JERUSALEM
It is widely assumed that Jerusalem will be the last, and most difficult, issue to be addressed in permanent status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While it is undeniable that Jerusalem is a core component of the peace process, much of the perceived difficulty associated with its final disposition arises from serious misconceptions about its competing religious, historical and political significance to Jews, Muslims and Christians. A final resolution of the Jerusalem issue will only be possible when the Palestinians and their international advocates (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Vatican and representatives of other Christian denominations) accept the permanence and legitimacy of Israel's claim to unified Jerusalem as its capital and acknowledge that only under unchallenged Israeli political sovereignty can the interests of all religious faiths be protected . In the words of the city's former longtime Mayor, Teddy Kollek: "Because I recognize the Palestinians' right to self-expression does not mean I recognize their [political] claim on Jerusalem."
Jewry's Preeminent Claim Over Jerusalem
While specific locations in the city, such as the Dome of the Rock and the Via Dolorosa, do have significance both to Muslims and Christians, Jerusalem – Mt. Zion, the City of David, the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall – has religious centrality only for Jews. As the respected historian, Martin Gilbert, has noted, for the Jews Jerusalem is not a "mere" city: "it holds the central spiritual and physical place in the history of the Jews as a people." Moreover, in its more than 3,000-year history, Jerusalem has been the political capital only of the Jewish nation, beginning in 1004 BC, when King David declared Jerusalem the capital of the first Jewish Kingdom. In the words of Teddy Kollek:
"Jerusalem was never the capital of any empire or country or conqueror, despite the many rulers who passed through the city; only the Jews declared it their capital. Throughout the more than 12 centuries that Muslims controlled Jerusalem, they did not declare it to be their capital, or even an administrative centre."
A remarkable chain of attachment, of historical longing, links the Jewish people today with the city of Jerusalem. Following the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile in 586 BC, the Jews returned 50 years later and rebuilt Jerusalem as their capital which it remained under the Maccabees. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD marked the end of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, but for the next 2,000 years Jews, facing towards their holy city, prayed for the restoration of Jerusalem three times a day. The "return to Zion" is central in Jewish liturgy and the phrase "Next Year in Jerusalem" is the concluding hope of the Passover Seder.
Even during their exile, Jews managed to maintain not only a spiritual but a physical attachment to Jerusalem, with communities of religious Jews maintaining a presence in the city despite periods of persecution and poverty. By the middle of the 19th century, 50 years before the foundation of modern Zionism as a political movement, Jews constituted a majority of the city's population. By 1914, under Turkish Muslim rule, there were some 45,000 Jews in Jerusalem out of a total population of 65,000. At the time of statehood in 1948 there were 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem and 65,000 Arabs.
In November 1947, the Zionist movement (under the leadership of the Jewish Agency for Palestine) accepted the United Nations General Assembly plan for a division of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, including, reluctantly, the plan to treat Jerusalem as a corpus separatum, an international city. However, the Palestinian leadership and the Arab states rejected the resolution out of hand and waged war against the incipient Jewish State. In the course of hostilities David Ben-Gurion and the Hagana military command took the vexing decision to evacuate the ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City and other Jewish neighbourhoods in the eastern half of Jerusalem lest they be annihilated by the Jordanian Legion.
For all its three-millennia existence, only during Jordan's 19-year occupation (from 1948-1967) was Jerusalem physically divided. In violation of the Israel-Jordan armistice agreement (of 1949) Jordan prevented Jews from praying at their places in the Old City – including their holiest, the Western Wall (Christians also were denied access to their religious sites in Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank). To add insult to injury, synagogues and cemeteries were desecrated and destroyed, and all evidence of the ancient Jewish presence in the Old City was eradicated.
Given the historical, religious and emotional significance of these Jordanian misdeeds, when the Israelis finally reunified Jerusalem, in the context of the June 1967 Six-Day War, they vowed that it would never be divided again. Steps were taken to apply Israeli law over the unified city, which was declared "the eternal capital of the Jewish state", the Jewish Quarter was rebuilt, and neighbourhoods of eastern Jerusalem owned and dominated by Jews prior to 1948 were re-established and modernized.
