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Israelis Are Not Prepared to Concede Jerusalem

(Jerusalem Post) Dore Gold - UN General Assembly Resolution 181, adopted in 1947 and known as the partition plan, recommended putting Jerusalem under UN control as a separate entity. The resolution was forcibly rejected by the Arab states and the UN never established the special regime for Jerusalem that it proposed. In fact, it failed to dispatch any forces to save the Old City when reports streamed in that its ancient synagogues were being systematically destroyed. Nevertheless, even after the war ended, leading diplomatic players including the U.S. insisted on resurrecting the idea of international control. On December 5, 1949, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that Israel rejected the demand for internationalization of Jerusalem. He explained that the UN "did not lift a finger" when invading Arab armies tried to destroy the holy city and declared that Israel no longer viewed Resolution 181 as having any further "moral force" with regard to Jerusalem. On December 13, Ben-Gurion declared that the Knesset and the rest of the government would be transferred from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Sixty years later, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has put forward a proposal for the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, to be overseen by "an international trusteeship." According to Olmert, Israel would renounce its sovereignty over the holiest sites of the Jewish people located in an area called "the Holy Basin." Yet there is no basis for the naive belief that internationalization might now work. In the past 20 years, international oversight of areas of conflict has ended with one disaster after another. In 1994, a UN force in Rwanda, made up of mostly Belgian paratroopers, abandoned the Tutsi tribe to acts of genocide by Hutu supremists, resulting in 800,000 deaths. A year later, UN peacekeepers in Bosnia abandoned the Muslims they were supposed to protect in Srebrenica and the Bosnian Serb army slaughtered more than 8,000 innocent people. Poll after poll in the past decade indicates that Israelis are not prepared to concede Jerusalem, and especially the holy sites of the Jewish people. The impression left by this proposal badly weakens Israel's ability to defend itself, since it implies that Israel has lost its will and might be prepared to concede what has been - and will remain - one of the core values defining the identity of the Jewish people. The writer, who served as Israel's ambassador to the UN between 1997 and 1999, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is the author of The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, 2007).
2010-09-29 09:13:58
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