Capital Folly
Review of Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, by Bernard Wasserstein. 412 pp., Profile Books, 2001.
Avi Shlaim
London Review of Books, 21 March 2002.
More than any other capital city in the world, Jerusalem demonstrates
the power of symbols in international politics. The conflict between
Israel and the Palestinians is one of the most intense, bitter, and
protracted conflicts of modern times, and the Jerusalem question lies
at the heart of this conflict. Religious zealotry and secular jingoism
combine to make Jerusalem one of the most, if not the most sensitive
and seemingly intractable issues in this conflict. The Oslo accord
which lauched the Palestinians on the road to self-government simply
by-passed Jerusalem and the other difficult and divisive issues in the
dispute, such as the right of return of the 1948 refugees, the future
of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and the borders
of the Palestinian entity. They were deferred until the
negotiations on the final status of the territories due to begin
towards the end of the five-year transition period. All these issues
were belatedly placed on the table at the summit conferece convened by
Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000. Jerusalem, however, was the
issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the
breakdown of the Oslo peace process.
Jerusalem is no stranger
to strife, conflict or controversy. Its spiritual resonance for the
three great monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
-- make it so because religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to
resolve. The political prestige that goes with possession of the
city is another ingredient in its long and blood-soaked history.
Politics and religion make an explosive mixture and nowhere more so
than in Jerusalem. Between its foundation and its capture by the
Israelis in 1967, Jerusalem is said to have been conquered 37 times. It
has been on the international diplomatic agenda for a century and a
half. When Arthur Koestler went to Jerusalem during the 1948 war, he
was filled with gloom at the ‘international quarrelling, haggling
and mediation’ that seemed in store. ‘No other town,’
he wrote, ‘ has caused such continuous waves of killing, rape and
unholy misery over the centuries as this Holy City.’ In its
current form the Jerusalem question contains two separate elements:
sovereingnty over the city and the status of the holy places. The
former is contested by two national groups, the latter by three
religions. Anyone seeking to understand the Jerusalem question should
start with Bernard Wasserstein’s thoroughly researched, elegantly
written, and strikingly fair-minded book.
Psychlogists have long
been aware of the ‘Jerusalem syndrome’ that afflicts some
visitors to the city, especially Western Christian tourists. The most
common symptoms are to assume the identity of a Biblical character, to
undergo mystical experiences, and to succumb to the delusion of
possessing supranatural powers. Wasserstein points out at the outset
that Jerusalem is not just a problem but also an emotion, above all a
religious emotion. Veneration for Jerusalem by Jews, Christians, and
Muslims runs deep and it is the duty of the historian, as he sees
it, to record this religious fervour but not to succumb to it.
From this eminently sensible starting point, Wasserstein goes on to
develop his rather iconoclastic argument that politicians of all
religions have deliberately inflated the religious importance of
Jerusalem in order to serve their own political ends.
When the Ottoman Turks
captured Jerusalem in 1516, it was an obscure, provincial backwater
with a population of under 15,000. During the four centuries of Ottoman
rule, it did not develop into a major administrative centre but only
served as the capital of a district that formed part of the province of
Damascus. What the Ottomans did do, during the reign of Suleiman
the Magnificent, was to build the girdle of walls around the city that
are still intact today. Under the Ottomans, the various religious
groups were left to run their own affairs and to administer their own
institutions with little interference from the central government. The
Jerusalem question in its modern form arose as a by-product of the slow
decline of the Ottoman Empire. Its central feature in the first phase
was the struggle over the Christian holy places. As Ottoman power
waned, the other great powers sought to extend their authority in and
through the holy city. The methods they employed in the pursuit of
power and prestige are laid bare with wry humour in a chapter on
‘The Wars of the Consuls’. These methods included the
exploitation of religious sentiment, patronage of local proteges, and
the construction of dependent institutions such as churches,
monasteries, convents, hospitals, orphanages, schools, and colleges.
