20 Years of Research Reveals: Jerusalem Belongs to Jews

From IsraelNN.com ( links inserted by Smooth Stone) :

Jacques Gauthier, a non-Jewish Canadian lawyer who spent 20 years researching the legal status of Jerusalem, has concluded: "Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, by international law."

Gauthier has written a doctoral dissertation on the topic of Jerusalem and its legal history, based on international treaties and resolutions of the past 90 years. The dissertation runs some 1,300 pages, with 3,000 footnotes. Gauthier had to present his thesis to a world-famous Jewish historian and two leading international lawyers - the Jewish one of whom has represented the Palestinian Authority on numerous occasions.

Gauthier's main point, as summarized by Israpundit editor Ted Belman, is that a non-broken series of treaties and resolutions, as laid out by the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations and the United Nations, gives the Jewish People title to the city of Jerusalem. The process began at San Remo, Italy, when the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I - Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan - agreed to create a Jewish national home in what is now the Land of Israel.

San Remo
The relevant resolution reads as follows:

"The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust... the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory [authority that] will be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration... in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

Gauthier notes that the San Remo treaty specifically notes that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" - but says nothing about any "political" rights of the Arabs living there.

The San Remo Resolution also bases itself on Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which declares that it is a "a sacred trust of civilization" to provide for the well-being and development of colonies and territories whose inhabitants are "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." Specifically, a resolution was formulated to create a Mandate to form a Jewish national home in Palestine.

League of Nations
The League of Nations' resolution creating the Palestine Mandate, included the following significant clause:

“Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

No such recognition of Arab rights in Palestine was granted.

In 1945, the United Nations took over from the failed League of Nations - and assumed the latter's obligations. Article 80 of the UN Charter states: "Nothing in this Chapter shall be construed, in or of itself, to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties."

UN Partition Plan
However, in 1947, the General Assembly of the UN passed Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan. It violated the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine in that it granted political rights to the Arabs in western Palestine - yet, ironically, the Arabs worked to thwart the plan's passage, while the Jews applauded it.

Resolution 181 also provided for a Special regime for Jerusalem, with borders delineated in all four directions: The then-extant municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns up to Abu Dis in the east, Bethlehem in the south, Ein Karem and Motza in the west, and Shuafat in the north.

Referendum Scheduled for Jerusalem
The UN resolved that the City of Jerusalem shall be established as a separate entity under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations. The regime was to come into effect by October 1948, and was to remain in force for a period of ten years, unless the UN's Trusteeship Council decided otherwise. After the ten years, the residents of Jerusalem "shall be then free to express by means of a referendum their wishes as to possible modifications of regime of the City."

The resolution never took effect, because Jordan controlled eastern Jerusalem after the 1948 War of Independence and did not follow its provisions.

After 1967
After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel regained Jerusalem and other land west of Jordan. Gauthier notes that the UN Security Council then passed Resolution 242 authorizing Israel to remain in possession of all the land until it had “secure and recognized boundaries.” The resolution was notably silent on Jerusalem, and also referred to the "necessity for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem,” with no distinction made between Jewish and Arab refugees.

Today
Given Jerusalem's strong Jewish majority, Gauthier concludes, Israel should be demanding that the long-delayed city referendum on the city's future be held as soon as possible. Not only should Israel be demanding that the referendum be held now, Jerusalem should be the first order of business. "Olmert is sloughing us off by saying [as he did before the Annapolis Conference two months ago], 'Jerusalem is not on the table yet,'" Gauthier concludes. "He should demand that the referendum take place before the balance of the land is negotiated. If the Arabs won’t agree to the referendum, there is nothing to talk about."

Forgotten Legal Rights

From Forgotten Legal Rights:

After most armed conflicts, the international community has sought to re-establish the status quo ante - the previous situation - as part of a political settlement. However, many aspects of the prewar status quo in 1967 were untenable, if not illegal. Jordan and Egypt previously occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a result of an invasion by the Arab states in 1948 that the UN Secretary-General at the time, Trygve Lie, called an act of "aggression."

