Some may be surprised that the outcome is a prelude to talking about the future of the Israeli project in Jerusalem, so the talk here starts from the point of judging this project as inevitable failure. But the truth that should be understood in the introduction to the conversation in this context is that historians agree that the laws of history do not change, and as long as there is a project that collides with the laws of history, it cannot continue or develop, and it must undergo a radical change represented either by its fall or changing its identity, and both cases mean the end of the project effectively, and this is the case in the Israeli project in Jerusalem.
We focus here on Jerusalem as a main focus that has its own specificity and nature, which differs from other aspects in the project that began at the end of the 19th century to culminate in the establishment of Israel in 1948, and then developed until it reached the peak of its power in the eighties of the last century, when Israeli tanks entered the Lebanese capital Beirut with ease, after which he began to face the existential challenges that brought him to the crisis he is experiencing today.
Jerusalem at the heart of the Israeli project
First of all, it should be clarified that Jerusalem is theoretically the millstone around which the idea of a national home for world Jewry revolves; the Zionist movement that initially created Israel takes its name from the name of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and the national anthem of Israel, written in 1878, 70 years before its establishment, concludes with the word "Jerusalem." It is therefore not surprising that Jerusalem is the subject of consensus among the various segments of Israeli society, both religiously and nationally and historically among secular currents.
Jerusalem has never been devoid of indigenous people, and even when it was invaded, it remained in its entirety within the same human groups that had always inhabited it.
However, the presence of Jerusalem at the heart of the Israeli project does not necessarily mean that Israel succeeded in translating its centrality practically on the ground or in changing its nature, because the project of the Zionist movement in its foundation was based on an incorrect perception that that land (Palestine) is already empty of inhabitants, which turned out to be incorrect when the early pioneers of this project began to explore the land of Palestine and understand its nature and the possibilities of establishing a Jewish national home in it. Depth, which led Jabotinsky in the famous historical novel of the late 19th century to send a telegram to his leaders in the Zionist movement describing Palestine as "the bride is beautiful but married to another man."
The same applies more and more clearly to the city of Jerusalem: Jerusalem has never been devoid of indigenous inhabitants, and even when it was invaded, it remained in its entirety among the same human groups that have always inhabited it, and its Arab character has remained constant throughout history.
The failure of ethnic cleansing
Historically, Israel could only have been established, as envisioned by the early pioneers of the Zionist project, in one way: the total genocide of the Palestinians. In fact, there is no relatively successful experience in human history in this sense other than the European colonization of North America and Australia, where a people can only displace an entire people from the earth by literally wiping it out, as Europeans did with the indigenous people of North America and Australia between the 16th and 18th centuries, and this was no longer really possible during the 19th and 20th centuries with the social and conceptual changes that humanity went through with the Industrial Revolution.
In other words, it can be said that Israel in the sense imagined by the pioneers of the Zionist movement was established at the wrong time, because it wanted to do in the 20th century the concepts of the 16th century, which is illogical. Therefore, the ethnic cleansing movement carried out by the Zionist gangs in Palestine during the Nakba was not enough to completely empty the land of the population, and this process proved its failure to empty the entire Palestinian land of the indigenous population; Palestinian citizens known today as "Arabs of the interior" or "Palestinians of the interior" remained to constitute 20% of the total population in Israel, and Israel failed to change their identity completely, and over time they turned into a chronic headache for Israel, as evidenced by the events of 2021 in the areas of the Green Line. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship engaged in a violent confrontation with the occupation government and its settlers.
On the other hand, when Israel was established, it needed Jerusalem to obtain religious and national legitimacy among Jewish communities around the world, and thus be able to convince them to immigrate to it, but it failed after its establishment in 1948 to obtain Jerusalem in full, so it was satisfied with the western part of the city, which did not contain any of the holy religious sites, but successive Israeli governments at the time were keen to declare that its capital is Jerusalem despite Tel Aviv's superiority in economic, industrial and social terms, especially since Jerusalem is located in the heart of the conflict zone and directly bordering the armistice line. When the opportunity arose for Israel to occupy East Jerusalem and annex all areas of religious importance, it did not wait a single moment, and on June 1967, <>, its army was able to storm East Jerusalem, occupy all the holy places and tighten control over the entire city.
Israel has resorted to a clear distinction in services between the east and west of the city, and has forgotten that East Jerusalem is organically linked to the Palestinian perimeter in the West Bank and cannot be cut off.
Pretending that Palestinians do not exist
Although the dream of a "land without a people" was already over, Israel insisted on dealing with East Jerusalem with the same logic, declaring the annexation of the land without the inhabitants, and considering the residents as mere foreign residents of the city, because in short, it was not able at that time to carry out the dream of genocide like America and Australia in the 16th century, nor was it even able to carry out the same ethnic cleansing that occurred in the Nakba of 1948, forcing it to resort to the method of neglecting the presence of the Palestinian population. In Jerusalem, trying to imagine a reality that does not exist, in an act similar to that of a child who closes his eyes when afraid, thinking that what he fears does not exist.
To implement this vision, Israel has resorted to pressuring Jerusalemites with measures to withdraw their IDs, prevent urbanization and other measures aimed at forcing them to leave the city voluntarily in the end as the only solution to the dilemma of their presence in Jerusalem. Strangely, it acted with Jerusalem on the basis that it had already succeeded in expelling the Palestinians from it! Therefore, from the first moment of the occupation of East Jerusalem, it grouped the two parts of the city together in all its statistics to convince itself that the Jewish population in the Jerusalem municipality is 3 times the Palestinian population, suggesting that Jerusalem is a Jewish city, and forgot that the statistics related to East Jerusalem still today give a clear numerical advantage to the Palestinians, who still constitute the overwhelming majority in it, especially in the Old City and around the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, that is, in the heart of the historic city, which is the heart of the project. Israeli religious, national and historical aspects.
At the same time, Israel resorted to a clear distinction in services between the east and west of the city, and forgot that East Jerusalem is organically linked to the Palestinian periphery in the West Bank and cannot be cut off from it; this policy led to the fact that Jerusalem is in fact two cities, and if Israel claims to be one, and the East Jerusalem area has in fact turned into a fragile and very weak flank for Israel, most of the infiltrations that led to armed operations in the heart of the Green Line areas passed. in Jerusalem.
The failure to separate Jerusalem from its surroundings
When Israel tried to stop this by building the separation wall in 2003, events moved to a new phase in which the operations began from Jerusalem itself and from the Jerusalemites themselves, simply because experience has shown that the city cannot be separated from its surroundings and reality, nor can it be neglected that Palestinian Jerusalemites who do not have any legal affiliation to this state are still the majority in the eastern part of Jerusalem, and even reach almost 40% of the total population in the two parts of the city. This clearly indicates the failure of the 1967 annexation without population annexation project. Moreover, everything that Palestinians have experienced in Jerusalem over the past five decades has only led to the explosion of the entire Jerusalem community, as happened in the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 5, the Jerusalem uprising in 2000, and all the events that followed in 2015, 2017, and 2019.
The result is that the Israeli project in Jerusalem does not have any horizon, and cannot succeed, but the calls of the extreme right in Israel to repeat the events of the Nakba will not be valid at this time and are nothing more than illusions, what could have been fixed yesterday cannot be fixed today, and whoever lives in a long dream must come a day when he wakes up to a reality completely different from what he dreamed of, and then Israel will not find anything to do in Jerusalem has done what it did in the past in Gaza; it has no choice but to withdraw from East Jerusalem at least in any way to save its very existence.