The battle over the future status of Jerusalem and control of its
holy places feels as if it has been raging between Arabs and
Israelis for decades, if not for centuries. The issue had come to
be seen as the thorniest in a list of thorny problems to be
resolved in peace negotiations. I want to show in this article
that, in fact, this struggle for Jerusalem is a distortion of
reality and only serves to side-step the issue that is at the heart
of the conflict. Worse still, concentrating on attaining a
settlement over the future status of Jerusalem, at the expense of
resolving other contentious issues between the two sides, will
reduce the chances for reaching an ultimate peace.
When did Jerusalem become such a heated bone of contention between
Israelis and Palestinians? If indeed it had held such a seminal
place in the hearts and minds of Jews, why had so few of them ever
taken any interest in it before 1948? Historically, Jewish pilgrims
had always traveled to Jerusalem and a small number had always
resided there. But the vast majority of Jews, including those who
lived in the Arab countries outside Palestine, showed little
inclination to leave those places and go there before 1948. The
city featured little in the thinking of the early Zionists and the
majority of secular Jews. Theodor Herzl was horrified when he saw
the Western Wall. Like many other early Zionists, he resolved to
leave the Old City to its impoverished religious communities and
concentrate on building a new city outside the walls. He never
mentioned Jerusalem once in his classic study Der Judenstadt, which
set the foundations for the Israeli state. Zionist proposals for
the city during the 1930s and 1940s left the Old City out of the
intended Jewish state, provided there was some municipal
arrangement with the rest of the city. In 1946, the Jewish Agency
even suggested that all of Jerusalem could be within an Arab state,
in exchange for the creation of a Jewish mini-state in Palestine;
and before that, the leaders of Labor Zionism were willing to
accept a partition of Palestine, in 1937 (and again in 1947), which
excluded Jerusalem and placed it under separate jurisdiction.
A Neglected City
The Jewish immigrants who came to Palestine in the 1920s
concentrated their efforts on expanding Tel Aviv and building new
Jewish settlements, and did not bother with Jerusalem at all.
Religious Jews had, of course, traditionally held the city sacred
and, as of the 1920s, a minority of devout Zionists, who looked
towards rebuilding the Temple, joined them. The latter were openly
ridiculed by the secular Zionist leadership, for whom the city
scarcely featured in their public utterances or planning until
1949, when the Israelis acquired West Jerusalem. It was then that
David Ben-Gurion spoke for the first time about "Jewish Jerusalem"
as "the heart of the State of Israel."
Yet, neither he nor any other Israeli prime minister until Menachem
Begin had their residence in the city. And until 1967, it was a
relatively neglected place, with low economic growth; some of its
areas had become slums. Today, many secular Israelis prefer the
more European atmosphere of Tel Aviv or Haifa. Even so, an interest
in Jerusalem's religious and historical significance for the Jewish
people has grown amongst Israelis of all persuasions in the recent
past and has culminated in what can only be described as an
obsession. This obsession really dates from the conquest of
Jerusalem's eastern half during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It was
then that secular as well as religious Israelis succumbed to the
symbolism of the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.
As the English religious writer, Karen Armstrong, has argued in her
1996 book on Jerusalem, the passion for the Old City, which
enveloped its Jewish conquerors in 1967 was a psychological
phenomenon that had little to do with religious fervor. In
"discovering" a physical embodiment of their historical narrative,
Israelis found self-validation and an affirmation of their right to
the land. Possibly also, this affirmation allowed them to put away
any guilt they might have had over rival Palestinian claims. But
even if one were to accept the biblical narrative about Jerusalem
as valid, the logic of this position seems to be that, if a
monument is deemed to be sacred or otherwise significant for a
particular group, then that group has the right to physically own
it.
'Eternal Capital'
In the years since 1967, this right to ownership has taken firm
hold amongst Israelis. At the official level, a mantra has
appeared, endlessly repeated by successive Israeli prime ministers,
that Jerusalem is Israel's "eternal, undivided capital." Today,
they vie with each other to display their commitment to this
concept. The Camp David talks last summer [2000] were said to have
broken down over the issue of Jerusalem. Ehud Barak was accused of
having "conceded" sovereignty over parts of the Temple Mount. In
fact, the Israeli proposals were minimal: Palestinian control over
some of East Jerusalem's suburbs, administrative autonomy for some
of the central areas, and control over the Muslim and Christian
quarters of the Old City. The secular Barak, like all his recent
predecessors, had to pay homage to the new sacred cow of Israeli
politics: Jerusalem's special status for Jews. Following in the
same tradition, the incoming prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has
already announced that Jerusalem is Israel's capital forever. His
house in the heart of the Muslim Quarter and his visit to the
Temple Mount last September are all testimony to this
now-obligatory convention.
Only a minority of Israelis concedes exclusive sovereignty to the
Palestinians in East Jerusalem, with some arrangement for sharing
the Old City. At the same time, Arab history and the Palestinian
presence in Jerusalem have been denied or systematically undermined
in a multitude of direct and indirect ways. This is all the more
remarkable, since the overwhelming historical architecture of
Jerusalem is anything but Jewish. Mosques, madrasas, shrines,
churches - even the configuration and walls of the Old City -
attest to the concrete reality of a centuries-old, non-Jewish
history. Likewise, and despite the ethnic cleansing that has
expelled thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, that part
of the city remains predominantly Arab. Although rival religious
sentiments are also powerful here - Muslims revere Jerusalem as the
place from which Mohammad ascended to Heaven, a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem is a commendable pious act and numerous sayings of the
Prophet attest to its importance in Muslim theology; for
Christians, it is the place where Jesus was crucified, buried and
resurrected - the Palestinian view of Jerusalem never needed a
mythology to justify it. It was not an imagined history that tied
them to their city, but a consciousness of a continuous,
generational, living presence on its territory. For them, as for
all Arabs, Muslims and Christians - Jerusalem was self-evidently
not a Jewish city.
