sides of the garden. The discussions included diplomacy, politics and the future of the British Empire, mixed with strained humor about relations among the local residents.

The various nations that have conquered Israel bequeathed a legacy of grand buildings — from the Roman fortress of Masada, to Byzantine citadels and the arched palaces of effendis in Acre. But the British High Commissioner’s headquarters is the only one that still serves more or less its original purpose. It has not been turned into a museum, hotel or visitors center, or, on the other hand, left to sink into ruin. Since the British Mandate ended in 1948 and to this day, it has been used as UN headquarters and as the private home of the commander of UN forces. The sunken garden has lost some of its splendor and its exclusive crowd, but now and then it hosts weddings or other parties held by UN staff.

Read more at Haaretz.com

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.