In theory, the Old City of Jerusalem is — or will be — on the table for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Every Middle East peace plan, including the recent “road map,” has envisioned this eventuality.
But “it is not going to happen” that Israel will agree to give up sovereignty over the Old City, especially not the parts “50 feet from the Western Wall” like the “Muslim Quarter,” according to Yossi Baumol.
Baumol is executive director of Ateret Cohanim: The Jerusalem Reclamation Project, which engages in scholarly activity (a yeshiva, kollel and research institute) and in the purchase of property in the Muslim and Christian Quarters of the Old City to restore Jewish life to these areas.
In an interview before Sabbath last Friday, Baumol said the Old City will remain in Israel’s hands not because his organization and its supporters would oppose or resist the idea.
“Our philosophy is one should not compromise with the Arabs over the land of Israel,” Baumol said. “But we have to compromise with our fellow Jews, no matter what their opinions are. For us, the laws of the state [of Israel] are holy, and we don’t break the law.”
“But we don’t believe the Jewish people will agree to a solution that would require a Jew to leave his home in Jerusalem,” he continued. “I think the [former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak government fell because of that.”
Therefore, “I don’t anticipate” Israel will ever give it up. Indeed, every past Israeli government, Labor or Likud, has said Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem is not negotiable, Baumol said.
Baumol also rejected the idea that he and his organization are conducting their own foreign policy independently of Israel’s elected government, an allegation sometimes made about some of the Jewish settlers in the Israel-administered West Bank and Gaza Strip.
He pointed out that, in contrast to those lands, Israel annexed the Old City within a month of its capture in June 1967. So when a Jewish citizen of Jerusalem buys a property there from an Arab citizen, “that is not a settlement; it is a business transaction.”
That such transactions are legal, he said, is proven by the fact that since about 1978, some 300 court cases have been brought against the project, and “we never lost a case.”
But that is just the legal case. The moral argument for his organization’s work is that Jews lived in these quarters in the past and it would be “ethnic cleansing” to exclude them, he said.
Baumol said that in 1921 the population of the “Muslim Quarter” was 70 percent Jewish. One can still see evidence of this; many buildings there have the hollowed out compartment in their doorposts in which mezuzahs were placed when Jews lived in them, said Dr. Dennis Maiman, the Mequon resident primarily responsible for Baumol’s local visit.
But Jews were forced out of those parts of Jerusalem by the Arabs first in the riots of the 1920s and 1930s, and then in the wake of the 1948 War of Independence, when Jordan captured the Old City.
So today, Baumol said, “We are paying money to the children and grandchildren of those who stole our homes from us [so they will] give our homes back. It’s ludicrous.”
To date, the project has purchased some 100 apartments in 40 areas of the Muslim and Christian Quarters, Baumol said. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is just one of the residents who made his purchase through Ateret Cohanim.
Baumol, a New York City native, has been executive director of Ateret Cohanim since 1990. He was in the United States to speak and raise funds and spoke at Congregation Agudas Achim Chabad in Mequon last weekend.
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