(An oldie, but goodie)

The public debate over the future of Jerusalem has been heating up. This is
partly because of Israel's negotiations over the city with the PLO and also
in light of the Jerusalem 3000 celebrations which mark 3,000 years since
King David conquered the city. David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel,
thereby transforming it from just another walled town in the mountains into
a city of worldwide significance for religion, civilization, and culture,
and for their history. As part of Israel and Judea, Jerusalem was the home
of kings, priests and prophets, warriors, poets and the sages of the
Sanhedrin. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder called the Jerusalem of Second
Temple times, "the most illustrious city of the East by far, not merely of
Judea" (Natural History, V:xv:70). It is of interest that the Jebusites,
prior inhabitants of Jerusalem, merged so well with the Israelites that the
descendants of Araunah the Jebusite (2 Samuel 16-24) became sages of Jewish
law, as we learn from the Talmud.

In the ongoing debate, proponents of dividing the city and handing Jewish
holy places in it over to Arab-Muslim control complain that the Jerusalem
3000 celebrations ignore the Muslim (or Muslim and Christian) place in the
history of the city. I am not aware that anyone holding official
responsibility in the celebration does that. If so it would be wrong. By the
same token, it is wrong for anyone to deny that the city's world importance
has its roots in Jewish history and religion.

Indeed, the city's meaning for Christians and Muslims is connected directly
and indirectly with Jewish history and with the city's significance for
Jewish religion and tradition. Detractors of the celebration might point out
that the Muslims even use different names for the city, such as al-Quds and
Bayt al-Maqdis. In fact these names derive from the Jewish tradition. They
are adaptations of Hebrew names. Al-Quds comes from ha-Qodesh, meaning
holiness or holy, a Hebrew appellation for the city found in the Bible. Bayt
al-Maqdis comes from Beyt ha-Miqdash, the Hebrew name for the Temple and
later a name for the city as a whole. Muslims may consider Jerusalem a holy
city, but it does not attain in their eyes the degree of holiness of Mecca
and Medina, places where Muhammud actually lived and preached. They pray in
the direction of Mecca and pilgrimage to Mecca is ordained to be a duty of
every Muslim who can make it.

No one can deny that Jerusalem is holy for Christians. It was a main
location of Jesus' preaching and the place of his crucifixion by the Romans.
Christians invested great resources over centuries in building churches and
monasteries here. They sacrificed lives in fighting the Crusades to win the
city back from Muslim rule and to hold on to it. They still retain great
interest in the city and many Christians come here on pilgrimage. However,
the New Testament accounts present Jesus and his followers as Jews.
Christians believe that his status as a messiah is a fulfillment of prophecy
in the Hebrew Bible.

Now voices are heard here and abroad calling for the city to be divided, for
the sake of peace. Yet when the city was divided between Israel and Arab
Jordan between 1948 and 1967 there was no peace. Arab Legion snipers shot
from the Old City's walls at Jewish passersby in the Jewish section of the
city. Israel had to put up concrete walls to protect its people from
sniping. Many Jewish graves were desecrated on the Mount of Olives; Jewish
gravestones were used to build roads and for purposes even more offensive
than that. Jews were kept away from the Jewish holy places and Jewish
archeological sites during Jordanian control, despite an explicit promise in
the armistice agreement of Jewish access to the Western Wall. In fact Jews
were not allowed at all in any territory under Jordanian control. Jews could
not live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, nor in other Old City
quarters where Jews had lived in the nineteenth century and up through the
British conquest of the Holy City in 1917. Nor could Jews live in
Jordanian-ruled Jerusalem outside the Old City. The Shimon ha-Tsadiq,
Nahalat Yits'haq, and Nahalat Shimon neighborhoods (north of Orient House
and the American Colony Hotel), Jewish up to 1948, were now off limits to
Jews as was the adjacent Tomb of Simon the Just (Shim`on ha-Tsadiq), a focus
of Jewish pilgrimage before 1948.

