How Israel lost East Jerusalem
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The European Union made public last week that they wish for Israel to cede East Jerusalem to a future Palestinian state. A European Union policy paper also implies that East Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Jerusalem existed as a united city until the British Mandate collapsed in 1948. While the United Nations supported turning Jerusalem and nearby Bethlehem into an open international city, Jerusalem was de-facto divided between Israel (West) and Jordan (East) as a result of the 1949 ceasefire. Israeli Jerusalem did not include the Old City, the Western Wall and Mount Zion. In 1967, Israeli forces conquered Jordanian Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. The city was quickly declared as reunified by the Israeli government and was formally annexed, along with nearby parcels of land in the West Bank, to an enlarged city of Jerusalem.
In comparison, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were never formally annexed to the State of Israel.
Nonetheless, Israel’s claim to East Jerusalem (and, to a lesser degree, to Jerusalem as a whole) has been in dispute by the international community for quite some time. Despite being the seat of Israeli government — with the Knesset and government ministries being located in Jerusalem — foreign countries locate their embassies in Tel Aviv instead. Jerusalem, by contrast, is home to a consulates that are largely intended to serve Palestinians. The ex-Jordanian sections of Jerusalem are routinely referred to as “Occupied East Jerusalem” by the United Nations and the press (including writers on this site).
Clearly, Israel has not succeeded in gaining international approval for their rule over the whole of Jerusalem since 1967. Both the United Nations and the European Union now formally support an Israeli withdrawal from the Old City and adjacent neighborhoods; only the United States remains to offer lukewarm support for Israeli rule there.
How did this happen?
Since 1967, Israeli policies in the territories they acquired have been marked by confusion, paralysis and more confusion. Israeli historians such as Michael Oren (right-wing) and Tom Segev (left-wing) have compiled mountains of evidence to how infighting between Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan prevented a coherent policy in the months following the Six-Day War. Some Israeli politicians wanted to grant citizenship to the Jordanians, Egyptians and Syrians who now came under Israeli rule; others wanted to expel them in an act of ethnic cleansing; others simply wanted to let them stay in a legal quasi-limbo. As time went on, the third option became the easiest.
Due to Jerusalem’s special status as the capital city, the city’s Jordanian neighborhoods were quickly de-facto annexed to Israel and de-jure annexed in 1980. Jordanian residents there were offered Israeli citizenship (the offer still stands today) and the right as non-citizens to vote in local elections and receive social security and health insurance.
The residents of East Jerusalem actively receive governmental benefits and (to their grumbling) pay taxes, but largely opt not to vote in local elections. Their claim is that they refuse to recognize an “illegal” government, despite the fact that the Israeli government has been in power in Jerusalem longer than the Jordanians were at this point.
More than 225,000 Palestinian Arabs live in the municipality of Jerusalem, comprising more than one third of the population. However, their choice not to vote in elections means that they have no representation in local government. This predictably leads to city services in Arab neighborhoods being massively underfunded.
When large-scale infrastructure improvements take place in non-Jewish East Jerusalem neighborhoods, they’re largely for the benefit of Jewish residents. Case in point: the quixotic and utterly stupid Jerusalem Light Rail.
The flipside of this is that the Israeli government has not made any effort in the past few decades to encourage Palestinian Jerusalemites to either accept Israeli citizenship or to “buy their loyalty” through massive infrastructure improvements. As a result, Jerusalem’s Arab population has been all too happy to go along with the calls of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to include East Jerusalem in a future Palestinian state.
While Jerusalem’s longtime mayor Teddy Kollek was a master of political horsetrading who ran the city masterfully, his successors Ehud Olmert (a future Prime Minister), Uri Lupolianski and Nir Barkat ended up being distinctively inept in their treatment of both Jews and Arabs.
The lesson: Lack of a coherent government policy towards a newly conquered territory, coupled with a failure to curry favor among a restive population that speaks a different language and professes a different faith… well, it usually results in the conquered group demanding that the conquering government relinquish their hold on the territory.
