Lisa Alcalay Klug
As afternoon arrives in Jerusalem, the sun gently infuses the city walls with their legendary golden color. Among a group of 40 English speakers on a lookout platform in the ancient City of David, it suddenly became clear to me that this is exactly where Jerusalem began and the Bible comes alive. True to the biblical verse harim saviv la, hills surround the holy city. The Mount of Olives stands to the east. The Armon Hanatsiv ridge lies to the south. To the west is Mount Zion and to the north, the Temple Mount.
According to tradition, this is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac and where all blessing flows from heaven.
The city’s history begins around 1000 BCE, when King David captured the Jebusite city south of the Temple Mount, established his capital and relocated the Ark of the Covenant. Over the next 500 years, Jerusalem expanded despite many political and religious upheavals until the Babylonians conquered the city and destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE.
There was plenty more to explore on our three-hour tour, so we quickly descended toward Warren’s shaft, an underground tunnel hewn long before David’s arrival. In ...   more »

Yehoshua Halevi
While Jerusalem is in the midst of a year-long celebration marking the 40th anniversary of reunification, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged recently that his government was prepared to divide the city as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
The difficulties presented by this issue are highly complex and emotional and there has yet to be published any official government plan detailing just how such a division would occur.
Conventional thought holds that the city would be divided roughly between east and west, between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. But that won't be so simple in modern Jerusalem, a city of 750,000 residents, where neighborhoods often intertwine. And then there is the question of the old city, where suggestions range from giving the area international status to granting security control to the Palestinian Authority.
Even where such physical division of Jerusalem might be practical, the idea raises the specter of pre-1967 Jerusalem, when Jewish neighborhoods were regularly targeted by cross-border sniper fire. Indeed one doesn't have to go back to 1967, but only to 2002, when terrorists fired repeatedly at homes in Gilo from nearby Beit Jalla. Or to this week, as rocket fire continues unabated from Gaza. ...   more »

State sources say Olmert orders top cabinet officials to draft proposals for dealing with potential nuclear Iran. Minister Ayalon: 'We must prepare for scenario where all alternatives fail'
Israel is quietly preparing for the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran despite public pledges to deny its arch-foe the means to pose an "existential threat", political and defense sources said on Thursday.
Diplomatic Efforts 
They said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instructed cabinet officials to draft proposals on how Israel, which according to foreign media reports retains the only atomic arsenal in the Middle East, might deal with losing that monopoly.  
Israel predicts that Iran's nuclear program could produce warheads by 2009. Western intelligence services say it may take several more years.  
Olmert has endorsed US-led efforts to curb Iran's atomic ambitions through sanctions. He has also hinted that Israel, which bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 and is believed to have carried out a similar raid against Syria in September, could hit Iran too if it deems diplomatic pressure a dead end.
But two senior Israeli sources with knowledge of the Olmert government's defense planning said a memorandum was being prepared for "the day after", in case Iran attains ...   more »

By Sarah Shapiro    
What have we done?
This morning marked the first weekday in three decades that I wasn't confronted by beggars when approaching the Western Wall. After a long history of complaints from tourists and residents, a front-page article in the Friday (November 9) Jerusalem Post reported, "Praying, Yes — but Begging, No," — beggars have at last been banned from Judaism's holiest site. So their absence today didn't come as a complete surprise.
But it felt a little odd, even vaguely disorienting, to descend from the bus, make my way across the Western Wall Plaza, then turn right onto the walkway down toward the Wall — all without being accosted by those supplicant eyes and outstretched hands. Gone were Malka and Tzipora, Shoshana and Ilana, and all the others, whose names I never knew. Apparently, somewhere along the line, I'd gotten used to them. The persistent annoyance of their presence had become an integral feature of my Western Wall experience, perhaps as much as the huge, eternal stones themselves.
And annoyance it often was. Except for violence and outright acts of aggression (which in 30 years I myself never witnessed; perhaps behavior of that sort occurred over ...   more »

