East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis

 

Please see this, this, and this. And then Juan Cole's "Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis." 

The Israeli government has mastered the Realpolitik art of creating "facts on the ground:"

Nowhere is the nature of the Israeli project to assert territorial control of the external spaces in the West Bank more evident than in and around Jerusalem. 'Jerusalem,' like 'Israel,' itself, is not a stable concept—it is not one place fixed in space and time. Where Jerusalem is, where it begins and ends, how much land it encompasses, who is counted as a resident, and who is excluded: these have all proved unstable and shifting variables. This is one reason why hardly any country, including the United States, recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital: almost all nations, again including the United States, maintain their Israeli embassies not in Jerusalem, but rather in Tel Aviv (though the U.S. Congress recently passed legislation urging the president to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem).

Jerusalem was divided during and after the war in 1948 during which Israel was created. When the fighting ended, the western part of the city had fallen under Israeli control. The eastern part, along with the rest of the West bank, had ended up under Jordanian control. At that time, what was called East Jerusalem amounted to the area of the Old City and a few outlying neighborhoods, totaling a little over 2 square miles. After the 1967 War, during which Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank (as well as the Gaza Strip), the Israelis expanded the territorial dimensions of what they called Jerusalem by adding almost 27 square miles of West Bank land to the city's municipal borders. In 1980, they also claimed to annex this additional land to Israel.

In fact, over 90 percent of the eastern part of what the official Israeli slogan refers to as 'the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people' actually consists of land thus added to Jerusalem after 1967. According to international law, this land is—like the original 2 square miles of post-1948 East Jerusalem itself—part of the West Bank, or, in other words, militarily occupied territory, not subject to unilateral annexation. 'East Jerusalem is not part of Israel,' the U.N.'s John Dugard has repeatedly said. 'On the contrary, it is occupied territory, subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, Israel's illegal attempt at annexation of East Jerusalem has obscured this truth. As a consequence, world public opinion tends, incorrectly, to treat Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem as different from that of the West Bank and Gaza.' Having claimed to annex it, Israel not only refuses to acknowledge that East Jerusalem is occupied territory, it treats it as though it were sovereign territory, which legally it is not. (From Saree Makdisi's Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, 2008: 63-64)

In an attempt to affirm Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem's Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif, Ariel Sharon strode into the Al-Aqsa compound on September 28, 2000, guarded by an armed entourage. Right after the provocative visit, Palestinian demonstrators hurled stones at Israeli police, who fired back tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets. Twenty-five policemen and three Palestinians were injured in the confrontations. The next day, demonstrations erupted at the Temple Mount following the Friday prayers; rapidly, they spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Within two days fifteen Palestinians had been killed. Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa compound had served as a trigger for the outbreak of the second, much bloodier, intifada. (From Neve Gordon's Israel's Occupation, 2008: 197)

Addendum: Joel Beinin, "Confronting Settlement Expansion in East Jerusalem."

Comments

[Robert Hockett]

Thanks very much for the terrific further thoughts, Patrick, and for the cite, Michael. I should make plain that I don't mean here to attempt to justify the building of further settlements in East Jerusalem, let alone the timing of the most recent announcement of intent to do so. Nor do I wish here to criticize these decisions, for that matter. For these are matters about which I generally find myself strongly inclined to abstain from forming strong opinions, for a number of reasons that I'll post on some time in future. My only concern here is to say that in my (doubtless fallible) view, the faith traditions that are offshoots of the Jewish tradition have a very nasty track record when it comes to their treatment of their 'elder siblings in the faith,' as one pontiff put it, and reluctance to acknowledge the special significance of Jerusalem to Jewish faith and identity, against that lamentable historical backdrop, I think is bound to cause stalemate in the process of seeking a modus vivendi. I also think that, well into the indefinite future, suggestions of a 'one state solution' will be non-starters. 'One state solutions' simply have too tight an historic correlation with 'final solutions' -- precisely the reason for Israel's founding. I might be predictively wrong, of course, but I truly don't think there is any alternative, for the foreseeable future, to the two state model.

Thanks again for the thoughtful reflections!,

Bob

[Michael Perry]

Bob,

Check out what Robert Wright had to say in the NYT yesterday:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/against-pro-israel/

Do you find any of it problematic?

Michael

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Bob,

We do see things rather differently here. First, I'm not at all confident at this point about the viability of a "two-state solution," agreeing with Virginia Tilley that, "As many people privately acknowledge, and as Tony Judt has now proposed in the New York Review of Books, the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed...:"

"Carved up by populous Jewish-Israeli settlements, neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip is a viable national territory. And it follows that if there can be no reversal of the settlement policy, a Palestinian state is not practicable. Judt believes, correctly, that the one-state solution, in whatever form (binational or ethnically cleansed), is now the only option. He has argued persuasively that Israel must confront its obsolete ethno-nationalism and face a post-Zionist vision for the country, however hard that might be. The alternative – the forced transfer of Palestinians out of the territory – is both unconscionable and unimaginably dangerous. Not surprisingly, Judt’s piece has drawn fire from those who see a binational Israel as a betrayal of the promise of a Jewish haven, but as Judt points out, these objections crumble under the onslaught of ‘facts on the ground’. And in any case, the ramifications of a one-state solution go far beyond Israel’s existential crisis."

Tilley wrote those words in 2003 and they ring even more true today, given the incessant expansion of settlements.

