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Jerusalem: The Contested City

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Jack Friedman, a City University of New York professor emeritus and former US chairman of the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, admirably tackled this book in the Jerusalem Post.

In it Bar-Ilan University political scientist Menachem Klein calls for Israel to end its rule of Jerusalem, which he claims will lead to continuing conflict. The board member of Israel's hard left B'tselem proposes, instead, to impose the terms from Ehud Barak's 2000 Camp David failed offer of peace.

Klein recounts points of contention from the 1977 Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian Arab autonomy through the 1993 Oslo Accords to the Barak-Arafat talks at Camp David II. Against the evidence, he concludes that Israel and the Palestinians have "moved closer" to peace. That would be news, if it were true.

But Jerusalem remained a sticking point at the first of these conferences. At Camp David II, Ehud Barak seriously proposed to share sovereignty over Jerusalem--which would have given Palestinians most of the Old City, including the Temple Mount. Klein forgets that Arafat violently rejected that offer, sans counter-proposal, and has pursued war ever since.

An addendum to the Oslo Accords' Declaration of Principles officially put Jerusalem in play, including the city among items to be negotiated in permanent status talks. Then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres wrote an infamous letter to his Norwegian counterpart --- a sort of secret codicil to the Declaration of Principles --- in which he stated that the "Palestinian institutions of East Jerusalem... are of great importance."

Klein surveys massive amounts of data on Jerusalem and those seeking to influence its fate. But he jumbles and misrepresents history. He claims, for example, that starting with the Peel Commission era in 1937, "winning control of [Jerusalem's] Jewish population and establishment of the state were more important to the Zionists than sovereignty over... East Jerusalem." Not true. He also falsely implies that Menachem Begin --- one of the most passionate defenders of Judaism's holiest shrines --- was prepared to consider "removing the Temple Mount from... Israeli sovereignty and establishing an 'Islamic state' in the heart of the Old City..." Nonsense.

Camp David's one city/twin capital solution would have established a Palestinian Jerusalem - Al Quds - alongside the Jewish city and Palestinian sovereignty over most of Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods. It would also have provided Arabs wide-reaching civil and religious authority in the Old City. Barak even agreed to appoint Arafat official custodian of the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount.

But Klein ignores several key facts. In 2000, tens of thousands of Jerusalem Arabs hurriedly applied for Israeli citizenship and signed petitions to protest the proposed transfer of their neighborhoods to authoritarian rule. More important, Barak declared the Camp David "oral understandings" to be non-binding when he left office.

Furthermore, neither Yasser Arafat nor his Palestinian Authority can be trusted. Just today, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that President Bush would not meet Yasser Arafat because he has failed to stop incitement and violence. He has broken every agreement he ever made. In 15 months, Arabs have launched more than 7,500 attacks on Israeli civilians and noncombatants, a disincentive for Israel to repeat its offer.

Klein misses no opportunity to heap blame on Israel. He berates every Israeli government for failing to improve the lot Jerusalem's Arabs--even while he sympathetically notes their view of Israeli investments in Jerusalem infrastructure "as another type of conquest." He wildly exaggerates the effects of Jewish "extremists." Yet he ignores altogether Hitlerian incitements that emanate daily from Arab media, schools and mosques; the waqf's destruction of Second Temple remains; and the free access to the holy sites that has been a cornerstone of Israeli rule.

Klein fails to prove that surrendering any part of the ancient Jewish capital would bring peace to Israel. In fact, as Professor Friedman rightly concludes, Israel cannot cede the most important Jewish historical and religious sites without imperiling national security and opening to question Israel's very sovereignty in the land.

---Alyssa A. Lappen