The Failure of Acute Violence: Jerusalem

Abstract

The conflict between Jews and Arabs over Jerusalem is a modern one, extending back no further than the late nineteenth century. Yet no city in history has been contested for as long as Jerusalem. This arid but symbolically important hill town is said to have been conquered thirty-seven times. But after its capture from the Byzantines by the Arabs in 638 AD it remained, with the exception of the crusading period, under Muslim rule until 1918. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem ruled the city for most of the twelfth century, and briefly regained it from the Muslims during the thirteenth. Mamluk rule subsequently established the religious division of the city into the well-known Quarters — Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. In 1516 the city was captured again by the Ottoman Turks, who built the great walls which still define the Old City. Throughout the four centuries of Ottoman rule, Jerusalem remained a small, provincial backwater. Between 1919 and 1948 Britain governed Palestine under League of Nations/United Nations Mandate. Since 1949 Jerusalem has been the declared — if not internationally recognised — capital of the State of Israel, although its eastern section, including the Old City itself, was part of the Kingdom of Jordan between 1949 and 1967. Today the wider Israel/Palestine dispute remains unresolved, largely because neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs feel able to renounce their particular claims to Jerusalem.

… the first impression I received of walled Jerusalem in the early days … [was] that it was an Arab city. It was as Arab as Cairo or Baghdad, and the Zionist Jews (that is the modern Jews) were as foreign to it as I was myself.

Vincent Sheean, 1935⁶²

Since Jerusalem’s destruction in the days of the Romans, it hasn’t been so Jewish as it is now …

David Ben-Gurion, 1948

This is how I remember Jerusalem in that last summer of British rule. A stone city sprawling over hilly slopes. Not so much a city as isolated neighbourhoods separated by fields of thistles and rocks …

Amos Oz, Panther in the Basement, p. 11