In the Six-Day War nearly 20 years later, Israel entered these territories in what was plainly a war of self-defense. Before Israeli forces moved in Jerusalem, Jordanian artillery fired nearly 6,000 artillery shells on the Israeli parts of the city.

Stephen Schwebel, who later became the president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote in 1970: "When the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

UN Security Council Resolution 242, that would become the cornerstone of every Arab-Israel peace agreement for decades thereafter, did not call on Israel to withdraw from all the territories it captured in the Six-Day War. Resolution 242 called for establishing "secure" boundaries, with the understanding that the pre-war lines were not secure.

The "Saudi Peace Initiative," if implemented, would strip Israel of defensible borders, push it back to the vulnerable 1967 lines, and redivide the heart of Jerusalem.

Today, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have replaced the Arab states as claimants to the territories that Israel captured and that have been disputed since 1967. Who would suggest placing the holy sites of Jerusalem under Hamas, whose ideological cousins are attacking churches and mosques across the Middle East?

Moreover, it is transparent today that if Israel were to withdraw from its security positions along the Jordan Valley barrier, al-Qaeda affiliates that are today penetrating Lebanon, Gaza, and Jordan would seize the opportunity and unleash a wave of jihadi volunteers to escalate attacks against Israel.

The writer, the former ambassador of Israel to the United Nations, is the author of The Fight for Jerusalem (2007). He is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Amid General Amnesia

Excellent points made here. From Amid General Amnesia:

It's a curious thing: Although the map that was changed by the Six-Day War had been in existence for less than 20 years, starting with Israel's War of Independence in 1948, and more than twice as many years have gone by since then, that map of the Middle East continues to be regarded by the world as the "right" map, while the map that replaced it is considered a temporary aberration that needs to be canceled or reversed.

Similarly, the world has forgotten what the pre-1967 map was really like. Far from being demarcated by clear and accepted borders, it showed Israel separated from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon by mere armistice lines, frontiers created by the ceasefire that ended the 1948-1949 war and considered temporary by all Arab countries, not one of which recognized Israel and all of which looked forward openly to its destruction - an easily imaginable eventuality in view of the fact that these frontiers narrowed to a few miles' width along the Mediterranean coastal plain where Israel's population was most concentrated.

It is no longer remembered that immediately after the June 1967 war, Israel was ready to return nearly all of the land conquered by it in return for peace and was answered by a monolithic Arab refusal to negotiate, accompanied by a partial recommencement of hostilities by Egypt in the 1968-1970 "War of Attrition." The history of the 1967 war and what came before it has been so successfully written by the losers that the winners' account is scoffed at incredulously today even by supposedly knowledgeable people.

The Most Justified War

From The Most Justified War:

As Ha'aretz's correspondent in Paris before the 1967 Six-Day War, I was at the Israeli Embassy when half a million people rallied in the streets to show their solidarity with Israel. There was a sense that the Arabs were about to wipe out the Jewish state. On television, people saw Egyptian troops marching into Sinai; they heard Nasser's warmongering speeches. Ahmed Shukeiry, the secretary of the Arab League, declared that the Jews of Israel would be sent back to the countries they came from and native Israelis would be slaughtered. What those now denouncing the 40th anniversary of the "occupation" do not understand is that the Six-Day War was the most justified war Israel ever fought - because it knocked out of the Arabs' heads the idea that Israel could be destroyed by force.

Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy

From Forty Years Later, Doing Nothing Is the Best Policy:

In this week's torrent of 40th anniversary recollections about the Six-Day War, one TV image cut straight to the chase: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia staring into a camera to say, "The essential point remains the total elimination of Israel." The king's statement of principles was captured in "Six Days in June," an impressive two-hour documentary that aired Monday on PBS. For all the noise about peace in the 40 years since, the Saudi monarch's silver bullet solution is still the basic Arab mindset.

As do-gooders and militants reflect on what Israel should have done, what Arabs failed to do, what the UN ought to do, I vote for doing nothing. Regardless of the peace treaties with Israel forged by President Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, the overwhelming majority of Arabs need more time to dismantle their war posture. At this point, Israel's primary antagonists in this conflict, the Palestinian Arabs, are no longer an entity that can be engaged. Having dissolved into a myriad of warring gangs, there is no one to settle with.

