Jerusalem is the center of the struggle between Arab and Jew
What can I say that others have not said already . . . told many times over and drawn again and again? . . . What can these places say to you, if in your mind's eye you do not see . . . the fearful day of the death on the Cross within the walls of Jerusalem?
—Nikolai Gogol, Letter on Jerusalem, 1850
The first thing to be said about Jerusalem, even if it has been said before, is that the ancient city is eternally new. In this magical place, sacred to three religions, the slopes outside the Jaffa Gate are ablaze with orange tulips, and rows of golden hyacinths sprout beneath the outstretching arms of the Moses Montefiore windmill. An unusual sight among the orange trees of the Mediterranean? "Ah, yes," a handsome Israeli woman sighs, "the Dutch sent us 100,000 bulbs when they moved away their embassy. So we planted them."
In Gogol's time, three centuries of Ottoman rule had reduced the City of God to a crumbling Levantine village of no more than 15,000 inhabitants (slightly fewer than half of them Jews). "Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless," Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad. "Everything in it is rotting," said Gustave Flaubert, "the dead dogs in the streets, the religions in the churches." Today, after a turbulent sequence of British, Jordanian and Israeli conquests, after years of sporadic bombings and gunfire, this beautiful and richly diverse city is vibrant with growth and prosperity.
Since the Israelis forcibly reunified Jerusalem in 1967, the population has climbed from 275,000 to 407,000, and more than 1.1 million visitors pour in every year. The fortress-like apartment towers clustered on the once bare hills surrounding the city now extend to the very edge of the desert wilderness where Satan tempted Jesus; and though the walled Old City surrounding the holy shrines is still redolent of cinnamon and roasting lamb and hashish and donkey turds, the twisting alleys leading onto the Via Dolorosa (Sorrowful Way) are covered with paving stones rather than mud. Even the cats—Jerusalem has a remarkable quantity of cats—look content.
Yet all this exuberant rebirth is, in a strict sense, illegal. Not a single nation in the world recognizes the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem. And when the Knesset voted in 1980 that a reunited Jerusalem was, in the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, "the eternal capital of our country, our people, our faith, our civilization," the United Nations promptly voted that it was no such thing. Hence the departure, under strong Arab pressure, of the Dutch diplomats.*
Of all the conflicts between Jews and Arabs, that over Jerusalem is the most complex and intractable. It is so deeply rooted in centuries of political and religious strife that each side is passionately determined to have its way. As long as there is no settlement, every terrorist bomb on the West Bank contains the danger of escalation: rioting, warfare, spreading oil cutoffs, a new confrontation of the superpowers. Arab claims on Jerusalem range from demands for Islamic sovereignty over the Muslim holy places to more contentious proposals for a Palestinian Arab capital in the east of the city, and even to wild-eyed cries that all Israelis should be expelled. The Israelis are