Religion and politics in Jerusalem.

• Author: Breger, Marshall J.

Few can deny that, as Helena Cobban suggests, "what happens in Jerusalem over the next couple of years will be a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in determining whether the peace process ... can stay on the rails."(1) Jerusalem is listed in the so-called Declaration of Principles (DOP) of 13 September 1994, as one of the "issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations."(2) These negotiations, originally put off because of the Israeli elections on 29 May 1996, commenced on 5 May 1996.(3)

For their part, opponents of the peace process have tried to thrust Jerusalem to center stage. Thus, Edward Said has declared Jerusalem to be "the front line in the struggle for Palestine,"(4) calling for "a concentrated Palestinian strategy"(5) to resist Israeli control over the city. "Gaza-Jericho" he tells us, is a "kind of elaborate distraction, so that Palestinian energies will be absorbed in administering the peripheries, while the core is left to the Israelis."(6) And on the right, Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem urges a Jerusalem First policy not only to test Arab intentions, he says, but the Labor government's as well.(7) The Likud party is running its current election campaign on the theme that "Peres will divide Jerusalem."(8)

One cannot address the question of Jerusalem without starting from an understanding of the city as "sacred space." It is a city in which varied religious communities have specific religious needs. There are innumerable holy places sanctified by text and tradition, and numerous religious rituals dependent on the use of the city's "sacred space."(9) In addition, significant religious communities exist whose presence in history inform and validate the religious character of the city. These communities have unique political requirements.

At the same time Jerusalem is a nationalist symbol as well. For Israelis, it is the symbol of national revival, providing a direct link between the Zionist impulse and the Biblical Commonwealth. For Palestinians, the city has become a symbol of their political renaissance. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that in Jerusalem religious values and beliefs heavily influence political options. It is not modern West Jerusalem that Jews have dreamed of throughout the ages and are prepared to die for today -- it is the city of the Temple Mount. Similarly, it is not Sheikh Jarrah Street and its commercial environs that begets Arab martyrs but rather Al-kuds, the holy city.

First, this paper will review the religious perspective of Jerusalem for the three faiths with which it is associated. Second, it will look at possible resolutions of the problem of the holy places. Finally, it will consider ways of resolving political sovereignty issues in the context of these religious concerns.

The Religious Perspective

Jewish Perspective

The traditional Jewish position on Jerusalem is abundantly clear. For Jews, Jerusalem is the "mountain of the Lord," the very core of the Jewish people for 3,000 years. Indeed, the mishnah (the second century compendium of Jewish laws) tells us that the shechina, the divine presence, has never left the Western Wall. It is the symbol of both national and spiritual revival. The Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, speaks of the yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. In the daily prayers, the religious Jew three times a day entreats that the Lord "return in mercy to thy city Jerusalem."

There has never been a time when Jerusalem was not the center of the Jewish consciousness. In medieval times elderly Jews traveled to Jerusalem to be buried in its hallowed ground. Throughout the centuries they came to live lives of spiritual piety. By 1844 they constituted the largest single religious group in the city. In the 1870s they were an absolute majority, and have remained so ever since.

For Jews Jerusalem is not, as in Islam and Christianity, a city that encompasses holy places. It is not, as in Christian articulation, the spiritual city that is holy. Rather it is the earthly city itself that is holy, both the land and, as the former Chief Rabbi Kook tells us, even the air. Jerusalem is synonymous with Judaism's rootedness in the land of Israel. It is the very center of that rootedness. For Jews, political control over that part of Jerusalem it deems holy is intrinsic to its holiness. The religion itself "requires political control as the capital of the Jewish Commonwealth."(10)

Muslim Perspective

Those who try to suggest Al-kuds is less holy to Islam than to Judaism are simply incorrect. As Professor Zvi Werblowsky has pointed out, "[t]he sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam is a fact."(11) It is the original direction for Muslim prayer -- `ula al-qublatheyn -- and the al-mi'radj haqq, the place from which the Prophet ascended (some say on a winged mount) to heavenly spheres. It is, moreover, the place which in Muslim tradition those eschatological events hearkening the end of the world will commence.

