US President Donald Trump has recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in a move that would upturn decades of precedent and run counter to international consensus.
The
city is revered by three major faiths but mired in political, as well
as religious, disputes. Its status is one of the thorniest issues of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Whose capital?
Jewish Israelis consider Jerusalem to be their
3,000-year-old capital and the inalienable birthright of Jews
everywhere. Since the destruction in ancient times of two separate
Jewish temples in the city and the exile of the Holy Land’s surviving
Hebrews, Judaism has looked for a return of its people to their biblical
home. According to scripture, King David made Jerusalem the capital of a
unified kingdom of Israel around 1000 BC.
The city’s
heavily visited Western Wall is among the last remnants of the second
Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
The
Palestinians, who make up about a third of the modern city’s population
of some 882,000, claim east Jerusalem as the capital of the state to
which they aspire. It also has great religious significance for Muslims
as it houses the Al-Aqsa mosque complex, Islam’s third-holiest site, and
the emblematic gold-topped Dome of the Rock.
While
Palestinians have been divided in recent years between President Mahmud
Abbas’s Fatah and Islamist movement Hamas, Jerusalem remains one of
their most powerful rallying points for both religious and nationalistic
reasons.
The city is also home to the holiest sites in
Christianity, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the
site where most Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried.
City of controversy
A 1947 United Nations plan prescribed partitioning
British-run Palestine into three separate entities: a Jewish state, an
Arab state and a separate enclave, or “corpus separatum”, consisting of
Jerusalem, nearby Bethlehem and holy places in the vicinity to be under
UN control. The proposal was accepted by Zionist leaders but rejected by
the Arabs.
Following the departure of the British in
1948, the Jews declared an independent state of Israel, followed by
fighting with Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states.
At the end of the war, east Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands while the new Jewish state set up its capital in the west.
The
two sides were divided by barbed wire, sandbags and machine-gun
emplacements until the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel seized and
occupied the eastern zone.
It declared the whole city its
eternal and united capital and in 1980 annexed east Jerusalem, a move
never recognised by the international community.
Capital without embassies
Until the annexation, 13 countries maintained their
embassies in Jerusalem: Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, the
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, The
Netherlands, Panama, Uruguay and Venezuela.
They all relocated to Tel Aviv, where other states had their legations.
Costa Rica and El Salvador returned to the city in 1984 but headed back to Tel Aviv in 2006.
US policy on holy city
In 1995, the US Congress passed an act stating “Jerusalem
should be recognised as the capital of the State of Israel and the
United States embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no
later than May 31, 1999”. Since then, implementation has been blocked by
successive US presidents.
Trump vowed during his
election campaign to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to
recognise the disputed city as Israel’s capital.
He has
partially fulfilled that pledge, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s capital,
but only declaring his intent to move the embassy there, which could
take years.
The traditional US position on the city had been that Jerusalem’s status must be negotiated between the two sides.
