Let the New Walls Tumble Down

Searching Palestinians as they arrived from Jordan during a stint of army reserve duty more than 20 years ago at the Allenby Bridge crossing, I recognized a man in line. He was the proprietor of a grocery store in East Jerusalem that I sometimes frequented on Saturdays when shops on the Jewish side of the city were closed. The grocer was a courteous man, but there was a clear sense of distance, just short of sullenness, with Israeli customers. Stepping back inside the search booth, I asked another soldier to deal with him. The possibility of buying a carton of milk in a city we both called our own without the burden of conquest weighing upon the grocer or me seemed at the time a remote possibility. The current Camp David talks have brought it close to reality, whatever the specific outcome of this round of negotiations.

The problem with Jerusalem begins with its name. The word evokes thousands of years of history and the spiritual heritage of the three great monotheistic religions. But only a tiny part of what is today called Jerusalem is in fact connected to that historic city.

Until 1860, Jerusalem was confined within the kilometer-square walls of what is today called the Old City. The holy places are almost all within those walls and a smaller extramural area embracing the adjacent Mount of Olives and Mount Zion.

Today’s Jerusalem, however, is more than 100 times the size of the Old City. The sanctity conferred upon the modern city in all its girth by political rhetoric accounts for much needless passion. The boundaries of modern Jerusalem were set not in antiquity but only 33 years ago; not by holy writ but by a committee of mid-level Israeli government officials and army officers.

Their mandate immediately after the Six-Day War was to draw boundaries that would, among other things, include defensible high ground and ensure that medium artillery could not reach the heart of Jewish West Jerusalem. Given that there had just been a bitter battle in the streets of the city and that there had been an even bloodier battle only 19 years earlier--during Israel’s War of Independence--these were not frivolous concerns. But God had no place at the committee’s map table.

The 18,000 acres of former Jordanian territory that Israel duly annexed tripled the size of the city. Only 1,500 of these acres had been part of Jordanian Jerusalem, a small backwater left under Jordanian rule in a state of benign neglect. The rest of the annexed area was made up of parts of 28 Arab villages between Bethlehem and Ramallah.

Around the outer perimeter of the new territory, Israel subsequently built a string of massive housing developments that, in effect, created a new city wall--demographically, and even tactically. Inside this wall, and occasionally poking through it to touch the West Bank, are homogeneous Arab neighborhoods whose 200,000 residents make up close to one-third of the city’s population. These neighborhoods have less claim to sanctity than much of the West Bank territory already ceded to the Palestinians.

Israel has been a prisoner of a formula repeated by every one of its governments, right and left, since 1967--that Jerusalem, to which Jews have prayed for thousands of years, will remain forever a united city under Israeli sovereignty. Through repetition, this litany virtually has taken on the sanctity of prayer. The issue, however, is pragmatic, not historical or religious.

It is clear that there can be no lasting peace unless the Muslim world feels that it has a proprietary role in Jerusalem. It is in Israel’s interest that the Muslim world feel that way. It is in Israel’s interest that the Palestinians find their political satisfaction by declaring their capital in Jerusalem.

Israel has no long-term interest in continuing to impose its rule on Arab neighborhoods whose political allegiance lies elsewhere. There are serious questions about how the city can be divided administratively between Jewish and Arab sectors without dividing it physically, and how this can be done without threatening law and order. But these are questions that must be addressed functionally, not by resorting to slogans. If peace can be made to work in Jerusalem, it might even become contagious.

Failure certainly will be.