Wasserstein's Jerusalem.

• Author: Halevi, Yossi Klein
• Position: Books

Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 432 pp., $29.95.

BERNARD Wasserstein is driven by an obsessive commitment to symmetry. His title, Divided Jerusalem, refers not merely to the reality of a city torn between two estranged national and religious communities, but to the moral and historical claims that reinforce that separation. Wasserstein divides these two elements of Jerusalem's division into balanced equations, priding himself on fairness. Indeed, dispassion is his passion. Yet, in his ideological commitment to balancing the centrality of Jerusalem for the Jewish people with the often ambivalent relationship of Islam and Christianity toward the holy city, he transforms a virtue into a distortion. Divided Jerusalem is an inadvertent warning against false evenhandedness--a curse with which the Middle East conflict, often reduced by outsiders to a "cycle of violence", is routinely afflicted.

Along with a symmetry of claims, Wasserstein posits a symmetry of ambivalence: All three monotheistic faiths, he insists, not only venerate Jerusalem but, at various points, have downplayed, disparaged and even despised the holy city. And so he begins his narrative--which focuses mainly on the role of international diplomacy in determining the city's fate--with contradictory historical voices about

Jerusalem from within each of the Abrahamic faiths. He quotes the Temple priest Ananus bemoaning the fact that he lived to see the Temple's desecration by the Romans, and then counters that devotion with a dismissive quote from Zionist forerunner Moshe Leib Lillienbium: "We do not need the walls of Jerusalem, nor the Jerusalem temple, nor Jerusalem itself." He then offers similar contradictory quotes about Jerusalem from within the Christian and Islamic traditions. The very idea of Jerusalem, he insists, is divided within all three of the faiths that profess uncompromising loyalty to her.

But compared to the frequent neglect of Jerusalem under Muslim rule and the theological ambivalence within Christianity toward the earthly Jerusalem (indeed, both Islam and Christianity, at various points, dismissed attachment to Jerusalem as an archaic "judaizing" tendency), Wasserstein offers only flimsy evidence of Jewish ambivalence. He cites the neglect and even loathing of the city by early secular Zionists, adding that the Zionist movement was prepared to live with the partition of the city and even, in the mid-1930s, with its internationalization. Yet what Wasserstein perceives as disdain for Jerusalem among secular Zionists is more likely disdain for the ultra-Orthodox who dominated Jewish Jerusalem at the beginning of the Zionist return. The mainstream Zionist willingness to accept internationalization in exchange for statehood in 1937-and partition between 1948 and 1967-more accurately reflects the movement 's ability to accept the limits of the possible rather than any disinterest in Jerusalem. I ndeed, mainstream secular Zionism repeatedly proved its loyalty to Jerusalem. In the 1948 War of Independence, a third of the 6,000 Israeli casualties fell in defense of Jerusalem, including the Old City. And when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was confronted with the threat of internationalizing the city...