Trump’s Jerusalem decision sets peace prospects back, and people of faith must move it forward

Poets sing the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without war, envy or hatred. Some of us have long hoped to see whether the work over decades by many imams, rabbis, ministers and priests could make the earthly Jerusalem more like its heavenly counterpart. Secular politicians do the negotiations but teachers of these great religions are charged with teaching compassion, tolerance and brotherhood.

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Israel has long rebuffed American demands for a total freeze on Israel’s colonisation of occupied Palestinian land. In 2009, Netanyahu went further, evicting Palestinian families in Arab East Jerusalem to allow Jewish families to take over. Now, Trump’s move has anti-Zionist Israelis seeing collusion with Netanyahu’s hardline, anti-Palestinian policies.

President Bill Clinton was wrong after the Camp David summit broke up in 2000 in berating Yasser Arafat for not compromising on Jerusalem. He seemed not to understand Arafat’s observation: “The Arab leader has not been born who will give up Jerusalem.” Clinton looked at the compromises Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak had made and assumed this was a fair deal.

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At the ending of the British mandate, Jerusalem belonged to the Palestinians. They lost West Jerusalem in their ill-judged war with Israel in 1948. In 1967, Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem and its Old City. The US recognised there would be no peace until this occupation was reversed, hence its vote for UN Resolution 242 in 1967 that called on Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied”. Thus it is a matter of international justice that, at the very least, the Arab parts of East Jerusalem be returned to Palestine, as long as Jews have free access to their sacred Western Wall at the foot of Temple Mount.

French president Emmanuel Macron says Jerusalem decision by the US is a ‘danger to peace’