Around the year 1010 B.C.E., King David defeated the
Jebusites in Jerusalem and
decided to make the city his administrative capital.
When he brought the Ark of the Covenant to the city, he
stripped the Twelve Tribes of
the spiritual source of their power and concentrated it
in his own hands.
King David wanted to build a great
Temple for God as a permanent
resting place for the Ark of the Covenant. According to
Jewish tradition, David was not permitted to build the
Temple because he had been a
warrior. The task was to fall to a man of peace, David's
son, Solomon. The Temple
would become the focus of Jewish veneration from that
point to the present.
After Solomon died in 931 B.C.E., a
civil war led to a split in the Israelite nation. Jerusalem became part of the
southern kingdom of Judah, while ten of the northern
tribes formed the new kingdom of Israel. That kingdom
lasted until 722 B.C.E., when it was conquered by the
Assyrians.
Exile
Israel Fact
If you think modern
punishments are harsh, after his defeat by
Nebuchadnezzar, Zedekiah's sons were murdered in
front of him and then his eyes were gouged
out. |
Meanwhile, Judah staved off the
Assyrians and other potential invaders until the
Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, led his army into Jerusalem and captured the city in
597 B.C.E. He deported thousands of Jews and appointed
21-year-old Zedekiah, a descendant of King David, to
serve as king, expecting him to be a puppet ruler.
Zedekiah had different ideas, however, and mounted a
revolt. After an eighteen-month siege, Nebuchadnezzar
razed Jerusalem. Most of the
population was deported to Babylon in 586 B.C.E.
In 560 B.C.E. a new empire emerged, the
Persians, led by Cyrus the Great. Cyrus conquered
Palestine and then unexpectedly told the Jews they could
return to their homeland. While he was probably
motivated primarily by the desire to have someone else
rebuild Palestine and to make it a source of income for
the Persian Empire, the impact on the Jews was to
reinvigorate their faith and stimulate them to
reconstruct the Temple. The
Second Temple was completed
in 516 B.C. Over the next 150 years, Judea flourished as
the Jews rebuilt Jerusalem
and developed the surrounding areas.
Israel Fact
The family of
Mattathias became known as the Maccabees, from the Hebrew
word for "hammer," because they were said to
strike hammer blows against their enemies. The
family is more commonly known as the
Hasmoneans. |
In 332 B.C.E. a new power swept through
the Middle East. This time it was Alexander the Great
who became Palestine's ruler and introduced Greek culture and ideals --
Hellenism. Though many Jews had been seduced by the
virtues of Hellenism, the extreme measures adopted over
the years helped unite the people. When a Greek official
tried to force a priest named Mattathias to make a
sacrifice to a pagan god, the Jew murdered the man.
Responding to Greek reprisals, the Jews rose up in 167
B.C.E. behind Mattathias and his five sons and fought
for their liberation. Three years later, Jerusalem was recaptured from the
Greeks by the Maccabees and the Temple purified, an event that gave
birth to the holiday of Chanukah.
The last Jewish kingdom survived only
76 years. The grandsons of the Maccabees who had won Jewish
independence lost it in large part because of their
jealousy and greed. In all likelihood however, with
their own empire expanding, the Romans would not have permitted the
Jews to keep their kingdom much longer anyway. After
three years of fighting, Herod's Roman-backed army
wrested control of Jerusalem
and the rest of Judea from the Jews in 63 B.C.E.
Rome Rebuilds the
Temple
The most significant of Herod's
projects was the rebuilding of the Second Temple in the first century B.C.E.
It took 10,000 people and a thousand priests nine years
to complete the project. The original Temple of King Solomon was a
relatively small building on top of Mount Moriah. Herod
doubled the area of the Temple Mount and surrounded it
with four massive retaining walls. The western wall is
the longest, about 1600 feet (485 meters), and includes
the Jewish area of prayer known as the Kotel or
Western Wall.
In 66 A.D., after the procurator Florus
provoked the Jews through a variety of activities that
ranged from stealing silver from the Temple to desecrating the vestments
of the High Priest, the Zealots started a revolt. The Jews initially met with
success, routing Roman armies in Jerusalem, but the Romans returned with a larger
force. The Jews hoped to hold off the Romans in fortified Jerusalem, but they began a
fratricidal battle in which the Zealots murdered Jewish
leaders who refused to go along with their rebellion.
The Romans laid siege to the
city and in the year 70 A.D. overwhelmed the remaining
defenders and destroyed the Second Temple. Some of the Zealots escaped
and made their last stand at Masada.
Though the mighty Romans had been held at bay for
four years, their ultimate victory was never in doubt
and the consequences of the Jews' defeat was
devastating. Not only was the Temple destroyed, but perhaps as
many as one million Jews were killed and many survivors
enslaved.