And still more time is necessary to contemplate whether what has been achieved can be retained. Egypt's 1979 peace accord will not survive a day if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in its decades-old effort to topple President Mubarak's dynastic military reign. The Brotherhood is significantly closer to that goal now. In Jordan, since the peace treaty of 1994, the anti-Semitic discourse has grown thick, leaving little room to imagine that peace with Israel could survive a change in leadership.

It is pointless even to think about structuring new accords with Arab societies that are relentlessly marching toward various stages of radicalism, Islamic or otherwise. It would not help, and it would not hold. As for Israel, going forward with more unilateral evacuations, as in Lebanon and Gaza, has only liberated land for terrorist operations.

Three paratroopers

One of my most favorite photos revisited 40 years later. Via In Context:

JERUSALEM: It's an image etched in history — an iconic photo that captured Israel in its most triumphant moment.

Three young, battle-worn faces gazing up in wonder at the Western Wall, moments after capturing Judaism's holiest site on June 7, 1967.

The three paratroopers — Zion Karasanti, Yitzhak Yifat and Haim Oshri — became famous as symbols of that victory before drifting back into anonymity. Forty years later, they recalled the instant that changed their lives and the life of their country.

"It was an uplifting moment, a real spiritual experience," said Karasanti, 64. "My heart was beating, there were soldiers crying, just staring at the stones .... the wall was so pure and divine, it gives me goosebumps every time."

The three men were recently reunited at the wall for a photo shoot, recreating their pose of 40 years ago.

The Western Wall, a remnant of the second biblical Jewish Temple, is the holiest site where Jews can pray. It lines the Al Aqsa Mosqe compound, home to Islam's third holiest shrine. The holy sites in Jerusalem's walled Old City were under Jordanian control and off-limits to Jews for 19 years.

On the third day of the 1967 Six-Day War, the three young reservists were frozen in photographer David Rubinger's frame, after fighting in a series of bloody battles and making their way into the Old City.

The Six-Day War: A Defensive War

From The Six-Day War: A Defensive War:

International law makes a clear distinction between land "occupied" during a war of aggression and land taken as a result of a defensive war. On June 5, 1967, Jordan attacked Israel. Suburbs of Tel Aviv were shelled by artillery. Israel's largest military airfield, Ramat David, was shelled. Jordanian warplanes attacked the central Israeli towns of Netanya and Kfar Saba. Thousands of mortar shells rained down on western Jerusalem, targeting Israel's parliament building and the prime minister's office. Twenty Israelis died in these attacks; 1,000 were wounded; 900 buildings were damaged. Only after coming under fire and sustaining casualties did the Israeli military respond against Jordanian forces in the West Bank.

No Pyrrhic Victory

From No Pyrrhic Victory:

It is often said today that the Six-Day War humiliated the Arabs and propelled the region into future rounds of fighting. Yet only a few days before the outbreak of the war, Iraq's then-President Abdul Rahman Aref saw it as "our opportunity...to wipe Israel off the map," describing the war as the Arabs' chance "to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948."

It is said that the Palestinian movement was born from Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was already in its third year of operations when the war began [having been established with the singular intent to destroy Israel as early as 1964].

To read some recent accounts, a more sagacious Israel could have followed up its historic victory with peace overtures. In fact, the Israeli cabinet agreed on June 19, 1967, to offer the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace deals. In Khartoum that September, the Arab League declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it."

On June 5, 1967, Israel was a poor, desperately vulnerable country, which threw the dice on its own survival in the most audacious military strike of the 20th century. It is infinitely richer and more powerful today, and sure in its alliance with the U.S. If these are the fruits of Israel's "Pyrrhic victory," it needs more such of them.

How the Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast

From How the Six-Day War Reshaped the Mideast:

The great irony of the Six-Day War of 1967 was that it began with a hoax - a piece of faulty Soviet intelligence given to the Egyptians. On May 13, the Soviet ambassador to Cairo informed the Egyptians that Israel was massing "10 to 12 brigades" on the Syrian border in preparation for a big push against the radical regime in Damascus. In response to that Soviet report, Nasser mobilized his troops on May 14 and dispatched them into the Sinai. The casus belli would come on May 22, when Nasser announced the closing of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Euphoria gripped the Arab world; Nasser hadn't fired a shot, but great gains had come his way. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan rushed to Cairo to place his army under Egyptian command.

