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Fri Feb 24 11:55:10 PST 2006

CITIES with walls in their hearts are never happy places. Jerusalem is again
becoming one of these. From the war of 1948 till the war of 1967, the
armistice line between Israel and Jordan ran through Jerusalem, dividing the
Jewish west from the Arab east. After capturing Jerusalem in 1967, Israel
said the reunited city would be its eternal capital. Now the concrete and
barbed wire are back. Before long, the ³security barrier² Israel is building
in and round the occupied West Bank will bisect its own capital. But as our
special report explains, the new wall does not follow the old border: it
swallows into Israel both the new Jewish suburbs Israel built in east
Jerusalem after 1967 and most of the Arab city. When the wall is finished,
and if its gates are closed, Arab Jerusalem will then be cut off from its
hinterland in the West Bank.

Jerusalem is both a problem in its own right and a parable for the wider
conflict. It is a problem in its own right because Arabs and Jews have found
no way either to share or divide it. In Jerusalem God and history have made
sharing bitterly hard. This is a city in which religions as well as
nationalisms collide. The Temple Mount, which Jews call their holiest place,
is the very same place Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, from which Muhammad
ascended by a golden ladder to heaven. And although the world has invented a
multitude of peace plans, none has stuck. The United Nations' stillborn
partition plan of 1947 said the city should be internationalised. But in
1948 Israel and Jordan preferred to keep the parts they grabbed in war. Just
over five years ago, Bill Clinton sketched out in his ³parameters² a plan to
divide the city. Instead came a new sort of war, in the shape of the
Palestinian intifada.

The problem

There will be no peace in Palestine until the problem of Jerusalem is
solved. Together with the fate of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, it is
rightly called the heart of the conflict. But it is a heart shared by
conjoined twins. Both Israel and Palestine say that they cannot live without
it. So any operation designed to separate Israel from the Palestinians must
be exceptionally sensitive and delicate. Worse, it must be performed from
the outset in the knowledge that complete separation is out of the question.
In Jerusalem at least, Israel and Palestine are doomed to remain perpetually
entwined.

In the nearly 40 years since 1967, sensitivity and delicacy have not been
Israel's watchwords in Jerusalem. As it happens, most orthodox Jews
subscribe to a dogma that forbids Jewish access to the Temple Mount until
the day of redemption. This has helped Israel leave the running of the Noble
Sanctuary and its mosques in Muslim hands. But in Jerusalem as a whole
Israel's policy has been to entrench its control and create facts that
cannot be reversed. This has entailed reshaping the physical and demographic
geography of the city, settling Jews on the Arab side of the pre-1967 border
and creating vast Jewish neighbourhoods to the north, east and south.

On one level, the policy has worked. The huge physical changes render it
impossible to redivide the city along the pre-1967 boundary. But on many
other levels, the policy has failed. The rest of the world, including the
United Nations and the United States, says still that Israel's annexation of
the city, and the settling of Jews across the old border, are illegal.
Moreover, in spite of sometimes ruthless Israeli efforts to turf Arabs out
of their homes, demography has defied expectations. Jews have formed a
majority in Jerusalem since the late 19th century. Since 1967, however, this
has declined, from 74% of the reunited city in 1967 to about 67%. And for
all Israel's declarations, the city has never been ³reunited² in spirit. Its
Palestinian residents refuse to vote in municipal elections and insist on
their future as part of an independent Palestine.

The parable

Jerusalem is a microcosm. Israel has settled Jews in much of the West Bank,
but these settlements are illegal too. As in Jerusalem, demography has
undone the dream of a Greater Israel. Israel's incoming government
acknowledges that it must fall back to shorter borders and let an
independent Palestine arise behind it. But, as in Jerusalem, the old
pre-1967 border has been largely erased. And the chances of negotiating a
new one, now that the obdurate Islamists of Hamas have replaced the
impossible Yasser Arafat, are remote. Hence the appeal of the big idea that
Israelis have come to see as the next-best thing: unilateral withdrawal to
borders of their own choosing. In essence, this entails building a security
barrier to keep out suicide bombers, evacuating the settlements on the far
side of the barrier, hunkering down and hoping for the best.

As a second-best, unilateralism has merits. By going it alone, Israel left
Gaza. If Israel now evacuates more Jewish settlements in the West Bank, so
much better for the prospects of an eventual Palestinian state. But even if
it is better than nothing, this is no substitute for a negotiated peace.

Again, Jerusalem shows why. Israel's barrier is not just for security. It is
also a land grab: an attempt to map out preferred borders. That is why, in
the case of Jerusalem, the barrier ignores demography and swallows up east
Jerusalem. This follows the annexation border but traps on the Israeli side
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who will be cut off from their
brethren in the West Bank and may well be tempted in any new intifada to
help or become suicide bombers.

Israel does not bear sole responsibility for the current impasse. The crazy
human geography of Jerusalem and the West Bank has been created by more than
half a century of missed opportunities on both sides, in which the Arab
refusal to come to terms with Jewish statehood has played its part.
Historians will argue uselessly till the end of days over which side
deserves more blame. What is clear is that by redividing Jerusalem in the
way it is about to, Israel is making things worse. No peace is possible
unless the city remains accessible, from both its east and west. At the very
least, during this period of relative calm, Israel must keep its barrier as
open as possible. Sealing in and cutting off the Palestinians of Jerusalem
will only make another descent into violence more likely.