Marshall J Breger. Journal of International Affairs. Volume 50, Issue 1, Summer 1996.
It appears that an effective peace process in Jerusalem needs to address the religious needs of three major faiths as well as the daily realities of operating a major metropolitan city. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all claim portions, with some duplicate portions, of Jerusalem as holy to their religion. Several solutions have been proposed to facilitate peace in Jerusalem with various expectations for success. These solutions include dividing the city, enlarging and then dividing the city, sharing power over the city, delegating power to portions of the city, and giving the city back.
Few can deny that, as Helena Cobban suggests, “what happens in Jerusalem over the next couple of years will be a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in determining whether the peace process … can stay on the rails.” Jerusalem is listed in the so-called Declaration of Principles (DOP) of 13 September 1994, as one of the “issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations.” These negotiations, originally put off because of the Israeli elections on 29 May 1996, commenced on 5 May 1996.
For their part, opponents of the peace process have tried to thrust Jerusalem to center stage. Thus, Edward Said has declared Jerusalem to be “the front line in the struggle for Palestine,” calling for “a concentrated Palestinian strategy” to resist Israeli control over the city. “Gaza-Jericho” he tells us, is a “kind of elaborate distraction, so that Palestinian energies will be absorbed in administering the peripheries, while the core is left to the Israelis.” And on the right, Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem urges a Jerusalem First policy not only to test Arab intentions, he says, but the Labor government’s as well. The Likud party is running its current election campaign on the theme that “Peres will divide Jerusalem.”
One cannot address the question of Jerusalem without starting from an understanding of the city as “sacred space.” It is a city in which varied religious communities have specific religious needs. There are innumerable holy places sanctified by text and tradition, and numerous religious rituals dependent on the use of the city’s “sacred space.” In addition, significant religious communities exist whose presence in history inform and validate the religious character of the city. These communities have unique political requirements.
At the same time Jerusalem is a nationalist symbol as well. For Israelis, it is the symbol of national revival, providing a direct link between the Zionist impulse and the Biblical Commonwealth. For Palestinians, the city has become a symbol of their political renaissance. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that in Jerusalem religious values and beliefs heavily influence political options. It is not modern West Jerusalem that Jews have dreamed of throughout the ages and are prepared to die for today—it is the city of the Temple Mount. Similarly, it is not Sheikh Jarrah Street and its commercial environs that begets Arab martyrs but rather Al-kuds, the holy city.
First, this paper will review the religious perspective of Jerusalem for the three faiths with which it is associated. Second, it will look at possible resolutions of the problem of the holy places. Finally, it will consider ways of resolving political sovereignty issues in the context of these religious concerns.
The Religious Perspective
Jewish Perspective
The traditional Jewish position on Jerusalem is abundantly clear. For Jews, Jerusalem is the “mountain of the Lord,” the very core of the Jewish people for 3,000 years. Indeed, the mishnah (the second century compendium of Jewish laws) tells us that the shechina, the divine presence, has never left the Western Wall. It is the symbol of both national and spiritual revival. The Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, speaks of the yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. In the daily prayers, the religious Jew three times a day entreats that the Lord “return in mercy to thy city Jerusalem.”
There has never been a time when Jerusalem was not the center of the Jewish consciousness. In medieval times elderly Jews traveled to Jerusalem to be buried in its hallowed ground. Throughout the centuries they came to live lives of spiritual piety. By 1844 they constituted the largest single religious group in the city. In the 1870s they were an absolute majority, and have remained so ever since.
For Jews Jerusalem is not, as in Islam and Christianity, a city that encompasses holy places. It is not, as in Christian articulation, the spiritual city that is holy. Rather it is the earthly city itself that is holy, both the land and, as the former Chief Rabbi Kook tells us, even the air. Jerusalem is synonymous with Judaism’s rootedness in the land of Israel. It is the very center of that rootedness. For Jews, political control over that part of Jerusalem it deems holy is intrinsic to its holiness. The religion itself “requires political control as the capital of the Jewish Commonwealth.”
Muslim Perspective
Those who try to suggest Al-kuds is less holy to Islam than to Judaism are simply incorrect. As Professor Zvi Werblowsky has pointed out, “[t]he sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam is a fact.” It is the original direction for Muslim prayer—`ula al-qublatheyn—and the al-mi’radj haqq, the place from which the Prophet ascended (some say on a winged mount) to heavenly spheres. It is, moreover, the place which in Muslim tradition those eschatological events hearkening the end of the world will commence.
This said, it must also be recognized that as Saul Cohen points out, “[a]t no time in the thirteen centuries of Islamic rule was Jerusalem part of, let alone synonymous with, a national entity.” The Umayyids in the seventh century chose Ramle rather than Jerusalem as the administrative capital of the country. Under the Ottomans, Palestine was ruled from Damascus. Indeed, some twelfth century Muslim leaders were prepared to trade the city of Jerusalem for Dammietta (now Dumyat), a then-important port on the Egyptian coast. While there is much in Islam that integrates the spiritual and the physical, it does not appear that Islam demonstrated a political interest in Jerusalem until the Zionist era. Some say this modern Arab interest in Jerusalem heightened after the Six-Day War, in the same way that the Crusader conquest brought with it the flourishing of the fadha’il al -Kuds—literature praising the virtues of Jerusalem.
