THE FIGHT FOR JERUSALEM by Dore Gold
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Remember the talk about Bill Clinton getting a Nobel Prize for his efforts at Camp David to bring peace between Israel and Palestine? It's a good thing it didn't happen. As former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold writes, Clinton was perfectly willing to sell the Holy City down the river. Why? Because he believed that big concessions by Israel would cool the passions of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.
What the “Clinton Parameters” involved was a divided Jerusalem—a latter-day Berlin, except that Clinton's vision was, as Gold puts it, of “a chessboard of sovereignties with different governments controlling the equivalent of the red squares and the black squares.” In other words: a disaster.
It's one of the finer accomplishments that, whereas Yasser Arafat was the most frequent visitor to the White House under Clinton, he became persona non grata under Bush. But in Gold's view, the Clinton damage had been done. Consider the intriguing story of what Gold calls Temple Denial. Faced with Arafat's failure to win any concessions from Israel, Palestinians began to champion the notion that Israel's claim to its heritage in Jerusalem was false: there never was a Temple of Solomon. Or if there was, it wasn't located in Jerusalem. Anti-Semitic “scholars” picked up the claim, even as people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran fanned the flames of Holocaust Denial. All this was going on—and still is—as archaeological discoveries confirm the Biblical accounts of the reigns of Kings David and Solomon.
One thing is sure: were the Islamists to get control of the Holy City, they'd destroy every vestige of its Jewish and Christian past, just as the Taliban demolished the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan.
We can't let that happen.
Every Israeli I've ever met is something of a historian-archaeologist. Dore Gold certainly is, and his erudition gives The Fight for Jerusalem much of its beauty and power.—Brad Miner
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