Christianity in
Jerusalem also suffered setbacks. Starting in 1953, the Jordanians decided that
Christian institutions would face restrictions in buying land in and around
Jerusalem. There were worldwide protests against the
Jordanian actions, leading the Jordanians to suspend the application of some of
these provisions. Nonetheless, according to one historical account, two years
later the British consul-general wrote a cable about an "anti-Christian
tendency" evident in Jordanian behavior. (Wasserstein, 193).
By
the 1960s Christian schools were told that they would have to close on Fridays
instead of Sundays, which had been their past practice. In this difficult
environment, the Christian population of Jerusalem declined from 25,000 in 1948
to 10,800 in 1967. (Address of Foreign Minister Abba Eban
to the Knesset, June 30, 1971. See John M. Oesterreicher,
"Jerusalem the Free," in Oesterreicher and
Sinai, 258)
It
would be erroneous to conclude however that during the period of its rule,
Jordan essentially cut itself off from Jerusalem; Jordan always sought to
invest in the area of the TempIe
Mount. Between 1952 and 1959, the Jordanians undertook a new restoration
project at the Dome of the Rock. The U.S. began to receive reports in 1960 that
Jordan planned to treat Jerusalem as a second capital. (Document 31, "Aide
Memoire Delivered by the United States Department of State to the Prime
Minister of Jordan Concerning the Intention of Jordan to Treat the City of
Jerusalem as Its Second Capital, 5 April 1960," in Lapidoth
and Hirsch, 160).
During
the period of Jordanian rule, another political body would come to influence
the struggle for Jerusalem: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It was
founded in May 1964 by a conference of four, hundred delegates meeting at the
Intercontinental Hotel in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. Its first head, Ahmad
Shukeiry, was a Palestinian who served as a Saudi
Arabian diplomat until he fell out with the Saudi leadership. The early PLO was
completely controlled by Egypt, which sponsored the proposal for its creation
at an Arab Summit meeting in order to reduce the
relative responsibility of the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue.
The PLO covenant rejected Jewish claims to Palestine and the validity of the
League of Nations mandate. But it did not specifically single out Palestinian
claims to Jerusalem, which are not even mentioned in the covenant-either in its
original version promulgated in 1964 or in its 1968 rendition. (Wasserstein
noted that there was no mention of Jerusalem either in its ten-point political
statement issued in Cairo on June 8,1974). The early PLO had good reasons to
leave Jerusalem out of its founding charter. It did not want to antagonize its
Jordanian hosts.
Enter Arafat:
For a short period of four years in the mid-1930s, Arafat's
widowed father sent him from Cairo to Jerusalem to live with his mother's
family. He was a child volunteer to one of the assistants to the mufti, who
became for Arafat a figure to be emulated. In order to
sustain the legend that he promoted about his past, Arafat would argue that he
fought in the First Arab-Israeli War under Abdul Qader
al-Husseini, who was both the mufti's cousin and one of the main Palestinian
commanders who died in the battle for Jerusalem. Arafat did fight in the 1948
war, but not with the Palestinians as he maintained. Instead, he was recruited
into the Egyptian tmits that were organized by the
Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. (M. Shemesh, The
Palestinian Entity 1959-1974: Arab Politics and the PLO, London, 1996).
Even
after Arafat's takeover of the PLO, certain aspects of the organization's
unique approach to the Jerusalem question only became evident many years later.
Arafat's real political constituency that sustained him in power over the years
was located in the Palestinian refugee camps, first on
the East Bank in Jordan, and then in Lebanon. The Palestinian elites in East
Jerusalem were not part of that constituency and even presented a potential
alternative leadership, at times, to Arafat's organization, which was based far
away in Lebanon and later in Tunisia. Due to the PLO's refusal for several
decades formally to renounce terrorism or meet any of the minimal
pre-conditions that the U.S. set for a diplomatic dialogue, the East Jerusalem
leadership would be able to meet U.S. secretaries of state, while Arafat could
not even see a U.S. ambassador.