Israel Fact
Scholars now believe
Jesus Christ was born between 4 and 7 B.C.E. and
was crucified either in 30 or 33 C.E. Like other
major figures in religious history (including
Moses and Mohammed), little is known about
Christ's childhood beyond the fact that he visited
Jerusalem when he was
about 12. He does not reappear in the Gospel until
he is 30, when he is baptized by John the
Baptist. |
After the suppression of the Jewish
revolt, relative calm settled on the Holy Land for
nearly 60 years. The Emperor Hadrian had even talked at
one point of rebuilding the Temple. He did build a temple;
however, it was in honor of Jupiter rather than the god
of the Jews. He also renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and made
it a Roman city.
This insult, along with other
indignities that went along with being Roman subjects, provoked yet
another rebellion beginning in 132 A.D., this time under
the charismatic leadership of Simeon
Bar-Kokhba. It took nearly three years for the
Romans to pacify the country
and, when they were done, roughly 600,000 Jews were dead
(including Bar-Kokhba) and Judea had been devastated.
The Emperor renamed the entire province Syria
Palaestina, Jerusalem became
a pagan city that Jews were forbidden to enter, and the
persecution of Judaism became
widespread.
After the destruction of the Second
Temple, the center of Jewish
life shifted from Jerusalem
to Yavneh, where Yochanan ben
Zakkai established an academy to train scholars.
Meanwhile, the influence of Christianity began to grow
in the region, culminating in 330 C.E. with Emperor
Constantine's decision to move the capital of the empire
from Rome to the city of Byzantium, which he renamed
Constantinople (now Istanbul).
The Rise of
Islam
The Islamic
conquest of Palestine, which began in 633, was
the beginning of a 1,300-year span during which more
than ten different empires, governments, and dynasties
were to rule in the Holy Land prior to the British
occupation after World War I.
In 638, the Jews in Palestine assisted
the Muslim forces in
defeating the Persians who had reneged on an agreement
to protect them and allow them to resettle in Jerusalem. As a reward for their
assistance, the Muslims
permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and to guard the Temple
Mount.
The Muslims fended off their rivals
until the end of the 11th century. In 1095, Pope Urban
II called for Crusades to
regain Palestine from the infidels. They succeeded in
1099 and celebrated by herding all the Jews into a
synagogue and burning them alive. Non-Christians were
subsequently barred from the city.
Saladin succeeded in expelling the
Crusaders and recaptured
Jerusalem for the Muslims in 1187. Two years later,
the Christians mounted the Third Crusade to retake Jerusalem, but Saladin's forces
repelled them.
Here Come the
Turks
The next important phase in the history
of Jerusalem was the conquest
of the Ottoman Turks at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The Turkish sultan
then became responsible for Jerusalem. The Holy Land was
important to the Turks only as a source of revenue;
consequently, like many of their predecessors, they
allowed Palestine to languish. They also began to impose
oppressive taxes on the
Jews.
Neglect and oppression gradually took
their toll on the Jewish community and the population
declined to a total of no more than 7,000 by the end of
the seventeenth century. It wasn't until the nascent
Zionist movement in Eastern
Europe motivated Jews to return to Palestine that the
first modern Jewish settlement was established -- in
Petah Tikvah in 1878.
The Ottoman
Empire held its own against rivals from Europe
and Asia for roughly 400 years. They chose, however, to
engage in a battle they could not win -- World War I --
and lost their empire. Palestine was captured by the
British, who subsequently were awarded a mandate from the League of Nations
to rule the country.
Politics & Religion
Mix
Ever since King David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel
3,000 years ago, the city has played a central role in
Jewish existence. The Western
Wall in the Old City the last remaining wall of
the ancient Jewish Temple,
the holiest site in Judaism
is the object of Jewish veneration and the focus of
Jewish prayer. Three times a
day for thousands of years Jews have prayed, To Jerusalem, thy city, shall we
return with joy, and have repeated the Psalmist's oath:
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.
Jews have been living in Jerusalem continuously for nearly
two millennia. They have constituted the largest single
group of inhabitants there since the 1840's (map of Jerusalem in 1912). Today,
the total population of Jerusalem is approximately 662,000.
The Jewish population in areas formerly controlled by
Jordan exceeds 160,000, outnumbering Palestinians in
"Arab" East Jerusalem.
The Dome of the Rock
 |
Muslims also revere the Holy City.
According to Islam, the prophet Mohammed was miraculously
transported from Mecca to Jerusalem, and it was from there
that he made his ascent to heaven. Still, despite
controlling the city for more than a thousand years,
Jerusalem was never the
capital of any Arab entity. In fact, it was a backwater
for most of Arab history.
For Christians, Jerusalem is the place where Jesus
lived, preached, died, and was resurrected. While it is
the heavenly rather than the earthly Jerusalem that is emphasized by the
Church, places mentioned in the New
Testament as the sites of his ministry and
passion have drawn pilgrims and devoted worshipers for
centuries.
A City
Divided
When the United
Nations took up the Palestine question in 1947,
it recommended that all of Jerusalem be internationalized. The
Jewish Agency, after much soul-searching, agreed to
accept internationalization in the hope that in the
short-run it would protect the city from bloodshed and
the new state from conflict. The Arab states were as
bitterly opposed to the internationalization of Jerusalem as they were to the rest
of the partition plan. Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion,
subsequently, declared that Israel would no longer
accept the internationalization of Jerusalem.
