AT a U.N. press conference last week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak finally made an argument that he should have offered long ago: “When Jesus Christ walked the streets of Jerusalem, he saw neither a mosque nor a Christian church but only the second Temple of the Jews.”
Whether he said it for domestic political purposes – his governing coalition is rapidly disintegrating – or out of anger at Yasser Arafat, who continues to claim that the Jews’ historical connection to Jerusalem is dubious, Barak is plainly right. The Jewish claim on Jerusalem is centered on 3,000 years of history, not some recent squatters’ rights.
Barak’s long silence on this simple fact strengthened Arafat’s hand. As former Israeli Interior Minister Natan Sharansky said yesterday while meeting with The Post editorial board, “Arafat is speaking about his obligation to Muslims and Christians to liberate Jerusalem and his refusal to give up the struggle for total control. He speaks about the last 1,000 years, while Barak is talking about the next three or four weeks.”
Most Israelis would agree with Sharansky that “Jerusalem is the soul of the Jewish people.” Which is why so many Israelis and their supporters are mystified by Barak’s willingness to surrender control over what he himself acknowledges is “the cornerstone of Jewish identity.”
The division of Jerusalem that Barak has offered, at the Camp David summit and in last week’s negotiations here in New York, “has historical consequences,” warns Sharansky.
He’s right: Israel’s willingness to cede control over the very symbol of its national identity would be a huge triumph for those who question the very basis of the Zionist undertaking and who argue that the Jews no longer need a state of their own.
(Sharansky also notes the irony of Arafat claiming to defend Jerusalem for Christians, since “in every place that has come under Arafat’s control, the local Arab Christians flee.” Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, has become almost devoid of Christians since it came under Palestinian Authority rule. )
But Arafat is not the only one denying the historical tie between ancient Israel and today’s state. Egypt’s foreign minister, Amr Moussa, did so on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” Tuesday night. And Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat’s most skillful public mouthpiece, has long claimed that “we Palestinians are the original Christians” (to which the writer David Bar-Illan swiftly retorted: “Funny, she doesn’t look Jewish”).
Under Barak, however, Israel has seemed reluctant to press its historical claims to what has been known throughout history as the Land of Israel. Has he yielded to the rising influence of the Israeli “new historians”? This group has seized control of the Israeli educational system – and believes that the modern Jewish State is founded on a mammoth lie, rooted in immorality, injustice, deception and war crimes.
These historians, whose influence in Israel grows daily, seek to negate every moral basis for the establishment and continued existence of the state – a fact they freely concede. Leading “new historian” Benny Morris admits that his writings are “undermining things basic to [Israel’s] identity and statehood,” adding that “it goes to the heart of the nature of Zionism.”
Which is why many on the Israeli left argue that the notion of a Jewish state is now outdated – indeed, that its only possible justification, as a haven from persecution, is no longer necessary. They even claim, as Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center noted recently, that the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, never intended to found a Jewish state, but simply a “state of the Jews,” with a Jewish majority but no particular Jewish characteristics.
If there’s no reason to maintain a Jewish identity for the state of Israel, then it really doesn’t matter who controls Jerusalem, including its Old City and the Temple Mount – to which Jews have directed their prayers for thousands of years.
Those who denigrate the idea of a Jewish State as an immoral embarassment simply can’t comprehend the feeling of someone like Nathan Sharansky – whose final words to the Soviet court that exiled him to the gulag for nine years were, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Which is why Barak’s reminder that Jerusalem was a Jewish city long before the birth of Jesus or Muhammad was so welcome. But what’s the point of winning one particular rhetorical battle if the war has already been lost?
E-mail: efettmann@nypost.com
