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Jerusalem
- the maker or breaker of great peace?
By JONATHAN
POWER
October 4, 2000
LONDON - Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda
Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem,
a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness,
envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Mankind now has the
historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making
the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of
its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly
Jerusalem. For once we can see whether the work of imams,
rabbis and priests has born fruit. The secular
politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and
ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the
three great deistic religions who have been exerting
their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance
and brotherhood.
These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is
their God, now will be tested in the hottest of fires.
Have their peoples imbibed the true message of their
faiths? Or have they been diverted along life's way by
ceremony over substance, by position over principle and
by nationalistic myth over historic perspective? Has
greed overcome charity and the recourse to violence
driven out the spirit of human unity? The issue of the
ownership of Jerusalem and its parts now being negotiated
is a popular decision par excellence. The governments
involved cannot go forward on this issue unless they
carry the overwhelming majority of their people with
them. The riots and killings of the last week suggest, at
least on the Palestinian side, the mood of tolerance is
at breaking point. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's
room for manoeuvre is demonstrably even smaller than
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's.
In contrast, the progress made at the Camp David
summit in July was nothing short of remarkable. In a
matter of days, decades of Israeli intransigence were
overturned by Mr Barak. Long held Israeli positions that
would have in effect left a new Palestinian state as
little more than an archipelago of isolated enclaves with
perhaps as little as 50% of the land of the West Bank
were thrown to the wind.
Very few politicians, scholars or journalists can
cross their hearts and say they saw this coming. Most of
them thought if a peace agreement were formulated it
would be on lesser terms, as far as Palestinian interests
were concerned. Barak's great strength is that he knows
enough about war to know that there can only be a
sustainable peace if a vast majority on both sides concur
with it. Even if by some feat of diplomacy Arafat's will
could have been bent to settle for less it would have
been repudiated by enough of his own people and by much
of the Arab community at large. Violence would have
returned to centre stage. The Israeli settlements would
have been besieged. Jerusalem itself would be in the
perpetual grip of urban terrorism and the pressures and
fissures in the Islamic world would help produce more
rulers of the Saddam Hussein, Ayotollah Khomeini type.
Who knows, at the end of the day there might be a nuclear
exchange between Israel and a neighbouring country? To
this extent, this week's riots have been a useful
reminder of the tinder box at hand.
Which brings us to Jerusalem, the last important
outstanding issue to be negotiated. President Bill
Clinton was profoundly wrong after the Camp David meeting
broke up at the end of July to lead the U.S. side in
berating Arafat publicly for not compromising on
Jerusalem. He seemed not to understand Arafat's
observation: "The Arab leader has not been born who will
give up Jerusalem". Clinton looked at the enormous
compromises Israel's leader had already made and, in the
detached manner of western diplomacy, assumed this was a
very fair deal. It was, indeed, but it wasn't enough.
First, consider the fall out from contemporary
history. There is no question that at the time of the
ending of the British mandate Jerusalem belonged to the
Palestinians. They lost West Jerusalem in their
ill-judged war with Israel in 1948. And only in 1967
during the Six Day War did Israel capture and annex East
Jerusalem and its Old City. (But it did allow Islamic
authorities to continue to exercise control over the two
ancient mosques and the great stone plaza atop the Temple
Mount.) At one time even the U.S. itself recognised there
would be no peace until this occupation was reversed,
hence its vote for UN Resolution 242 in 1967 that called
on Israel to withdraw from "territories occupied". Thus
it is a matter of international justice that at the very
least the Arab parts of East Jerusalem be returned to
Palestine, as long as Jews have free, untrammeled access,
to their sacred site, the Western Wall which sits at the
foot of Temple Mount. (Imagine, by comparison, the wrath
of the German people if Berlin were still occupied by the
Allies.)
Nevertheless, it is also just as obvious that the
Jewish identity is now so bound up with the idea of
Jerusalem ( a fuzzy concept if ever there was one, since
present day Jerusalem is four times the size of the one
that existed in 1948) that to prize Israel loose by a
process of capitulation is not within the realms of
possibility.
At last, at the eleventh hour, under American
prodding, the Israelis have begun to think seriously
about the idea first mooted in this column of
internationalising part of East Jerusalem. For the
present the suggestion of a UN Security Council fiefdom
only extends to the Temple Mount, but once that principle
is accepted the possibilities of geographical extension
to include some of the neighbourhoods around shouldn't be
so difficult to swallow. The Palestinians are still
balking, but that is probably only because Arafat sees
the idea as presently drawn as too geographically
limited. Extend it somewhat and an agreement could be at
hand.
Could the end be in sight? Yes, indeed it is. But
realizing it will require enormous political courage by
all the parties. Time is probably not on their side. And
the people? Perhaps that depends on how well their
religious teachers have performed their duties.
I can be reached by phone +44
385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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