WHITHER JERUSALEM?
By Richard L. Cravatts
History News Network
8-10-09
Mr. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University’s Program in
Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, is currently
writing a book about higher education, Genocidal Liberalism: The
University’s Jihad Against Israel.
The stridency of the Obama administration’s attitude about Israeli
settlements in the West Bank has stunned some observers, not the
least of whom is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself. Even
more troubling to the Israelis is the State Department’s recent
scolding of Ambassador Michael Oren about a 20-unit apartment project
financed by a wealthy American philanthropist who purchased the former
Shepherd Hotel property in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, adjacent
to a compound of Israeli government buildings. What is stunning about
this latest U.S. policy is that the project in question is in Israel’s
capital, Jerusalem, in an Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood that, if the
Palestinians have their way, ostensibly will be the capital of their
putative state; more disturbing is the fact that U.S. diplomats have
now decreed that Israeli construction in Jerusalem itself constitutes
the forbidden settlement activity.
Speaking to the Jerusalem Post in July, State Department spokesman
Ian Kelly was clear that the U.S. considers building projects in East
Jerusalem to be in violation of the settlement "freeze" that President
Obama and Secretary Clinton have been calling for; Kelly said very
pointedly that "We’re talking about all settlement activity, yes,
in the area across the line," meaning that, henceforth, any territory
beyond the 1949 Green Line is to be off limits to Jews. Mr. Netanyahu
did not hesitate to immediately reject the U.S.’s suggestion to
facilitate the redivision of the Jewish state’s sacred capital,
tersely but directly asserting that Israel "cannot accept such a
ruling on East Jerusalem."
In characterizing East Jerusalem-or any part of Jerusalem, for that
matter-as territory that Israel "occupies" but over which it enjoys
no sovereignty, the Obama administration is misreading, once again,
the content and purpose of 1967’s U.N. Security Council Resolution
242 that suggested an Israeli withdrawal "from territories" it
acquired in the Six Day War. Critics of Israeli policy who either
willfully misread or deliberately obscure the resolution’s purpose
say that the Jewish State is in violation of 242 by continuing to
occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem, including what is mistakenly now
referred to as "Arab" East Jerusalem. But the drafters of Resolution
242 were very precise in creating the statute’s language, and never
considered Jerusalem to have been "occupied" by Israel after the
Six Day War. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg,
one of the resolution’s authors, made this very clear when he wrote
some years later that "Resolution 242 in no way ref!
ers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate . . . At no time in
[my] many speeches [before the UN] did I refer to East Jerusalem as
occupied territory."
Along with their unwavering and various demands, including a "right
of return" of all refugees and sovereignty over the Temple Mount,
the Palestinians now insist that Jerusalem must be divided to give
them a capital in its eastern portion as the location of their new
state. But these have always been points for future negotiations,
at least before the State Department gave public expression to its
new view that East Jerusalem-a patchwork community where some 200,000
Jews and 270,000 Arabs currently live has already been assumed to
be the Palestinian capital, and that Jews should no longer build
or live there. That view is troubling, and not just because of the
settlement issue, Israeli security concerns, and the fate of the
Shepherd Hotel project; it is troubling because it reveals a pattern
in which Arabs endow Jerusalem with intense significance to serve
purposes of political expediency. In fact, observed scholar of Islam
and Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, "An hi!
storical survey shows that the stature of the city, and the emotions
surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims when Jerusalem has
political significance. Conversely, when the utility of Jerusalem
expires, so does its status and the passions about it." When Jordan
illegally annexed the West Bank and purged Jerusalem of its Jews from
1949 to 1967, for example, Jerusalem’s stature declined. But Israel’s
recapture of the territory in 1967 changed the political landscape,
including an Arab desire for Jerusalem, suggesting to Dr. Pipes that
"the Muslim interest lies not so much in controlling Jerusalem as it
does in denying control over the city to anyone else."
Ever since the Camp David meetings in 2000 when Ehud Barak opened
the door to a divided Jerusalem in his negotiations with Yasser
Arafat, the Palestinians have been relentless in creating a false
impression of how important Jerusalem is to them, while, at the same
time, they have de-Judaized Jerusalem and tried to obscure the Jewish
relationship with and continuing presence in the holy city, something
Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has called their desire to effect
"a reversal of history."