Having told the sorry
tale of intrigues, petty squabbles, endless disputes, and antagonisms,
Wasserstein gives credit where credit is due. He notes that during the
whole of the late Ottoman period, there were no significant instances
of mass communal violence in Jerusalem. Inter-communal relations of
Muslims, Christians, and Jews, while often fraught with acrimony and
sectarian contempt, were contained within the framework of law and
civil peace. What the consular wars do illustrate is the propensity of
the Jerusalem question to inflame and aggravate relations between the
powers: ‘Seized upon as a sacred cause, Jerusalem proved a handy
pretext for warmongers with much larger objectives.’ Alas, this
feature of the holy city has not faded with the passage of time.
Britain governed
Jerusalem, within the framework of the British mandate over Palestine,
from 1920 until 1948. Nominally, Britain was responsible to the
Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations but in reality
Palestine was governed as if it were a British crown colony. Although
British rule in Jerusalem lasted only three decades, it transformed the
city and paved the way to its eventual partition. This was
Jerusalem’s first Christian administration since the Crusades,
yet it granted unprecedented privileges to the Supreme Moslim Council
and sponsored the establishment of a Jewish National Home. Breaking
with the Ottoman legacy, the British made Jerusalem a major
administrative centre and the seat of the High Commissioner for
Palestine. The result was a profound change in Jerusalem’s
relationship to Palestine. For the first time in its modern history,
Jerusalem was a capital city. The status of the local elites, both
Muslim and Jewish, was enhanced by their proximity to the seat of
power. The British, for their part, tried to be even-handed. But
reconciling the claims of the two nascent national movements proved
beyond their power. Both Arabs and Jews became progressively alienated
and staged revolts against British rule, the former in the late 1930s,
the latter in the late 1940s. By the time the mandate reached its
inglorious end in May of 1948, there was precious little goodwill left
towards Britain on either side of the Arab-Jewish divide.
On 29 November 1947, the
United Nations passed the resolution for partitioning Palestine into
two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish, but with an
international regime for Jerusalem which was to be treated as a corpus
separatum. Formally, the British remained neutral but in practice
they were hostile to the plan for an independent Palestinian state
because it was bound to be ruled by the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini,
who had thrown in his lot with Nazi Germany during the Second World
War. Their secret objective was to promote the partition of Palestine
between the Zionists and King Abdullah of Jordan, their loyal ally.
This was precisely the outcome of the war for Palestine. Towards the
end of that war, Jerusalem once again became a burning issue on the
international agenda. Most members of the UN still supported an
international regime for Jerusalem but the powers on the ground, Jordan
and Israel, were united in an unholy alliance to partition the holy
city between themselves. After the guns fell silent, Jordan continued
to rule East Jerusalem and Israel continued to rule West Jerusalem
until the six days that shook the Middle East in the summer of 1967.
By taking his country to
war, King Hussein lost the West Bank and east Jerusalem that his
grandfather had incorporated into to Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan by the
Act of Union of 1950. Jordan’s participation in this war was
largely symbolic but the price it paid was a heavy one. On 7 June 1967,
Israeli forces captured east Jerusalem as part of their sweep through
the West Bank. At noon that day, Moshe Dayan, the defence minister,
went to the Western Wall and declared that Jerusalem had been
‘liberated’: ‘We have united Jerusalem, the divided
capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our Holy Places,
never to part from it again.’ Contrary to the view held by most
Arabs, Israel had no prior plan for keeping the West Bank or east
Jerusalem. But the victory unleashed powerful currents of
religious messianism and secular irridentism that no government could
possibly hold in check even if it wanted to. The Zionist
movement’s moderate position on Jerusalem disappeared overnight.
Suddenly, life in the Jewish state without Zion, one of the Biblical
names for Jerusalem, became difficult to imagine. On 27 June, in a
remarkable display of national unity, the Knesset enacted legislation
to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration to Greater
Jerusalem which included the Old City. This amounted to annexation in
all but name, opening a veritable Pandora’s box.
