Is Jerusalem the “eternal capital” of the Jewish people?
Recently I have heard from many Jewish friends statements such as that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, or that it has been the capital for three thousand years, since it was first established as such by King David. One respected Rabbi friend of mine (who is very critical of Trump) posted on Facebook that we don’t need Trump to tell us Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people, because God and the Torah already said so.
Are the above statements true?
From a religious point of view, who does Jerusalem belong to? To the Jewish people? No, to God. The Torah explicitly says all of the land of Israel belongs to God, and also warns, pointedly, that should Israel misbehave it will “vomit them out” no different than the previous non-Jewish inhabitants were (Leviticus/Vayikra 18:28).
From a religious point of view, that’s what happened when the Romans destroyed national and religious life in Israel in the 2nd century. Jewish religious tradition held that when the time was ripe, which would either be because Jews finally deserved it, or because God judged it to finally be time to redeem Israel and the world, God would return Jews to Israel and re-establish us there.
Though some will argue otherwise, the Zionist project was accomplished by the hard work and at the expense of the blood of Jews and others, with no miraculous divine intervention and no accompanying messianic age (to put it mildly).
From a religious point of view, Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel until God says it is, and so far that is far from happening in any sense that would have been recognizable to 2,000 years of Jewish tradition.
From a secular point of view, Jerusalem was established as the capital of the Kingdom of Judah, possibly in the 9th century BCE, after being taken from the Jebusites. It was named “City of Shalem” after a deity in the Canaanite pantheon. It ceased to be the capital of Israel in the 2nd century due to Roman suppression of Jewish nationalism. After that it was the capital of a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were barred from entering the city on pain of death for five hundred years. The city was ruled by the Byzantines, then Arab Muslims, then changed hands in a dizzying series of conquests, expulsions, re-conquests and counter-conquests, though most of the time staying under Muslim control until the British took it from the Ottoman Empire during WW1.
From a Jewish point of view all of this was a tragic loss. Jews, an indigenous people of Israel, had been colonized and then largely displaced, scattered to the winds, while others fought over control of the city of our dreams.
Yet that’s what happened. The land, though it remained home in the Jewish imagination, became the home of others. For almost 1800 years that was the case. Non-Jewish people were born, lived, loved and died there, and it was their home. They formed ties to the land that are not, in their minds, less than the ties we Jews have to it.
When Jews returned to Palestine and recreated a national home there it was a stunning achievement. Even then, in 1947, Jerusalem was not re-established as the capital due to the just claims of Arab Palestinians and the fact that Jerusalem had also become sacred to two other world religions with billions of followers as well as to the eleven million Jews then surviving in the world.
The U.N. recommended Jerusalem be an international capitol, but it remained divided between Israeli and Jordanian control until Israel seized the eastern half in the 1967 war. Even after that, however, only the Western half was recognized internationally as belonging to Israel.
What good is a capital that the world does not recognize? What reality does it have? However real it might be in the imagination, it does not possess much reality outside of it. There is no question that since 1947 Israelis, and most Jews, have viewed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Yet that does not make it so. It has never been united under international law, and the world community still rejects that assertion, as today’s UN vote showed again.
As a thought experiment, imagine if the original indigenous inhabitants of New York were to claim that City as the capital of a reborn nation. Let’s say it was the Mohawk, or as they call themselves, the Kanienkehaka. Imagine the Kanienkehaka came back from all parts of the world and slowly bought up the New York real estate, segregating themselves from the current inhabitants and openly saying they would turn the city into a nation state for themselves that was to revolve around their preservation, their laws, their religion, their identity.
Although the Indigenous people of New York have been displaced for less than three hundred years this claim would be accepted by very few New Yorkers indeed. Massive anti-Indigenous sentiment, and likely war, would likely follow. Imagine now they had been displaced for 1800 years!
Imagine the Kanienkehaka claimed New York, under another name, was their eternal capital and had been given to. them by God, who they call He-wan-ni-yu, “he who rules”. How would the current denizens of the Bronx feel about that?
This is an essential thought experiment for Jews who want to understand how Zionism may be viewed from the outside.
Would there be any justice to the claims of the Kanienkehaka? Yes, there would be. Yet a sole focus on the justice of their claim to the exclusion of the claims of the people who had come to live in New York in the last centuries would not be humane. It would not be truly just.
Justice would demand that a compromise solution be reached, and New York become a multicultural city one that honoured all of its histories and all of its inhabitants, with an essential place being made for its surviving ancient indigenous inhabitants, the Kanienkehaka.
It seems easy to see this with regards to our fictional reconstruction of New York. Why is it so hard for us to see this with regard to the new Jerusalem?
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