Divided Jerusalem: the struggle for the Holy City
Bernard Wasserstein Profile Books, 412pp, £20
ISBN 1861973551
Throughout history, Jerusalem has been a glittering prize for conquering armies, an opportunity for imperial powers to display symbolic grandeur. In the year 638, on the occasion of the first Muslim conquest, the caliph Omar entered Jerusalem on a white camel. In 1898, when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited the Holy City to open the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, he passed under a triumphal arch on a white horse. And in 1917, when General Allenby took possession of the city for the British after the defeat of the Turks, he arrived on foot, a gesture of imperial humility to contrast with the vainglory of the Kaiser before him.
Long after the Middle Ages, the city represented the convergence of the temporal and the spiritual, with Jews, Christians and Muslims venerating holy sites there. But by the time the state of Israel was declared in 1948, international diplomacy had been reduced to impotence regarding the future of the old city. In this lucid and absorbing study, Bernard Wasserstein writes that, right up until the Six Day War in 1967, the Israelis had shown little interest in controlling all of Jerusalem, and that the city could be both prized and neglected by those who venerated it.
The Zionists' first office was in Jaffa; after 1948, the Israeli government's centre of gravity was Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. But however much the Israelis were "politically, diplomatically and psychologically unprepared" for the capture of the city, overnight they decided that it must become an eternal possession. Thus Moshe Dayan could say, as he stood at the Wailing Wall in June 1967: "We have returned to our holiest of our Holy Places, never to part from it again." A year later, the mayor of the forcibly reunited city, Teddy Kollek (regarded as a dove), began to oversee those land expropriations designed "to ensure that all of Jerusalem remains for ever a part of Israel".
Kollek aimed to unify the city at the same time as consolidating Israeli control. But Wasserstein judges Kollek's policy a failure. Despite the Israeli policy of "creating facts" through land confiscation and extending Jewish settlements, while simultaneously trying to entice Palestinians into accepting a limited role in municipal politics, east Jerusalem was not pacified. When the intifada began in 1987, east Jerusalem had become a centre of resistance to Israel. And when it came to bargaining for peace, the attempt of the previous three decades to make the population of Jerusalem more Jewish was shown to have led nowhere.
Since 1967, the population of the city has doubled, but the proportion of Jews has decreased. One reason for this is the higher birth rate among the Arab population. But Wasserstein identifies another factor that undermined Israeli policy: the promotion of Jewish immigration was offset by the number of secular Jews leaving to escape ultra-orthodox domination.
When the peace process all but collapsed in September last year, the future status of Jerusalem had become one of the most intractable issues in the negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Today, the "idea" of Jerusalem retains a certain power, but it is also an anachronism, and its future lies no longer in the realm of international myth, but in the painful redrawing of maps and boundaries by its own inhabitants.
Maurice Walsh is a BBC foreign correspondent
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