‘Arab East Jerusalem’ Is a Fiction for Discrimination

Anyone who thinks that the postponement of the construction of a modest two-story apartment house project for Jewish residents on a plot of land I own on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives represents an advancement of the cause of Arab-Israeli peace has crossed the bridge between reality and delusion.

In fact, the forestalling, through manufactured political frenzy, of my legal right to proceed with a project fully approved by the Jerusalem Municipal Planning Commission has set the cause of genuine peace back by several strides. The message it sends to Yasser Arafat and his associates, first and foremost, is that the bloody rioting they unleashed last year over the opening of an archeological tunnel exit in Jerusalem and brought to a crescendo this year in reaction to the city’s Har Homa housing development have not been wasted exercises. If the Mount of Olives proceeding illustrates anything, it illustrates how brilliantly they succeeded in locking in a psychological veto over Israel’s sovereign right to the development of its capital city. It is a covert call to Palestinian violence--or the threat of violence--in response to any future Israeli building decision in eastern Jerusalem. That is no formula for peace.

The retreat from the Mount of Olives project lends corollary credibility to Arafat’s ultimate dream of a politically and geographically redivided Jerusalem. It’s a false hope and a dangerous one, because whatever chance of success the battered Oslo accords may still have, they are certain to collapse on a fantasy that no Israeli government of any hue can fulfill and hope to survive.

The harsh truth is that the Mount of Olives affair simply underscores the continuing mockery Arafat has made of Oslo. Aside from the fact that Jerusalem is almost completely outside the aegis of the accords, the dire reaction that the prospect of a two-story Jewish apartment house project in the city has elicited from Arafat & Co. is further evidence of their concept of Oslo as diplomatic cover for the exercise of force rather than the intended Palestinian-Israeli accommodation and coexistence. Like the continued refusal to amend the Palestinian Covenant calling for Israel’s annihilation or to disarm, disband and disavow the Hamas terrorists in their midst, it is reflective of a Palestinian leadership that has still to produce any tangible evidence of a desire to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors.

Finally, the Mount of Olives affair provides yet another illustration of the odious tugging power of the uninformed cliche on the Israeli-Palestinian Gordian knot. Like Har Homa, which is situated between two large Jerusalem communities, the Mount of Olives is not more distinctively circumscribed by “Arab East Jerusalem” than Mount Scopus or French Hill, directly to its north, or the Western Wall and the Old City’s Jewish quarter, respectively 700 yards and 860 yards west. The Jerusalem City Hall and the King David Hotel, for that matter, are only a mile away. While the site has no Islamic religious significance, its spiritual and historical relationship to Judaism (and Christianity) is profound.

The Mount of Olives is a classic example of the huge blob of fiction that has been invested in the term “Arab East Jerusalem.” Using its proximity to Arab housing as the criterion for eliminating it as a site for Jewish habitation would, in effect, eliminate half of the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, all of which adjoin or abut Arab neighborhoods. Save for the tragic, internationally unrecognized Jordanian occupation of the eastern portion of the city from 1948 to 1967, a period that witnessed the destruction of every standing synagogue, Jewish library and Jewish school in the Old City, Jerusalem has for 13 centuries been an urban commingling of Jewish, Arab and Christian neighborhoods and populations. It can no more be divided and partitioned than the tendons of a muscle. It is a living tissue. To countenance Arafat’s contention that Palestinian Arabs are incapable of accepting common ground in Jerusalem with their Jewish neighbors is to countenance racism at it worst--the kind that would be decried anywhere else by any other people. Do only the Arabs get an international pass on racism? Are Israel’s Jews the only people expected to serve as its quiescent targets?

In the final analysis, for all its unprecedented regard for the needs and sensitivities of its representative faiths, Jerusalem remains the only capital of the world’s only sovereign Jewish state--its original fountainhead, its historical touchstone. After 3,000 years of glory, ruin and resurrection, Jerusalem yearns for peace, even as the Jewish nation yearns for peace. But even the price of peace must have its limits, and Jerusalem’s cannot be purchased at the cost of its physical integrity.