Begin clings to united Jerusalem

Press, 5 August 1980, Page 16

Begin clings to united Jerusalem

By

COLIN SMITH

Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s energetic Viennese Mayor, is fond of saying that the problems of his city will be solved only when the Messiah returns.

The Prime Minister, Mr Menachem Begin, has made it plain that he expects a solution at an earlier date and that this can be nothing less than international recognition of a uhited Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Hence his fury when a recent announcement that he intended to move his office into predominantly Arab - East Jerusalem occasioned some criticism from the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. “It will make things much more difficult for your friends,” he said, “and very much easier for your enemies.”

Rising from his hospital sick bed, where he was convalescing after a recurrence of his heart complaint, Mr Begin tore into the Foreign Secretary as if he had just given a tea party for the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Jerusalem, he reminded Carrington, was the Jewish capital when London was a village. “It is 'not his business where the Prime Minister of Israel has his office,” Mr Begin thundered.. “As it is not the business of any Israeli citizens to advise Mrs Thatcher on the subject of London.”

But Mr Begin’s wrath undoubtedly stems mainly from his determination that East Jerusalem, which was occupied with the rest of the West Bank of the River Jordan after the 1967 war and includes the Wailing Wall, can never be negotiable. All the major Israeli politicians, including Shimon Peres, ths Labour Opposition leader subscribe to this view although some may be more willing than others to give the Arabs sovereignty over Islamic shrines.

Mr Begin has never made any secret of his own mystical passion for Jerusalem. In his account of his leadership of the Irgun underground movement against the British — “The Revolt” — he writes of the Wailing Wall: “The stones are not si-

lent. They do not cry out. They whisper. They speak softly of the house that once stood there, of kings who knelt here once in prayer . .. This is the house and this the country which knelt here once in prayer . .. is the house and this the country which,., was ours before the British were a nation. The testimony of these stones, sending out their light across the generations.” Almost all the holy places are behind the medieval walls of the old city in East Jerusalem. But Jews have predominated in the modern western half since about the turn of the century', when the crumbling Ottoman Empire relaxed its immigration laws and Jews, many of them elderly people who wanted to die in King David’s citv. started to re-

turn to Palestine. The official census Tigures of 1895 indicated that 30,000 of Jerusalem’s 50,000 inhabitants were Jews. Half a century later, at the time of the partition of Palestine, there were, entire Jewish suburbs in West Jerusalem all fronted in sandcoloured Jerusalem stone in accordance. with a bylaw made under the British mandate. In the cramped Jewish quarter of the Old City the lure of space and fellowship beyond the walls, plus the odd plague or two, have reduced the ghetto population to about 2000. When the United Nations voted for partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab States they declared that Jerusalem was to be an international city with Jordan’s Arab Legion commanding

the walls of the Old City from which the Jews had been expelled and the Israelis firmly in control of the western half. For the first time since the Crusaders burnt them alive in their synagogues there were no Jews living near the Wailing Wall. Despite objections from both the United Nations and the United States Government the Israelis declared the shattered metropolis, its cease-fire line defined by barbed-wire and barricades, to be their capital. This remained the situation for 19 years when, in June, 1967, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, the Arab Legion withdrew to the East Bank of the Jordan and the Israeli paratroopers came storming in. Within days the Israelis had extended the legal jurisdiction to both

sides of the city, and begun the process of swallowing un Arab land so that Jerusalem became Israel’s largest citv. A ring of new Jewish suburbs housing about 55.000 people has been built around it. The last link came this year when the Government expropriated 1000 acres of land, two-thirds of it Arabowned in northern Jerusalem. Under Kollek’s regime the citv underwent a tremendous facelift. Parks and gardens grew over the rubble of the old barricades. Museums and art galleries were opened. In the Old City, the vandalised Jewish quarter became an architectural gem — its crumbling houses converted into well-appointed flats for artists and businessmen. The tourists came back. To an extent the Arabs pros-

pered alongside the Jews. Mr Kollek frequently told visitors that his Arab cith zens preferred business to terrorism. He still does. Since 1968 the Jewish population of Greater Jerusalem has risen from 195,000 to 290,000; the Arab population from 56,000 to almost 100,000. ( Over the same period East Jerusalem, which was neglected under Jordanian rule in favour of Amman, has gradually become the de facto capital of the Palestinian West Bank despite the tourists and the other benefits of Mr Kollek’s rule. Neither the new suburbs, the Israeli army patrols, nor Mr Begin’s change of business address is likely to persuade its Arab residents that this is not the case. — Copyright, London Observer Service.