Agreement on Jerusalem was meant to be the culmination of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead, failure to agree on it at Camp David in the summer of 2000 started the descent into a new round of sub-war, sporadically interrupted by efforts to renew negotiations. The “al-Aqsa intifada,” sparked off by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on 28th September 2000, is rumbling on inexorably as both sides pursue unrealisable goals by means of unrealistic strategies. The Palestinians apparently thought that, by initiating a return to violence, they could deepen divisions within Israel and between Israel and the US, with a view to securing a mass return of refugees to Israel and a Palestinian state that would include “Arab Jerusalem.” But Israeli opinion is less divided than for many years, and the prospect of concessions beyond the sweeping ones that were on offer from Ehud Barak last year seems ever more remote. Meanwhile, the Sharon government is thrashing around, rhetorically and militarily, in the vain hope that it can eliminate suicide bombers and repress the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank into the helot status that they occupied between 1967 and 1987, before the first intifada. That too is not working. Yet given the expectations that both leaderships have aroused by resorting to force, neither can call a halt with nothing to show for it. So, like blinded boxers, they jab at each other with no clear purpose or hope of victory.

Jerusalem remains the territorial and symbolic heart of the conflict and both sides have been trying to establish new footholds for the negotiations which will eventually be resumed. Among the more bizarre manoeuvres are the preparations by Israeli zealots for animal sacrifice in a rebuilt Temple. The Palestinian response has included reassertion of the dubious claim that the Western Wall is a Muslim holy place and the ancient Jewish shrine was not on what Jews today call the Temple Mount, but somewhere else altogether. These debates are not restricted to the fringe; they are close to the political mainstream.

Since his election in February 2001, Sharon has declared that he is committed “to protecting a united Jerusalem with the Temple Mount at its centre, under Israeli sovereignty for ever.” Such statements return Israel to the rigid posture maintained (except for Barak’s wobble) since the capture of east Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967.

• Share
•  Subscribe to post comments