The city of Jerusalem, holy to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths, is known to cause its own particular kind of madness. About 50 foreign visitors to the city a year experience what is known as “Jerusalem Syndrome” — psychotic delusions that they are biblical figures or harbingers of Armageddon.
The city also causes some peculiar diplomatic madness. Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, but almost no country recognises it as such. Israel is the only country in the world which other nations refuse to allow to choose its own capital.
Many commentators and journalists say or imply that is because other countries don’t want to recognise Israel’s supposed occupation of the eastern half of the city, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, and which the Palestinians want as the capital of their own future state.
This is just wrong. Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1950, long before the 1967 war, and even between 1950 and 1967, most states refused to recognise it as Israel’s capital.
So it’s not about the “occupation” of east Jerusalem.
So what is it about? It’s because of a completely obsolete element of the UN Partition of 1947 which called for a Jewish state and an Arab state in what had been the British mandate of Palestine. This had called for Jerusalem to be an “international city” under UN control, reaffirmed by a couple of subsequent General Assembly resolutions.
Yet during the 1948 war between a fledgling Israel and several Arab states after the Arabs rejected partition, the UN made no effort to enforce its plans for Jerusalem, or defend its majority Jewish residents from a siege launched by the Jordanians and Palestinian militias to starve them out. Nonetheless, after the war, it was thought by some diplomats that the old idea of an “international city” might be revised in peace talks.
Read the full article by Colin Rubenstein at The Australian.