Jerusalem Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Jerusalem - Essay Example Being at the center of the Israel – Palestine dispute, the city has been besieged twenty-three times, destroyed twice, attacked 52 times and captured and recaptured about 44 times, its status still an unresolved matter at the core of the two disputing countries (Bard, 2009). The annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel has been criticized by the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies, while Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, creating the now stalemate status of the conflict (ibid.). A UN Security Council Resolution 478 passed in 1980 gave the signal for most foreign embassies to move out of Jerusalem, and, on October 28, 2009, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon emphasized on the need for Israel and Palestine to agree on having Jerusalem as their mutual capital to achieve peace in the region (UN News Center online, 28 October 2009). Jerusalem must remain an undivided city, and the eternal capital of Israel under the Israeli control, since it rightfully belongs to the Israelis by historical and by religious significance as well as based on political and socio-demographic accounts. Politically, Jerusalem has been declared as Israel’s own. In the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DoP), the status of Jerusalem is left open, but that Palestinian Council’s jurisdiction does not include the city, as confirmed by the Prime Minister Rabin statement that Jerusalem is not included in any sphere of the prerogatives of any body that will conduct Palestinian affairs in the territories, leaving Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty (Bard, 2009). Further, the same agreement states that the final status of Jerusalem will be based on the UN Security Council’s Resolutions 242 and 338, which both do not mention and refer to Jerusalem in any way, as it deliberately omitted by the UN Security Cou ncil (Ibid.). Likewise, historically