By Jeff Jacoby  
In advance of the upcoming diplomatic conference in Annapolis, Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the other day that he expects the Palestinian Authority to finally acknowledge Israel's existence as a Jewish state. A newly arrived visitor from Mars might wonder why this should even be an issue — after all, Israel is a Jewish state. If the more than 55 countries that make up the Organization of the Islamic Conference are entitled to recognition as Muslim states, and if the 22 members of the Arab League are universally accepted as Arab states, why should anyone balk at acknowledging Israel as the world's lone Jewish state?
Yet Olmert's demand was rebuffed. Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian Authority negotiator, said on Monday that Palestinians would refuse to recognize Israel's Jewish identity on the grounds that "it is not acceptable for a country to link its national character to a specific religion."
In fact, there are many countries in which national identity and religion are linked. Argentinian law mandates government support for the Roman Catholic faith. Queen Elizabeth II is the supreme governor of the Church of England. In the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the constitution proclaims Buddhism the ...   more »

JERUSALEM (AFP) - The Israeli army said on Tuesday it is to launch a major military exercise across the occupied West Bank simulating its response to an outbreak of Palestinian violence.
"The army will undertake a current exercise on November 18 to prepare it to better face all eventualities," an army spokesman told AFP.
The manouevres will take place shortly before an expected US-sponsored international peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, but according to Israel's Haaretz newspaper the exercises had been planned back in July.
"The exercise is not an official preparation in case talks at Annapolis fail, though senior IDF (army) officers have been predicting for weeks that the conference has little chance of succeeding," Haaretz said.
The drills will simulate a scenario whereby Palestinian militants carry out a wave of attacks across the West Bank amid widespread demonstrations and heightened tensions in the Gaza Strip and along the Syrian border.
Haaretz cautioned however that such war games are often deliberately exaggerated and do not reflect what the military brass actually expects will happen on the ground. 
Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in intense negotiations over the past few weeks in an attempt to prepare a joint declaration ...   more »

By Shahar Ilan,
tags: Jerusalem, Israel  
The Knesset plenum passed in a preliminary vote Wednesday a bill that would make it far more difficult to divide Jerusalem in the context of a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
54 MKs voted in favor of the bill, with 24 against. The Knesset holds preliminary votes on private bills, presented by individual MKs. Before being enacted into law, however, the bill must still be approved in committee and then pass three more plenum votes.
The bill, which was authored by Likud faction whip Gideon Sa'ar and 25 other rightist and religious MKs, would require the support of 80 MKs for any changes to the Basic Law: Jerusalem.  
An absolute majority of 61 MKs is currently needed to change the basic law, and raising the bar to 80 MKs would make it nearly impossible to gain Knesset approval for concessions on Jerusalem.
The timing of the bill is also significant, and is designed to warn the government that it cannot make concessions on the capital a few weeks before the U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland.
The coalition apparently does not intend to try to scuttle the bill at this time, ...   more »

Hilary Leila Krieger ,
A former Bush administration stalwart who has become a vocal critic told The Jerusalem Post this week that the planned meeting in Annapolis later this month to push for Israeli-Palestinian peace is "a mistake."
John Bolton, a leading neoconservative who served as the US ambassador to the UN before leaving the administration last winter, spoke to the Post following a lecture Tuesday night on his new book, which takes issue with aspects of American policy toward Iran, North Korea and Lebanon, among others.
"It's a mistake to push ahead with the Annapolis peace conference in November or December," he said, noting that the date hasn't been finalized.
"I just don't see this as the moment to make progress on Israeli-Palestinian matters. And I don't think that a failed conference will simply leave us at the status quo. I think it will set us back, so I think the effort is perhaps well-intentioned but misconceived."
In his talk he referred to an Israeli government with "internal political difficulties" and a Palestinian Authority that's "broken perhaps beyond repair," so any attempt at an "unnatural" reconciliation could leave US influence diminished.
Bolton, who spoke to an audience at the ...   more »