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Reuters
Reuters - Thursday, May 13 By Dan Williams JERUSALEM - Beset by questions about Jerusalem's future in talks with
the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached for
the Bible on Wednesday to stake out the Jewish state's contested claim
on the city.
Netanyahu told a parliamentary session commemorating Israel's capture of
East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war that "Jerusalem" and its
alternative Hebrew name "Zion" appear 850 times in the Old Testament,
Judaism's core canon. "As to how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the holy scriptures of
other faiths, I recommend you check," he said. Citing such ancestry, Israel calls all of Jerusalem its "eternal and
indivisible" capital -- a designation not recognised abroad, where many
powers support Arab claims to East Jerusalem as the capital of a future
Palestinian state. The dispute is further inflamed by the fact East Jerusalem houses
al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine, on a plaza that Jews
revere as the vestige of two biblical Jewish temples. Heckled by a lawmaker from Israel's Arab minority, Netanyahu offered a
lesson in comparative religion from the lectern. "Because you asked: Jerusalem is mentioned 142 times in the New
Testament, and none of the 16 various Arabic names for Jerusalem is
mentioned in the Koran. But in an expanded interpretation of the Koran
from the 12th century, one passage is said to refer to Jerusalem," he said. Responding to Netanyahu's citations, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb
Erekat said: "I find it very distasteful, this use of religion to incite
hatred and fear. East Jerusalem is an occupied Palestinian town, and
East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be peace." MANY RULERS Destroyed as a Jewish capital by the Romans in the 1st century AD,
Jerusalem was a Christian city under their Byzantine successors before
falling to Muslim Arabs in the 7th. European Crusaders regained it for a
century, after which came 700 years of Muslim rule until Britain
defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1917. As Britain prepared to quit, the United Nations proposed international
rule for the city in 1947 as a "corpus separatum." That proposal was overtaken by fighting that left Israel holding West
Jerusalem in 1948 and Jordanian forces in East Jerusalem. Israel then
took the rest in the Six Day War of 1967. The city, within boundaries defined by Israel but not recognized
internationally, is now home to 750,000 people, two in three of them
Jews and the rest mostly Muslim Palestinians. Netanyahu did not refer in his speech to indirect peace negotiations
with the Palestinians that resumed this month after 1-1/2 years of U.S.
trouble-shooting. Diplomacy has been mired by mutual recrimination,
including from Israel over the Palestinian refusal to formally recognise
it as a Jewish state. This has ossified into diehard hostility among Palestinians aligned with
Islamist Hamas, while those more inclined towards peacemaking accuse
Israel of sabotaging prospects by treating occupied land as a Jewish
birthright that can be freely seized. Netanyahu said Israel would retain control over all of Jerusalem while
ensuring freedom of worship at its holy sites. Such assertions are challenged by Palestinians given that Israel, over
the last decade of fighting, has often limited their access to al-Aqsa.
Christians in the adjacent West Bank complain of similar difficulties in
reaching Jerusalem churches. "There is no undercutting, nor do I intend to undercut, the connection
of others to Jerusalem," Netanyahu said. "But I do confront the attempt to undercut and warp or obfuscate the
unique connection that we, the people of Israel, have to the capital of
Israel."
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