by Keith Redfern

Created on: February 20, 2010   Last Updated: February 21, 2010

Jerusalem should be more than split between Israel and the Palestinians, it needs to be declared an open city.

For two thousand years religious groups have struggled to gain ownership of Jerusalem, because for each group it holds a special significance in their religious lives.

One thing which can be learned from history is that separation never produces long lasting peace, but a means of bringing people together can. This may seem a strange thing to write on the yes side of a ‘should the city be split?’ debate, but the one situation which would never produce lasting peace in the Middle East is a Jerusalem either totally in Israel or totally in a Palestinian state.

There are many examples in history of divisions of land and separations of peoples which have led to years or centuries of struggle, bloodshed and death.   

However, whenever groups of people have been brought together within one national community, the result has nearly always been harmonious.

The Balkan region was settled as Yugoslavia, but as separate ethnic and religious groups, pulling each other in different directions, a recipe for long lasting mutual distrust has been recreated through division.

Europe has been troubled by invasion and wars since the fall of the Roman Empire. The development of the European Union, originally for reasons of mutual trade benefit, has brought together countries often known as ‘old enemies’ under one political umbrella, diminishing, hopefully forever, the prospect of future wars within the continent.

As one Arab Empire from Turkey across Arabia and the whole area of Mesopotamia, the region of the middle east was relatively stable, but subdivided artificially by the acts of European colonial governments, it has never been able to reach a mutually settled situation.

But even before the Arab Empire was established, there was fighting between Christians and Moslems over what each called their holy ground. In the present Palestinian regions Christians and Moslems exist together, sharing the mutual aim of a Palestinian homeland.    

The current source of conflict is between the state of Israel and a Palestinian area from which terrorists sometimes operate, and one of the main bones of contention preventing the final formation of a Palestinian state is the situation of Jerusalem.

It seems highly unlikely that Israel will accept a Palestinian Jerusalem, and nor are the Palestinians likely to accept a Jerusalem

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