JERUSALEM - Valentine Vester, who witnessed history as the proprietor of one of the Middle East's most storied hotels, has died. She was 96.
Mrs. Vester spent the last years of her life in an apartment on the manicured grounds of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel, which sits on the dividing line between the city's Arab and Jewish sections, has served for decades as a favorite hangout for diplomats and foreign correspondents and as a backdrop for political intrigue.
Mrs. Vester was born in the English town of Alverstoke into the wealthy family of a Royal Navy officer. She came to Jerusalem in the early 1960s with her husband, Horatio, the grandson of the Colony's founders.
Nicholas Vester, her son, said the move was "a colossal wrench," but that she "adapted to everything that was thrown at her."
"She and Horatio made this place into a global landmark by their wit and by being interesting enough that people would travel a long way to see them, and were flattered by their attention," he said.
Her association with the Mideast began before the marriage. A relative who worked in the British administration of the Holy Land between the world wars introduced her to King Abdullah of Transjordan, and another relative, Gertrude Bell, was a renowned British diplomat and archeologist in the region a century ago.
Mrs. Vester went on to live through much of the upheaval that shaped the modern Mideast. In 1967, she saw her hotel move from Jordanian to Israeli control.
Over the years, her son said, Mrs. Vester "learned to really hate people who make wars."
"Very often her irritation with Palestinians and Israelis was summed up by the phrase, 'a plague on both their houses,' " he said. The hotel, which has always seen itself as neutral ground, managed to maintain that status largely because of Mrs. Vester's "intemperate hostility to extremists on both sides."
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators secretly drafted parts of the Oslo peace accords at the hotel, in Room 16. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, now an international Mideast envoy, has a suite on the top floor.
Mrs. Vester's husband's grandparents, Anna and Horatio Spafford, were millennialist Protestants from Chicago. They arrived in the holy city - then a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire - in 1881, after losing their four daughters in an Atlantic shipwreck and then a son to scarlet fever. They wanted to do charitable work and await the Second Coming.
They gathered a community around them of Americans and Swedes, forming a kind of Christian proto-kibbutz. For a time, they observed strict rules of celibacy and even banned marriage because Anna deemed it little more than a "license to sin."