Christian Perspective
Christian views on the Holy Land and Jerusalem are layered and complex. Starting in the third century Christians viewed the land as God-trodden and their eschatology foresaw a Jerusalem restored on earth. In the third century, however, Origen and later Augustine, sought to “dispel the mistaken notion that the sayings about a good land promised by God to the righteous have any reference to the land of Judea.” Since then Christians have wanted a living community of believers in the city to serve as witnesses. Thus we can observe the process of spiritualization of the meaning of Jerusalem which resulted in the “…oscillation between the two dimensions of Jerusalem…celestial or terrestrial, eternal or temporal, transcendent or imminent.” In the main Christians have focussed on the heavenly Jerusalem rather than its earthly counterpart.
Christian concerns with broader issues of sovereignty have often reflected political rather than theological considerations about best protecting Christian interests in the Holy Land and in the Middle East generally. To some extent, the positions on Jerusalem taken by the Christian churches are conditioned on demographic reality. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have substantial minority populations throughout the Muslim world and need to be concerned about their interests, while other Christian churches also have substantial indigenous populations to protect.
The Christian holy places include sites believed to have been the scenes of the crucifixion and the burial of Jesus. This includes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the churches marking the stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Church of the Ascension. While not part of Jerusalem proper, we may also include the churches of Bethlehem, including the Church of the Nativity. All are governed by a firman or Ottoman proclamation dividing up control of each church between the different Christian denominations. These and other edicts regulating the conduct of religious institutions in Jerusalem have been called the Status Quo. This Status Quo was reaffirmed in 1852 and guaranteed in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. It was further confirmed by the British during the Mandate period and then again by Israel after 1967.
The Status of the Holy Places
This religious context has created a city filled with “sacred space” for all three religions. No political solution is conceivable that does not promise to protect this “sacred space,” specifically the holy places of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
History does not tell a hopeful tale. Conqueror after conqueror, upon capturing the holy city, defiled the holy places of the conquered. There were, of course, some notable exceptions. On conquering Jerusalem in 638, Caliph Umar refused to pray in the Christian holy places, knowing that if he entered the church to pray his followers would destroy it. And Lord Allenby, on entering the city in 1918, took pains to dismount and enter on foot as a pilgrim rather than as a conqueror (in marked contrast to Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, whose progress through the city required its gates to be widened for his chariot).
In this context, Israel’s conduct, while certainly not perfect, must be considered exemplary. Control of the Islamic holy places is vested in the waqf appointed by a Supreme Muslim Council. Even before the 13 September handshake, Muslims from Saudi Arabia and Libya were allowed to undertake the pilgrimage to pray at Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City. In contrast, Israeli Arabs were not allowed to visit Arab Holy places in Jerusalem prior to 1967. Christian denominations were forbidden from acquiring land or homes in Jerusalem, whether by purchase or gift. In addition, under the Jordanians no new Christian churches were permitted to be built.
As to the Jews, paragraph 8 of the 1949 Armistice agreement notwithstanding, Jews of whatever nationality were prohibited from all of Jerusalem’s Holy Places between 1948 and the city’s reunification. Jewish holy places were desecrated; over 38,000 of the 50,000 graves in the Mount of Olives cemetery were destroyed or defaced. Tombstones were used for construction materials and cemeteries for garbage dumps.
It must be recognized that the Arab interest in Jerusalem is not solely a Palestinian interest. The Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty states that “Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status takes place, Israel will give high priority to Jordan’s historic roles in these shrines.” This should not be over-interpreted, but indicates what ought in some sense to be obvious—that there are various formulations by which the Hashemite Kingdom might well keep a foothold in Jerusalem by meeting the religious, if not national, needs of the Arab world.
Representing the spiritual concerns of Islam in Jerusalem is the Islamic Conference, a unique grouping of states with extensive Muslim populations who meet to discuss the problems of the Muslim faith that cut across political boundaries (in contrast to the Arab League). The conference’s Jerusalem Committee is headed by Morocco’s King Hassan II, who himself claims descent from the Prophet. There can be little doubt that the Jerusalem Committee will seek to involve itself in matters spiritual pertaining to Jerusalem.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Vatican sought control of Palestine by a western power—preferably Catholic. This desire was not mitigated by the Second World War. By the time “[s]uch a solution, it well knew, however, was unattainable, and in the actual circumstances it preferred the Arabs (sic) to the Jews.” Thus 1948 and after the Vatican supported an international city, however with its 1993 accord with Israel, the Vatican has apparently moved away from its insistence on the creation of a separate legal jurisdiction or corpus separatum to some notion of “international guarantees to safeguard the uniqueness of the city.” The Vatican Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, has pointed out that “[t]he religious aspect of Jerusalem must be discussed in a multilateral forum and we want to be involved in it.” How this major rhetorical shift in Vatican policy will work itself out remains to be seen.
