O, Jerusalem

In 1919 Louis Brandeis, the great Supreme Court justice, took a trip to Egypt and Palestine with his daughter. He was moved, in Jerusalem, to write his wife Alice: "It's a wonderful country, a wonderful city. [...] It is a miniature California, but a California endowed with all the interest which the history of man can contribute and the deepest emotions which can stir a people. The ages-long longing, the love is all explicable now. [...] The problems are serious and numerous. The way is long, the path difficult and uncertain; but the struggle is worthwhile. It is indeed a Holy Land."

If only he knew.

Jerusalem is Yerushalayim in Hebrew, which means "City of Peace," Al Quds in Arabic, which means "The Holy." It has been anything but for a place so sacred to the world's three largest religions.

Islam's Dome of the Rock, also known as the Mosque of Omar (Omar was the second caliph to succeed the Prophet Muhammad, though he didn't build the mosque), is there. So is Al Aksa Mosque, from where Muhammad is supposed to have taken his Black Elk-like mystical night flight, though the mosque was built almost two centuries after Mohammed's death. Christianity's Church of the Holy Sepulcher (to some Christians the site of Christ's tomb, to other Christians not) is there. And of course the Western Wall of Judaism's temple, which was never part of the temple, is there. In other words, even the holiest (or near-holiest) sites of the great religions seem to be arguing with themselves about the authenticity of their connection to willed beliefs, themselves tentacled exclusively by faith to religion's trellises beyond it all.

And to think that anyone at this late date (I'm speaking millenniums here, not years), Palestinian or Israeli, would want to layer Jerusalem's congenital heartbreaks in yet another prisonhouse, this one least justifiable of all because it's a rational choice, therefore an avoidable one--the prisonhouse of political demarcation, which by definition defines inclusion as much as it defines exclusion.

For all its strategic religious value Jerusalem was never the capital of any state. In the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 Jordan took control of East Jerusalem, threw out all Jews and demolished most of the synagogues there. Israel retaliated, first by occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, then by annexing it and declaring the whole city Israel's capital in 1980, an act the United Nations condemned and the United States didn't recognize.

But Jerusalem is never too far from American politics. In 1995, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a law that required the U.S. government to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by 1999, pending completion of the "final-status" agreement between Israel and Palestinians that was supposed to have been achieved in line with the Oslo accords of 1993. Oslo collapsed, "final status" is as un-final as ever, the embassy is still in Tel Aviv, as are the embassies of all nations with diplomatic ties with Israel.

Now John McCain has vowed to move the embassy to Jerusalem regardless-should he be elected president, that is. He needs that South Florida vote (where Florida's liberal and independent Jewish vote is concentrated), and we now know he'll say anything, and occasionally do anything, to get his way. But does he realize what an inflammatory act that would be? Ariel Sharon triggered the second Palestinian Intifadah on Sept. 28, 2000 by merely (well, let's say provocatively) visiting, with a phalanx of armed men, Jerusalem's Temple Mount complex, where the Dome and the al-Aqsa Mosque are located, to declare that Israel would control the place from here to (apologies to James Jones) eternity. Then as now the state of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations was in intensive care. Sharon's gambit flat-lined it and the lives of many Israelis and many, many more Palestinians.

Imagine what McCain would inflame by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. Why the provocation?

I'm reminded of a New York Times editorial on Aug. 3, 1980, following Israel's passage of its "basic law" declaring Jerusalem the capital: "Thus did Israeli moderates, like so many Arab moderates, mortgage themselves to the frantic fringes that prefer war, terror and repression to conciliation, compromise and peace. And for what? A new law that in no way alters the already proclaimed annexation of East Jerusalem or Israel's development of the city in patterns that make a future division almost inconceivable. A final peace may one day provide for a symbolic sharing of sovereignties in Jerusalem, and define rights of access to the holy shrines of three religions. But that is for the end of the peace process, when passions have been cooled by the vision of a new future. To play upon those passions now is reckless, as most Israelis surely know."

Read More About Jerusalem:

• Jerusalem As the Capital of Israel: Legal Status or Illegal Occupation?

• Should the American Embassy Be in Jerusalem?
• United Nations Resolution 478 (1980) on the Status of Jerusalem
• United Nations Resolution 476 (1980) on Israel's Occupation of East Jerusalem
• Israel: Country Profile
• What Is the Knesset?