Triumph and Tragedy: David Hulme Discusses Middle East Tension

Author：佚名 Source：none Hits：139 UpdateTime：2008-10-19 1:36:02


Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion died in 1973. But if anything could bring him back to life it would have been US Presidential candidate Barack Obama's recent statement concerning Jerusalem. In a June speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama said he would work for peace with a Palestinian state alongside Israel and that, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

While music to Zionist ears, the notion of Jerusalem as Israeli capital implies the expulsion of the Palestinians who also claim the territory as their own. Mr. Obama, currently visiting the Middle East, later clarified what he called 'poor phrasing' by explaining that "we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the '67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent."

According to Mid-East scholar David Hulme, merely looking at Jerusalem today or even back to the 1967 war when Israel took control of Jerusalem does not provide a long enough view to settle the Jerusalem question. In the Vision article Triumph and Tragedy in the Middle East, Hulme discusses the 60-year history of the State of Israel and the deep compassions that impede the development of the long-sought 'cohesive and coherent' agreements between peoples claiming the same homeland.

Hulme notes that the optimism of 1948 has given way to 60 years that "have proven more challenging and more tragic for both Israelis and Palestinians than Ben-Gurion could ever have imagined in those first heady days of statehood. And always at the heart of the seemingly endless conflict has been the holy city, Jerusalem."

In the companion article, David Ben-Gurion: For the Love of Zion, Hulme takes a longer look at the background of the man who established Jerusalem as Israel's benchmark possession. "A people which for two thousand five hundred years has steadfastly observed the oath which the first exiles swore on the rivers of Babylon not to forget Jerusalem," Ben-Gurion stated in a 1949 United Nations speech, "will never acquiesce in separation from Jerusalem."

Hulme offers a surprising solution to the problem that reaches beyond the geopolitical crosstalk that has failed to solve the Jerusalem question over the ensuing decades. That solution involves understanding how both historical and ideological factors create national identity and how the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian can be successfully mediated.

"Over the past century, not only Palestinians and Zionists but also Turks, Britons, and Jordanians have fought on Palestine's terrain of battle," Hulme writes in his text, Identity, Ideology, and the Future of Jerusalem. "[E]ach people has expressed aspects of its own identity and ideology vis- -vis Palestine."