The ongoing pressures exerted against construction in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem such as Gilo reflect intensified global efforts to redivide the city. Like many aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the issue of Jerusalem is being reviewed in a vacuum, without relationship to the reality on the ground. This overlooks the abominable restrictions on freedom of worship in East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, when the city was under Jordanian control. Jewish holy sites, including the 2,000-year-old Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, were desecrated and the tombstones were used to build latrines, and all 58 synagogues in the Old City, including the ancient Hurva synagogue, were razed to the ground.
The uninhibitedly anti-Semitic Jordanian military governor of the Old City, Abdulla el Tal, proudly proclaimed that, "For the first time in 1,000 years, not a single Jew remains in the Jewish quarter … and as not a single building remains intact, this makes the return of the Jews here impossible." Christians were also maltreated, with more than 60 percent of them leaving Jerusalem during that period.
Yet, since the reunification of the city in 1967 following Israel’s defeat of the combined Arab assault, complete freedom of religion was immediately extended to all citizens of Jerusalem. In addition, universities, hospitals and social service facilities provided absolutely equal services to Jew and Arab alike. One need only visit any of the major hospitals in Jerusalem to verify the extraordinary high standard of health benefits that unification provided for Arab residents.
Ironically, Jews today are the ones being discriminated against by their own government in their own capital. In 1967, immediately after the liberation of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan effectively handed over the keys of the Temple Mount to the Waqf, the Muslim religious authority, which has retained total control and jurisdiction over this extensive area, which includes the holiest Jewish site in the world. It proved to be a disastrous blunder. The situation was further aggravated by the rabbinate, which on Halachic grounds, prohibited Jews from visiting the holy site. However, today many national religious rabbis maintain that Jews are entitled to visit most of the area and even consider it a mitzvah to pray there.
On a recent visit to the Temple Mount, I was astonished to observe the bizarre spectacle of Jews being bundled off by Israeli police in cooperation with the Waqf for quietly engaging in private prayer. I was informed that some Jews who were seen praying are permanently prohibited from visiting the area. This is scandalous. For Israeli police to deny Jews the right to pray at their holiest site in their own capital because it offends Moslem sensitivities is surely outrageous. It amounts to practicing inverse discrimination, denying the same freedom of worship to our own people which we take pride in guaranteeing to others.
This chaotic arrangement also provided fuel to Palestinians to initiate a massive exercise in historical revisionism in order to bolster their false narrative. They are now frenziedly attempting to deny the Jewish links to Jerusalem and make the preposterous allegation that the Jewish relationship to Jerusalem was effectively a Zionist fabrication designed to justify the “invasion” of Palestine. It is a form of revisionism no less obscene than Holocaust denial and has emerged as a central tenet of hostile Palestinian nationalism.
As late as the 1930s, even Muslim Council guidebooks identified Solomon's Temple on the site. It is only since 1954 that such references have been expunged. In 2000, at the Camp David meeting, Yasser Arafat stunned U.S. President Bill Clinton by declaring that “Solomon's Temple was not in Jerusalem, but in Nablus." On another occasion he said it was in Yemen. Others, like Palestinian Authority spokesman Saeb Erekat, alleged that “the issue of the Temple … is a Jewish invention lacking any basis."
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas now repeatedly dismisses any Jewish link to the Holy Land, and the authority’s Information Ministry website describes the Jewish connection to Jerusalem as a “biblical myth." Sari Nusseibeh claimed, "The historical ties and attachments of the Palestinians precede any Israeli claim to Jerusalem."
These expressions were recently extended to even include denial of a Jewish link to the Western Wall. Only last week, Ahmed Al-Tayib, the Sheik of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the principal global religious authority for Sunni Muslims, warned that the continued “Judaization” of Jerusalem, which he claimed had originally been constructed by Arabs, would result in the annihilation of “the Zionist entity in Palestine."
In addition, we are witnessing a systematic ongoing course of wanton destruction in which bulldozers have been employed on the Temple Mount by the Palestinian Waqf to eliminate ancient Jewish archaeological evidence and yet, despite protests and expressions of outrage from most Israeli archaeologists, the government has refused to intervene.
The links of the Jewish people to Jerusalem are at the very core of our national and spiritual history and identity. For more than 2,000 years of exile we yearned and prayed for a return to Jerusalem, and since 1800 Jews have constituted the majority of the population of Jerusalem. It is noteworthy that Yitzhak Rabin's last speech before his assassination pledged to the Knesset that Jerusalem would never again be divided.
Yet the sad truth is that in addition to condemning any construction in Jewish Jerusalem as “undermining the peace process," neither the U.S. nor the Europeans have even recognized Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem. There is no doubt that if any areas of Jerusalem were ever to fall under Palestinian jurisdiction, the despicable discriminatory practices applied by the Jordanians until 1967 would be reintroduced. Abbas has already publicly proclaimed that not a single Jew would be permitted to live in any future Palestinian state.
It is also inconceivable that neighborhoods like Ramot, Gilo, French Hill, Ramat Eshkol and Givat Zeev would ever be cut off from Israel. No power could evacuate more than 100,000 Jews from these areas.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently over the announcement of new construction in Gilo, but in view of her personal Berlin background she should be sensitive to the highly negative aspects of dividing a city. Although it will never happen, greater autonomy and allocation of municipal duties could be extended to Arabs in areas in which they comprise the majority of inhabitants.
Interestingly, a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion demonstrated that 59 percent of Arab residents in Jerusalem were satisfied with their standard of living and that the majority strongly objected to dividing the city and living under Palestinian jurisdiction. In fact, as many as 40% stated that if the city was divided, they would prefer to move to an Israeli neighborhood rather than fall under the authority of the corrupt Palestinian Authority and possibly eventually find themselves under Hamas control.
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The writer can be reached at ileibler@netvision.net.il. His website is www.wordfromjerusalem.com.