Over the next quarter of
a century, the central political figure in Israeli Jerusalem was its
mayor, Teddy Kollek. A liberal-minded and pragmatic man, he sought
practical solutions to the town’s manifold everday problems and
harmony among its variegated groups. But his overriding aim, which he
made little effort to conceal, was to secure Israel’s permanent
hold on Jerusalem as its unified capital. The expropriation of Arab
land in east Jerusalem proceeded at a rapid pace and new Jewish
neighbourhoods were built there in flagrant violation of international
law. Driving all this hectic activity was a long-term geopolitical aim:
the creation of a ring of Jewish population around the northern,
north-eastern, and southern periphery of the city. As Kollek himself
candidly admitted in a newspaper interview in 1968: ‘The object
is to ensure that all of Jerusalem remains for ever a part of
Israel. If this city is to be our capital, then we have to make it an
integral part of our country and we need Jewish inhabitants to do
that.’
The position of the great
powers remained virtually unchanged: they refused to recognise the
legality or legitimacy of the Israeli attempt to incorporate east
Jerusalem. The United Nations passed a series of resolutions,
condemning the Israeli measures in the Arab part of the city. External
pressures, however, failed to dent Israel’s confidence in its
moral right to impose its rule over a large and recalcitrant Arab
population. In nationalist circles these pressures provoked deep
resentment and defiance. In July 1980, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem
Law, which stated that ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the
capital of Israel’. Its initiator, the ultra-nationalist Knesset
member Geula Cohen, made it clear that her purpose was to forclose any
negotiations over the status of the city. Unlike earlier legislation
regarding Jerusalem, the bill was widely criticised within Israel as
unnecesary and even harmful. The bill did indeed place Israel on the
defensive in the international arena. It drew criticism from all the
major powers. On 20 August the UN Security Council passed a resolution
reprimanding Israel by fourteen votes to zero, with the USA abstaining.
The New York Times called the law ‘capital folly’.
In the years after this
capital folly was committed, Israeli leaders of all political hues
continued to repeat, like a Greek chorus, the mantra that unified
Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the State of Israel. Their other
constant refrain was that Jerusalem is non-negotiable. To get round
this self-imposed constraint, the Israeli architects of the Oslo accord
put the Jerusalem question to one side. The Declaration of Principles
signed on the White House lawn, on 13 September 1993, said little on
this particular subject. The Palestinian Interim Self-Government
Authority was to have no jurisdiction over Jerusalem. The status quo
was to continue until the ‘final status’ negotiations that
were due to begin in the third year of the interim period. In the
meantime, both sides were free to cling to their symbols of sovereignty
and their dreams. An optimistic Yasser Arafat said that the agreement
was merely the first step towards ‘the total withdrawal from our
land, our holy sites, and our holy Jerusalem’. But an Israeli
spokesman insisted, ‘Jerusalem is not part of the deal and there
has been no weakening on that.’
The framework for a final
status agreement between Israel and the PLO was concluded on 31
October 1995 by Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister,
and Mahmoud Abbas (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen), a
close adviser to Arafat. This bold document made a first stab at
resolving all the outstanding issues between Israel and the
Palestinians. It envisaged an independent but demilitarised Palestinian
state over Gaza and 94 per cent of the West Bank with al-Quds as its
capital. Four days later Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and his
successor, Shimon Peres, lacked the courage to adopt the plan, not
least because it would have exposed him to the charge of dividing
Jerusalem. Peres was narrowly defeated by Binyamin Netanyahu, the
leader of the right-wing Likud, in the elections of May 1996. On coming
to power, Netanyahu abruptly reversed the cautious peace policy of his
Labour predecessors, especially with regard to Jerusalem. The secret of
Oslo was to keep Jerusalem to the end of the process. Netanyahu placed
it at the centre of his policy, thereby blocking progress on all the
other issues.
