Updates from AIJAC

Jerusalem and "Internationalisation"

December 4, 2000
Number 12/00 #01

Here is a piece which appeared in today's Canberra Times by our own Dr Daniel Mandel. He was answering an earlier piece repeating the always popular suggestion that since Israelis and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem, the solution is to internationalise the city. This argument has a certain naive appeal to it among those who poorly informed about local realities and history, and willing to ride roughshod over the desires of the city's 650,000 inhabitants, as Dr Mandel shows.

DISSECTING JERUSALEM JEALOUSIES

Daniel Mandel

The air above Jerusalem remains filled with the smoke of gunfire and rioting. At Camp David last July, the Israelis and Palestinians failed to reach a comprehensive agreement to end their conflict. Since then, in the wake of the present disorders, some commentators have proposed introducing an international constabulary to restore calm and protect religious shrines. But this is a non-starter, as history shows.

There is an interesting Australian aspect to this vexed question, with the ghost of Australia’s External Affairs Minister, Dr H.V. Evatt, floating unnoticed over this latest Jerusalem controversy. It was Evatt, chairing the UN committee dealing with Palestine in 1947, who largely persuaded the UN to adopt partition. Partition aimed to satisfy legitimate Arab and Jewish aspirations for statehood. It also called for internationalising Jerusalem, which neither side wanted, but which the Jews reluctantly accepted at the time.

Partition fell then on Palestinian and wider Arab rejection. The Oslo peace process amounted to an attempt to restore it. That attempt is presently in tatters, though probably not beyond redemption.

Internationalisation, however, has fared even worse.

Israel, in resisting invasion in 1948, secured not only the territory earmarked for Jewish statehood, but also other areas, including west Jerusalem, as the lawful successor authority to the departed British authorities. Jordan took east Jerusalem. This division was cemented by the UN-mediated Israeli-Jordanian armistice of April 1949. This did not prevent Evatt, who was courting the domestic Catholic vote, pushing for full internationalisation in accordance with the Vatican’s position at the time. The case for internationalising the whole city, both east and west, was never good. The UN never acted to assert control when it had the chance before the end of the British Mandate in May 1948 and both controlling powers, Israel and Jordan, rejected the idea. Today, it is no better. No side wants it; very few of Jerusalem’s 650,000 residents want it.

Additionally, internationalising the Holy Places in opposition to the controlling power is beyond the capacity of the UN, even in the unlikely event that the Security Council would ordain it. And the Security Council rarely authorises measures - disarming Iraq is perhaps an exception - that it does not intend to carry out.

A quick fix of this sort would in any case merely paper over a genuine problem whose resolution can only take place at the negotiating table.

What can each side claim? The Israelis assert that Jerusalem, while sacred to three faiths, holds unmatched priority for Judaism, the Western Wall and Temple Mount being its holiest sites. It is the only city in the world with a Jewish majority since the 1880s. It was divided by war in 1948 when the Jordanian Arab Legion besieged it, its Old City’s Jewish Quarter wilfully destroyed and plundered by its Arab conquerors who drove out its inhabitants and denied access to Jews until 1967. In that year, Israeli forces reunited the city after Jordanian attack.

It has been said that Israeli sovereignty in west Jerusalem is not recognised, but this is inaccurate: the US has under construction at this moment a new embassy in west Jerusalem, and a number of Latin American states have maintained embassies in Jerusalem for most of the past half century.

The Palestinians claim that Jerusalem is a long-standing Palestinian city, that many Palestinians fled during the 1948 war, never to return, and that Palestinian Jerusalemites have been subjected to various inequalities in municipal funding and development since coming under Israeli rule. The Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount and adjacent Christian sites cannot be ceded, and the Palestinian population in the city has risen considerably to constitute over 200,000 of its 650,000 inhabitants today. In the event of a negotiated solution, Palestinian sovereignty in east Jerusalem would probably be also affirmed.

History and residence attaches to both peoples and must ultimately be reflected in arrangements. Proposals for dividing the city between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including control of the Holy Places, were rejected at Camp David by the Palestinians, who offered no alternative proposal other than their opening position of exclusive Palestinian control of the Holy Places. But like internationalisation, that too is ultimately a non-starter. Whether this dispute over Jerusalem, 200 deaths later, can be resolved by proposals for shared or limited sovereignty or other forms of attenuated authority for Israelis and Palestinians, only time will tell.

Dr Daniel Mandel is Associate Editor of The Review, published by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. Dr Mandel’s forthcoming book, The Undercover Zionist, which will be published by Scribe in 2001, examines Dr Evatt’s role in the emergence of Israel and the Jerusalem issue.