Fifteen years ago, when Bar Ilan University first bestowed the Guardian of Zion Award on Nobel Prize laureate Professor Elie Wiesel, the idea that someday the State of Israel would be in a genuinely fierce battle to prove her legitimate claim to Jerusalem seemed to fall in the province of doomsayers and cynics.
But times have changed, and the unthinkable has become an accepted standard that is flown at high mast even above parliaments in the western world.
For this reason, it is significant that Bar Ilan’s Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, directed by Professor Joshua Schwartz, which created the award to honor persons who have dedicated their lives to the strengthening of Jerusalem, has chosen Ambassador Dore Gold to be this year’s recipient of this prestigious award.
Ambassador Gold, who served as Israeli ambassador to the UN from 1997-1999, is a prolific author and outspoken orator on the centrality of Jerusalem, on Israel, and on the Middle East. He accompanied Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the 2003 Aqaba Summit with President George W. Bush and has advised Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his terms in office. He has become identified with the “defensible borders†project, which he spearheads in his capacity as the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a multidisciplinary, independent think tank. His books include The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, and, most recently, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.
The award ceremony took place on June 6 at the 80-year-old King David Hotel, whose history is, itself, a symbol of Israel’s struggle for freedom. Previous recipients present that evening included Prof. Elie Wiesel, Academy Award winning producer Arthur Cohn, journalist Caroline Glick, David Be’eri, and Rabbi Yehuda Maly of the Ir David (City of David) project, and Mordechai (Suli) Eliav of the Cotel Tunnels. Other previous recipients include Dr. Charles Krauthammer, Dr. Daniel Pipes, Sir Martin Gilbert, Herman Wouk, and the late former New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal. Last year’s recipient was Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Bar-Ilan University President Prof. Moshe Kaveh praised U.S. Jewish community leaders Ingeborg and Ira Rennert for establishing the Center in Mrs. Rennert’s name at the University. According to Professor Schwartz, the Ingeborg Rennert Center provides the research and publication forum for the presentation of most of the initial archaeological research that takes place today, and maintains academic and research cooperation with numerous institutions and scholars abroad regarding Jerusalem throughout the ages.
Great Legal Minds On The Sovereignty Of Jerusalem
Amb. Gold opened by stressing that, “Forty-four years ago, at the end of the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israeli paratroopers reached the Western Wall and their commander, Motta Gur, announced ‘Har Habayit beyadeinu†(the Temple Mount is in our hands), there was no doubt over the fact that Israel had waged a just war.†From there he proceeded to cite legal experts who made the case that the secular legal claim of the Jewish people and the State of Israel on the city of Jerusalem is as cogent and solid as the religious-historical claim. Among those were scholar Stephen Schwebel, who eventually became legal advisor of the U.S. Department of State, and then the President of the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
Schwebel opposed the opinions of Secretary of State William Rogers—who claimed that Israel was only entitled to “insubstantial alterations†in the pre-1967 lines—and to the Nixon administration which “had also hardened U.S. policy on Jerusalem as reflected in its statements and voting patterns in the U.N. Security Council.†Gold said that “the 1967 lines were not an international border. Formally, they were only armistice lines from 1949 . . . [Schwebel] explained that when territories are captured in a war, the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the conflict directly affect the legal rights of the two sides upon its termination.
“Two main facts that influenced Schwebel’s thinking were that, first, Israel had acted in the Six-Day War in the lawful exercise of its right of self-defense†and, secondly, “The Jordanian invasion of the West Bank, and Jerusalem, 19 years earlier in 1948 had been unlawful . . . and no right can be born of an unlawful act (ex injuria jus non oritur) . . . Jordan’s claim to sovereignty over the West Bank was not recognized by anyone, except for Pakistan and Britain. Even the British would not recognize the Jordanian claim in Jerusalem itself.†Gold said that the UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 22, 1967, “did not call for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from all the territories it captured in the Six-Day War.†He recalled that Arthur Goldberg, as the U.S. ambassador to the UN in 1967, pointed out in 1980 that Resolution 242 did not even mention Jerusalem. “Goldberg, a previous Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, never described Jerusalem as “occupied territory.â€
Schwebel was joined in his opinions by Julius Stone, the Australian legal scholar, and Professor Elihu Lauterpacht of Cambridge University, who for a time served as a judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. “Lauterpacht argued that Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 was legally valid. He explained that the last state, which had sovereignty over Jerusalem, was the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it from 1517 to 1917.†The fourth legal authority quoted by Gold was Prof. Eugene Rostow, the former dean of Yale Law School and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Johnson administration.
Misconceptions, Misrepresentations And Myth-Making
Regarding the erosion of Jerusalem’s Jewish status both in the West and in the international media, Gold said, “Some misconceptions were the product of misinformation. Others were the result of deliberate efforts to misrepresent what happened in past negotiations and to mislead the public.†Among those events that led to and exacerbated this cracking of the diplomatic armor, he said, were the Oslo accords of 1993, and the Beilin-Abu Mazen understandings from 1995, which Gold described as part of the “intellectual industry that has been busy trying to prove that an Israeli-Palestinian deal on Jerusalem is doable.†Regarding one idea that was floated, Gold said, “In typical fashion, Arafat managed to pocket Israeli concessions without undertaking firm Palestinian commitments himself . . .â€
Disconnect Between Reality And Fantasy
“At the end of the Taba talks [in late 2000],†said Amb. Gold, “Israel’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami was interviewed on Kol Yisrael Radio and asserted that the parties had ‘never been so close to reaching an agreement.’ The Israeli interviewer then went to Muhammad Dahlan, the Gaza Security Chief, and asked if indeed the parties had never been so close. Dahlan replied in Hebrew slang: “Kharta Barta†(baloney).
There were other attempts that failed, but each time, “It seemed that there was a shared interest by those who engaged in this activity in binding Israel to the diplomatic record of failed negotiations and to the concessions of previous Israeli governments.â€
Denying The Jewish Claim To Jerusalem
Amb. Gold also described the goal of the Arab world to promote a “revisionist history,†which described the Jewish people as “Colonialist latecomers, who have no claim to Jerusalem . . . Arafat rejected all ancient Jewish connections to Jerusalem by even denying the very existence of the Temple . . .
“These doctrines of Temple denial in the Palestinian narrative have spread like wildfire in recent years,†he said, even among Western audiences.
The Will Of The People
Amb. Gold emphasized that the Israeli public has not lost faith, and that “According to a poll conducted for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs released on June 6, 2011 . . . 85 percent of the Israeli public still believes a united Jerusalem should be preserved.â€
Only A Free And Democratic Israel Will Protect Jerusalem
Amb. Gold outlined the attitude and behavior of the Arab leadership and public toward the holy places of Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel over the last century, a story of destruction and the attempted ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem.
Internationalization is not an answer for Jerusalem either, said Amb. Gold. “In 1947 . . . The only force that protected 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem from certain destruction were the forces of Israel . . . by protecting Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, the State of Israel also serves a universal mission of keeping the holy city truly free and accessible for peoples of all faiths.â€
For the full text of Ambassador Gold’s lecture, see www.5tjt.com.
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Fifteen years ago, when Bar Ilan University first bestowed the Guardian of Zion Award on Nobel Prize laureate Professor Elie Wiesel, the idea that someday the State of Israel would be in a genuinely fierce battle to prove her legitimate claim to Jerusalem seemed to fall in the province of doomsayers and cynics.
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