Beset by questions about Jerusalem's future in talks with
the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached for the
Bible on Wednesday to stake out the Jewish state's contested claim on the city.
Netanyahu told a parliamentary session commemorating
Israel's capture of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war that
"Jerusalem" and its alternative Hebrew name "Zion" appear
850 times in the Old Testament, Judaism's core canon.
"As to how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the
holy scriptures of other faiths, I recommend you check," he said.
Citing such ancestry, Israel calls all of Jerusalem its
"eternal and indivisible" capital -- a designation not recognized
abroad, where many powers support Arab claims to East Jerusalem as the capital
of a future Palestinian state.
The dispute is further inflamed by the fact East Jerusalem
houses al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine, on a plaza that Jews
revere as the vestige of two biblical Jewish temples.
Heckled by a lawmaker from Israel's Arab minority, Netanyahu
offered a lesson in comparative religion from the lectern.
"Because you asked: Jerusalem is mentioned 142 times in
the New Testament, and none of the 16 various Arabic names for Jerusalem is
mentioned in the Koran. But in an expanded interpretation of the Koran from the
12th century, one passage is said to refer to Jerusalem," he said.
Responding to Netanyahu's citations, Palestinian chief
negotiator Saeb Erekat said: "I find it very distasteful, this use of
religion to incite hatred and fear. East Jerusalem is an occupied Palestinian
town, and East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be
peace."
MANY RULERS
Destroyed as a Jewish capital by the Romans in the 1st
century AD, Jerusalem was a Christian city under their Byzantine successors
before falling to Muslim Arabs in the 7th. European Crusaders regained it for a
century, after which came 700 years of Muslim rule until Britain defeated the
Ottoman Turks in 1917.
As Britain prepared to quit, the United Nations proposed
international rule for the city in 1947 as a "corpus separatum."
That proposal was overtaken by fighting that left Israel
holding West Jerusalem in 1948 and Jordanian forces in East Jerusalem. Israel
then took the rest in the Six Day War of 1967.
The city, within boundaries defined by Israel but not
recognized internationally, is now home to 750,000 people, two in three of them
Jews and the rest mostly Muslim Palestinians.
Netanyahu did not refer in his speech to indirect peace
negotiations with the Palestinians that resumed this month after 1-1/2 years of
U.S. trouble-shooting. Diplomacy has been mired by mutual recrimination,
including from Israel over the Palestinian refusal to formally recognize it as
a Jewish state.
This has ossified into diehard hostility among Palestinians
aligned with Islamist Hamas, while those more inclined toward peacemaking
accuse Israel of sabotaging prospects by treating occupied land as a Jewish
birthright that can be freely seized.
Netanyahu said Israel would retain control over all of
Jerusalem while ensuring freedom of worship at its holy sites.
Such assertions are challenged by Palestinians given that
Israel, over the last decade of fighting, has often limited their access to
al-Aqsa. Christians in the adjacent West Bank complain of similar difficulties
in reaching Jerusalem churches.
"There is no undercutting, nor do I intend to undercut,
the connection of others to Jerusalem," Netanyahu said.
"But I do confront the attempt to undercut
and warp or obfuscate the unique connection that we, the people of Israel, have
to the capital of Israel.
Jerusalem