One can take at least three approaches to the problem of the holy places. One approach is to physically transfer power (or control) over the holy places to an interfaith committee consisting of representatives of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, the Vatican and of course the Jewish community. In recent years Walid Khalidi urged this approach with his proposals for an “interfaith council” to govern the Holy Places.
A second approach is to devolve power to committees of the relevant religious confessions. International lawyer Elihu Lauterprecht urged such a resolution in his 1968 study of the status of the holy places. Then Foreign Minister Peres intimated such an approach when he noted that the status of Jerusalem “is closed politically and open religiously.” Thus a Muslim committee would govern the Muslim holy sites and a Christian committee would govern the Christian holy sites (presumably the problem of the Jewish holy sites can be dealt with by the Israeli political system and would not require international approbation.) A model for this might be found in the governance of the Mount Athos peninsula in Greece. While under formal Greek sovereignty, the peninsula is governed autonomously by a religious council and Greece has provided for this in various international guarantees subscribed to in the nineteenth century.
This devolution is easier said than done. The different sects who claim possessory interests in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre jealously guard every inch of “title,” every presumption of customary privilege they can. Even today, the Christian sects at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre give the key to the Church each night to a Muslim family as they do not trust their fellow Christians. It has taken over 30 years to create a consensus among the different denominations present at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as to how proceed to make vital building repairs. A dispute over the painting of the dome of the rotunda took over 12 years to resolve.
Indeed the Greek Orthodox have often evinced the fear that maintenance of Israeli control of Christian holy places was preferable to revision of the Ottoman status quo. In any revision, they fear, they would lose out to the larger and more powerful Roman Catholic Church. In speaking of the holy places, Metropolitan Timothy, Secretary of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem underscored that “the Vatican does not represent us.” Yet late last year, the Patriarch Diodores 1 issued a call for a legally binding agreement with Israel that would not compromise the existing status quo.
Similar intramural tension might be expected among Muslim interests if they were handed over the Muslim holy places to “govern.” There have already been two waqfs, Jordanian and Palestinian, competing for authority over the Muslim holy places. Thus far, while Israel has recognized Jordan’s “special role” in the holy places the local community follows the rulings of the mufti appointed by the Palestinian Authority. And while Saudi Arabia and Morocco support Palestinian claims to political sovereignty, they have not recognized Arafat’s spiritual control. Indeed King Hussein has called for a: dialogue among the adherents of the divine faiths, preceded by a dialogue among the Muslim sects, which would unify their position and lead to brotherly relations among the faithful, as decreed by God when He made Jerusalem the object of their reverence… As to custody over Jerusalem, this can only be the prerogative of Almighty God. Nor is there in any of this any diminution of the rights of the Palestinians to Jerusalem.
To make matters even more complicated various holy places, most preeminently the Temple Mount, are holy to both Arabs and Jews. Indeed Gershon Solomon, leader of the Temple Mount Faithful, a group of Jews seeking to restore control of the Temple Mount to Jewish hands, has argued that “whoever controls the Temple Mount has rights over the land of Israel.”
A third approach would be to leave the matter to various international guarantees among them the 1972 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage or the 1954 Hague convention for the Protection of Cultural Goods in the Case of Armed Conflict. As Israel has already subscribed to these guarantees, reaffirmation would be a relatively simple act and could satisfy both the Israeli need for sovereignty and the religious communities’ need for some indicia of international involvement.
We must remember that control of the holy sites themselves is only one of the issues to be resolved. The issue is not who owns, or has historic worship rights to, a particular holy place, but rather how the holy places can be administered so as provide public access while respecting community traditions, causing the least offense to any group and insuring safety and security.
An example of these difficulties can be seen in the problem of access to Jerusalem itself—since if a group does not have access to Jerusalem the question of access to the holy places does not arise. Because Jerusalem is part of Israel proper rather than the West Bank, closure of the territories for security reasons (or as Palestinians claim, simply as punishment) has a significant effect on both Muslim and Arab Christian access to their holy sites. During Easter 1995 Israel closed off the West bank, offering lamely to bus in Arab Christians for prayers. Again in Easter 1996 West Bank Palestinians were forbidden entry to Jerusalem for “security reasons,” including the “traditional Palm Sunday march by Palestinian boy and girl scouts.” Since mid-January 1996 the Army has limited the number of Muslims it allows to pray at Jerusalem holy sites on Friday during Ramadan, admitting them only if they already bear entrance permits to Israel and are over 30.
Proposed Solutions: Secular Nationalism; Israeli and Palestinian
The issue of Jerusalem is not simply one of “sacred space.” Jerusalem is a living city as well with housing and industry problems and road and infrastructure needs. To make matters even more complex, this “earthly Jerusalem” has become an emotive symbol for the nationalist political aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.
For Israelis, whether religious or secular, it is as the popular hit song put it, “Jerusalem of Gold.” In locution of politicians, this has translated into “a united Jerusalem,” the “eternal capital of Israel now and forever.” For their part, Palestinians find it hard to imagine a Palestinian entity that does not encompass some part of Jerusalem. These competing political aspirations create a belief among many that Jerusalem, like the baby in the Judgment of Solomon, presents a zero-sum problem in which the winners must be offset, of necessity, by losers.
