As Amirav lay in his recovery bed, he could not believe that he was missing the reunification of the Holy City, an ancient Jewish dream. As a boy, he had sat in on meetings of a secretive nationalistic sect called the Mourners of Zion—praying, listening to stories and poring over maps of the city. Now, with a wad of gauze covering one eye, he climbed out of his first-floor hospital window and hitchhiked back toward the battle. By the time he arrived, jubilant Israelis were already streaming toward the Western Wall, cheering and singing. Amirav broke into a run. “I was high, like on drugs—really high, LSD,” he says now. “The whole nation was on these drugs.”
Four decades after the battle, Israeli leaders still refer glowingly to Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital” of the Jewish state. But the mantra is accurate only as myth. Even as they celebrate the 40th anniversary of the war this week, a growing number of Israeli voices are saying the once unthinkable: that Jerusalem may never truly be united. The city is now Israel’s poorest metropolis; ambitious young people prefer making their living in the country’s high-tech corridor along the Mediterranean coast. A vastly disparate standard of living divides Jerusalem’s Arabs and Jews, who only rarely mix. A concrete barrier cuts through the city, locking more than 50,000 East Jerusalemites outside the wall. Not a single foreign nation keeps its embassy there anymore. “The story of Jerusalem is a story of decay and deterioration,” says historian Tom Segev. “All these dreams of 1967 were actually illusions.”
Even for Arab residents, the occupation’s early days held a kind of promise. Fifty-nine-year-old Nabeela Maswadeh recalls how Israeli-government child credits gave her a heady new sense of financial independence. “I was finally free,” she says. “Suddenly a woman like me had rights.” But the optimism didn’t last. As Jewish settlements began to sprout along the hilltops surrounding East Jerusalem during the 1970s, the network of roads and checkpoints connecting them began to feel like a stranglehold. When the first intifada broke out in 1987, Maswadeh’s original sense of well-being evaporated. Her husband lost his job at a souvenir stand, as tourists vanished with the rising violence.
Even as they were populating the Jerusalem-area settlements, Jews began leaving the heart of the city. The reasons were both economic and cultural. Overall, roughly 300,000 people have fled the city since 1967. According to a demographic study released this month by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 17,200 people left Jerusalem last year, while only 10,900 moved in. With Arab birthrates rising faster than Jewish ones, demographers predict the Jewish-to-Arab ratio in the city will be roughly even within 20 years.
Both the rising violence and the demographic trends led Israel to construct the winding, 465-mile barrier that now surrounds and divides Jerusalem. Yet the wall creates new problems of its own. According to a confidential Red Cross report leaked earlier this month, the Israeli government has shown a “general disregard” for Palestinian human rights by carving out “isolated Palestinian enclaves” in the city. The demographic realities, combined with the resentment created by the wall, are “like a small atomic device,” says Jerusalem rights lawyer Danny Seidemann. “It can blow up any minute,” adds Segev.
Forty years after the war, Moshe Amirav can’t help but wonder what would happen if Israel just let go. After years of dabbling in right-wing Israeli politics, Amirav eventually joined the peace camp, volunteering as a Jerusalem adviser to Ehud Barak at Camp David. “We have to divide Jerusalem,” he says now. “We have to get rid of some of our syndromes, some of our dreams.” Yet religious symbols like the Temple Mount and the Western Wall retain a stubborn allure. For many Israelis, handing back half the city still seems as wild a dream as keeping it.