Because
Arafat had a different political constituency, he was willing to agree to
tactical concessions in Jerusalem that were unacceptable to the local
leadership. In fact, looking ahead a number of decades,
one of the reason that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was willing to
pursue a secret negotiating track with the PLO in Oslo-which eventually led to
the signing of the Declaration of Principles in 1993 on the White House
lawn-was precisely because the PLO was willing to exclude Jerusalem from any
interim self-governing arrangements for the Palestinians.
Indeed, while Jerusalem played a central role in Yasser Arafat's rhetoric, he was willing
to set the Holy City aside, when pressed in negotiations, in the years that
followed.
By
then of course, the 1967 Six-Day War had revolutionized the situation of
Jerusalem by bringing about its reunification after nineteen years. Moreover,
the specific conditions out of which the conflict erupted created new legal
rights and diplomatic terms of reference that would replace the armistice
agreements of 1949; for the armistice agreements had patently failed, and
something new was needed in their stead. But the immediate causes of the war
were related to developments on other fronts. Military tensions along the
Israeli-Syrian front rose steadily from April 1967, provoking the Soviet Union
deliberately to mislead Egypt into believing that an Israeli strike on Syria
was imminent.
As a
result, the Egyptian regime under President Gamal Abd aI-Nasser
took three critical steps that led inevitably to war. First, Nasser massed
80,000 troops in Egyptian Sinai along Israel 's southern Negev border. Next, to
give credibility to his threat, the Egyptian president demanded that the UN
Emergency Force that had been deployed for a decade along that sensitive border
zone withdraw-and UN secretary-general U Thant complied. Finally, Nasser
announced a naval blockade of Israel's southern port of Eilat.
All shipping between the port and the Red Sea and Indian Ocean was thus
threatened by artillery positions Egypt had emplaced adjacent to the narrow
Straits of Tiran, near the tip of the Sinai peninsula.
The Egyptian president's military buildup had taken on a momentum of its own.
He announced his intentions on May 26, 1967: "The battle will be a general
one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." (Document 39,
"Nasser's Speech to Arab Trade Unionists," May 26,1967, Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israeli-Arab Reader: A
Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, New York: Penguin Books,
1984, 176).
But
Internationalization had already patently failed back in 1948; the UN hadn't
lifted a finger to break the siege of Jerusalem, leading Prime Minister
Ben-Gurion to declare in 1949 that the elements in Resolution 181 that related
to Jerusalem were "null and void." Now the EU was resurrecting a
superannuated UN General Assembly resolution that had been utterly rejected by
the Arab side in 1947 and had been abandoned afterwards by the Israelis after
they had waged a bitter war, with no international help, in Jerusalem 's
defense. In any case, it had not been a legally binding international
agreement, but only a failed recommendation of the UN. The newly articulated EU position only radicalized the
Palestinians.
The official Palestinian Authority
newspaper al-Ayyam quoted on March 14, 1999, the
conclusion of the leading Palestinian negotiator, Abu Ala': "The [EU's] letter
asserts that Jerusalem in both its parts-the Western and the Eastern-is a land
under occupation." It should be stressed that Abu Ala' was thought by most
Israelis to be pragmatic; he was the senior PLO official in the Oslo back
channel that led to the Oslo Agreement. Yet even his position had hardened.
Just over one year before Camp David, Arafat emerged from a meeting with UN secretary-general
Kofi Annan and spoke to reporters in Arabic about Resolution 181. On March 25,
his representative to the UN, Nasser al-Kidwa, then
wrote a letter to Annan that was released as a UN document in which he argued
that the old partition boundaries from Resolution 181 were what the
international community had accepted. This argument not only could be used to
refute Israel's claims to East Jerusalem, but could egually
be applied to West Jerusalem as well. Meir Ben-Dov,
Historical Atlas of Jerusalem, New York: 2002, 214).
In fact Yasser Abd Rabbo, the
Palestinian Authority minister of information, confessed on a television
program broadcast on November 17, 2000 on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera
network that there was "a consensus among Palestinians that the direct
goal is to reach the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the
June 4, 1967, borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, [but] regarding to the
future after that, it is best to leave the issue aside and not to discuss
it."