At the remove of four decades, we should not overdo the importance of that Soviet report about the phantom Israeli brigades. At the heart of the war lay the willful Arab refusal to accept Israel's legitimacy and statehood. Israel's victory in 1967 delivered a message: that the state that had fought its way into the world in 1948 is there to stay.

Contributing Editor Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author, most recently, of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

For Israel, There Was No Peace Before The Land

From the great Charles Krauthammer:

There has hardly been an Arab peace plan in the past 40 years -- including the current Saudi version -- that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

The real anniversary of the war should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser demanded the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. The U.N. complied, at which point Nasser imposed a naval blockade of Israel's only outlet to the south, the port of Eilat -- an open act of war.

How Egypt came to this reckless provocation is a complicated tale (chronicled in Michael Oren's magisterial history "Six Days of War'') of aggressive intent compounded with fateful disinformation. An urgent and false Soviet warning that Israel was preparing to attack Syria led to a cascade of intra-Arab maneuvers that in turn led Nasser, the champion of pan-Arabism, to mortally confront Israel with
a remilitarized Sinai and a southern blockade.

Why is this still important? Because that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of the Six Day War -- the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez War, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.

All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser's hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson tried to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel's south. The effort failed dismally.

It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel's every frontier,
jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. "We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,'' declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, "and as for the survivors -- if there are any -- the boats are ready to deport them.''

For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel's citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance.

We know the rest of the story. Rabin recovered in time to lead Israel to victory. But we forget how perilous was Israel's condition. The victory hinged on a successful attack on Egypt's air force on the morning of June 5. It was a gamble of astonishing proportions. Israel sent the bulk of its 200-plane air force on the mission, fully exposed to antiaircraft fire and missiles. Had they been detected and the force destroyed, the number of planes remaining behind to defend the Israeli homeland -- its cities and civilians -- from the Arab air forces' combined 900 planes was ... 12.

We also forget that Israel's occupation of the West Bank was entirely unsought. Israel begged Jordan's King Hussein to stay out of the conflict. Engaged in fierce combat with a numerically superior Egypt, Israel had no desire to open a new front just yards from Jewish Jerusalem and just miles from Tel Aviv. But Nasser personally told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel's air force and airfields and that total victory was at hand. Hussein could not resist the temptation to join the fight. He joined. He lost.

The world will soon be awash with 40th anniversary retrospectives on the war -- and on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only return to June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that unbearable May when, with Israel possessing no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel's imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

Prelude to the Six Days

Thank goodness for brilliant journalists like Charles Krauthammer who nails the failures of Pan-Arabism in Prelude to the Six Days:

There has hardly been a Middle East peace plan in the past 40 years - including the current Saudi version - that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

In fact, the real anniversary should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser ordered the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the UN buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. That three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of that war - the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza - in return for paper guarantees of peace. With troops and armor massing on Israel's every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel.

The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war - and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel's imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

Forward this article to everyone you know, folks. Make them read this article because it is your duty to wake up everyone. Everyone is asleep, goddammit. You need to wake them up to the fact that Islam is more than pretty fabrics and mosaic tiles.

Please heed your Judeo-Christian conscience.

40th Anniversary of the Reunification of Jerusalem

Via Israel HighWay:

Most Jews in Israel and throughout the world barely remember a time when the Old City of Jerusalem and the rest of east Jerusalem were not an important part of the fabric of the city and the country. For 19 years, from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 until the Six Day War in 1967, Jerusalem was a city divided by barbed wire and dangerous "no-man’s land" running roughly north to south separating the Jewish people from the Old City of Jerusalem. The Old City, the City of David, was the cornerstone of 2,000 years of Jewish longing for Zion. The long-held dream of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was finally achieved, but the heart of the land was at once visibly close and miles away.

When Israel was born in 1948, its citizens and armed forces were unable to defend the Old City, and it fell to the Jordanian Legion. Jews were cut off from their holiest sites in Jerusalem, including the Kotel (Western Wall), the City of David just outside the Old City Walls, Mt. Scopus and the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery.

