which included the Old City, coming under Arab (Jordanian) control and the rest under Israel's (Phillips, 1975, p. 191). Currently, this is still the official, or de jure, status of the city. However, in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel annexed the whole of the city, which remains under Israel's de facto control. It is widely agreed by both Arabs and Israelis that a lasting settlement of differences between them is virtually impossible unless the status of Jerusalem is settled. There is no agreement on what that status should be, except on one difficult point, that both Israel's government and the Palestinian authorities claim, for religious reasons, Jerusalem as their national capital (Pogrebin, 1993).
Territorial and cultural rivalry in the Middle East in general and Jerusalem in particular has been a fact since 1947, when the UN began to supervise the partition of the British-controlled Palestine Mandate with a view toward establishing a Jewish state in the region. Issues surrounding political and territorial stability have never been resolved, and the status of Jerusalem has been of particular concern and conflict. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the governance authority for the Palestinians in Israel, wants to reassert control over Arab (east) Jerusalem (Katz, 1994; Masalha, 1995), while Israel wants to institutionalize its control over the entire city. This is a function of the fact that in 1967 Israel merged Arab and Jewish Jerusalem under Israeli control. Now this merging technically violates international law, i.e., the 1947 UN decision, and the UN does not officially recognize the 1967 Israeli act. However, as a practical matter this does not automatically mean that the PLO is likely to seek UN sanction for its claim to East Jerusalem. The reason, suggests Masalha (1995), is that neither the Palestinians nor the Israeli government want to relinquish Jerusalem to international control.
In support of t...