THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTECTING JERUSALEM’S HOLY SITES

THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTECTING JERUSALEM’S HOLY SITES

This data illustrates that the people of Israel are attached to their holy sites in Jerusalem and understand what could happen to them if Israel were to concede them. These positions undoubtedly have been affected by Israel’s own experiences. In 1948, after all, the Arab Legion took over the Jewish Quarter and began to systematically destroy or desecrate 55 synagogues and study halls, like the great Porat Yosef Yeshiva. The Old City’s Jewish population was ethnically cleansed. The Yohanan Ben Zakai Synagogues became stables for the mules of the Old City’s Arab residents.
Meanwhile, the Jewish people were denied access to the Western Wall and their other holy sites from 1948 through 1967.

In modern times it is equally clear what would happen to religious sites if the Palestinians obtained control of the Old City. Under the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinian Authority was given responsibility for Jewish holy sites in the territories under its jurisdiction. On October 7, 2000, Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus came under attack by a Palestinian mob that included Palestinian civilians and security forces. Hebrew texts were trashed, while the mob tried to dismantle the stones of the tomb with crow bars and pipes. They also cracked the tomb’s dome as well. In April 2011, Israelis received another reminder about how the Palestinians fail to fulfill their responsibilities at holy sites, when Palestinian security personnel murdered Ben Yosef Livnat, who had visited Joseph’s Tomb with a group of Breslover Chasidim. These events have reinforced Israeli concerns about who will protect the holy sites.

Christian sites have also been attacked under Palestinian rule. On April 2, 2002, a joint Fattah-Hamas force of thirteen terrorists entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and held the clergy as hostages for thirty-nine days. Generally, over the last decade and a half, holy sites have lost much of their traditional immunity and have come under attack by radical Islamic groups. This trend began when 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley were blown up by the Taliban. This act was ultimately supported by Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent organization of Hamas. These attacks on non-Muslim religious sites have since spread from Pakistan to Iraq and most recently to Egypt, under the banner of radical Islam.

Internationalization is not an answer for Jerusalem either. In 1947, internationalization, in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 181, was proposed but was unworkable and ultimately failed. Jerusalem was invaded by three Arab armies. The only force that protected 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem from certain destruction were the forces of Israel. Thee UN did not lift a finger in 1948 against the threat that was posed to Jerusalem. There is no basis for thinking that an international body, containing members with conflicting interests, would be any more selective in the future than the UN was in 1948.

Christian sites have also been attacked under Palestinian rule. On April 2, 2002, a joint Fattah-Hamas force of thirteen terrorists entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and held the clergy as hostages for thirty-nine days. Generally, over the last decade and a half, holy sites have lost much of their traditional immunity and have come under attack by radical Islamic groups. This trend began when 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley were blown up by the Taliban. This act was ultimately supported by Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent organization of Hamas. These attacks on non-Muslim religious sites have since spread from Pakistan to Iraq and most recently to Egypt, under the banner of radical Islam.

In short, Israel’s own history, as well as more recent events, illustrates what is at stake in Jerusalem. Were Israel to agree to a re-division of Jerusalem, losing control of the Old City, the security of its holy sites would undoubtedly be put in jeopardy. What Israeli diplomacy must make clear is that only a free and democratic Israel will protect Jerusalem for all faiths.

Keeping Jerusalem open for all faiths is a historical responsibility of the State of Israel. Yet, Jerusalem has been at the heart of a great internal debate in Israel and the Jewish world more broadly. Many with a more particularistic orientation understand its reunification in 1967 as part of the national renewal of a people who had faced centuries of exile and even attempted genocide just a few decades earlier. It was where the Jews first restored a clear-cut majority back in 1863 at a time when the world began to recall and recognize their historical rights and title. Jerusalem was the meeting point between the nation’s ancient history and its modern revival.

Others with a more universalistic view make a priority of integrating the modern State of Israel with the world community by using Jerusalem as a bargaining chip in a peace process presently under the auspices of the EU, Russia, the UN, and the U.S. In fact, the elaborate international ceremonies of world leaders orchestrated around the signing of each peace accord in the 1990s were intended to remind Israelis that their international acceptance, as well as the normalization of their relations with their Arab neighbors, was tied to this very diplomatic process.

The clash between the particularistic instincts inside Israel and its universalistic hopes has been at the heart of the country’s political debate for forty years. Jerusalem, however, is where these two national instincts converge, for by protecting Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, the State of Israel also serves a universal mission of keeping the holy city truly free and accessible for peoples of all faiths.
Particularists will have to understand that there are other religious groups with a stake in the future of the Holy City, while universalists will have to internalize that they have a great national legacy worth protecting for the world and that conceding it would condemn it to total uncertainty at best.

CONCLUSIONS
Prior to the granting of the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain by the League of Nations, there were many proposals to restore the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland. From Napoleon Bonaparte’s proclamation in 1799 to Theodore Roosevelt’s writings in 1918, the idea of the historical rights of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland was linked to their rights to Jerusalem. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weitzman, quoted in this context the Archbishop of Canterbury during a debate in the late 1930s in the British House of Lords, saying:

It seems to me extremely difficult to justify fulfilling the ideals of Zionism by excluding them from any place in Zion. How is it possible for us not to sympathize in this matter with the Jews? We all remember their age long resolve, lament and longing: “If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” They cannot forget Jerusalem.25

Thus the return to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) and the restoration of Jerusalem became understood in the West as inseparable aspirations.

What struck legal experts writing in this period was the fact that the Jewish people never renounced those rights and indeed acted upon them through prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. In the diplomacy of modern Israel, that refusal continued in one form or another, especially after the Six-Day War. Significantly, these rights were backed by some of the most important authorities on international law.

In the years of the Arab-Israeli peace process, proposals were raised and considered for the re-division of Jerusalem, but no binding agreements were actually reached and brought to the Knesset for ratification. Israeli opinion remained firm about the rights of the Jewish people to retain their united capital under the sovereignty of Israel. The recognition of those rights in the future by the international community will depend on Israel demonstrating that it alone will protect the Holy City for all faiths, is a standard which Israel has met in the past and will undoubtedly continue to meet in the future.