The Jerusalem question
did not make another major appearance on the international diplomatic
agenda until the Camp David summit which Bill Clinton convened at the
request of Ehud Barak in July 2000. At Camp David, Ehud Barak and
Yasser Arafat negotiated more back to back than face to face. Both
leaders faced serious internal problems. Barak’s coalition was
crumbling and he arrived at the conference at the head of a government
that seemed on the verge of collapse. Arafat was under pressure not to
yield on the Palestinian demand for an Israeli withdrawal from the
whole of Arab east Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the core issue at the
summit and the main stumbling block to an overall agreement. To
break the deadlock, the American mediators put forward ‘bridging
proposals’ that were broadly based on the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan.
But there was no meeting of minds between the two delegations and no
real negotiations took place. Arafat failed to put forward any
constructive counter-proposals. He stood his ground and and refused to
give way on Jerusalem and the holy places. Clinton’s proposal for
postponing the issue for later determination was also rejected by
Arafat. A frustrated Clinton likened the experiece to
‘going to the dentist without having your gums deadened’.
After the breakdown of
the talks, the outbreak of another round of violence was only a
question of time. On 28 September 2000, Ariel Sharon, the leader of the
opposition, sparked it off by his ostantatious visit to Temple Mount.
Sharon, surrounded by a phalanx of security men, claimed he was going
to deliver what he called ‘a message of peace’. To the
other side, the message that came across loud and clear was
‘Israel rules OK!’ The visit sparked off riots on the
Haram al-Sharif, that spread to the Arab parts of Jerusalem, the West
Bank, Gaza, and, for the first time, some of the Arab-inhabited parts
of Israel. Riots quickly snow-balled into a full-scale uprising. Within
ten days the death toll of what became known as the al-Aqsa intifada
approached 100. The Oslo accords were completely submerged by the
volcanic outpourings of collective hatred that accompanied the return
to violence.
It was against this grim
background that Bill Clinton made one last attempt, just before the end
of his term, to bridge the gap between the two warring sides. At a
meeting at the White House with Israeli and Palestinian representatives
on 23 December, Clinton presented his ideas for a final settlement.
These ideas, or ‘parameters’ as he called them, had moved a
long distance from the American bridging proposals at Camp David
towards meeting Palestinian aspirations. Israel was to withdraw
altogether from Gaza and fom 94-96 per cent of the West Bank. There was
to be an independent Palestinian state but with some limitations on its
level of armaments. The guiding principle for solving the Palestinian
refugee problem was that the new state would be ‘the focal point
for the Palestinians who choose to return to the area.’
With regard to Jerusalem ‘the general principle is that
Arab areas are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Israeli. This would
apply to the Old City as well.’
Negotiations on the basis
of the Clinton parameters took place at the Egyptian Red Sea resort in
Taba in the last week of January 2001. Both sides broadly accepted the
proposals but with a long list of reservations. On Jerusalem the
Israeli reservations were more substantial than those of the
Palestinians. Barak stated publicly that he would not transfer
sovereignty over Temple Mount. At this critical juncture, as so often
in the past, peace was held hostage to internal Israeli politics. The
elections for prime minister scheduled for 6 February led Barak to
adopt a tough line over the Old City and Temple Mount. Despite these
local difficulties, the negotiators came closer to a final status
agreement than ever before but they were overtaken by events.
Ariel Sharon won the election by a landslide. His government
immediately declared that the undestandings reached at Taba were not
binding because they had not been embodied in a signed document. To
make things worse, the incoming administration of George W. Bush chose
to disengage from the peace process and did not consider itself bound
by the proposals of its predecessor. Consequently, most of the
achievements of the Taba talks disappeared into the desert sand.
In the Preface to this
admirable book, Bernard Wasserstein observes that the ‘eternally
unified capital’of the state of Israel is the most deeply divided
capital city in the world: ‘Its Arab and Jewish residents inhabit
different districts, speak different languages, attend different
schools, read different newspapers, watch different television
programmes, observe different holy days, follow different football
teams -- live, in almost every significant respect, different
lives.’ What the book eloquently demonstrates is that the
struggle for Jerusalem cannot be resolved without some recognition of
the reality and legitimacy of its plural character. It is sad to have
to add that such recognition is a more remote prospect today than at
any other time since the Oslo accord was signed.
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