Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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

'A new history of Jerusalem offers an unbiased account of how the city came to be so politically contentious.' Financial Times

Anybody seeking a reliable guide to this awful situation can do no better than Professor Wasserstein's timely book.

Lucid and absorbing.

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

'The 'eternally unified capital' of the state of Israel is the most deeply divided capital city in the world. Its Arab and Jewish residents inhabit different districts, speak different languages, attend different schools, read different newspapers, watch different television programmes, observe different holy days, follow different football teams - live, in almost every significant respect, different lives...' (from the preface) A fascinating account of the tumultuous history of one of the most troubled and important cities in the world by a brilliant historian. How has the city become so hopelessly divided and will it always be so? Is a solution possible and what has been the fate of earlier attempts to reconcile the different communities? Bernard Wasserstein examines the often unhappy history of the Holy City - one of the most contentious places in the world. Wasserstein shows how, throughout modern history, Jerusalem has been exploited for the ulterior purposes of many powers. The religious devotion of masses of Christians, Muslims and Jews throughout the world, he argues, has been manipulated for often squalid ends. Wasserstein contends that a long-term solution to the Jerusalem question must involve recognition of current social reality: a city that in almost every way is irrevocably divided. Against the background of renewed violence in and around Jerusalem, this book offers a timely and illuminating contribution towards the effort to achieve a negotiated settlement of a tragic conflict that, in one way or another, affects us all.

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London and educated at Balliol and Nuffield Colleges in Oxford. His many books include The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Penguin), which won the Golden Dagger Award for Non-fiction and was acclaimed as a tour de force of historical detection. His most recent book was the controversial Vanishing Diaspora (Penguin). He is currently working on a history of Europe in the twentieth century for Oxford University Press.