On the Day of Atonement in October 1973, Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, launched a successful surprise attack, in collusion with Syria, against an overconfident Israel. The Arabs scored early successes, discreditingdefence minister Moshe Dayan who almost lost his nerve after two days of reverses. However, the Israelis, supplied by an American airlift, rallied and the war made the name of General Ariel Sharon who led the Israeli counter-attack across the Suez Canal. Soon afterwards, the Arab League persuaded King Hussein to recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.
In 1977, thirty years after the bombing of the King David, Menachem Begin and his Likud finally swept aside the Labour party that had ruled since 1948 and came to power with a nationalist–messianic programme for a Greater Israel with Jerusalem as its capital. Yet it was Begin who, on 19 November, welcomed President Sadat on his courageous flight to Jerusalem. Sadat stayed in the King David Hotel, prayed at al-Aqsa, visited Yad Vashem and offered peace to the Knesset. Hopes soared. With the help of Moshe Dayan whom he had appointed foreign minister, Begin restored Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty. Yet, unlike Dayan who soon resigned, Begin knew little of the Arab world, remaining the son of the Polish shtetl, a harsh nationalist with a Manichean view of the Jewish struggle, an emotional attachment to Judaism and a vision of biblical Israel. Negotiating with Sadat under the aegis of President Jimmy Carter, Begin insisted ‘Jerusalem will remain the eternal united capital of Israel and that is that’, and the Knesset voted a similar formula into Israeli law. Driven by the bulldozer-like energy of his agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, and determined ‘to secure Jerusalem as permanent capital of the Jewish people’, Begin accelerated the building of what Sharon called ‘an outer ring of development around the Arab neighbourhoods’ to ‘develop a greater Jerusalem’.
In April 1982, an Israeli reservist named Alan Goodman shot two Arabs in a rampage across the Temple Mount. The mufti had constantly warned that the Jews wanted to rebuild the Temple on the site of al-Aqsa so now Arabs wondered if there really was such a secret plan. The vast majority of Israelis and Jews utterly reject any such thing and most ultra-Orthodox believe that men should not meddle with God’s work. There are only about a thousand Jewish fundamentalists in groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, who demand the right to pray on the Temple Mount, or the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple, which claims to be training a priestly caste for the Third Temple. Only the tiniest factions within the most extreme cells of fanatics have conspired to destroy the mosques, but so far, Israeli police have foiled all their plots. Such an outrage would be a catastrophe not just for Muslims but for the State of Israel itself.
In 1982, Begin responded to PLO attacks on Israeli diplomats and civilians by invadingLebanon where Arafat had built up a fiefdom. Arafat and his forces were forced out of Beirut, moving to Tunis. The war, masterminded by defence minister Sharon, became a quagmire which culminated in Christian militias massacring between 300 and 700 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Sharon, bearing in-direct responsibility for the atrocity, was forced to resign and Begin’s career ended in depression, resignation and isolation.
The raised hopes of 1977 were dashed by the intransigence of both sides, the killing of civilians, and the expansion of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1981, the assassination of Sadat, punishment for his flight to Jerusalem, by fundamentalists, was an early sign of a new power rising in Islam. In December 1987 a spontaneous Palestinian revolt – the Intifada, the Uprising – broke out in Gaza and spread to Jerusalem. Israeli police fought protesters in pitched battles on the Temple Mount. The youths in the streets of Jerusalem slinging stones at uniformed Israeli soldiers replaced the murderous hijackers of the PLO as the image of the persecuted but defiant Palestinians.
The energy of the Intifada created a power vacuum that was filled by new leaders and ideas: the PLO elite was out of touch with the Palestinian street, and fundamentalist Islam was replacing Nasser’s obsolete pan-Arabism. In 1988, Islamicist radicals founded the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was dedicated to the jihad to destroy Israel.
The Intifada also altered Jewish Jerusalem, admitted Kollek, ‘in a fundamental way’ – it destroyed the dream of a united city. Israelis and Arabs ceased to work together; they no longer walked through each other’s suburbs. The tension spread not only between Muslim and Jew but also amongthe Jews themselves: the ultra-Orthodox rioted against secular Jews, who began to move out of Jerusalem. The old world of Christian Jerusalem was shrinking fast: by 1995 there were only 14,100 Christians left. Yet the Israeli nationalists did not deviate from their plan to Judaize Jerusalem. Sharon provocatively moved into an apartment in the Muslim Quarter and in 1991, religious ultra-nationalists started to settle in Arab Silwan, next to the original City of David. Kollek, who saw his life’s work overwhelmed by aggressive redemptionists, denounced Sharon and these settlers for their ‘messianism which has always been extremely harmful to us in history’.
The Intifada led indirectly to the Oslo peace talks. In 1988, Arafat accepted the idea of a two-state solution and renounced the armed struggle to destroy Israel. King Hussein gave up his claim on Jerusalem and the West Bank where Arafat planned to build a Palestinian state with al-Quds as its capital. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister and crushed the Intifada; with his plainspoken toughness, he possessed the only qualities Israelis would trust in a peacemaker. The Americans had presided over abortive talks in Madrid but, unbeknown to most of the major players, there was another, secret process that would bear fruit.
This began with informal talks between Israeli and Palestinian academics. There were meetings at the American Colony which was regarded as neutral territory, in London and then in Oslo. The talks were initially run without Rabin’s knowledge by the foreign minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin. It was only in 1993 that they informed Rabin, who backed the talks. On 13 September, Rabin and Peres signed the treaty with Arafat at the White House, genially supervised by President Clinton. The West Bank and Gaza were partly handed over to a Palestinian Authority which took over the old Husseini mansion, Orient House, as its Jerusalem headquarters, run by the most respected Palestinian in the city, Faisal al-Husseini, son of the hero of 1948.* Rabin signed a peace treaty with King Hussein of Jordan and confirmed his special Hashemite role as custodian of the Islamic Sanctuary in Jerusalem which continues today. Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists negotiated their own academic version of the peace and enthusiastically started to work together for the first time.
The conundrum of Jerusalem was set aside until later in the negotiations and Rabin intensified the buildingof settlements in Jerusalem before any agreement. Beilin and Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud Abbas negotiated to divide Jerusalem between Arab and Jewish areas under a united municipality and to give the Old City a ‘special status,’ almost like a Middle Eastern Vatican City – but nothing was signed.
The Oslo Accords perhaps left too much detail undecided and were violently opposed on both sides. Mayor Kollek, aged eighty-two, was defeated in elections by the more hardline Ehud Olmert, backed by nationalists and ultra-Orthodox. On 4 November, 1995, just four days after Beilin and Abbas had come to an informal understandingon Jerusalem, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic. Born in Jerusalem, Rabin returned there to be buried on Mount Herzl. King Hussein delivered a eulogy; the American president and two of his predecessors attended. President Mubarak of Egypt visited for the first time, and the Prince of Wales made the only formal royal visit to Jerusalem since the foundation of Israel.