There is more than a little hypocrisy on the side of those demanding the
city's division on democratic grounds, especially on the part of Arab and
Muslim spokesmen. Jews have been an absolute majority here since 1870 or
even before, as early as 1854, depending on which contemporary estimate or
census one wishes to accept. Muslims had been a minority long before that,
since Jews and Christians together had made up a majority throughout the
whole 19th century, and earlier, long before the Jews attained majority
status, although Jews had been the largest single group since about 1840.
Now can anyone imagine Arabs or Muslims agreeing to divide a city where they
are a majority? In the days of Muslim imperial power, Muslims had no
compunction about ruling as a minority over a non-Muslim majority. Consider
Jerusalem under Ottoman rule. When the Sultan set up a municipality in the
1870s, the mayors appointed were never Jews despite the Jewish majority.
Nearly all of them were local Muslim Arab notables. Muslim-Jewish relations
in Jerusalem have not been all negative. Muslim rulers were more tolerant
towards Jews in Jerusalem in the Middle Ages than either Byzantine or
Crusader rulers. However, this tolerance was relative. Muslim officials and
local Arab notables displayed a predatory, exploitative attitude towards the
Jewish population in Jerusalem both before and after the Crusades. For the
pre-Crusades period we know this from documents that Moshe Gil and other
scholars have uncovered in the Cairo Geniza and other sources. These
documents tell of the oppression of Jews here. Not only did they have to pay
the standard taxes, jizya and kharaj, imposed on non-Muslims (dhimmis)
throughout the Islamic domain, but they also suffered the extortion of all
sorts of irregular taxes, levies, fines, and bribes. One Jerusalem Jew wrote
to a friend in Egypt, "They eat us alive," referring to all these exactions.
Another Jew wrote, "Their throats are like open graves," waiting for money
(a paraphrase of Psalms 5:10). "The sons of Kedar [Muslim officials] in
Jerusalem... harass a great deal," he complained. Jacob Barnai has studied
account ledgers of the Jewish community in Jerusalem from the second half of
the eighteenth century. Here again, despite the passage of time, the picture
is similar. The ledgers record, in addition to regular taxes, all sorts of
unofficial compulsory payments to Arab-Muslim notables, some of whose
descendants are still active as local Arab leaders today. As a sign of their
rapacity, Arab creditors burnt down a Jerusalem synagogue in 1720 when a
Jewish congregation was unable to pay its debts, driving the congregants
from the city. Christians too were, as dhimmis, sometimes subject to similar
treatment. Arab promises of Jewish access to holy places are undependable,
as we see from Jordan's violation of the 1949 armistice agreement in regard
to access to the Western Wall. In general we may conclude from experience
that when Arabs have control on the ground they do what they want,
regardless of any accords that they may have signed. In the case of the
Jewish holy places, the PLO-designated head of Muslim religious affairs has
already declared that Jews cannot have access to Jewish holy places where
Muslim law forbids them entry [see Jerusalem Post, 9-13-95; & Peace Watch
Background Paper, 11-28-95]. Muslims today choose to overlook the assertion
in the Quran that God [Allah] assigned the Holy Land to the Sons of Israel
(Sura V:21) based on a Covenant with them (Sura V:12).

One of the bizarre claims made by Arab spokesmen nowadays is that the
Canaanites and Jebusites were somehow Arabs. This politically motivated
invention has no foundation in fact. The Canaanites were known as
Phoenicians to the Greeks and Romans. They continued to inhabit the coast of
Lebanon and Syria after the Israelite conquest. Their language was very
close to Hebrew. Some linguists call Hebrew and Phoenician dialects of the
same tongue. Equally as false as the "Arab tribal identity" foisted on the
Canaanites and Jebusites is the Arab claim or insinuation of continuity
between the Jebusites and the present Arab minority living in Jerusalem.
Actually, the Jews assimilated the Jebusites, as we have pointed out.
Further, the city was destroyed and its people exiled, wholly or in part, on
several occasions in ancient times. The Romans went farthest in this regard
when they had suppressed the Jewish uprising led by Bar Kokhba in 135 CE.
Not only did they expel all Jews from Jerusalem and a large surrounding zone
(populated by Jews), but they colonized the city and the zone with foreign
peoples. Several other demographic changes had taken place by the time of
the Crusader conquest in 1099. The Crusaders made further changes by
massacring all Jews and Muslims that they found in the city. Obviously
Arab-Muslim spokesmen cannot point to continuity of Muslim residence here
from before the Crusades.

Of course Arabs can and should have civil and religious rights here in
Jerusalem. However, it is clear that civil and religious rights for
non-Muslims, indeed human rights in general, can only be protected by an
undivided Jerusalem within active Israeli sovereignty. Indeed there are no
grounds for Arab sovereignty over any part of the city, not in history, nor
in justice, nor in concern for peace, democracy or human rights, nor in
accepted international practice.

Sources:

Jacob Barnai, "The Jerusalem Jewish Community, Ottoman Authorities, and Arab
Population in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," in Jewish
Political Studies Review, Fall 1994.

Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century, 2 vols. (Jerusalem:
Ben-Zvi, 1984); p 279.

Moshe Gil, "HaShiltonot vehaOklusiya haMeqomit," in Sefer Yerushalayim:
HaTequfa haMuslimit haQeduma (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi, 1987), p. 85 n.12.

"Peace Watch Background Paper," 28 November 1995.