A major obstacle to reaching an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians has always been Jerusalem. The Palestinians have claimed that all or part of the city is theirs and that it is their capital. The fact that they actually run their services from Ramallah doesn’t affect that claim. Even the UN partition resolution of 1948 did not have a solution to this problem. In 1948 they decided to recommend that the city and the immediate area nearby become an international area belonging to neither side. From 1949 to 1967 the city was divided. In 1967 the Egyptian Army sent a company of special commandos to the city to join the Jordanian Arab Legion soldiers already located there.Israel initially avoided fighting with Jordan, but the Arab side opened fire on the Jewish side. There was sniper fire from the old city, Jordanian artillery randomly bombarded parts of
Jewish Jerusalem, and Arab forces moved to occupy the UN enclave at the edge of the Talpiot neighborhood. I as an eye-witness to these activities. Israeli forces responded by bringing in reserves stationed outside the city and quickly occupied it all.
Israel extended control over Jerusalem after the war, while refraining from doing so to the other areas that had been ‘liberated’ during the fighting. The other areas were not ‘annexed, because there was an expectation in Israel that they could be used for bargaining in the negotiations that should have followed the end of the fighting. Those negotiations did not take place. Instead, the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its’ Three Noes principal; No recognition of Israel, No negotiations, No peace.
Last week Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas managed to emulate the results of the Khartoum conference in a response to the US Peace Initiative. He made a long speech categorically rejecting all parts of the US plan. One part of that speech included the statement that he would not be the one to cede Arab sovereignty over Jerusalem. It was a nice theatrical gesture, but entirely lacking any foundation in fact. Sovereignty over Jerusalem was never his to give up. Jordan annexed the entire West Bank following the 1949 agreements, but that act was only recognized by two countries; England and Pakistan. the rest of the world, including other Arab states, did not approve. Jordan backed away from that annexation and now has a peace treaty with Israel that provides a recognized border, and special status for the Temple Mount under the control of the Jordanian based Muslim Waqf. There have been several UN resolutions since 1948 about the Arab-Israeli dispute. The one thing they have most in common is that they call on the sides to solve their problems through negotiations. This is precisely what the Khartoum conference refused to do, and also what Mahmoud Abbas got the Arab League to reject last week.
There is a similar situation with regard to Jerusalem, exacerbated by popular usage in the media. The city of Jerusalem is often called “The third holiest site in Islam”. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The term has come into use to further the political agenda of the Palestinian Authority. Back in 1917 the Turkish rulers didn’t even dignify it with the title of a provincial capital. We were treated to a staged spectacle in Lebanon this past week of “Palestinian refugees” demonstrating against the US plan. The ‘refugees’ in Lebanon are in a particularly awkward situation. As mentioned in a previous post, they cannot become Lebanese citizens, even if they so desired. They also cannot be resettled in any other country because the Arab interpretation of the UNRWA charter only allows for repatriation, not resettlement. It’s time to abandon the artificial conditions set up by the wishful thinking of the Palestinians and other Arabs. The clock doesn’t get turned back. The way forward does not include the false hopes fostered by the Palestinian ‘liberation’ parties. Humanitarian concerns are not synonymous with the political aspirations of Hamas or Fatah.
Wetherhorn 