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Reuters - Thursday, May 13
By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM - Beset by questions about Jerusalem's future in talks
with the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
reached for the Bible on Wednesday to stake out the Jewish
state's contested claim on the city.
Netanyahu told a parliamentary session commemorating Israel's
capture of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war that
"Jerusalem" and its alternative Hebrew name "Zion" appear 850
times in the Old Testament, Judaism's core canon.
"As to how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the holy
scriptures of other faiths, I recommend you check," he said.
Citing such ancestry, Israel calls all of Jerusalem its "eternal
and indivisible" capital -- a designation not recognised abroad,
where many powers support Arab claims to East Jerusalem as the
capital of a future Palestinian state.
The dispute is further inflamed by the fact East Jerusalem
houses al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine, on a plaza
that Jews revere as the vestige of two biblical Jewish temples.
Heckled by a lawmaker from Israel's Arab minority, Netanyahu
offered a lesson in comparative religion from the lectern.
"Because you asked: Jerusalem is mentioned 142 times in the New
Testament, and none of the 16 various Arabic names for Jerusalem
is mentioned in the Koran. But in an expanded interpretation of
the Koran from the 12th century, one passage is said to refer to
Jerusalem," he said.
Responding to Netanyahu's citations, Palestinian chief
negotiator Saeb Erekat said: "I find it very distasteful, this
use of religion to incite hatred and fear. East Jerusalem is an
occupied Palestinian town, and East Jerusalem cannot continue to
be occupied if there is to be peace."
MANY RULERS
Destroyed as a Jewish capital by the Romans in the 1st century
AD, Jerusalem was a Christian city under their Byzantine
successors before falling to Muslim Arabs in the 7th. European
Crusaders regained it for a century, after which came 700 years
of Muslim rule until Britain defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1917.
As Britain prepared to quit, the United Nations proposed
international rule for the city in 1947 as a "corpus separatum."
That proposal was overtaken by fighting that left Israel holding
West Jerusalem in 1948 and Jordanian forces in East Jerusalem.
Israel then took the rest in the Six Day War of 1967.
The city, within boundaries defined by Israel but not recognized
internationally, is now home to 750,000 people, two in three of
them Jews and the rest mostly Muslim Palestinians.
Netanyahu did not refer in his speech to indirect peace
negotiations with the Palestinians that resumed this month after
1-1/2 years of U.S. trouble-shooting. Diplomacy has been mired
by mutual recrimination, including from Israel over the
Palestinian refusal to formally recognise it as a Jewish state.
This has ossified into diehard hostility among Palestinians
aligned with Islamist Hamas, while those more inclined towards
peacemaking accuse Israel of sabotaging prospects by treating
occupied land as a Jewish birthright that can be freely seized.
Netanyahu said Israel would retain control over all of Jerusalem
while ensuring freedom of worship at its holy sites.
Such assertions are challenged by Palestinians given that
Israel, over the last decade of fighting, has often limited
their access to al-Aqsa. Christians in the adjacent West Bank
complain of similar difficulties in reaching Jerusalem churches.
"There is no undercutting, nor do I intend to undercut, the
connection of others to Jerusalem," Netanyahu said.
"But I do confront the attempt to undercut and warp or obfuscate
the unique connection that we, the people of Israel, have to the
capital of Israel."
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