This in part explains Arab apathy in the face of the Israeli drive
to lay exclusive claim to Jerusalem. In the plethora of plans drawn
up for its division since 1967, only a tiny number has emanated
from Arab or Palestinian sources. Some 18 Israeli plans have been
put forward to date, as against a half-dozen from Arab, Palestinian
or joint Israeli-Palestinian sources. The PLO, which recognized
Israel in 1988 and called for the establishment of a Palestinian
state, has never put forward a clear map of the borders of the
Jerusalem it wants to see incorporated within it. Although a
Palestinian mantra of a state on the 1967 territories with East
Jerusalem as its capital has been reiterated ever since, the
Palestinians have not been any more precise than that. Critics have
called this insouciance inexcusable in the context of Israeli
settlement in the city, manifesting itself in a steady campaign of
unashamed land expropriation. But it is, in my view, more a
statement of the bewilderment people feel who know a territory is
theirs, but are told that it is not. They do not see the need to
prove their attachment to it or justify their presence there. And
they certainly cannot contemplate dividing it to accommodate the
religious claims of a rival group whom they regard as
occupiers.
Exploiting Religious Sentiment
Palestinians never denied the special attachment of devout Jews to
certain parts of the Old City. On the contrary, for Muslim
Palestinians, Jewish legends and Jewish prophets play an important
part in the Quran. It is rather the use of this argument to justify
the concrete Israeli expansion in the city's territory that has
preoccupied them. And indeed, the growth of Jewish settlements and
the expropriation of Arab land to the point where, today, less than
13 percent of East Jerusalem is in Arab ownership, have been
staggering. This creeping colonization has taken place beneath a
veneer of religious pretension that has been skillfully used to
bamboozle public opinion, especially in the West. Most ordinary
people in Europe and the U.S. genuinely see Jerusalem as a Jewish
place, but concede that other religious groups should have freedom
to worship there. The talk of "sensitivity" over Jerusalem and the
relegation of this issue to final-status negotiations in the Oslo
process, because it is so "difficult," is part of the same
phenomenon. Although Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is the
subject of UN resolutions and illegal under international law, few
now seriously contest the Israeli presence there or would do
anything about ending it.
All this is indicative of the success of the Israeli campaign to
exploit myth and religious sentiment in order to gain physical
ownership of another people's territory. But this strategy has had
another effect: it has served to alter the Palestinian view of
Jerusalem and to evoke a counter strategy on the same lines. In the
immediate aftermath of 1967, the Palestinians focused on Israel's
physical conquest of the city and its appropriation of their land
and property. Israeli discriminatory policies towards the
Palestinians, especially in housing, featured strongly as the
reality of Israeli rule sank in during the following years.
In the last decade, however, a striking emphasis on Jerusalem's
religious significance, especially for Islam, has become apparent
in the Palestinian discourse. It is as if the Israeli insistence on
an exclusive Jewish claim to the city had reminded the Palestinians
of their own equally powerful claim. Up till then, they had
regarded Jerusalem's holy status for them as unarguable, and the
real bone of contention concerned Israel's illegal practices in the
city. But now, declarations about Jerusalem's holiness, and the
demand for Palestinian sovereignty over the city and its mosques,
comparable to those of Israelis, were being regularly made. This
was not merely reactive; it also had a political purpose.
Marginalizing the Right of Return
Danny Rubinstein, in a perceptive article (Ha'aretz, 22.12.00),
noted that Arafat had adopted this approach throughout the seven
years of the Oslo negotiations. He put this down, correctly in my
view, to Arafat's awareness of the international appeal of such an
approach. Raising the issue of Jerusalem's religious significance
would draw more support from the Arab and Islamic worlds, if not
from Western Christendom. The truth of this is borne out by the
recent utterances of Arab and Islamic leaders, to the effect that
Jerusalem's holy sites are the property of the world and not for
the Palestinians to give away unilaterally. This strategy has
certainly succeeded in bringing Israel's illegal take-over of the
city to international attention, but it has done so at serious cost
to other aspects of the Palestinian cause.
The emphasis on Jerusalem from both sides has served most
successfully to marginalize the much more important issue of the
right of return. Though the subject of refugees was on the agenda
of the Olso agreement, for most of the last seven years, it
scarcely featured at all and only came to prominence at the Camp
David talks in July 2000. There, it ranked of lesser importance to
the Jerusalem issue, which took center stage. This is a remarkable,
if unplanned, achievement for Zionism, which strove for over fifty
years to bury the memory of what had happened to bring the Jewish
state into being. This mass denial of historical fact and evasion
of responsibility can still be seen in the near-hysterical
opposition of Israelis, recently voiced, to the prospect of a
Palestinian return. For they know the truth that, at the heart of
the Jewish state, there is a terrible moral flaw, which, unless
corrected, will always threaten its carefully nurtured aspirations
to legitimacy. Some Israelis are already bravely grappling with
this reality and confronting the inevitable reckoning with the
consequences of the past. The Palestinian role in this should be to
help that struggle, not hinder it with an excursion up the blind
alley of a religious squabble over Jerusalem.