Israel will celebrate the 45th Jerusalem Day on Saturday night and Sunday, on the Hebrew date of the 28th of Iyar, the anniversary of the Six Day War, when Israeli soldiers liberated the eastern part of the city from the Jordanian occupation.
More than 40,000 people are expected to march toward the Western Wall on Sunday during the annual Dance of Flags.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has produced an informative four-minute video demonstrating a re-division of Jerusalem today is technically impossible, unnecessary and dangerous, and opposed by a majority of all the city’s residents — both Jews and Arabs.
The JCPA notes a re-division is no longer possible in a city that has dramatically grown and changed over the half-century since the war. Today, nearly half a million Arabs and Jews (270,000 Arabs and 200,000 Jews) live in a mosaic of neighborhoods called “East Jerusalem,” intermingled not only in terms of neighborhoods but vital infrastructures.
This might also be a good time to re-read Anne Lieberman’s extraordinary article “Six Days Remembered,” her chilling day-by-day summary of the Arab movements preparing to extinguish the 19-year old Jewish state in the lead-up to the war, which resulted instead in the re-unification of Israel’s capital.
Its eternal, undivided capital. An inter-active panoramic view of Jerusalem is here.