The slogan of a “united Jerusalem” is one of Israeli politicians' favorite electoral clichés. But while it can be understood when coming from right-wingers, it becomes confusing when it is repeated by center-left leaders, who want to prove that they are no less Jewish and patriotic. Thus they, too, collude with one of the great falsehoods that politicians and others have been telling the Israeli public for many years.
Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid, both of whom actively avoid the left-wing label, distance themselves from concretely dealing with the future of Jerusalem in a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. They make speeches about the two-state vision, but at the same time repeatedly recite the false mantra about a united Jerusalem. They are trapped in a right-wing Catch 22 and left unable to courageously explain to the public that detaching from the fringe Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem is not equivalent to “dividing the city.”
It seems that ever since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coined his winning election slogan “Peres will divide Jerusalem” in 1996, center-left leaders in Israel feel that they have to apologize for and justify something that never was on the agenda to begin with. Former President Shimon Peres never intended to divide Jerusalem, and in the Oslo Accord the issue of Jerusalem was set aside for the future. It was only a brilliant election slogan invented by campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein, aimed at the soft underbelly of the religious right.
As a result of that successful campaign, the expression “dividing Jerusalem” holds negative associations in the Jewish public. Partitioning the city is viewed as a willingness to dismember the capital into two equal parts and concede the State of Israel’s most important national and religious symbols. But that is not the case. Even in the negotiations during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's era, there was no intention of dismembering the city into two, but only to disengage from the Arab neighborhoods on its margins. Over the years, and on the heels of the first and second intifadas, these neighborhoods became closed, volatile sites, to the extent that today it is questionable what connection these areas have to Jerusalem at all.
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