The early Zionists like Herzl understood the national power of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. They were nevertheless mesmerized by the possibilities of Tel-Aviv, a city that symbolized the Zionist spirit. In any event under the mandate there was an implicit recognition that Great Britain would never allow a Jewish state complete control of Jerusalem. (Indeed the 1937 Peel Commission which was the first Palestine Royal Commission to recommend partition explicitly proposed a special Jerusalem enclave as “a sacred trust of civilization.”)
Thus, Ben-Gurion and the other Founders implicitly accepted the internationalization of Jerusalem as the price of independence for some part of Palestine. At a December 1947 meeting of the Jewish Agency, debate took place whether the new capital should be built in the northern Carmel forests (Golda Meir’s idea); Kurnab in the Negev (Ben-Gurion’s plan) or Sharona, a suburb of Tel Aviv (the agreed upon capital).
In the early years of the state, Jerusalem was a backwater town visited largely visited by school children on class trips and Israelis who had business with the government. The 1967 war resulted in the wholly unexpected prize of a united Jerusalem. Israel moved swiftly to capitalize on this “miracle” and it became the center of Israeli national hopes and aspirations. On 27 June 1967, the Knesset passed three laws which expanded the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality and ordered “the application of Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration” in East Jerusalem. The Jordanian municipality ceased to exist. Since then, Israel has insisted on a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty as a cornerstone of its political ideology. Indeed, in 1980 when it appeared that the United Nations was going to take on the Jerusalem question seriously, Israel passed legislation formally annexing the holy city.
As the population of Jerusalem itself becomes more orthodox, the haredim (literally “those who fear the Lord”) are growing in political strength and seek to protect their image of a holy city. Mayor Ehud Olmert owes his election to ultra-orthodox voters who felt ill-treated by former Mayor Teddy Kollek in his glory days. And Olmert pays his political debts. Housing for the religious has increased, the budget for haredi school systems has doubled, more streets near religious neighborhoods are closed down for the Sabbath. Indeed when the city of Florence wanted to give Jerusalem the gift of a full scale replica of Michelangelo’s David, it was declined by the city council for reason of modesty. The result of this demographic shift has been an outmigration of many secular and even modern orthodox from Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv population center. (Figures show 16,000 leaving in 1993, 80% of whom are either secular or modern orthodox) Jerusalem may begin to lose its centrality among the yuppies (or in Hebrew parlance, blazerim) of North Tel-Aviv. As the city refigures itself from a government and intellectual center to an ultra-orthodox bastion the question remains whether secular Israel will continue to see the city as the symbol of their national identity
Similarly, Palestinian claims to Jerusalem are a mixture of political and religious sentiments. As Walid Khalidi writes,
Without East Jerusalem there would be no West Bank. It is…the pivotal link between Nablus to the north and Hebron to the south. Together with its Arab suburbs it is the largest Arab urban concentration in the West Bank. The highest proportion of the Palestinian professional elite under occupation resides in it. It is the site of the holiest Muslim shrines on Palestinian soil.
Similarly, the Palestinian newspaper An-Nahar asserts that, “there can be no homeland without land and no peace without Jerusalem.”
During the period of Jordanian occupation from 1948 to 1967, Jerusalem was ignored. The Hashemites feared the Palestinian nationalism centered in the city (King Hussein’s grandfather, we must remember, was assassinated on his way to prayer at al-Aqsa in 1951). Efforts were made to build up Amman at the expense of Jerusalem. Government offices were relocated to Amman. Economic development was concentrated on the East Bank. Efforts to create a Jerusalem airport were quashed.
After the Israeli annexation, Jerusalem ironically became more important in Palestinian political and economic consciousness. The decline of the local notables with the development of a Palestinian diaspora shifted power from Nablus and Hebron to Jerusalem. Further, because the city was cut off from the Palestinian population on the East Bank, the city became a magnet for West Bank Palestinians. Falling under more lenient Israeli law, East Jerusalem became the Palestinian cultural and political center, and without Jordan as a market the economic center of the West Bank as well.
Jerusalem Arabs continually protested that they did not get a full share of the political pie under Israeli control. They are correct. In large part the situation reflects invidious discrimination which cannot be justified. However, in some measure these inequalities reflect the reality that most Jerusalem Arabs have consistently boycotted municipal elections since 1967, on the view that participation would in some way legitimate Israeli claims of sovereignty. Indeed only about 5,000 of the estimated 55,000 Palestinian voters in East Jerusalem cast their ballot in the January 1996 Palestinian election. A Palestinian party would likely form the largest single voting bloc in the Jerusalem city council. They could form an alliance with either the growing ultra-orthodox sector or with the secular parties in Jerusalem. Their claims for a more equitable share of the city’s resources would inescapably be met by the rough and tumble of the democratic political process– if they chose to join in.
There is a sense in which Arab and Jewish Jerusalem is a tale of two cities. Since the Intifada, as the 2 July 1994 Ottawa Citizen has incisively pointed out,” [m]ost Jews don’t feel welcome or safe in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, including the walled Old City and most Arabs don’t feel welcome or safe in Jewish West Jerusalem.” This separation defies those who claim that they have created a united city. Not only that, few Jews know about such Arab villages within the post-1967 borders of Jerusalem such as Ab-Dis. To that extent Jerusalem is a divided city.