Writing in al-Hayat al-Jadida,in March of 2009, for instance,
Dr. Tayseer Al-Tamimi, PA Chief Justice of religious court and Chairman
of Supreme Council of Islamic Law, absurdly claimed that "Jerusalem is
the religious, political and spiritual capital of Palestine," meaning a
Palestinian Palestine, and that "the Jews have no rights to it." But
the true danger of the Palestinian thinking about Jerusalem-and,
indeed, about all of the Palestine that they covet, including Israel
itself-was crystallized in Yasser Arafat’s own view that he expressed
in a July 2000 edition of al-Hayat al-Jadida. "I will not agree to any
sovereign presence in Jerusalem," he wrote, referring to the thorny
issue of who would have sovereignty of the Holy Basin, "neither in the
Armenian quarter, nor in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, neither in Via De La Rosa,
nor in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They can occupy us by force,
because we are weaker now, but in two years, ten years, or one hundred
years, there will be someone who will liberate Jerusalem [from them]."
"Liberating" Jerusalem, of course, does not mean transforming it into
a pluralistic, open city where members of three major faiths can live
freely and practice their religions openly. Liberating Jerusalem for
the Palestinians would be more in keeping with the type of liberation
that Transjordan’s Arab League effected when they burned and looted the
Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem in 1948, expelled and killed its hapless
Jewish population, destroyed some 58 synagogues, many hundreds of years
old, unearthed gravestones from the history-laden Jewish cemetery on
the Mount Olives and used them for latrine pavers, and barred any Jew
from praying at the Western Wall or entering the Temple Mount. That
same predilection to destroy religious property was on display
again shortly after Camp David when a crazed Palestinian mob took
sledgehammers to Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site, and completely
obliterated it as Palestinian policemen stood idly by and watched.
But false irredentist claims, Islamic supremacism which compels
Jews and Christians to live in dhimmitude under Muslim control,
and an evident cultural and theological disregard for other faiths-
while troubling in the battle over sovereignty in Jerusalem-are not,
according to Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United
Nations, the most dangerous aspects of a diplomatic capitulation
which would allow the Palestinians to claim a shared Jerusalem. In
his engaging book, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West,
and the Future of the Holy City, Gold points to a far more troubling
aspect: in their desire to accede to Arab requests for a presence
and religious sovereignty in Jerusalem, the State Department, EU,
UN member states, and Islamic apologists in the Middle East and
worldwide may actually ignite jihadist impulses they seek to dampen
with their well-intentioned, but defective, diplomacy. Why? Because,
as Gold explained, "In the world of apocalyptic speculat!
ion, Jerusalem has many other associations-it is the place where
the messianic Mahdi [the redeemer of Islam] is to establish his
capital. For that reason, some argue that it also should become the
seat of the new caliphate that most Islamic groups-from the Muslim
Brotherhood to al-Qaeda-seek to establish."
When Arafat gave expression to the eventual "liberation" of Jerusalem
as a sacred and unending ambition for the Palestinian cause, he
defined it as a recapture of what had been, and should be, in his
view, Muslim land, just as the eventual extirpation of Israel and the
reclamation of all of Palestine would accomplish. The establishment of
the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the first important step
in the long-term strategy to rid the Levant of Jews and reestablish
the House of Islam in Palestine. "Jerusalem’s recapture is seen by
some as one of the signs that ‘the Hour’ and the end of times are
about to occur," Gold suggested. "And most importantly, because of
these associations, it is the launching pad for a new global jihad
powered by the conviction that this time the war will unfold according
to a pre-planned religious script, and hence must succeed."
So far from creating a political situation in which both
parties-Israelis and the Palestinians-feel they have sought and
received equal benefits, such negotiations and final agreements would
have precisely the opposite effect: destabilizing the region and
creating, not the oft-hoped for Israel and Palestine "living side
by side in peace," but a incendiary cauldron about to explode into
an annihilatory, jihadist rage. Those in the West who are urging
Israel "to redivide Jerusalem by relinquishing its holy sites,"
Dore cautioned, "may well believe that they are lowering the flames
of radical Islamic rage, but in fact they will only be turning
up those flames to heights that have not been seen before." If the
State Department and other Western diplomats are intent on mollifying
the Arab street by pressuring Israel to divide Jerusalem as a peace
offering to the Palestinians, it may well be setting into motion the
exact opposite result: a jihadist, apocalyptic movement invigorat!
ed by the misguided diplomacy of the West that, once more, asks Israel
to sacrifice its security and nationhood so that Islamists can realize
their own imperial ambitions at the Jewish state’s expense.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