Or, in fewer words, I’ll just say this: The Middle East earned its ‘WTF’ badge again.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Qwerty, Neal Ungerleider. Neal Ungerleider said: How Israel lost East Jerusalem – http://is.gd/5bl84 #news #israel #palestine [...]
Who gets Jerusalem? The perennially fought-over set of hills. Little wonder the crusaders called it axis mundi – crossroads of the world.
Unlike a lot of non-Israelis and non-Jews, I am sympathetic to and respectful of the notion of Jerusalem as an eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people. How could one not respect the tragic history of the Jewish people, and their centuries of yearning to return to Jerusalem?
As an ecumenical sort, I’m also sympathetic to the notion that Mohammad rose to heaven from the Dome of the Rock/Second Temple. And I respect those who believe Jesus Christ was crucified and buried right nearby, on Golgotha hill. These religious notions can co-exist parallel to the city’s legal status, whatever that ends up being. Jerusalem is a Jewish city to the Jews, a Christian city to the Christians, and so on.
The more I read and research in this area, the more I am convinced that sharing Jerusalem is the only way Israel will secure its people’s future.
Legal status is a separate issue. Despite the “annexation” and the nearly 200,000 Israeli settlers that have poured into eastern Jerusalem, no nation, including the United States – recognizes the legality of Israel’s occupation of the territory east of the 1967 “green line,” including East Jerusalem. To every country but itself, “Israel” consists of the area of west of the green line. Israel’s capitol building, the Knesset, and nearly all of its government buildings are in West Jerusalem, within the internationally recognized legal boundaries of Israel.
For anyone interested in digging into the history behind the EU’s report on how the international community should behave toward East Jerusalem, on the Jewish Virtual Library site is a copy of a telegram from the 1960s, in which the U.S. govt. states: “USG continues to support 1948 UN General Assembly resolution that provided for international status Jerusalem under UN administration, and does not recognize Jerusalem as de jure capital of Israel.” I have never seen a U.S. government document that altered that policy, but if anyone else has, let’s see it.
Want more: Lara Friedman from Peace Now has put together a huge list of the international community’s policy pronouncements regarding East Jerusalem. See it here:
http://peacenow.org/entries/israels_strategic_hysteria_over_eu_document
The WTF badge has been worn and worn out so many time in Jerusalem that it defies imagination.
There is ample evidence that the city has been conquered and occupied so many times in recorded history that for anyone to claim a “birth-right” there is ridiculous.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped legions of people throughout recent history from trying to assert that “birth-right.” For all practical purposes, however, the city would have probably done far worse under almost any other middle eastern government in existence today. Going further, I find the notion that the UN could do as well as the Israelis have at guaranteeing access and preserving antiquities to be utterly laughable.
Sometimes leaving contentious issues as the status quo isn’t such an outrageous idea.
Hey Jake, def can relate to the history of Jerusalem; just finished reading a report that said it has changed hands 38 times. Regarding the status quo, have you spent much time in the Muslim world or watching Muslim media? The occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem is constantly portrayed and analyzed on Aljazeera, Alarabiya, Dubai One, and the Arabic language media (so I’m told; I don’t understand Arabic.) When I was in Bali last year watching English language tv from the Middle East, there were stories about Palestinians getting kicked out of their house in Jerusalem, halfway around the world. And of course the Indonesians aren’t Arab, but they are Muslims, and they get enraged about the occupation just as the Pakistanis and the Yemenis and the Uighurs do. Every little move in the occupied territories is amplified around the world. It is fueling worldwide growths in anti-semitism – and that alone is a reason not to accept the status quo.
Regarding the antiquities, I wouldn’t leave that to the UN, but to the US – an antiquities authority managed by the Smithsonian or Harvard. Also, Israel is one of our greatest allies, so I would think any international peacekeeping force in Jerusalem or on the border should include a major component of the US military; we have great relationships already between the US and the Israeli military.