For Jerusalem's sake I, like you, will not rest. With great interest I read the beautiful open letter you penned to the U.S. president that appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune on Friday, and which will appear in the New York Times today. From it I learned that you know much about heavenly Jerusalem, but less so about its counterpart here on earth.

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The Centrality of Jerusalem
Palestine Center Brief No. 194 (2 April 2010)

Policy Brief

By Yousef Munayyer

If international law matters to any American president, it ought to be President Obama who has taught constitutional law.

Israel's supporters are wrong to downplay the significance of illegal settlement activity as innocuous building in "Jewish neighborhoods" of Jerusalem. Contrary to Prime Minister Netanyahu's claim that "building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv," according to international law and longstanding U.S. policy, building in East Jerusalem is the same as building in Jenin - or any other city in the occupied West Bank.

Despite all its remonstrating, Israel stands isolated from the entire international community over occupied East Jerusalem. Israel has no legitimate sovereignty on any inch of land beyond the Green Line, regardless of what they call it. As one European foreign minister recently stated: "I think I can say very clearly that Jerusalem is not Tel Aviv." Legally speaking, this rebuke to Netanyahu's bluster is correct, and the U.S. knows it.

Those who watch this conflict closely know that Israeli settlement expansion in Jerusalem has the potential to destroy the two-state solution and precipitate a third intifada. It is no minor matter. Nor was the timing of the announcements of 1600 new Jewish homes in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo during the visit of Vice President Biden, or of 20 more units for a site owned by an American funder of Netanyahu just hours before the prime minister was to meet with Obama.

Netanyahu rejected U.S. calls to halt settlement expansion and his Interior Minister, Eli Yishai -- the same man who started the fracas when Biden visited -- also seems determined to continue flouting the Obama administration.

Undeterred, unrepentant, and still in his job, Yishai declared more than two weeks after the initial incident: "I thank God I have been given the opportunity to be the minister who approves the construction of thousands of housing units in Jerusalem."

And when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced the concern of the Obama administration, MK Danny Danon of Netanyahu's Likud party said her "meddling in internal Israeli decisions regarding the development of our capital, Jerusalem, is uninvited and unhelpful." American organizations such as AIPAC and the ADL then urged the Obama administration to hush while expressing no public dismay at Danon's tongue-lashing of the American secretary of state.

Could you imagine what would happen today if the United States annexed Mexico down to Mexico City, claimed it as part of Texas, then began building US cities there and preventing Mexicans from entering?

Obviously, the rest of the world would not accept the annexation of land through conquest for the United States or any state -- even Israel.

But Jerusalem is not only a flash point because of Israel's ongoing colonization through settlement expansion; this transcends the territorial dimension. Jerusalem is a symbolic city dear to Muslims, Christians and Jews. And as the economic and cultural center of Palestinian life for centuries, it is the only city that could be the capital of a Palestinian state. Likewise, no viable Palestinian state could emerge without East Jerusalem as its capital.

That's why other Israeli provocations in Jerusalem are equally damaging to the diplomatic process and stability in the region. The ongoing de-Arabization of Jerusalem which has accelerated in recent years, demands the immediate attention of all those interested in a just solution to this conflict. From eviction and demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, to the revocation of residencies and a complex matrix of walls and checkpoints, Israeli policies are slowly sapping Jerusalem of its Palestinian population.

In the Arab and Muslim world, this process playing out daily on the television screens of onlookers is interpreted as nothing short of a colonialist enterprise. (To see a video that explains Israels increasing grip on Jerusalem click here for a flash version and here for a YouTube version.)

While some Israeli spokespersons may claim that there is no need to fuss over building a few houses, the reality is that the Palestinians and others in the Middle East have been watching an ongoing and alarming trend in Jerusalem for decades. Major settlements like Har Homa, Gilo, Ramat Shlomo, Ma'ale Addumim and others, which were developed under the Israeli guise of building in Jerusalem "just like Tel Aviv," have created insurmountable obstacles to sharing Jerusalem between both peoples. The policies of removing or forcing out Palestinians from Jerusalem reinforce the notion that Israel has no intention of returning the land it occupies.

Without Jerusalem on the table, Palestinians not only lack incentive to negotiate, they lack any incentive to maintain the two-state framework.

Jerusalem tumult has the potential to send shockwaves through the Middle East and the broader Muslim world where the United States has far more important interests than the troublemaking state of Israel.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This policy brief may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.

Seven years ago today, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a Caterpillar D9R Israeli bulldozer while nonviolently protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah, Gaza Strip, along with other members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Now her parents, sister and brother are suing the State of Israel and the defense minister, claiming wrongful death.

This past January, over the course of 10 days, our class of 17 visited most major cities in the West Bank and Israel. Though we spent an entire semester preparing for the trip and doing research on the conflict, we were caught off-guard by nearly everything we saw. From the wall to the checkpoints and from the settlers to the soldiers, we were finally seeing everything that we had read about, and it was not comforting.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.

Whenever the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state is mentioned by Israeli politicians, they take for granted that their interlocutors understand that the future state would have to be demilitarized and disarmed, if an Israeli consent for its existence is to be gained. Recently, this precondition was mentioned by the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in response to President Barrack Obama's two states vision, presented to the world at large in his Cairo Speech this June.

In January 1989 I was questioned by the Jerusalem police over the publication of the "Service Notebook 2" of the "Yesh Gvul" movement, which included information about what soldiers could expect if they refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. I was one of the of five activists in the movement who were invited for questioning on the orders of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), which wanted to know where the Notebook had been printed and who wrote it.

Nearly everything you've been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip.

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

Large numbers of bodies, large numbers of wounded, and every minute another wounded is added to the list of those dead, and there is no longer space in the morgue. Relatives search among the dead and wounded so they can quickly bring their dead to burial. A woman has three school-age children killed. They are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, and she is screaming and crying and screaming again and then quiet. Mustafa Ibrahim managed to see all of that on Saturday at one o'clock in the Shifa hospital in Gaza. As a field investigator for a human rights organization, he thought he had been immunized but nothing had prepared him for these sights. Patients whose condition was not serious were requested to leave the hospital so there would be free beds.

After Hamas' January 25, 2006 electoral victory, Israel targeted Gaza oppressively.  All outside aid was cut off. Sanctions and an economic embargo were imposed, and the democratically elected government was falsely called a terrorist organization and isolated.  Stepped up repression followed along with repeated IDF incursions, attacks, killings, targeted assassinations, arrests, destruction of property and more in a pattern all too familiar to Palestinians for over six decades.  Gazans are imprisoned in their own land and have been traumatized for months.  In June 2007, things got worse after Israel placed the Territory under siege, described by some as medieval because of its extreme harshness.

Even before the voting began, Israeli politicians and pundits were asking: Will an Obama Administration be good for Israel? "Be good for Israel" is our code for "Will the US allow us to keep our settlements and continue to support our efforts to prevent negotiations with the Palestinians from ever bearing fruit?" For Americans the question should be: Will the Obama Administration understand that without addressing Palestinian needs it will not be able to disentangle itself from its broader Middle Eastern imbroglios, rejoin the community of nations and rescue its economy?

After campaigning on a platform of discarding failed past formulas and bringing "fundamental change" to Washington, Senator Barack Obama has won his bid for the presidency.