Thus
despite the unprecedented concessions offered by Barak regarding Jerusalem,
especially in comparison with every preceding Israeli prime minister since
1967, the PLO did not offer any corresponding readiness to compromise on
territorial matters. Arafat in essence insisted on
receiving 100 percent of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza
Strip. He was only willing to concede land in these territories if he received
equivalent compensation via a land swap from unpopulated territories inside of
pre-1967 Israel like the arid Halutza area of the
Negev. This in spite of the fact that Resolution 242
from November 1967, which had served until Camp David as the basis of Israeli -
Palestinian agreements, did not articulate any need for a land swap.
In fact Faisal al-Husseini was far more revealing about the
PLO's ultimate intentions during the Oslo years. He compared Arafat's use of
the Oslo peace process to a Trojan horse that allowed the PLO to get the
Israelis to open "their fortified gates and let it inside their
walls." The real strategic goal of the PLO, he explained, had been a
Palestine "from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea," and
not a mini-state in the West Bank. (Donald Little, "Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and the Mamluks: 1187-1516 AD,180).
Salim
Za'anun, the chairman of the Palestine National
Council, stated in an official PA newspaper that the PLO covenant calling for
Israel's destruction had never changed and hence remained in force. To give
these words added authority, they were written up in the official Palestinian
Authority newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida on January 1,
2001.
Black smoke came out of Bethlehem's Manger Square,
next to the Church of the Nativity, where on April 2, 2002, a joint Hamas-
Fatah Tanzim force of thirteen ('terrorists') held the clergy as hostages for
thirty-nine days:
In fact also according to shi'ite echatology according to the President of Iran Ahmadinejad,
the destruction of Israel is one of the key global developments that will
trigger the appearance of the Mahdi the 12th Imam of Meshad.
In his first UN General Assembly address, Ahmadinejad closed with a prayer that
the Mahdi's arrival be quickened: "Oh mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten
the emergence of your last repository, the promised one." Dr. Bilal Na'im assistant to the head of the Executive Council of Hizballah, discussing the details of how the Mahdi is
supposed to appear before the world, writes that initially the Mahdi reveals
himself in Mecca "and he will lean on the Ka'abah
and view the arrival of his supporters from around the world."
From
Mecca the Mahdi next moves to Karbala in Iraq . But
his most important destination, in Na'im's
description, is clearly Jerusalem. It is in Jerusalem from where the launching
of the Mahdi's world conquest is declared. He explains, "The liberation of
Jerusalem is the preface for liberating the world and establishing the state of
justice and values on earth." (Search for Common Ground in the Middle East, Program
Update 2006).
As I
explained at the start of this website, there is a common misperception that
preoccupation with the coming of the Mahdi occurred only in the world of
Shiism; but in fact, Sunni Islam has generated a number of
figures who claimed to be the Mahdi, including the famous Mahdi of Sudan who
fought General Gordon and the British in the 1880s, and most recently Muhammad
al-Qahtani, who with his brother-in-law, Juhaiman al-
Utaibi took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
Even
those who downplay the influence of Islamic apocalyptic literature on the
public at large admit that it has a strong following among Islamic radicals.
P.S. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, a radical Sunni organization that gave birth to many jihadist
groups. Without forfeiting its ties to militant Sunni networks Khaled Mashaal (left), the Damascus-based Hamas leader, meets with
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) in Tehran on February 20, 2006:
During the years of
Oslo, Jordan lost much of its influence over the administration of Islamic
affairs on the Temple Mount to the Palestinian Authority, but it has been
seeking to recover it as of late. (Jerusalem Post, October 11, 2006, Edgar
Lefkovits, "Jordan Plans New Temple Mt.
Minaret," Jerusalem Post, October 11, 2006). In fact
one could wonder if Arab states like Saudi Arabia would do better, by
supporting the moderate role of Jordan in these administrative issues today.
No state should have an interest in radical Islamic sermons in the al-Aqsa
Mosque calling for the overthrow of various UN recognized countries that
include in fact, Arab regimes.