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Jerusalem, 50 Years On

How long can an unstable ambiguity endure? Perhaps a very long time indeed
Flickr_-_Israel_Defense_Forces_-_Life_of_Lt._Gen._Yitzhak_Rabin,_7th_IDF_Chief_of_Staff_in_photos_(14)

On the Jewish calendar, today is the 50th anniversary of the reunification (or conquest, depending on how you look at it) of Jerusalem. The holy city has now been under Israeli control for as long as the combined periods of the British Mandate (1917-1948) and Jordanian rule (1948-1967). 2017 also marks the 500th anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem; Israeli rule still has a while to go before it matches their 400 year tenure of sovereignty, which I consider to be the record-holder (though dating events of the First Temple period is extremely contentious and it’s a matter of interpretation whether to consider the East Roman Empire under Constantine to be a new regime or a continuation of Roman rule). Regardless, 50 years is entirely respectable in historical terms, certainly for a modern state.

Except that it is not respected: Israeli sovereignty in the entirety of Jerusalem is not generally recognized, for very obvious reasons. The eastern part of the city was conquered in a war initiated by Israel (preemptively, in the context of very legitimate fears of an imminent attack). While the previous occupier of the eastern portion of the city, Jordan, renounced all claims many years ago, Jordan’s own claims were never recognized by most of the world, so that renunciation did not automatically validate Israel’s own claims. And a significant minority of Jerusalem’s residents, and most of its Arab population, remain non-citizens. Jerusalem is in many ways a microcosm of Israel itself, a place of unparalleled importance to Jewish history, all of which is under Israeli sovereign control, but only part of which is generally recognized as such, and the whole a peculiar hybrid of a modern democracy and a religio-nationalist regime.

For 50 years, Israel has lived and grown around this fundamentally unsettled and ambiguous condition. Its aims, honestly plainly, have been not to resolve those ambiguities until conditions on the ground are sufficiently favorable that they are likely to be resolved in Israel’s favor. It believes — not without reason — that any other course of action would expose its citizenry to unacceptable risk of violence, and also potentially fatal to the country’s national spirit.

It is common to say that a trend that cannot continue will not continue, and that a condition that cannot endure will not endure. I have been known to apply those adages to the situation in Israel and Palestine myself, and to join the chorus that says that Israel must, for its own sake, prioritize resolution of these ambiguities and irregularities, before events resolve them in far more unfavorable ways.

But a fiftieth anniversary is a good occasion to consider the other possibility, the possibility that what has endured and been endured for fifty years might continue for another fifty, and that one day Israel might celebrate a centenary of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem without the Messiah having come, without peace having been agreed, without borders having been generally recognized, without much of its population’s citizenship being settled — and without a catastrophe. That might not be the world that we want to live in — it might not be the world that either Jewish or Arab residents of Jerusalem want to live in. But it might be the world we get.

And it’s worth imagining what it will feel like, to those of us fortunate enough to still be alive in fifty years, and to the grandchildren of those Jerusalemites alive today, to have watched more settled and nominally secure orders rise and fall around the world, while their own formally less-settled existence endured.

What conclusions will they — and we — draw about the ways of the world if that should come to pass?

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