The last conquest of Jerusalem
Economist, 15 April 2006 [cover]
Jerusalem -- In the twilight of a Bethlehem evening, Jerusalem shimmers on a distant hilltop like the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City, its floodlit walls giving it a surrealist glow. Except that these are not the fortifications of ancient Jerusalem as seen above, but the appropriately named Har Homa (Wall Mountain), one of the new Israeli settlements that now ring the city.
After millennia of violent conquest and reconquest, Jerusalem, centre of pilgrimage, crucible of history and the world's oldest international melting-pot, is changing hands once more, but with a slow and quiet finality. Israel redrew the municipal boundary after the 1967 war to enclose some of the West Bank land that it had occupied, a de facto (though not internationally recognised) annexation.
Settlements like Har Homa gradually encroached on the empty spaces. In 2002, as the second intifada raged, and central Jerusalem took the brunt of suicide bombings, Israel started building the West Bank barrier or wall, supposedly to keep out Palestinian bombers. But its route, enclosing Palestinian as well as Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem (see map on next page), suggested another purpose too.
Before Israel's election last month, Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister, outlined his plan to do unilaterally what years of peace talks had failed to achieve: separate Israelis from Palestinians. Most of the smaller West Bank settlements would be removed, their residents brought over to the Israeli side of the barrier. A few days later, Otniel Schneller, a settler leader and member of Mr Olmert's Kadima party, publicly listed the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem that might stay on the West Bank side. Right-wingers accused Kadima of dividing the Jewish capital, but in fact all but two of the areas he mentioned