by Rachel Gold
What Israel intends to do about Jerusalem remains to be seen. For 2000 years the Jewish people have prayed every day of their existence, to return to Jerusalem. There is no precedent for such a bond between a people and a city in all the annals of mankind.
Since its founding by King David 3,000 years ago, Jerusalem has NEVER
been a capital of any other people. Mentioned close to 700 times in the
Bible, and known also as Zion, it is the heart of Zionism. It is the apotheosis
of the dream of return, the quintessence of the vision of rebirth which
has kept the Jewish nation alive since the destruction of the Temple. Without
Jerusalem
there can be no Israel. There can be no fulfillment of the Zionist
dream of ingathering.
As Ben-Gurion said, "The city of Jerusalem is not only a physical capital. It is the heart of the Jewish people." To deny Jerusalem's centrality in Jewish life and its role as the Jewish capital is to deny Jews their most fundamental rights as a nation.
Yet, the government of Israel, with just enough pressuring, will be prepared to do what the governments of the world want it to do.......relinquish half of Jerusalem, including the Old City and most of the holy places, and to who? To a PLO/HAMAS state now taking shape at its side.
On the contrary, of course, this is not what the government says it will do. It adamantly insists that Jerusalem will remain undivided under Israeli sovereignty as the eternal capital of Israel.
But its deeds contradict its words. More and more, it seems that Israel is on the way of ceding half of Jerusalem to a dictatorship. This will be the first time in history that a free democracy voluntarily invites the establishment of a police state in the very heart of its most precious city on the hill.
The Palestinian Arabs have learned from Zionist history that the most effective way to achieve political goals is to establish "facts on ground," preferably in low-profile increments. One application has already unfolded: Arab squatters have settled illegally near Israeli villages. Their intention is clear...to establish an irreversible Arab majority, imitating the Zionist pioneers who believed that every cultivated acre and every new settlement helped reinforce national claim to the land.
Another issue is the establishment of Orient House, which the government has chosen to ignore. Orient House, located in Jerusalem, is used by the PLO as the compound of its local headquarters.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin asserted that continued political activity in Orient House would spell the end of Oslo. The Palestinians not only ignored this threat....they opened 14 other offices which serve as government agencies under the direct control of the PA.
Furthermore, they have revived the Arab municipal council, dispersed in 1967. This move, clearly illegal, may have few practical applications, but it stressed the Palestinian disregard for the Oslo and Cairo agreements, which preclude changes in the political status quo in Jerusalem. When will prime Minister Netanyahu address this issue?
Orient House has raised itself to international status by receiving local guests there, and by signing international agreements, including the agreement for a US grant for the autonomous areas. The PLO has made it function as the political and diplomatic "capital" of the territories.
It has also given Orient House the aura of an armed-forces headquarters,
by decorating it with military paraphernalia and posting its own security
men around the building. When the newly recruited Palestine Police officers
arrived in town, the PLO used the place for a military reception for them.
With assiduity and persistence, the PLO is developing a bureaucratic,
political infrastructure intended to present the world with a de facto
Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, just in time for the "final status" talks.
Letting the PA maintain and enlarge its foothold in the city can only ensure Israel's defeat. Efforts to dislodge an even more entrenched Orient House at a later date will trigger worldwide protest and insurmountable resistance. Orient House will not only continue to function with impunity; it's activities will become more ostentatious than ever.
All sorts of suggestions regarding Jerusalem have been put forth...from Beilin's division of the city into boroughs, which will be municipally connected but under different sovereignties, to a single capital for two nations and three religions.
These suggestions have the commonality of detachment from reality. A city can work as two separate entities, as Jerusalem and Berlin did. But it cannot belong to two sovereignties and remain united. Jerusalem is not like an American town which can sit astride a state border.
A city with two totally different systems of government, different sets
of laws and law enforcement apparatuses would find it difficult to function
even if the two sovereignties were democratic. To suppose that it could
be a unified city and serve both a democratic government and a police state
is ludicrous!!!....<a nascent Palestinian police state prone to aggression,
and
both irredentist and revanchist.>
The most beleaguering argument used by advocates of dividing Jerusalem is that it is essential to achieving peace. Once this assumption is allowed to dictate Israel's moves, Israel becomes a state of extortion, taken hostage by her own ideologies.
In Johannesburg, Arafat relayed, Middle East peace would not be achieved without the return of Israeli-occupied Jerusalem to Palestine and its people, as he addressed the South African parliament Wednesday afternoon.
"Peace will not be achieved without Jerusalem; peace will not prevail, and security and stability will not be achieved without the return of Jerusalem to its homeland and owners," Arafat said in his speech delivered in Arabic.
His address was televised live on South African national television, as reported by the Xinhua news agency.
Arafat said Jerusalem was the capital of Palestine and would not be the subject of bargaining or concessions. He denounced the Netanyahu government for stalling the peace process and urged the international community to take a tougher approach against the Israeli government.
This disingenuous, patronizing, and contemptuous attitude of Arafat's should wake and shake the Israeli government once and for all. But much to my chagrin, the government is accepting the encroachment of Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem with perfect equanimity.
Israel is not a pariah state, nor does it depend on the whims of others for its survival. Israel's 50th Independence Day was three months ago, but it seems the meaning of independence has escaped some government ministers, as well as the Prime Minister himself.
As the only democracy in the Middle East, it deserves the respect that other countries, including some of the worst tyrannical dictatorships, take for granted. It is the right of any sovereign state to choose its own capital. The issue of Israel's capital is an Israeli issue, and only an Israeli issue. There will be no peace through appeasement.