Or consider the following from Helena Cobban, someone with impeccable credentials as a long-time student of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a deep knowledge of the region and its history:

"Until recently, the paradigm on which all this diplomacy was based was the “two-state solution,” which envisions an Israeli state and a Palestinian Arab state living side by side in the territory of pre-1947 Mandate Palestine. A corollary to that was generally—at Israel’s insistence—that the borders and other key aspects of this arrangement should be negotiated directly between Israelis and Palestinians, a process that would allow Israel’s representatives to gain “confidence” in the good intentions of the Palestinians. (Many Palestinians, and others, have noted that centering the negotiations on this bilateral encounter left the Palestininian side, which is stateless and still lives largely under Israeli occupation, considerably disadvantaged relative to their occupiers. Many Palestinians—but not Abbas or Fayyad—have sought the added confidence of having the U.N. or another international presence in the room, as well.)

The political pillars of the two-state solution were always Fateh and its secular allies, on the Palestinian side, and Labor and its leftist allies, within Israel. But over the past decade, both Fateh and Labor have grown considerably weaker within their individual bodies politic. Those two parties have been largely displaced by Hamas, and Likud, respectively. Of key importance: neither Hamas nor Likud ever believed in the two-state solution."

We can set the two-state/one-state quesion aside for now (for more on this question, see Makdisi's book as well as the argument by Daniel Lazare in The Nation). As for your sympathy for the proposition "that Jerusalem is Jewish much as Athens is Greek, Cairo is Egyptian, Ramallah is Palestinian, and so forth," I ask only that you consider what is missing from the analogical comparison, namely, that Greek, Egyptian and Palestinian identity is not first and last about "religion," while Jerusalem as "Jewish" is about religious identity first and foremost and there's the rub. As Avishai Margalit has written, "What makes the problem of Jerusalem so complex is that the current nationalistic competition over the city takes place against the background of an ancient, blood-soaked religious competition between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To understand the depth of the nationalistic conflict one must grasp the character of the religious one." The religious character of this conflict will not be resolved, I believe, by thinking predominantly of the "Jewish" character of Jerusalem, a description that in any case belies the city's history. After a short narrative of that history Margalit, rightly I think, concludes that

"Even so sketchy a history shows that Jerusalem, with its changes of rulers and religions, does not belong exclusively to the heritage of any one religion or any one community in the city. To establish its claims, each religion and each nation competing for the city clings to a particular sequence of events in the city's history from the Bronze Age onward and sees it as a guide to their present-day activities, while the history of others becomes for them a black hole from which not even one ray of light can escape.

One of the principal notions that has both undergone historical transformation and caused divisiveness is the concept of holiness, which is accompanied by the idea that Jerusalem is a holy city. Different ideas of holiness have given the struggle over Jerusalem its flavor of absolutism—for example, the expression that Jerusalem is Israel's 'eternal' capital. The recurrent pattern with regard to Jerusalem is a subtle one. Each religion and each national ideology started out with deep ambivalence about the city's importance. The attitude of each group toward the city became one of absolute commitment only as a result of rivalry and conflict with others. The religious competition for Jerusalem, and consequently the nationalist competition as well, were sustained by the idea that the city was a holy place for various religions, an idea that requires clarification."

Margalit proceeds to clarify the various dimensions and darker consequences that have attended the holiness ascription.

Consider too the following from Margalit:

"In the popular and ahistoric version of Jewish history, the destruction of the Second Temple is linked with the exile from the land. But a considerable part, perhaps even a majority, of the Jewish people already lived in the Diaspora before the Temple was destroyed; and after it was destroyed the size of this Diaspora did not increase very greatly. Most of the Jews who survived the Romans' destruction of the country remained in Palestine. It is not particularly far-fetched to conjecture that they were the ancestors of those inhabitants who accepted Islam many generations later."

Margalit himself, assuming a two-state solution, has proposed joint sovereignty over Jerusalem.

In brief, I think "acknowledgment of the profoundly Jewish-identity-constitutive significance of this city" is fairly commonplace and not what is at issue. Rather, what cries out for recognition is the extent to which the city is, at the same time, more-than-Jewish in many profound and historically legitimate ways. Juan Cole briefly narrates this history, as does Margalit, and that narrative suggests that the issue is rather more complicated and thus cannot be reduced to merely "tak[ing] seriously the Jewishness of of the very idea of Jerusalem."

All good wishes,
Patrick

(I knew there had to be at least one thing about which we do not see eye-to-eye!)

[Robert Hockett]

Thanks for this thought-provoking post, Patrick. I would be being a bit less than honest, though, if I did not own that this is one matter on which I might be at least as close to those who are commonly said to be on 'the right' as to those who are commonly said to be on 'the left.' Insofar as additional WB land not originally part of Jerusalem has been annexed to Israeli Jerusalem, I imagine -- and of course hope -- that it will be counted among those lands that figure into the 'land swap' portions of what I hope will eventually be a true two-state agreement. As for what the final status of Jerusalem as a whole might be, I don't at this point permit myself anything so bold as a 'decided opinion,' but I do find myself quite sympathetic to the proposition that Jerusalem is Jewish much as Athens is Greek, Cairo is Egyptian, Ramallah is Palestinian, and so forth. I could be wrong of course, but I doubt that any resolution to this tragic conflict is apt to be forthcoming absent acknowledgment of the profoundly Jewish-identity-constitutive significance of this city. How, precisely, that recognition should find expression in final status agreements is of course the $64k question, a question far beyond my competence even tentatively to attempt to answer. But I'm pretty confident that no answer that fails to take seriously the Jewishness of the very idea of Jerusalem will ever prove sustainable. Hopes and prayers definitely in order here!

Thanks again,
Bob