This said, it must also be recognized that as Saul Cohen points out, "[a]t no time in the thirteen centuries of Islamic rule was Jerusalem part of, let alone synonymous with, a national entity."(12) The Umayyids in the seventh century chose Ramle rather than Jerusalem as the administrative capital of the country. Under the Ottomans, Palestine was ruled from Damascus. Indeed, some twelfth century Muslim leaders were prepared to trade the city of Jerusalem for Dammietta (now Dumyat), a then-important port on the Egyptian coast. While there is much in Islam that integrates the spiritual and the physical, it does not appear that Islam demonstrated a political interest in Jerusalem until the Zionist era. Some say this modern Arab interest in Jerusalem heightened after the Six-Day War, in the same way that the Crusader conquest brought with it the flourishing of the fadha'il al -Kuds -- literature praising the virtues of Jerusalem.

Christian Perspective

Christian views on the Holy Land and Jerusalem are layered and complex. Starting in the third century Christians viewed the land as God-trodden and their eschatology foresaw a Jerusalem restored on earth. In the third century, however, Origen and later Augustine, sought to "dispel the mistaken notion that the sayings about a good land promised by God to the righteous have any reference to the land of Judea."(13) Since then Christians have wanted a living community of believers in the city to serve as witnesses. Thus we can observe the process of spiritualization of the meaning of Jerusalem which resulted in the "...oscillation between the two dimensions of Jerusalem...celestial or terrestrial, eternal or temporal, transcendent or imminent." In the main Christians have focussed on the heavenly Jerusalem rather than its earthly counterpart.(14)

Christian concerns with broader issues of sovereignty have often reflected political rather than theological considerations about best protecting Christian interests in the Holy Land and in the Middle East generally. To some extent, the positions on Jerusalem taken by the Christian churches are conditioned on demographic reality. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have substantial minority populations throughout the Muslim world and need to be concerned about their interests, while other Christian churches also have substantial indigenous populations to protect.

The Christian holy places include sites believed to have been the scenes of the crucifixion and the burial of Jesus. This includes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the churches marking the stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Church of the Ascension. While not part of Jerusalem proper, we may also include the churches of Bethlehem, including the Church of the Nativity. All are governed by a firman or Ottoman proclamation dividing up control of each church between the different Christian denominations. These and other edicts regulating the conduct of religious institutions in Jerusalem have been called the Status Quo.(15) This Status Quo was reaffirmed in 1852 and guaranteed in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. It was further confirmed by the British during the Mandate period and then again by Israel after 1967.

The Status of the Holy Places

This religious context has created a city filled with "sacred space" for all three religions. No political solution is conceivable that does not promise to protect this "sacred space," specifically the holy places of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

History does not tell a hopeful tale. Conqueror after conqueror, upon capturing the holy city, defiled the holy places of the conquered. There were, of course, some notable exceptions. On conquering Jerusalem in 638, Caliph Umar refused to pray in the Christian holy places, knowing that if he entered the church to pray his followers would destroy it. And Lord Allenby, on entering the city in 1918, took pains to dismount and enter on foot as a pilgrim rather than as a conqueror (in marked contrast to Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm, whose progress through the city required its gates to be widened for his chariot).

In this context, Israel's conduct, while certainly not perfect, must be considered exemplary. Control of the Islamic holy places is vested in the waqf appointed by a Supreme Muslim Council. Even before the 13 September handshake, Muslims from Saudi Arabia and Libya were allowed to undertake the pilgrimage to pray at Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City. In contrast, Israeli Arabs were not allowed to visit Arab Holy places in Jerusalem prior to 1967. Christian denominations were forbidden from acquiring land or homes in Jerusalem, whether by purchase or gift. In addition, under the Jordanians no new Christian churches were permitted to be built.

As to the Jews, paragraph 8 of the 1949 Armistice agreement notwithstanding, Jews of whatever nationality were prohibited from all of Jerusalem's Holy Places between 1948 and the city's reunification. Jewish holy places were...