Impotence Of Int’l Community In Syria Supposed To Reassure Israel About ‘Shared’ Jerusalem

Western reluctance to act militarily to impair or stop the genocide occurring in Syria plays an important role in that argument.

Aleppo, December 21 – Lack of political will around the globe to intervene in the bloodshed plaguing Syria is apparently supposed to help convince decision-makers in Israel to relinquish exclusive claims to Jerusalem in favor of an internationally-enforced sharing of the city and its holy sites, diplomats observed today.

Many successive US presidential administrations have insisted that Jerusalem be treated by the international community as a corpus separatum, a bubble administered by a consortium of outside nations, instead of as the declared capital of Israel. American and general Western reluctance to act militarily to impair or stop the genocide occurring in Syria plays an important role in that argument, demonstrating the commitment the West would have to defending the rights of Israelis and Jews to access their holy sites and ancestral heritage if Palestinian or wider Arab powers move to claim the city for themselves and bar Jews from it.

A US State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity told PreOccupied Territory that she and her colleagues remain prepared to argue for the implementation of the corpus separatum even though the original proposal for Jerusalem to have that status was never adopted by the international community, given unanimous Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan for British-Mandate Palestine. “We continue to believe that removing Jerusalem and its holy sites, with their fraught ramifications for who controls them, from jurisdiction of any specific power holds one of the keys to a peaceful resolution of this conflict,” she explained. “The incoming president might differ with the rank-and-file of this department in that regard, but we will remain steadfast in advising him and the staff he has appointed to push for the internationalization of Jerusalem under any final accord, with the fate of Aleppo as important evidence in the workability of any such resolution.”

Any such arguments would have to overcome Israeli contentions that only Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem has guaranteed universal access to holy sites. “It’s important for us to show how our decision to allow Assad and his Iranian and Russian patrons to massacre hundreds of thousands of people, solely not to jeopardize the Iran nuclear deal, militates in favor of Israel relying on us to protect her heritage,” asserted Terje Roed-Larssen, a former UN official. “It is especially important to note the international community’s contribution to other areas of vital Israeli interest where the UN is concerned, such as the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah has been violating Security Council Resolution 1701 with impunity for ten years already with its rearmament, and the provisions of the UN-brokered cease-fire agreement between Israel and Jordan in 1949, under which Jewish access to the holy sites in the eastern part of Jerusalem was to be guaranteed, but which Jordan proceeded to deny for all 19 years the city was under its control. We have to bring these arguments to bear if we are to persuade Israel of the benefits and security of a shared Jerusalem under international supervision.”

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