John Quigley is President’s Club Professor of Law at Ohio State University. His books include The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective (Duke University Press, 2005), and—with Luke T. Lee—Consular Law and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Jerusalem: Idea and Reality
edited by tamar mayer and suleiman ali mourad
London and New York, Routledge, 2008. 332 pages
Hardback: UK £80.00, US $160.00. Paperback: UK £22.99, US $42.95
This collection of eighteen essays, edited by an Israeli-Jewish geographer (Mayer) and a Lebanese-Muslim historian of religion (Mourad), provides a kaleidoscopic view of a city that has been the object of fascination probably more than any other on the planet. The contributing authors represent a wide range of ethnicities and perspectives, analysing Jerusalem from its role in religion, to its depiction in maps and photographs, to the politics of negotiation over the city’s status.
Mayer and Mourad organised a symposium on Jerusalem at Middlebury College in 2005, and the essays are its product. The essays in their totality convey a sense of the awe that Jerusalem inspires. In chapter 7, entitled “The Holy Fool Still Speaks”, Alexander van der Haven describes a physical reaction experienced by some visitors that has been given the name “Jerusalem syndrome”. Some visitors have wound up in mental hospitals. Van der Haven views the syndrome as a reaction associated with a certain religious subculture.
The strength of Jerusalem: Idea and Reality is that it contains analyses from so many different angles. A reviewer can only apologise to the majority of the essayists for not being able to include a description of their individual contributions. The essays range across early photography that focused on Jerusalem’s architecture, early mapping of the city, and songs about it that reflect the longing of displaced Arabs to return. Poster-art about Jerusalem in Iran after the Islamic Revolution is discussed by Christiane J. Gruber in chapter 11, “Jerusalem in the Visual Propaganda of Post-Revolutionary Iran”. She describes how such art was used in an effort to mobilise public sentiment in favour of the Palestinian cause.
The essays combine accounts of the history of Jerusalem and the aura surrounding the city from ancient times with assessments of its current political status.
In chapter 17, “Yerushalayim, al-Quds, and the Wizard of Oz: The Problem of ‘Jerusalem’ after Camp David II and the Aqsa Intifada”, Ian Lustick addresses Israel’s expansion of the city’s borders after it took East Jerusalem in 1967. Lustick sees the expansion as aimed at preventing a peace with the Palestinians. By getting Israelis to accept the idea that this vast, expanded “Jerusalem” was inevitably attached to Israel, the right wing sought to stake out a position that could not be accepted on the Palestinian side. This would prevent negotiations from coming to any successful conclusion and would allow for further takeover of West Bank land via settlement expansion.
Subsequent developments have pushed even more in the direction of making negotiations impossible. Israeli settlements have expanded yet further, rendering any effective Arab rule in East Jerusalem even less likely to be agreed to on the Israeli side.
The creeping annexationists have seemingly prevailed. Jews have altered the demographic balance in East Jerusalem. Palestinians are being pushed out.
Gilead Sher, who was on the Israeli team at the Camp David 2000 negotiations, provides an account of what happened at those talks in chapter 18, the book’s final essay, “Negotiating Jerusalem: Reflections of an Israel Negotiator”. With a straight face, he describes—as if they were reasonable—Israeli demands that the Palestinians agree that Israel is a Jewish state, and that a future Palestinian state agree to restrict itself in the political alliances it might make. Backed by President Bill Clinton of the United States, the Israelis demanded inclusion of a statement in the projected agreement that the agreement constituted an end of the conflict—code words for Palestinian renunciation of the right of return for those displaced in 1948.
Sher provides support for Lustick’s claim that Jerusalem initially was not central to Zionist thinking but was made into an issue. Sher quotes an Israeli historian as saying that there was no Zionist claim to Jerusalem before 1937. Tamar Mayer in her essay, “Jerusalem in and out of Focus: The City in Zionist Ideology” (chapter 14), provides additional confirmation on this point. In early Zionism, which after all bore little religious imprint, Jerusalem was not an object of particular focus. It was distant from the coastal areas where most immigrants landed. Only as part of their general effort to establish a presence throughout Palestine did the Zionists begin to settle in and buy land in Jerusalem.
Sher puts the blame for the failure at Camp David to resolve the status of Jerusalem squarely on Yasser Arafat. According to Sher, Jerusalem was the key issue as the negotiations unfolded, and Arafat was unwilling to accept a formula that called for Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) but for control of mosques and on the ground to be in the hands of Palestine’s authorities.
Barak offered virtually nothing on the question of the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. By 2000, the Israeli position on that issue had strayed so far from what is required in law that Israel’s negotiators could not conceive of a solution that would accord with principle and be seen as fair by the international community. The United Nations viewed refugee repatriation in line with international law as an inalienable right. Clinton sided more with Barak than with Arafat.
On Jerusalem in particular, the Israeli negotiators at Camp David could not conceive of an agreement under which they would withdraw the settlers that Israel had unlawfully inserted into East Jerusalem after Israel’s occupation of that half of the city in 1967. The international community had loudly and consistently condemned Israel for its settlement activity and for its claims over East Jerusalem.
The tragedy of Jerusalem was in the first instance of Israel’s making, but in a broader sense the international community shares the fault. The United Nations confined itself to passing resolutions. It did not take more forceful action through the Security Council, largely because of veto threats by the United States.
