By Victor Sharpe

Now that would be Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, has failed to assure the Sephardic religious party, Shas, that Jerusalem will not be divided, the likelihood is that a general election will take place in Israel to form a new government sometime in January or February, 2009. Meanwhile the problematic Ehud Olmert has another three months in power as acting prime minister and can cause irreparable damage.

Shas chairman and cabinet minister, Eli Yishai, declared after talks with Ms. Livni broke down that, “Shas cannot be bought ... Jerusalem is not for sale.”

The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have been demanding that the eastern half of Jerusalem must be given to them in order to declare it the capital of a new Arab state called Palestine.

Such an independent Arab state called Palestine has never existed in all of recorded history. Palestine has always been a geographical area just as Siberia is: never an independent state.

Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of only one people in all of that same recorded history: the Jewish people. A so-called Kingdom of Jerusalem existed under the regime of the Christian Crusaders but this was created by a motley group of European knights who had no historical roots in the land.

The Jewish Bible along with the Talmud and the Midrash tell us that the Torah, its light and its message, is to be broadcast to the entire world from one specific place: Jerusalem.

We know that each time the Torah scroll is taken from the Ark to be read during synagogue services the following prayer is always sung. “For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah (Law), and the word of G-d from Jerusalem,” (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2)

In the Jewish Bible (the Tanach) the words Jerusalem and Zion appear 821 times with Jerusalem appearing 667 times and Zion appearing 154 times. Both Zion and Jerusalem are usually considered synonymous.

In the Christian Bible, which itself is an account of Jewish personalities whose lives were formed within the Jewish province of Rome known as Judea, as well as the Galilee, the name Jerusalem appears 154 times and Zion seven.

In the Koran, Islam’s holy book, Jerusalem and Zion do not appear at all. Indeed, it was only after the Arabs, under their new banner of Islam, conquered Jerusalem in the year 638 that they invented Islamic history in and around Jerusalem. We are told that Mohammed flew on his magic horse to a place called Al Aksa, which means simply the farthest place. Much later, and for political reasons to do with historic and spiritual Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem, did Muslims name the holy city as the actual destination.

After the HolyTemple was destroyed in the year 70 CE by Titus, Jerusalem lay stricken. But Jews still maintained a presence there and continued to suffer under Roman occupation.

The heroic Bar-Kochba Revolt broke out in 135 CE but was crushed three years later by the Roman emperor, Hadrian, who razed Jewish Jerusalem, plowed the city under, and renamed it Aelia Capitolina in part after his own name, Hadrian Publius Aelius. He built a shrine to the Roman god, Jupiter, on the site where the Holy Jewish Temple’s Holy of Holies had once stood.

From the 10th century the Muslim Arabs still called the city various names that echoed the original Jewish origins. For instance they called it Beit al-Makdis, the Arabic version of the Hebrew name, Beit HaMikdash – House of the Sanctuary. The present Arabic name, beloved of Palestinian terrorists, is Al-Kuds, which is derived from the Hebrew, Ir Hakodesh – City of Holiness.

The Christian king, Frederick II obtained Jerusalem, along with Bethlehem and Nazareth, in a treaty with the Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil. This was a lease agreement given by the Muslim ruler and meant to last some ten years. Frederick subsequently crowned himself King of Jerusalem.

But in 1244 the Muslims retook Jerusalem and the city no longer was considered important to them. It lapsed into a long, dilapidated slumber and the Muslim shrines on the TempleMount, which today are a focal point of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activity, fell into disrepair and abandonment.

Only when Israeli forces in June, 1967 liberated the TempleMount and east Jerusalem, during their defensive war against Arab aggression, did the Arab and Muslim world suddenly wake up and demand control of the city, or at least the TempleMount and Jerusalem’s eastern half.

It is instructive to note that when the Jordanian Arab Legion occupied east Jerusalem and the OldCity in 1948, after driving out its Jewish population, the Arab world again lost interest in the city. Indeed, King Hussein, Jordan’s ruler had little interest in Jerusalem compared to his desire to build up his capital, Amman, which he considered far more important.

Between 1948 and 1967, during the illegal Jordanian Arab occupation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, no Arab leader ever thought it important enough to visit Jerusalem except King Hussein who visited it rarely.

Today, Mahmoud Abbas, the successor to arch terrorist Yasser Arafat and now head of the Palestinian Authority, demands that Jerusalem be divided again as it was from 1948 to 1967 and a new Arab capital – for the first time in history – established in Jerusalem.

Acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, was to meet with Abbas so that he could spell out once again his previous offer of giving up almost all of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem as well as trading off large parts of Israel in return for retaining Jewish population centers, particularly Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion. However with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s failure to form a new government the meeting has been called off.

Not only the Muslim world, with its more than fifty member states, but the Europeans and President Bush have pressured Israel into conceding parts of its holy capital to further placate the voracious Arab appetite and “further the peace process.” U.S. President elect, Barack Obama, is expected to continue raising the pressure, perhaps considerably.

Giving away even one inch of Jerusalem would be to spit in the face of the endless generations of Jews who have held Jerusalem as the central spiritual and physical place in Jewish history. It would be a cataclysmic act of betrayal of Jewish history and faith if any part of Jerusalem is lost to the Jewish people by this generation of Israelis. It would also be a reverse for the Christian world. Only under Israeli administration has Jerusalem been open for free and unfettered worship to members of all three monotheistic faiths.  

For Jews, Jerusalem is the spiritual and temporal heart. The prayer uttered at Passover and Yom Kippur – “Next year in Jerusalem” – must not become an empty phrase made even more bitter in its utterance by some Israeli politicians and leaders abandoning much of eternal Jerusalem to placate a fraudulent Arab people called Palestinians and appease a hostile world by succumbing to a fraudulent peace.

For now, one Israeli leader, Eli Yishai, has finally found enough courage to proclaim that, “Jerusalem is not for sale.” It remains to be seen if that resolve by the leader of Shas, a party that has in the past itself been for sale, will remain steadfast or crumble through political and economic expediency.