By Rabbi Ben Kamin
JERUSALEM–The so-called prime minister of Hamas—a terror syndicate banned from recognition by the United States and the European Union—is campaigning in European capitals against Israel’s practice of making Jerusalem too Jewish. Here is the verbal equivalent of Hamas’s launching of 10,000 killer missiles into Israeli towns and villages in the past year even while the UN discusses Palestinian statehood.
Let me state before proceeding that I happen to historically agree that there remains an unforgivable inequity, socially, politically, educationally, that exists between Jewish and Muslim residents of the Holy City founded by King David some 3,000 years ago. Arab denizens and Palestinians generally are too often subjected to wanton road blocks, destruction of homes and olive groves, water rights, and electoral participation that exists beyond their paper citizenship. Many Israelis are more vocal than American Jews about these deplorable conditions and 80%+ of Israelis have nothing to do with the “settler movement.”
But the systemic abjuration of real social justice for the majority African American population in Washington, DC, confined to substandard school houses (not without hard-working and meritorious teachers), intermittent public transportation, dangerous neighborhoods, and unparalleled employment does not call into question the inherent and historic status of Washington as the capital of the United States.
One doesn’t hear, in spite of Syria’s genocide of its own citizens, that Damascus is too Syrian. Nobody has suggested that Pyongyang, the urban playground of the now departed “Dear Leader” is just too Korean.
Jerusalem, while including—and responsible for—its significant Muslim and Christian minorities was, has been, and will always be the capital, symbol, and liturgical centerpiece of Jewish demography, theology, language, and history. Its reunification to what it was for centuries during the 1967 war was triggered by Jordanian shelling (after Jordan occupied its holy quarters for 19 years of squalid treatment) and only after Israel contacted Jordanian ministers and offered not to enter combat if Amman stayed out of the massive invasion of Israel underway from Egypt and Syria.
Jerusalem is mentioned 700 times in the Hebrew Scripture; there is not one reference to the city in the Holy Koran. Jerusalem was never sought as an Arab polity over twenty centuries, even during long intervals of colonial intervention (which afflicted the Jews therein just as much, if not more, than the Muslim and Christian inhabitants). No other people on the planet chant “Next Year In Jerusalem” as a poetic refrain every year—at the holiday of Passover. Jerusalem was capital of Israel when Saudi Arabia was just sand; it is as Jewish a capital as Ottawa is Canadian.
Jews face Jerusalem when we pray; Muslims actually have their back towards Jerusalem when facing their sacred pilgrimage city of Mecca. It’s about time that religious geographers simply face facts.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com