A history lesson for Trump before he splits the baby (or, Jerusalem).
A-history l esson f or Donald Trump as he leaves for the Middle East, during which he will be asked to play the part of Solomon and decide how to split not a baby, but Jerusalem.
Two thousand years ago, Jewish Jerusalem was one of the ancient world’s great cities. Its eventual conquest by the Romans was celebrated as a monumental triumph by the building of the Arch of Titus in Rome. Fifteen hundred years ago, Jerusalem — then a great Christian city because of its centrality to Jesus — was made resplendent through the building of churches, a fabulous basilica and a hospital for pilgrims, and was renowned as a centre of Christian scholarship. Almost 1,000 years ago, centuries after Jerusalem had fallen to Arab invaders, Jerusalem remained a great city: The crusaders who tried to reclaim the city for Christendom were amazed at levels of wealth unseen in Europe.
But after the waves of crusaders were finally repelled, and the prize of Jerusalem was secure, the Muslim rulers let Jerusalem fall into ruins. Although Muslim leaders had built two magnificent buildings to cement their conquest over the holy sites of the Christians and Jews (the Dome of the Rock, where Abraham is believed to have prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the Al- Aqsa Mosque, atop of what had been the Temple of Solomon), for nearly a millennium, Jerusalem saw scant investment of any kind — whether for religious buildings, or for canals or other public works. Jerusalem became a backwater, its Ottoman rulers preoccupied with squeezing its poverty-stricken population of whatever taxes they could turn over.
When Herman Melville, the American author, visited the Holy Land in 1856, he expected to be inspired by Jerusalem. Instead, he was dismayed. “How it affects one to be cheated in Jerusalem,” he wrote of his weeklong stay, saying it “looked exactly like arid rocks.” He wrote of “the desolation of the land,” finding that “The color of the whole city is gray and looks at you like a cold gray eye in a cold old man.”
Mark Twain, who visited in 1867, found that Jerusalem had “become a pauper village.” “No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is mournful, dreary, and lifeless. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.”
Twain was struck, as were so many others, at the Holy Lands’ depopulation: “A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
As the British consul in Palestine reported in 1857, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants.”
The often-made claim that Jerusalem is — after Mecca and Medina — the thirdmost revered city in Islam-dom is challenged by history. While Jerusalem under Muslim rule was left to rot — mostly “grasse, mosse and Weedes,” according to a 1590 account by an English tourist — the Ottomans built their magnificent Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Selimiye Mosque in Edrine. The Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, built in 972 to honour Muhammad’s revered daughter, Fatima, has through the centuries been recognized as Islam’s most revered seat for religious learning. Shia Muslims value the holy city of Najaf, where Ali, the brother of Muhammad is entombed. Over almost the whole of the last millennium, when Muslims ruled over a vast empire, they invested in countless locales that they deemed important. Jerusalem was not among them. Muslims abandoned the city to its wretched inhabitants, who by the time of Mark Twain’s visit were mostly Jewish.
Jerusalem was always paramount to Jews and Christians; to Muslims, not so much. The Hebrew Bible mentions Jerusalem 349 times and Zion ( a synonym for Jerusalem) 108 times. The Qur’an does not mention Jerusalem at all. Even in modern times, Jerusalem has been very much an afterthought. Initially, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s National Covenant, written in 1964, didn’t mention Jerusalem. The PLO updated its covenant to include Jerusalem only after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel’s capture of Jerusalem made it politically relevant.
As Trump should understand better than most, Jerusalem is a bargaining chip, and an asymmetrical one at that, since it has such disproportionate importance to Jews. But a bargaining chip for what? If, as many Israelis fear, the Palestinians’ demand for Jerusalem is a ruse, and they would accept nothing less than the complete eradication of the state of Israel, there would be no basis for a negotiation. After all, in past negotiations, such as those that President Bill Clinton attempted, the Palestinians refused a deal that virtually met their every last demand.
Trump has not decided whether to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, thus recognizing it as the undisputed Jewish capital. Such a move would be largely symbolic, giving Israeli Jews their due while denying Muslims little but their ability to deny Jews their due.
But dispensing with the Jerusalem issue — which in truth is a distraction — would have benefits. With the symbolism of Jerusalem settled, discussions — and negotiations — could turn to the substance: discovering what the Palestinians truly want, apart from the eradication of Israel.