In May 1948,
Jordan invaded and occupied
east Jerusalem, dividing the
city for the first time in its history, and driving
thousands of Jews whose families had lived in the city
for centuries into exile. For the next 19 years, the
city was split, with Israel establishing its capital in
western Jerusalem and Jordan
occupying the eastern section, which included the Old
City and most religious shrines.
In 1950, Jordan annexed all the territory it
occupied west of the Jordan
River, including east Jerusalem. The other Arab countries
denied formal recognition of the Jordanian move, and the
Arab League considered
expelling Jordan from
membership. Eventually, a compromise was worked out by
which the other Arab governments agreed to view all the
West Bank and east Jerusalem
as held "in trust" by Jordan
for the Palestinians.
From 1948-67, the city was divided
between Israel and Jordan.
Israel made western Jerusalem
its capital; Jordan occupied
the eastern section. Because Jordan like all the Arab states
at the time maintained a state of war with Israel, the
city became two armed camps, replete with concrete walls
and bunkers, barbed-wire fences, minefields and other
military fortifications.
Broken grave stones in the Mount of
Olives cemetery
 |
In violation of
the 1949 Armistice Agreement, Jordan denied Israelis access to
the Temple Wall and to the
cemetery on the Mount of
Olives, where Jews have been burying their dead
for 2,500 years. Jordan
actually went further and desecrated Jewish holy places.
King Hussein permitted the
construction of a road to the Intercontinental Hotel
across the Mount of Olives cemetery. Hundreds of Jewish
graves were destroyed by a highway that could have
easily been built elsewhere. The gravestones, honoring
the memory of rabbis and sages, were used by the
engineer corps of the Jordanian Arab Legion as pavement
and latrines in army camps. The ancient Jewish Quarter
of the Old City was ravaged, 58 Jerusalem synagogues some
centuries old were destroyed or ruined, others were
turned into stables and chicken coops. Slum dwellings
were built abutting the Western
Wall.
Jews were not the only ones who found
their freedom impeded. Under Jordanian rule, Israeli
Christians were subjected to various restrictions, with
only limited numbers allowed to visit the Old City and
Bethlehem at Christmas and Easter. Because of these
repressive policies, many Christians emigrated from
Jerusalem, leading their
numbers to dwindle from 25,000 in 1949 to less than
13,000 in June 1967.
Jerusalem is Unified
In 1967, Jordan ignored Israeli pleas to
stay out of the Six-Day War
and attacked the western part of the city. The
Jordanians were routed by Israeli forces and driven out
of east Jerusalem, allowing
the city's unity to be restored. Teddy Kollek, Jerusalems mayor for 28 years,
called the reunification of the city "the practical
realization of the Zionist
movement's goals." Today, a museum devoted to
promoting dialogue and coexistence, the Museum on the Seam, is located at
the junction of East and West Jerusalem.
Freedom of
Religion
The Temple Mount
 |
After the war, Israel abolished all the
discriminatory laws promulgated by Jordan and adopted its own tough
standard for safeguarding access to religious shrines.
"Whoever does anything that is likely to violate the
freedom of access of the members of the various
religions to the places sacred to them," Israeli law
stipulates, is "liable to imprisonment for a term of
five years." Israel also entrusted administration of the
holy places to their respective religious
authorities.
Muslim rights on the Temple Mount, the
site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa Mosque,
have not been infringed, and the holy places are under
the supervision of the Muslim Waqf. Although it is
the holiest site in Judaism, Israel has left the Temple
Mount under the control of Muslim religious
authorities.
Since 1967, hundreds of thousands of
Muslims and Christians many from Arab countries that
remain in a state of war with Israel have come to
Jerusalem to see their holy
places. Arab leaders are free to visit Jerusalem to pray if they wish to,
just as Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat did at the El-Aksa mosque.
Along with religious freedom,
Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem have unprecedented
political rights. Arab residents were given the choice
of whether to become Israeli citizens. Most chose to
retain their Jordanian citizenship. Moreover, regardless
of whether they are citizens, Jerusalem Arabs are permitted to
vote in municipal elections and play a role in the
administration of the city.
The Final Status of
Jerusalem
The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DoP)
signed September 13, 1993, leaves open the status of
Jerusalem. Other than this
agreement to discuss Jerusalem during the final
negotiating period, Israel conceded nothing else
regarding the status of the city during the interim
period. Israel retains the right to build anywhere it
chooses in Jerusalem and
continues to exercise sovereignty over the undivided
city. Meanwhile, the Palestinians maintain that Jerusalem should be the capital of
an independent Palestinian state.
Jerusalem is
one issue on which the views of Israelis are unanimous:
The city must remain the undivided capital of Israel.
Still, efforts have been made to find some compromise
that could satisfy Palestinian interests. For example,
one suggestion is to allow the Palestinians to set up
their capital in a West Bank suburb of Jerusalem Abu
Dis.
