Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City - Hardcover

Wasserstein, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300091648 ISBN 13: 9780300091649

Publisher: Yale Univ Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Jerusalem is a deeply divided city. The Jewish and Palestinian populations lead completely separate lives with different schools, shops, taxi companies. languages and newspapers. How has the city become so hopelessly divided and will it always be so? Is a solution possible?

About this title

Review:

Professor Bernard Wasserstein's meticulously researched Divided Jerusalem is compulsory reading for all those grappling to understand the passions and perplexities behind the Palestinian uprising. Despite--or possibly because of--its reunification in the Six-Day War of 1967, Jerusalem today, says Wasserstein, is: "the most deeply divided capital city in the world." The struggle between its two main protagonists will be resolved, "only when there dawns some genuine recognition of the reality and legitimacy of its plural character, spiritually, demographically and--all claims to sole possession notwithstanding--politically."

The Holy City, he believes, is at the core of the Arab-Israeli relationship. Although prospects for a settlement look bleaker today than for many years, Wasserstein believes that the current violence cannot prevent a long term-solution. And for that solution, he sees the best hope of success in aspects of the draft final-status agreement reached, on October 31, 1995, between then Israeli deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and scuppered only four days later by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

While leaving many key questions unanswered, the so-called Beilin-Abu Mazin agreement (incorporating Abbas' nom de guerre) attempted to settle all outstanding issues between the Israelis and Palestinians and--most crucially--came close to providing a blueprint for solving the Jerusalem problem. Detailing its main points over several pages, Wasserstein describes the agreement as "a surprising achievement" and adds: "We cannot now know whether [it] could have turned into a final peace treaty. Yet the experience of its negotiators in relation to the Oslo Agreement, which had also started out as a similar back-channel document, gave them some ground for optimism." Whether its findings can be resurrected, and the optimism realised, only time will tell.-- Meir Persoff

Review:

Among many recent books on similar lines, Wasserstein's care, coolness and his striving after the elusive goal of objectivity should be congratulated. -- Independent, April, 2001

Anybody seeking a reliable guide to this awful situation can do no better than Professor Wasserstein's timely book. -- Church Times, March 2001

For a lucid and impartial of the problem, and of the possibilities of solving it, this is the book to which they should turn. -- International Affairs, July, 2001

Lucid and absorbing. -- New Statesman, April, 2001

This humane and wise book transcends the bitterness, prejudice and intractability that mar the city of three faiths. -- Literary Review, April, 2001

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0300091648
• ISBN 13: 9780300091649
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 412