But the division is far different than the political division of 1967. For better or worse, Israeli building projects in East Jerusalem have permanently altered the demographic landscape, so that as Michael Romann and Alex Weingrad have insightfully noted “the previously clear-cut continuous dividing lines segregating Jewish from Arab zones can no longer be said to exist…. The distinction between East and West Jerusalem no longer coincides with the Arab-Jewish divide.”
Thus, the notion that Jerusalem can be easily divided up is frivolous to anyone who actually walks its metes and bounds. Jerusalem has a population of over 550,000. Of the 320,000 who live on land not under Israeli control before 1967, a majority are Jewish. An additional 35,000 Jews live in West Bank settlements within easy commuting distance of the city. Ramot with 38,000 inhabitants and Gilo with 30,000 protect the Eastern and Southern approaches, respectively. Neve Yaacov and Pisgat Zev on the north with over 29,000 inhabitants and Maale Adumim on the West with 20,000 complete the security corridor.
The last few years have seen a plethora of symposia and colloquia about dividing up Jerusalem. Indeed a recent book has catalogued over 150 such proposals in this century alone. All attempt, in Meretz Knesset-member Naomi Chazan’s words, “to share, split or pool ownership and use of the city’s valued resources and suggest various ways of compensating losses.” The mere fact that both Israelis and Palestinians are seeking practical instead of ideological solutions is itself a sign of progress. The proposals generally discussed are of at least six kinds:
1. Give it Back
None but hard-liners on the Arab side argue that the entire city (that is to say, East and West) should be handed back to whatever Palestinian entity might issue from the Peace process. While some international law professors like John Quigley continue to argue that Israel has no rights in Jerusalem at all, this position is a non-starter. To the extent that it is laid down by Palestinians as a negotiating marker, it serves in reality to stir up fears among Israelis regarding Arab negotiating bona fides.
2. Split it Up
Many Palestinians, like Sari Nusseibah, propose splitting the city into Jewish and Palestinian sectors, creating a kind of divided sovereignty. This would be very difficult to do because there are no longer clear cut dividing lines between Jewish and Arab areas. Recognizing this, Ibraham Matar would allow Israel to keep sovereignty over western Jerusalem but demand the dismantling of all “illegal” Jewish construction built in eastern Jerusalem after June 1967, as well as secure “repatriation of Palestinians to their homes, villages and property in West Jerusalem,” providing compensation for those “who do not wish to have their property back.” Similar views were broached in a March 1993 symposium co-sponsored by the United States Institute for Peace.
This approach raises considerable difficulties. King Solomon understood that the superficially attractive notion of cutting the baby in two would fail. So too with Jerusalem. Nusseibah and others would try to avoid this problem by proclaiming a divided yet open city. More likely a divided Jerusalem would become a new Berlin split in two by a wall.
3. Devolution of Power
Chief among these approaches is the borough system talked up (yet rarely acted upon) by former Mayor Teddy Kollek. This approach wants to keep the city physically united but is prepared to hive off certain areas or functions in which power can be delegated to the Palestinian population. Thus Kollek suggests Arab and Jewish boroughs with the Arabs having control over their daily life (e.g. education, zoning and welfare) with Israel having sovereignty over the entire city. Cynics have suggested that this gives Israel the city and allows the Palestinians to collect the garbage. While Kollek calls it “shared” this is more properly classified as “functional sovereignty”. Already the Labor government allowed East Jerusalem to vote in last month’s Palestinian elections, maintaining their link to whatever Palestinian entity may evolve from the peace process.
The PLO, however, appears uninterested in pragmatic formulations. It shows no interest, for example, in the Arab villages on Jerusalem’s periphery, like Sufat or Sur Bahir. It claims the Old City, close-in Arab communities such as Sheik Jarrah, and such bustling Jewish suburbs as French Hill, Gilo and Ramot. Its interest in neighborhood autonomy is less to promote local empowerment through a borough system than as a straw for “shared sovereignty” with all the consequences that entails.
Nor is the PLO interested in “home rule” in the sense of neighborhood autonomy. If they were, the problem would be far simpler. A joint Palestinian-Israel Jerusalem economic development council could encourage economic links to any Palestinian entity. The municipal government can proffer Palestinian building permits, using the zoning Master Plan to encourage, not retard, Arab economic development. Local control of schools and libraries can ensure that East Jerusalem receives its fair share of government programs with due sensitivity to the special needs of the Arab population.
Israel has expressed a willingness to meet these concerns. In July 1968 Shlomo Hillel of the Foreign Ministry pointed out that any settlement on Jerusalem “will contain steps which will satisfy the need of the Muslims for status–extraterritorial standing and the right to raise flags”. Other symbolic connections to Jerusalem might be envisioned.