Vetoes in defence of Israel were cast by the United States in the mid-1990s as Israeli settlement construction continued apace in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank. So when Clinton pressed the Palestinians at Camp David, he was as much to blame as the Israelis for overriding Palestinian rights.
In Sari Nusseibeh’s essay, “Negotiating the City: A Perspective of a Jerusalemite” (chapter 12), a different view of the Camp David talks is offered. According to Nusseibeh, it was indeed the proposal by Ehud Barak for Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount that killed any chance of agreement at Camp David. Nusseibeh bases that conclusion on a conversation with Saeb Erekat, who was a principal Palestinian negotiator at the talks. But Nusseibeh does not regard Arafat’s negative reaction as unreasonable. Nusseibeh speculates that Arafat needed a solid outcome on Jerusalem because he thought he could not get one on repatriation of the refugees. A fair deal on Jerusalem would at least let him explain to the refugees that he had obtained something for Palestine.
Elie Rekhess recounts the changing picture of local institutions of leadership in East Jerusalem under the Israeli occupation (chapter 16, “The Palestinian Political Leadership in East Jerusalem after 1967”). Jordan maintained influence even after being ousted in 1967, but gradually the Palestine Liberation Organisation became the focal centre for opposition to Israel’s occupation. The PLO set up political, social, economic, religious, cultural, scientific, and professional organisations. Rekhess views the wall that Israel began constructing in 2000 as a blow to the influence in the West Bank of Jerusalem-based institutions and organisations as it inhibits contact between the city and other West Bank population centres.
Kimberly Katz gives an account of Jordan’s administration of East Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967 (chapter 15, “Administering Jordanian Jerusalem: Constructing National Identity”). King Abdallah refused to let Israeli (but not non-Israeli) Jews pray at the Western Wall, in response to Israel’s refusal to repatriate Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948. After 1948, Katz explains, both Israel and Jordan sought to consolidate their positions in the western and eastern sectors of Jerusalem respectively. Israel located most of its government ministries there and began construction of a parliament building. Despite the efforts of Israel and Jordan to stake out their claims, other countries regarded Jerusalem as remaining in an undetermined legal status. The UN General Assembly had called for an internationalised city, at least for a period of time. The international community declined to recognise Israel’s claim to the western sector, or Jordan’s to the eastern sector.
F. E. Peters examines the attachment of the three Abrahamic faiths to Jerusalem (chapter 2, “Jerusalem: One City, One Faith, One God”). Peters distinguishes the Jewish attitude towards Jerusalem from the Christian and Islamic. For Jews, the city as a whole is significant, because it was the religious and political capital of the ancient Israelites. For Christians and Muslims, the significance lies in particular sites where certain events are supposed to have occurred: for Muslims, the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) as the site of the Prophet’s ascension to heaven; and for Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial.
In their introduction, editors Mayer and Mourad offer an interesting perspective on how Jerusalem figures in the theologies of the three faiths. They write that “the centrality of Jerusalem to the three Abrahamic religions was constructed carefully over time. For each group, there was a time-lag between when the constitutive events presumably took place and the time Jerusalem is noted as important”. They say that “in considering Jerusalem’s religious significance, one has to constantly struggle to distinguish between what is belief and what is history” (p. 3).
Here one finds an eerie consonance with Lustick’s discussion of the insistence of Israel’s right-wing Likud party on Jerusalem’s remaining “whole and undivided” after 1967. In the ancient constructs as in the recent, there may have been a certain artificiality. An aim, whether religious or political, may rest beneath the significance attributed to Jerusalem.
Artificiality of another sort is detailed by Sari Nusseibeh in his essay. Nusseibeh, scion of one of Jerusalem’s most prominent Arabic families, explains that his family can be traced back to the seventh century to the time of the caliph Umar, who is buried near St Stephen’s Gate. Ancestors of Nusseibeh from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are buried in the Mamluk Cemetery in what is now West Jerusalem, their names inscribed on tombstones there.
Nusseibeh, a resident of East Jerusalem, describes the travel documents he must carry to pass through borders. His passport is Jordanian. But that does not completely suffice for him, so he carries as well an Israeli-issued pass. Whereas for most persons, travel documents tell something about who they are, for Nusseibeh that is not true. “I am not a Jordanian or an Israeli. I am a Palestinian,” he writes. Nusseibeh likens life in East Jerusalem to that described in Alice in Wonderland: “everything is upside down” (p. 198).
As Nusseibeh explains, the place he identifies with is not principally Palestine. Notwithstanding his statement that he is a Palestinian, Nusseibeh says that for families like his, the principal identification is with the city: Jerusalem is the locus of their belonging.
Nusseibeh describes a surreal encounter with the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who grew up in a house located close to that in which Nusseibeh grew up—Oz on the western side of the divide that came with 1948, Nusseibeh on the eastern side. Each described to the other something of his early life: “And it was amazing for me to see how totally different these two worlds were from one another, how totally different the experiences were, though we were hardly two kilometers apart” (p. 198).
Jerusalem: Idea and Reality enhances one’s understanding of the city and of the broader religious and political issues of the region. One gets a sense of both the wonder and the tragedy of Jerusalem. The city ever fascinates. This reviewer, like thousands of other people from around the world, relishes walking on its stone pathways. The tragedy is that the strong focus on Jerusalem, the importance given to it, may condemn Israelis and Arabs to even more years of conflict, of death, of destruction.
