Peres: Jerusalem already at peace, an agreement will ruin it

Dimi Reider By Dimi Reider June 14, 2011 | Edit
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player...

President Shimon Peres has this observation to offer today during a visit to the Bedouin township of Houra:

“People are living and working peacefully, and there are also mishaps, but if they try to put it into writing, a world war will break. Practically speaking, there is already peace in Jerusalem, anyone who will try to turn it into an agreement will ruin everything. All faiths and all the prayers rise up together, and the government doesn’t intervene.”

I suppose the takeovers of Palestinian property in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, proto-fascist parades with chants of “death to Arabs” and the agressive building of settlements are all mishaps, while the relentless ban on males under 40 to prayer at Temple Mount, and the barring of Gaza Muslims and Christians to worship at the city’s holy sites, don’t really come up to a “government intervention” into the matters of the three faiths.

Peres is a keen political weathervane and a remarkable survivor (in the weakest, most dependent sense of the word); he’s never been able to actually shift the course of events (weathervanes don’t direct the wind), but he has built his career in the past decade by clutching onto the mainstream for dear life and going wherever dominant political currents took him. Whether this was a slip of the tongue or a deliberate signal of loyalty to Netanyahu, it’s clear Peres thinks partition is so unlikely that defending it even with lip service would be stupid.

He’s probably correct; it’s extremely difficult right now to imagine a scenario in which the city is actually divided between two sovereign states. But the real issue about Jerusalem isn’t partition in the future, but the segregation taking place today. As that segregation’s architect Teddy Kollek had the decency to admit, Israel has deliberately and persistently neglected East Jerusalem, only installing sewer there because it feared a cholera outbreak might occur and carry over to the Jewish side of the city. People get by from day to day, true enough, but this doesn’t mean tension isn’t building up. Even if actual partition is completely unlikely, the city is not united and it’s certainly isn’t at peace.

Dimi Reider

Dimi (Dmitry) Reider is an Israeli journalist.  His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books,  The New York Times,The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Haaretz,  Jerusalem Post, and  Index on Censorship. "Dimi's Notes" has been quoted and referenced by the following publications:

<p>End of article module for Members</p>

TEST TEST GAL Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war. The world is reeling from Israel’s unprecedented onslaught on Gaza, inflicting mass devastation and death upon besieged Palestinians, as well as the atrocious attack and kidnappings by Hamas in Israel on October 7. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing this violence.    We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies.   This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized siege on Gaza.   We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.   Can we count on your support? +972 Magazine is a leading media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where Palestinian and Israeli journalists, activists, and thinkers can report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality, and justice. Join us.

Make a Donation