At the same time as it affirmed its sovereignty over the unified city, Israel undertook measures to ensure and safeguard the rights of all Jerusalem's citizens, including free access to the holy places of all faiths. In deference to Muslim sensitivities, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War ordered the lowering of the Israeli flag over the Dome of the Rock and Israeli soldiers were forbidden to set foot on the Temple Mount (despite the centrality of the Mount in Jewish liturgy). Israel placed responsibility for the management of Muslim and Christian holy places in the hands of their respective religious authorities (including the Jordanian-appointed Islamic holy trust, the Waqf). There are continuing efforts to improve the distribution of municipal services to Arab sectors of the city and ideas have been put forward to facilitate increased representation of Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem's municipal political affairs (this, despite the fact that the vast majority of Arab Jerusalemites have rejected the Israeli citizenship open to them since 1967). In significant diplomatic concessions, Israel agreed to permit Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem to participate in the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation with which Israel undertook bilateral negotiations after the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), and then agreed to have Arab Jerusalemites participate in the election of the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 1996. More recently, in an effort to defuse tensions, Interior Minister Natan Sharansky decided (in October 1999) to end the practice of lifting the residency permits of Arab residents who live outside Israel for more than seven consecutive years. At the same time, Public Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami moved to significantly reduce the amount of demolitions of illegal buildings in eastern Jerusalem (although it is important to note that of all demolition orders pending only 4-8% were normally carried out on an annual basis). Regrettably, few of the steps taken by Israel to maintain a degree of normalcy in unified Jerusalem since 1967 have been acknowledged by the Palestinians and their supporters, who seemingly prefer to use the "Jerusalem card" as a political weapon against Israel.
Current Discussion
The Oslo Accords deferred discussion about Jerusalem until permanent-status negotiations and restricted Palestinian Authority political and diplomatic activities to areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip transferred to Palestinian control. Israel from the outset made very clear its rejection of any plan that entailed "re-dividing" the city or having Jerusalem serve as the capital of both Israel and a proposed West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state. According to Professor Menachem Klein of the respected Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, "it is now impossible to return to the reality that prevailed in [Jerusalem] before the 1967 Six-Day War. The principle of non-partition of Jerusalem by means of border barriers has become part of the international consensus, and is also accepted by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat."
Moshe Safdie, the world-renowned Israeli-Canadian architect, who has done considerable work and planning in Jerusalem where he maintains an office, recently reported on the outcome of a joint Israeli-Palestinian conference on the future of the city. He noted that "regardless of their political affiliations, the conference participants acknowledged that the implementation of Israel's policy [of ensuring, since 1967, that the city would never be physically redivided] has made it all but impossible to configure any kind of separating line that would allow Jerusalem to evolve into two jurisdictions, Israeli and Palestinian, without each of there areas being in fact a mix of both populations. And neither side was prepared to support such a division. Instead, virtually all the participants readily supported the concept that Jerusalem must be one city" (although there was considerable disagreement over social, political and cultural arrangements.)
A unified city means a unified infrastructure, including roads, mass transit, sanitation and water.
Moreover, Safdie also explained, with approximately 100,000 Israelis now living across the Green Line and "intermingled into Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages," there is no practically way of returning to the pre-1967 situation where Arabs and Israelis "were neatly settled in neighbourhood clusters on either side of the Green Line."
In addition, Israel has rejected the proposal of returning to the idea of "internationalizing" Jerusalem suggested in the November 1947 UN partition plan, as both impractical and unjust (in that it ignored the Jewish people's unique and special attachment to the city as well as the discriminatory treatment of Jews and Jewish interests between 1948 and 1967).
At the same time, while setting continued Israeli political sovereignty over the unified city as a sine qua non for peace, Israel has remained open to plans to accord greater respect to the Muslim (and Christian) religious and cultural attachments to Jerusalem. In the words of former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Shimon Peres: Jerusalem "is closed politically but open religiously." Teddy Kollek has also written: "Knowing that two capitals cannot co-exist in Jerusalem, [and so] denying Palestinian [political] claims to Jerusalem, does not imply denial of their rights as a people."
Many analysts have emphasized the need for "creative solutions" to the Jerusalem issue, ones that will take into account both Muslim religious sensitivities and Palestinian national aspirations, short of physically re-dividing the city, and with it, Israeli sovereignty. In the "understanding" on permanent status arrangements they arrived at in November 1995, Israeli government minister Yossi Beilin and Palestinian official Abu Mazen reportedly agreed in principle on an elaborate scheme designed to address Palestinian political interests in Jerusalem while not re-dividing the city and effectively tempering the whole question of political sovereignty in favour of practical co-existence; however, no agreement was reached on the permanent political status of the Old City, and the question was left open for further negotiations. Despite the fact that the Beilin-Abu Mazen understandings were never formally approved by either side, the creativity of the two officials seems likely to establish the basic terms of reference for eventually achieving a workable and just settlement of the Jerusalem issue.
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