4. A Vatican Solution
Others have suggested a kind of “Vatican” model allowing a Palestinian parliament to meet within Israeli precincts. According to this view, the Palestinian entity would be allowed to site their parliamentary or executive functions on land within Jerusalem otherwise under Israeli sovereignty. This extraterritorial enclave would allow for a symbolic Palestinian presence in Jerusalem.
It has one obvious precedent, the Vatican enclave in Rome. An indirect analogue, as Helen Cobban has pointed out in a recent lecture at the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, is Chandigarh in India, in which the Federal City of Chandigarh is capital for two Indian states. By this Cobban was referring to the fact that Chandigarh supposedly serves as the Capital of the Sikh state of Punjab as well as the Hindu state of Haryana.
A variant of this proposal has been made by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Affairs in a much-discussed recent options paper. The paper raises the possibility of recognizing Palestinian sovereignty over a limited area at the edges of Jerusalem’s city limits, territorially linked to the Palestinian Authority (perhaps Ra’s al-Amud, Arab al-Sawahirah, or Sur Bahir as but a few examples). This territory could then be used as the capital for any future Palestinian entity. Helena Cobban has pointed to this approach as current among the Israeli Peace Now movement. As she describes it “a future Palestinian Parliament might be established in Abu Dis (an Arab village at the edge of Jerusalem). The Palestinians would then (so their argument goes) be able to claim that their “capital” was located in Jerusalem just as much as Israel’s is. At the same time, Israeli nationalists could continue to claim that the Palestinian capital was not actually in the city that Israel claims as its own.
5. Sharing Sovereignty
The more sophisticated devotees of partition recognize that even Israeli doves will instinctively recoil at proposals to split the Holy City (as will many Western sympathizers). Thus, they seek a less controversial linguistic phrase and many have begun to talk the language of dual or shared sovereignty, or in the words of Hebrew University professor Avishai Margalit, “one city that could be home to two capitals.” Faisal al-Husayni has recently given primacy to this locution, stating:
We do not want to see the city divided. Part of it is under occupation and the other part sanctions this occupation…. We are seeking a comprehensive solution that will keep Jerusalem open, with free movement and without orders; but at the same time it will contain two capitals.
Husayni has moved (at least rhetorically) away from earlier Palestinian demands for control of the entire city, or failing that, to divide it in two.
There is a qualitative difference, however, between proposals to increase Palestinian involvement in the political process through, for example, the devolution of power and proposals to share sovereignty in Jerusalem. Talk of a borough system can be viewed as a way to devolve authority to neighborhoods or it can be seen as the beginning of shared sovereignty.
It is worth giving special attention to the proposals to share sovereignty in Jerusalem. Even with the best will in the world, dual sovereignty simply won’t work, in part for reasons of public administration. Shared sovereignty does not mean shared authority. A city cannot be run by consensus. Divided centers of power are possible, as, for example, in present day Jerusalem where haredi (religious), Labor and Likud interests each control portions of the vote. That is what democratic pluralism means. Power can also be devolved downwards (as for example, with neighborhood autonomy or boroughs). What is not possible is divided authority where all sides must be in agreement for political decisions to occur.
It also won’t work from the perspective of political theory, for the shared sovereignty position corrodes the concept of the nation-state. To say that Jerusalem has two sovereigns is another way of saying that it has none. If both a Palestinian entity and Israel share sovereignty over Jerusalem it becomes a city without borders.
Without borders, there is no control over commerce, taxation or aspects of a national economy. Further, if Jerusalem has no control or perimeter control, it cannot protect itself against ingress or egress of persons or criminals (including terrorists). As even the American Friends Service Committee (no friend of Israel) has recognized, under such solutions “anyone entering Jerusalem from either country would be free to cross Jerusalem to the other country.” Put more bluntly, a porous Jerusalem permits Palestinians to accomplish the right of return with the bothering with negotiations.
Thus, the cosmopolitan notion of no borders defeats the essence of the nation-state, a place where one political community can exercise its vision of “the pursuit of happiness.” Political integration may yet reduce the importance of states and borders in the European Community (although the checkered experience of the Maastricht treaty in national referenda belies this optimism). But it is simply naive optimism to assume it will happen in the Middle East.
Shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, then, is nothing more than a replay in one city of the binational state idea fostered by utopians like Judah Magnes before 1948. It marks a defeat for Zionism, and for the notion of a Jewish state in the Middle East. However, subtle the diplomatic dance, when the music ends, the inescapable reality remains—there cannot be two sovereignties in one city.
Unfortunately, all efforts at shared sovereignty inescapably lead to divided sovereignty. Therefore, any negotiations on the future of Jerusalem must be based on the practical reality that Jerusalem can serve as the capital of one state only. Here Israeli differences with the Palestinians are most starkly evident.
6. Enlarge the City
Various scholars suggest that enlarging of the size of Jerusalem would enable a peaceful solution. This counterintuitive notion is based on the view that an enlarged city would allow for flexibility over sovereignty and control.
