Moroccan King Mohammed VI, who chairs the Al Quds (Jerusalem) Committee of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference OIC) and whose country is home to the largest Jewish community in any Arab or Muslim country, warned against such a move; the Arab monarch urged the heads of State of the U.N. Security Council member countries, Pope Benedict XVI and presidents of the EU and EC, among others, to use their "good offices" to persuade Israel "to renounce any measure that would in no way serve the cause of peace in the region and in the world."
The Israeli government also has recently allocated $90 million over eight years until 2013 for maintaining the Israelization of the Old City, $79 million to attract non-profit groups and NGOs into the city and $50 million for the Jewish municipality to help bring in more settlers, whose numbers rocketed from zero to more than 210.000 since 1967, while indigenous Arab citizens are completely cut off western Jerusalem and left with only 9% of the municipal area to accommodate the natural growth of those of them who so far survived what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe termed as Israel's "ethnic cleansing."
According to the Israeli activist Jeff Halper and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Israel's "Jerusalem metropolis" covers 10% of the West Bank, 440 sq. km., where 75% of the West Bank settlers live in colonial settlements extending from the Latron (Beit Shemesh) in the West, through Kiriat Sefer to Ramallah in the North then Southeast through Maale Adumim almost to the Jordan River; thence, southwest, the metropolis is due to include the Palestinian cities of Bait Sahour, Bethlehem and the settlements blocks of Efrat and Gush Etzion, thence Westwards to Beitar Ilit, Tzur Hadassa and Beit Shemesh.
Maintaining the current Israeli demographic, urban and political plans for the Holy city "means no viable Palestinian state, no Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and thus no viable two-state solution," said Saeb Erekat, who heads the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel's partner to the Oslo Accords. "Greater Jerusalem" breaks the territorial contiguity needed for a viable Palestinian state by separating the southern part of the West Bank from the northern part.
Proclaiming the conquered city as the prize of all prizes of Israel's 1967 conquests, former "Defence" Minister Moshe Dayan said that year: "We have united Jerusalem... We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again." But the euphoria of 1967 is fading away as a "wasted victory," as The Economist had marked the 40th anniversary, and increasing numbers of daring souls are voicing more realistic warnings and calls to say "the once unthinkable: that Jerusalem may never truly be united," according to Kevin Peraino in the Newsweek, who quoted historian Tom Segev as saying: "All these dreams of 1967 were actually illusions."
In a May 15 op-ed in the New York Sun ("Mounting Figures"), the writer Hillel Halkin marked the 40th anniversary of the "reunification" of Jerusalem by calling for its division, citing among other reasons that in the post-1967 municipal borders there are 28 Arab villages, and concluding his op-ed with a bold call on Israel to relinquish Islam's third holiest site of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount, claiming its retention is an imperative "felt more strongly by religious Muslims than by religious Jews."
Other whistle blowers are citing demography as the reason. Latest Israeli surveys and studies exaggerate the forecasted Arab population numbers, saying they increased at more than twice the rate of its Jewish inhabitants over the last decade and predicting that only 60% of the "capital"'s residents will be Jews by 2020. The American-Israel Demographic Research Group's 2,400-word study on May 15, titled, "Realities on the Ground: Jerusalem 2007 – 2025," could be a reference. Accordingly they prefer division to preserve the Jewish purity of the Jewish unilaterally-declared capital. However unification advocates promote the same unconfirmed statistics as a justification for persisting with what Ilan Pappe describes as the ethnic cleansing strategic policies. The "Realities on the Ground: Jerusalem 2007 – 2025," concludes however, citing data from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, that for the first time since 1948, Israel holds a strong demographic advantage in Jerusalem: "There is no inherent demographic crisis for Jerusalem's Jews."
Historical Trend: Message of War
Illusions or no illusions Israel seems stubbornly clinging to biblical "promises." "The international community has sought to re-establish the status quo ante (in Jerusalem) as part of a political settlement," the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, wrote in The New York Sun on June 8, but "A completely new international legal reality emerged since 1967," he added. Finding solace in U.S. backing, he quoted U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in 1967, Arthur Goldberg, as saying: "Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem and this omission was deliberate." He also quoted former secretary of state, George Shultz, as saying in 1988 that Israel "will never negotiate from or return" to the 1967 lines, before he cited Bush's letter to Sharon in April 2004. But Gold missed to note that none of them was a representative of international law or legitimacy.
Gold was in fact merely confirming an Israeli historical trend. Israel's policies and plans in Jerusalem are building on an historical trend that has its base precedent in the immediate aftermath of the British mandate, which on May 15, 1948 left the fate of Palestine and Palestinians to the unmerciful whims of the Zionist leaders and the overwhelming military superiority of their paramilitary troops and terrorist gangs who came to lead the Jewish people.
That was the first of several major Israeli missed opportunities to trade victorious conquests for peace. Earlier the Zionist Jewish leadership missed minor opportunities like the Jewish self-rule proposal of late Jordanian monarch King Abdullah I. The recently proposed Arab Peace Initiative to trade the Israeli conquests of 1967 for a full and collective peace with the 22-member League of Arab States was the recent major missed opportunity.
On the basis of the principle of "land-for-peace" as stipulated by the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 that were adopted after the 1967 and 1973 wars respectively, the international community has developed the currently deadlocked and dormant Arab – Israeli peace process, the cornerstone of which is creating a viable and independent Palestinian state living in security and peacefully alongside Israel.
Only the Israeli military occupation of Arab lands on June 5, 1967 made possible the two-state option, which was originally decided by the United Nations General Assembly's resolution 181 of 1947, but was precluded the following year by Israel's military victory in the Arab – Israeli war, which created the Palestinian refugee problem and resulted in her first military expansion.
Had Israel used her conquered land then as a bargaining chip and traded her conquests for peace on the basis of the two-state solution of resolution 181, which ruled out Jerusalem to an international status not subject to the jurisdiction of either state, the conflict might not have dragged on to the present time.
But Israel did not, and since then set out a precedent that her military onslaughts and conquests are irreversible and won't be reversed, at least not voluntarily, unless she is forced to. If this precedent is to serve as indicator of her stance vis-à-vis her conquests of 1967, it will explain her policies in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past 40 years.
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