Mounting Figures

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Mounting Figures
  By HILLEL HALKIN
May 15, 2007

 
"After 40 years, an ever less Jewish Jerusalem," was the headline of a dispatch filed today by The New York Times' Israel correspondent Greg Myre. That's hardly news in Israel. For years now, the country has been aware that the ratio of Jews to Arabs in its capital is steadily dropping. Once 3-to-1 after Jerusalem was greatly enlarged by the annexation of its Arab neighborhoods in 1967, it is now down to 2-to-1 and still declining.

This isn't because Jerusalem's Jewish population hasn't grown since then the Six Day War. On the contrary, it has grown by leaps-and-bounds, from an estimated 185,000 in 1967 to close to half a million today. It's just that the Arab population has grown even faster in the same period of time — from a little over 60,000 to about a quarter of a million. From a Jewish point of view, this is tantamount to running as fast as one can on a treadmill and losing ground all the time.

In some ways, what happened in Jerusalem after 1967 was a recapitulation in a single city of what happened in all of Palestine after Zionist settlement began there in the late 19th century. Encountering a relatively small Arab population in Palestine when it first launched its colonization project, the Zionist movement failed to realize that, precisely to the extent that it succeeded in attracting Jewish settlers and capital, it would also attract Arabs settlers from neighboring countries looking for work and better living conditions. As fast as the Jewish population of Palestine grew, the Arab population, which had a higher birthrate, would grow even faster.

The same thing has been true of Jerusalem. The economic boom that swept the city after 1967, with its vast Jewish housing projects undertaken by the government, drew tens of thousands of Arab construction workers and other laborers from all over the West Bank and made Jerusalem a greater center of Arab economic activity than it had ever been. Moreover, when economic expansion slowed down in Jerusalem starting with the late 1980s, and the city began lagging behind the rest of the country, many young Jews left it for other places while Arabs — for whom conditions were still better there than elsewhere — didn't.

How does one beat a treadmill? Only by getting off it. Israel will eventually have to surrender most of the Arab neighborhoods in the east and north of municipal Jerusalem that it annexed in 1967.

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That's the bad news. The good news is that municipal Jerusalem and historic Jerusalem are two totally different things, and that in yielding most of the first, Israel doesn't necessarily have to give up very much of the second.

Indeed, historic Jerusalem — the areas and sites that constituted the city throughout nearly all of its history and to which the Jewish people always swore its fealty — is but a tiny fraction of what today is municipal Jerusalem. The entire old walled city of Jerusalem, which was the entire city until the mid-19th century, is barely a square kilometer in area. Add to that nearby sites like Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives, and one might have five square kilometers. By 1967 the city, divided between Israel and Jordan after Israel's 1948 war of independence, had spread over 44 square kilometers — 38 of them in the Israeli part and six in the Jordanian. More than twice this amount, 64 additional square kilometers, were added when Israel annexed 28 West Bank villages adjacent to Jerusalem in 1967 and included them within the city's new municipal boundaries.

The great majority of Jerusalem's 250,000 Arab inhabitants live in these additional 64 square kilometers, which were never traditionally thought to be part of Jerusalem at all. When one speaks, therefore, of "re-partitioning" Jerusalem, this is not quite the frightful specter that it might appear to be at first glance. For the most part it would simply involve returning to earlier definitions of what and where Jerusalem was while adding to them the extensive Jewish neighborhoods built around inner Jerusalem since 1967. It would no more mean surrendering the Jewishly sacred core of Jerusalem than drawing a political line between Manhattan and Westchester County means surrendering the former's skyscrapers.

There is, however, one part of core Jerusalem that Israel will eventually have to give up to, namely, the Temple Mount, even though it is certainly a sacred Jewish site. Fortunately, though (at least in the eyes of all those who are not anxious to see the ancient temple restored and herds of animals led to it for daily sacrifice), it is also the site of the El-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and felt even more strongly about by religious Muslims than it is by religious Jews. If Israel is ever to arrive at an understanding with the Muslim world, this will have to be one that places the Temple Mount — as it in any case is de facto even today — in Muslim hands.

In this respect, the decision this week of a large group of Orthodox rabbis to reverse previous rulings forbidding Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount for fear of treading on the site of the Holy of Holies in a ritually impure state is to be regretted. Even more regrettable is the apparent intention of this group and others to work in the long run for the building of a Jewish synagogue on the Mount. If anything could throw a match into the tinderbox of Jewish-Muslim relations in Israel and the world, it is this.

One needn't accept the contention of ultra-Orthodox Jews that the state of Israel is a sinful attempt to enter the messianic age prematurely in order to understand the value of nevertheless postponing certain things for the Messiah — the rebuilding of the Temple among them. Until then, Jews have enough synagogues to pray in without erecting another in the worst possible place it could be in.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

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