There is much precedent for this. The 1947 UN approved plan for a greater Jerusalem (reaffirmed in 1949) would have expanded the city southwest to include Bethlehem and its Christian holy sites. Its border was drawn to achieve rough parity between the Jewish and Muslim populations. In May of 1967 the Jordanians discussed and approved an enlargement of the city’s borders (including a wide swath of the West Bank) but failed to act before the 1967 war. And after June 1967 the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem was of a city with enlarged boundaries, designed to include as much land and as few Arabs as possible, to include areas designed as a buffer zone to protect Jewish areas and to “create facts” by encircling Jewish Jerusalem with a collar of Jewish suburbs.
Thus, Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania has argued with more than a dash of hyperbole that Jerusalem’s post-1967 boundaries are “devoid of any religious, historical or emotional justification.” Given that this 1967 expansion of Jerusalem’s boundaries was artificial there is no reason, in Lustick’s view, that its boundaries could not be contracted if such a redefinition would assist the peace process. Thus Lustick suggests that enlargement and division would allow both Israelis and Palestinians to claim victory over the issue of who owns what.
It must not be forgotten that the Jordanian government in May 1967 proposed a significant expansion of the city, including a much larger swathe of what is now the West Bank than the post-1967 Israeli formulation. Thus it could be argued that Israel was merely following Jordan in its efforts to create a Greater Jerusalem. Similarly, the 1947 United Nations-approved plan for an internationalized Jerusalem (reaffirmed in 1949) would have expanded the city southward to include Bethlehem and its Christian holy sites. The mere fact that an expanded or “Greater” Jerusalem encompasses Arab areas does not vitiate the integrity of the underlying Jewish claim.
In February 1992, the Instituto Affari Internaziali co-hosted in Rome the final conference of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Research Project. As reported in the International Spectator of July-September 1993, former Jerusalem Council member Moshe Amirav and Al-Fajr editor Hanna Siniora both propose to expand the boundaries of Jerusalem from its present 109 square kilometers to 461 square kilometers. This Greater Jerusalem would be drawn to create rough parity between Jewish and Palestinian areas. Drawing upon ideas of long-time Labor dove Merom Benvenisti, the city would be governed, like the late Greater London Council, by local borough councils and a central political council.
Conclusion
Israel faces a number of significant problems in addressing the Jerusalem issue in any final peace accord. While the international community nearly universal rejection of Israel’s position on Jerusalem has had little de facto impact on the city’s status, it will heavily condition the negotiations regarding any formal de jure arrangements. Israelis and the pro-Israel Americans often forget this. Thus, Martin Peretz has recently written that “much of the world seems ready to accept sovereign Jewish title.” This assumption is only correct in part. While their lobbying has been muted, various Christian advocacy groups such as the World Council of Churches have argued that peace in the Middle East is impossible without a “just solution” to the problem of Jerusalem.
On 6 March 1996, together with seven other Christian leaders, Cardinal William Keeler, President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops signed a controversial appeal to President Clinton seeking a greater Christian voice in discussions over the future of Jerusalem. It asked the Clinton administration to “use its influence to prevent this vital issue from being settled by force of events or the creation of facts on the ground.” The letter evoked considerable controversy in the Jewish community in part because it suggested that “[i]n contravention of international law, more and more land is taken out of Palestinian hands and placed under Israeli control by annexation, expropriation and private purchases, often coercive or of questionable legality.”
At a meeting with Jewish leaders held 13 March 13, Keeler appeared to backtrack—later issuing a clarification of the “context” in which he had signed the original letter to Clinton and underscoring that the statement was intended as a plea “to preserve all options and possible solutions until the principals could address them.”
What most upset the Jewish groups was the notion that Christian leaders failed to acknowledge the “uniqueness of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem that dates back 3,000 years.” Thus, the American Jewish Committee pointed out that “[t]he statement equates the Jewish religious devotion to Jerusalem with Christian and Islamic ties to the city. They are not the same. While recognizing the Christian and Islamic ties to Jerusalem, the Jewish attachment to the Holy City is 3,000 years old … and the city … is at the center of Jewish identity and faith.”
Any discussion of the future of Jerusalem must recognize that there is a very narrow “trading range” in which the parties can bargain. No Israeli government will give the city back. Efforts to prove that Israel has no “rights” in Jerusalem under international law, whether correct or not, will have little if any effect on the practical discussions over the city’s future. Similarly, proposals to divide the city in two are probably non-starters. Of course, we must recognize that the “trading range” itself is evolving as inter-communal confidence ebbs and flows. Nevertheless, possibilities meriting discussion include notions of devolution of power, including decentralized boroughs, some form of a Vatican solution, and the idea that an enlarged “Greater Jerusalem” can in some way accommodate the political as well as religious needs of both communities.
We must remember that exclusivity is not only a function of religious categories but of nationalistic zeal as well. Gabriel D’Annunzio saw himself as reclaiming “unredeemed” Italian soil when he occupied Fiume (now Rijcka, Croatia) after the First World War, and Moroccan peasants today see the Western Sahara as a cause sacre.
Nonetheless, to a great extent Israel hopes that separating the religious from the political dimension of the Jerusalem problem will allow it to satisfy Christian and Muslim interests if not Palestinian nationalist aspirations. For their part the Palestinians have resisted this formulation. Nasser Al-Kidwa, PLO observer to the United Nations, stated in response to the Israeli peace treaty with Jordan that “any attempt to detach religious issues from the overall political situation of East Jerusalem could only serve the illegal status quo created by the Israeli government.”