Throughout this time the Jewish character of the Old City was systematically destroyed by the Jordanian government. Thousands of Jewish residents of east Jerusalem and the Old City were driven from their homes. Fifty-eight Jerusalem synagogues, including some that were hundreds of years old, were destroyed or ruined and others were turned into barns for animals or public bathrooms. The entire Jewish Quarter was destroyed, houses were built immediately adjacent to the Kotel and all access to the ancient city was completely denied to Jews. Then suddenly, in the middle of the Six Day War, Israel found itself, unexpectedly, in control of the Old City.

With the news that Israel had taken control of the Old City and east Jerusalem, Israelis from all over the country began flocking to the Kotel to celebrate their young country’s miraculous victory. With Israeli sovereignty in all of Jerusalem, the holy sites of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths were opened to all, as they had never been under centuries of Muslim rule.

Now, 40 years later, many Israelis don’t know an Israel without a united Jerusalem offering free access to the Kotel and the important cultural and historic sites in the Old City. What was once "no man's land" dividing Israeli west Jerusalem from Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem is now home to many landmarks and tourist attractions. One such place is the Haas Promenade, the first stop for many tour groups because of its scenic overlook of the entire Jerusalem panorama.

In recent years, Jerusalem has struggled as a growing and modern city. The city's narrow and winding streets are often snarled with traffic, and the city center, the site of frequent terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, has struggled to keep shoppers and to attract people seeking entertainment who favor the modern indoor mall on the outskirts of the city. However, the city is in the midst of a major building campaign centered around the Jerusalem light rail system which will connect the outlying neighborhoods of the city with the center of town. The light rail, with its signature "Bridge of Strings" at the entrance to the city, will serve as a catalyst for new pedestrian malls, shopping areas and a reduction of traffic in and around the city center.

However, everything is not settled. To this day, 40 years after the unification of the city and almost 60 years after the founding of the State of Israel, the world refuses to fully accept Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Children born in Jerusalem to American parents are issued U.S. passports with the country of birth left blank. For decades, only two countries, Costa Rica and El Salvador, maintained their Israeli embassies in Jerusalem, and both of those countries announced last year that they would be moving their embassies to Tel Aviv.

The issue of Jerusalem has played a significant role in various diplomatic discussions in recent years and remains a key "final status" issue in the on-again, off-again talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords, the negotiations at Camp David and the other interim discussions have all touched on the future of Jerusalem but opted to postpone the discussion. This year’s controversy over the Mugrabi Gate excavations shows just how sensitive an issue Jerusalem can be. The Mugrabi Gate serves as the entry point to the Temple Mount for all non-Muslim visitors. The bridge was built after the Six Day War to bring visitors to the Temple Mount. Recently it was heavily damaged during torrential rainstorms, and Jerusalem city architects ruled that is must be replaced with a more permanent and safer structure. In February, initial excavations of the site for the new bridge brought a swirl of controversy from the Muslim world, with Muslim and Arab leaders accusing Israel of seeking to undermine mosques on the Mount. Israel defended the decision to rebuild by inviting inspectors from various countries to observe and inspect the area themselves. A UN ruling on the incident cleared Israel of wrongdoing, acknowledging that they had acted with professionalism.

What is the future of Jerusalem? Will it remain the undivided capital of Israel or will the world demand official Palestinian sovereignty in parts of the Holy City? The answers to these questions remain unclear to all; but on this, the 40th Yom Yerushalayim, we should all stop to appreciate the Eternal City.

Take Action:

* Celebrate Yom Yerushalayim on May 16.
- Put an Israeli flag on your window or porch.
- Wear an Israeli flag pin.
* Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Attend a special service at your school or synagogue to mark the miracle of Jerusalem's reunification.
* Write a letter to your congressmen, senator, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that the American Embassy be moved to Jerusalem.

* Watch these video clips on Jerusalem:

- Jerusalem of Gold
- Matisyahu's Tribute to Jerusalem

Click here to listen to a live broadcast of the liberation of the Old City on June 7, 1967.