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Did You Know?

A City Where Every Building Must Wear the Same Stone

In 1918, Ronald Storrs — then the British military governor of Jerusalem — issued a bylaw requiring that buildings in the city be faced with local limestone. It formed part of a master plan drawn up by Sir William McLean, at the time city engineer of Alexandria, with input from the Arts and Crafts architect C. R. Ashbee.

The rule outlived the administration that made it. It has been carried forward by every subsequent authority and remains in municipal law today.

The material is a family of pale limestones and dolomites quarried from the Judean Hills, formed in the Late Cretaceous. The archetypal variety is meleke, a white limestone that cuts cleanly into large blocks and has been used since antiquity — the Western Wall is built of it. When low sun strikes the cream and pink facades, the whole city takes on the golden cast behind the phrase Jerusalem of Gold.

The regulation has been amended repeatedly. The 1936 ordinance required that external walls be constructed of stone. The 1944 master plan required only that external walls, columns and any wall facing a road be faced with natural square-dressed stone — which reduced stone from structure to cladding, largely because reinforced concrete had become cheap and available.

It is still applied. The National Library of Israel, completed in 2023 to a design by Herzog & de Meuron, is clad in it. As of 2000, there were around 650 stone-cutting enterprises operating in the West Bank, producing pink, sand, gold and off-white stone.

Over a century, across several changes of administration, one rule about what the outside of a building must look like has held.

The clock: the question of when the hour changes has held less consistently.

Israel and the Palestinian territories both use UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer, under different names — Israel Standard Time and Israel Daylight Time on one side, Eastern European Time and Eastern European Summer Time on the other.

The dates have often differed.

Until 2013, Israeli standard time resumed on the Saturday night before Yom Kippur, so that the fast — which is set by nightfall — would both begin and end an hour earlier. Because the Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, Yom Kippur can fall anywhere from mid-September to mid-October, which meant Israel sometimes returned to standard time up to six weeks before most other countries. The date became a recurring subject of coalition negotiation. In 2013 the Knesset fixed the period to run from the Friday before the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, close to Europe's dates.

The Palestinian territories set their own dates. In 2021 they ended daylight saving on 29 October, two days before Israel. In 2023 Palestine delayed summer time until after Ramadan, leaving the two an hour apart for about five weeks. And in 2011, the West Bank and Gaza ran on different times from each other, after the authorities in Ramallah moved the clocks following Ramadan and the authorities in Gaza did not follow.

A city where the law has been unambiguous for over a hundred years about what every wall must be made of, and where the answer to what time it is has sometimes depended on which office issued the notice.