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Bernard Wassertstein was born in
London in 1948 and educated at Oxford and at the Hebrew
University of [occupied] Jerusalem. He was a member of the
History Department at Brandies University in Massachusetts and
from 1996 to 2000 served as President of the Oxford Center for
Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He is now Professor of History at
the University of Glasgow.
“Divided Jerusalem” First
published in G. Britain in 2001 by Profile Books Ltd
This paperback edition published
in 2002.
The writer, like Benny Morris,
Professor of History at Ben-Gurion University-- in his
Righteous Victims (2001)-- starts his book by a
quotation from a nineteenth century western visitor lamenting
desolate Jerusalem:‘ Jerusalem,’ wrote Herman Melville after a
visit there in 1860,‘ is besieged by an army of the dead.’
In the same manner Morris quoted
Mark Twain writing in 1867: ‘ Of all he lands there are for
dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The
hills are barren…The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed
with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of
being sorrowful and despondent…It is a hopeless, dreary,
heartbroken land…Palestine sits in sackcloth and
ashes…Nazareth is forlorn…Jericho…accursed…Jerusalem…a pauper
village…Palestine is desolate and unlovely.
Both quotations bode ill for
understanding the root of the conflict by coming in line with
the early Zionists’ claim that Palestine ‘ a land without
people i.e. the Palestinian People, to a people without land
i.e. the Jewish People.
The truth that Jerusalem was
connected since 1912 with Jafa by a railway, which was
operational eight years before the British occupation of
Palestine, and seven years before Balfour Declaration.
Jerusalem alongside Jafa became
within a couple of years after its occupation by Gen. Edmund
Allenby in December 1917, the hotbed of the Palestinian
resistance movement against the British invaders whom Imperial
government had promised the conquered land to be handed over
to the Jewish people, referring to the Arabs merely as
‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
The Great Palestinian Rebellion or
Revolution of 1936 had its leadership in Arab Jerusalem. ‘It
was ...the biggest and most protracted uprising against the
British history until the anti-Israel Intifada fifty years
later,’ according to Benny Morris (Righteous Victims,129).
All relevant U.N. resolutions
referred to Jerusalem, both West and East parts, as an
occupied city. Unfortunately, this fact failed to show up in
Wasserstein’s Divided Jerusalem.
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