Jerusalem has not lost its power. If anything, its power looms larger, thanks to the propulsive simplicities of 24-hour news and social media. It is the potential capital of two peoples, the sacred metropolis of three Abrahamic faiths. But it is also a living universal symbol that inspires in people all over the world a sense of possession that has driven and justified their claim to conquer it and rule it, to dream it and remodel it to suit their visions. Those who feel entitled to be arbiters of the Holy City have traditionally been entitled potentates in distant capitals, in chancelleries and churches. But they also include the 100,000 ordinary Europeans who joined the first Crusade – and nowadays the heroes of campus struggle and keyboard resistance, who thanks to the Christian and imperial history buried deep in their souls, feel more entitled to decide its destiny than any other place. It is what makes Jerusalem so important, so complex and so unique, for it exists not just on Earth and in heaven but in manifestations to many people who have never even been there.
This intensifies the challenge of how to make a peace deal in the Middle East, in which Jerusalem is always central but always the biggest obstacle. That is why there are so many versions of its status over the centuries that I chronicle in my newly revised, updated and relaunched Jerusalem: a History of the Middle East.
Even in the 12th century, some of these negotiations have an almost modern feel. One half expects Secretary of State Antony Blinken to fly in to negotiate with Saladin or Emperor Frederick. The fall of Crusader Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 aroused the horror of Christian Europe and the French, English and German kings led a campaign to retake the Holy City. After a brutal war, Richard the Lionheart and Sultan Saladin negotiated. Richard proposed that Saladin’s brother Safadin marry his sister Princess Joanna.
It is unclear how this would have worked, except that any son might have succeeded as a king-sultan of Jerusalem. In any case, it did not happen. A more modern peace was attempted by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, with al-Kamil, Sultan of Egypt, great-nephew of Saladin, who, in 1229, agreed a Muslim-Christian sharing of Jerusalem; the Christians got the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Muslims the al-Aqsa Compound. The deal lasted just over a decade.
After centuries of Muslim rule from Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul, it was during the First World War that Jerusalem urgently featured in the machinations of European grandees as they planned a carve-up of the Ottoman empire. The French, British and Russians all wanted Jerusalem, negotiating the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Treaty in which the Russians were promised Constantinople, swathes of today’s Turkey and an imperial Jerusalem shared by Britain, France and Russia. Britain got Palestine, France Syria. Amazingly, Russia had managed to negotiate shares of both Constantinople and Jerusalem. But Tsar Nicholas II had to survive the war to collect this astonishing bounty of great cities.
Simultaneously, Britain’s High Commissioner of Egypt, Henry McMahon, negotiated an Arab revolt led by Sherif Hussein, amir of Mecca, and his sons, Abdullah and Faisal. Hussein, who commanded a few thousand irregulars, demanded a family empire of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Arabia, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem and the Holy Land. McMahon made vague promises but their agreement, effectively excluded Jerusalem because McMahon wanted the Sultan of Egypt, Hussein Kamel, descendant of Mohammed Ali, Turkish-“Albanian” master of Egypt who had seized Jerusalem during the 1830s (and whose family ruled Egypt until 1952), to rule it. As the British advanced on Jerusalem in 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued their Declaration to foster “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Jerusalem was not mentioned because Lloyd George hoped to capture it as a “Christmas present for the British nation”, intending to keep this biblical prize. Simultaneously, he was negotiating peace with Istanbul that would leave Jerusalem as a special entity under the Ottoman sultan. The Sykes-Picot Treaty is denounced by enraged anti-imperialist historians but never fully activated.
The tsar fell; Britain took Jerusalem and made it the capital of a new entity called Palestine, a League of Nations Mandate that lasted just 30 years. The Arab population in Jerusalem was split between wanting to be ruled by a Greater Syria Kingdom under King Faisal bin Hussein, or the newly-minted King Fuad of Egypt. During the British Mandate, Jewish and Arab immigrants poured into a booming Jerusalem as the tensions between Zionism and rising Arab nationalism intensified.In 1936, when an Arab revolt exploded, British politician Earl Peel proposed Jerusalem should remain a British entity while forming a small Jewish state and a bigger Arab kingdom, including most of Palestine, under Abdullah of Jordan. The Zionists accepted the offer as did Abdullah but the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini rejected it; the revolt was crushed. In 1939 Britain proposed a Palestinian Arab state including Jerusalem, an offer that was made again in the 1947. In both cases, the Mufti rejected the best offer the Palestinian Arab ever received: independence for the first time – with Jerusalem. In 1947 the UN proposed a messy partition, with Jerusalem an internationalised Corpus Separatum.
Both Egypt under King Farouk, last of the Muhammed Ali dynasty, and Jordan under King Abdullah aspired to rule Jerusalem. Abdullah secretly negotiated with the Israelis to take the Arab sections, but spiralling atrocities accelerated war. Egypt Jordan and Syria invaded the new Israeli state. Abdullah captured the Old City and east suburbs; Israelis held the western suburbs; the city divided. In 1949, the Israelis offered to share Jerusalem, returning to Abdullah all the Arab suburbs, Temple Mount and a corridor to Gaza, in return for the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall.
The deal came close before it was scotched by Arab League threats . Instead, Abdullah annexed the West Bank, declared himself King of Jerusalem and was soon assassinated. But Jordan kept the Old City of Jerusalem. In June 1967, Israel warned his grandson, King Hussein, if he stayed out of the war, he would not be attacked. Jerusalem would still be part of Jordan. Instead, Egyptian President Nasser forced the king into the war; Israeli took the Old City. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan created a policy in which the Jerusalem Islamic authority, the Waqf, ran the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif; Jews could visit but not pray there. This Israeli statesmanship has endured, though it is increasingly strained. At the time, the Israeli capture of Old City and the Wall seemed like a historic deliverance and redemption. In retrospect the conquest ignited a messianic-nationalist exhilaration which now turns out to be perilous for the very survival of Israel.
It was in the Nineties that the sharing of Jerusalem again was discussed in the Oslo negotiations under Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. The two sides had in principle agreed to divide it within a single municipality, while the Old City would enjoy special status, not unlike a Middle Eastern Abrahamic Vatican.A separate treaty with King Hussein gave him (and now his son Abdullah II) custodianship over the Haram, but tragically the deal with the PLO had not been signed when Rabin was assassinated. A new jihadist terror sect in Gaza, Hamas, launched suicide bombings to destroy the peace.
In 2000, the Israelis again elected a tough peacemaker, Ehud Barak, who at Camp David and afterwards offered Arafat the whole Old City except the Jewish Quarter and the Wall. But the Old City would remain under Israeli “sovereignty” while the Palestinians would run their areas under “sovereign custodianship”. Arafat refused to sign, instead unleashing a ferocious intifada that helped bring Ariel Sharon to power.
After his stroke, his successor Ehud Olmert courageously offered the Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas the most generous deal to share Holy City since 1947: Jerusalem as joint capital; the ‘sacred basin’ under separate international administration by Israel, PLO, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians. Abbas could not sign. The hopeful moment glided into an era of intolerance and violence.
Looking back over the many complex visions for sharing Jerusalem from Richard and Saladin to Olmert and Abbas, the prototype still works, but only if both sides are willing to share.
The updated, revised edition of ‘Jerusalem: A History of the Middle East’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore is out now
