Jerusalem

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres" (137, 1-2).

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy." (137, 5-7).

The ancient city of Jerusalem is a Jewish city. Its ancient history saw it the capital of a Jewish nation under King David and King Solomon, and then the Kings of Judah. This is the biblical Jerusalem. But Jerusalem existed as a city before it was taken to be the capital of the Jews. It is written that the prophet Ezekiel spoke of Jerusalem thus: "Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: your origin and your nativity is of the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother was a Hittite" (16:30).

During the period of Egyptian hegemony in the Middle East, Jerusalem was the city of Canaanites, then Jebusites, Semitic peoples who lived in the Judean Hills. It was a small, fortified city with two strongholds, one named Zion, the name later used to describe the Temple Mount and Mount Zion, neither part of the city when it was a Jebusite protectorate. But surrounding the ancient city for two hundred years was a Jewish settlement, allotted to the tribe of Benjamin. Whose first king, Saul, lived alongside Jerusalem, until his successor, David conquered the city and made it his own.

And then came a long succession of conquerors including the Babylonians, Macedonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, followed by Muslim empires, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Ottoman Turks, the British, the Jordanians, and finally - full circle - the Jewish nation again, with the creation of the State of Israel. There is history and there is the incendiary dispute between Arab Palestinians and indeed the entirety of the surrounding Arab populations, resentful of Israel's creation.

This fabled, pre-biblical-era city (albeit named differently) may be three thousand years old, one of the most ancient remaining cities in the Middle East, celebrated by Jews as their eternal capital. Its population is a modest 740,000, and represents the most Orthodox of Jews, as well as Muslims and Christians for all of whom it is a city of faith. It is the walled Old City whose legitimacy as an Israeli possession is largely in dispute after the reunification of the city by modern conquest from Jordan, in 1967.

Under British and later Jordanian rule, Jews were not permitted to visit their most holy of sites, the ancient Temple Mount, nor could they pray at the Wailing Wall, the only portion of the Second Temple of Solomon left after its destruction. Under Jewish protection, all religions have free access to their holy sites. The Muslim Dome of the Rock was built directly over the ancient Second Temple, and it represents the third most sacred site for Islam. Jerusalem's biblical significance for Christians is obvious.

From historical antecedents as well as modern reality - where a Jewish presence was never absent from Jerusalem - present-day Israel, a Jewish state whose purpose was to offer a safe-haven homeland for the world's stateless and dispersed Jews, it seems a reasonable assumption that Jerusalem remain the universally-acknowledged site of the capital of Israel. That presumed reality has found vibrant denunciation in the opinion of Palestinians who claim it to be their capital for a nascent sovereign state.

Despite the historical reality that there never was a Palestinian state, that the original Palestinians were in fact Jews, and Palestine was an unacknowledged homeland for those Jews who had never left their homeland, despite the diaspora inflicted upon Jews by one conquering army after another in ancient times. History and the archaeological science that supports it, along with religious, social and traditional antecedents confirm Jerusalem as a Jewish capital of a Jewish state.