I am not so certain that the Israeli government is correct in this analysis. They begin from the view that the religious question is simply a matter of protecting each denomination’s holy places. On this view granting some form of autonomy to the governance Holy Places will solve the religious problem. I suspect, however, that lurking behind the nationalistic symbolism of both Israelis and Palestinians are religious sentiments and that it is those that are thought to be non-negotiable and exclusive in character. Indeed even if Arafat the political leader is more interested in the nascent state of Palestine than in the crowded shouk of Jerusalem’s Arab quarter, he cannot relinquish concern for Jerusalem—for it is the tie between his political nationalism and Islam.
The problem of nationalism is heightened when as with many of the Islamic and Jewish fundamentalists it reflects what really must be called a religious nationalism, a view that the national entity sought reflects religious needs and commands. For Jews this is the religious command to settle the land and the belief that Jewish settlement in Israel marks, as many prayerbooks put it, the “dawn of our redemption.” For Muslims it is part of the dares Islam and the view that no land, once Muslim, may revert to the control of the infidel, let alone the God-trodden land of Palestine saturated as it is with religious history and symbolism.
Sadly one must admit that it is the religious aspect that underscores the “zero-sum” approach of so many of Jerusalem’s partisans. Particularly today, if one can get beyond the security issues and the competing nationalistic metaphors the religious issue still stymies most efforts at resolution. What needs be done (and surprisingly has not been) is to analyze carefully what are the geographic bounds of what in Hebrew one would call the kedusha—the holiness—of each of the three monotheistic faiths. Does for example the kedusha of Jerusalem for Jews lie in the 1967 boundaries or in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City? What area do Christians require to satisfy their need for “witness” in the holy land. What portions of Jerusalem are holy from an Islamic perspective? Such an exercise for each of the monotheistic faiths might prove instructive.
It is important in any discussion of Jerusalem to be sensitive to the balm of time. Many of the fears of both Israelis and Palestinians will be tested by time, and solutions which may not pass popular muster today may well do so some years down the road, when confidence and trust between the parties has grown. Thus, peace on other fronts will make solutions to Jerusalem more feasible.
Until recently the national consensus regarding a united Jerusalem as an integral and indivisible part of Israel was hegemonic. As Yehuda Ben Meir has written, “any attempt by an Israeli government to propose division of Jerusalem, or to suggest that the city serve a capital for any other entity, would be soundly rejected by Israeli public opinion and by Jews throughout the world, and would cause a major crisis between Israel and world Jewry. Indeed any government that proposed division of Jerusalem or the relinquishing of Israeli sovereignty over any part of it, would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of Jewish public opinion, both in Israel and abroad.”
Yet, as Asher Arian has pointed out, “public opinion in Israel on security questions is malleable.” Already attitudes in Israel have begun to change. In the 1980s the number of Israelis prepared to even talk about the status of Jerusalem was in single digits. Arian’s 1994 survey of Israeli political attitudes for the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies shows that only 14 percent of Israelis were prepared to have the status of Jerusalem even raised at peace talks. Yet in January 1995 a gallup poll found over 33 percent of Israelis prepared to negotiate over Jerusalem if that were the price of peace.
The value of time can be best seen in the story of Trieste which, after Second World War, was organized as a—free state or, in United Nations language, corpus separatum. In 1954, Britain and the United States negotiated a resolution of the Trieste dispute by awarding the city itself to the Italy and splitting some of the outlying area (a so-called Zone A and Zone B) between Italy and Yugoslavia. In this resolution, “[n]either Italy nor Yugoslavia formally renounced its claim to the free territory. However, for the Great Powers the territorial settlement was final.” While the Yugoslavs “preferred to look at the London Agreement as a final accord, the Italian legal experts underlined its provisional character.” In particular, it nowhere referred to the imposition of Yugoslav or Italian sovereignty over the disputed zones. This was because Italian public opinion in particular would not accept giving up their sacred land. Some twenty years later, the European Union wanted a clear statement of the borders. On 10 November 1975 in the Treaty of Osimo, both countries resolved the final status of the borders with little fanfare. The treaty resulted from the Conference on Security Cooperation in Europe meeting in Helsinki between 30 July and 1 August of that year and took less than three months to negotiate.
It must further be remembered that the concept of sovereignty is a western import into the Middle East, where for centuries the Ottoman administrative structure provided significant religious minorities with religious and cultural autonomy through the millet system. In the nineteenth century, numerous special communal privileges were retained by citizens of western countries under various capitulation agreements. For centuries, the Mamluk Emirs ruled Egypt under the nominal suzerainty of the Sublime Porte. Indeed, until the centralizing efforts of the Young Turks in the last years of the empire, in much of the Ottoman lands the Sultan ruled largely through his yearly claim of tribute. For the rest of the year the Local Governor held sway. Given this history, innovative approaches that meet both Israeli needs and Arab sensibilities may yet be developed. For it will take creative articulations of sovereignty to proffer solace for those who work for the “peace of Jerusalem.”