BOOK REVIEW: HISTORY OF JERUSALEM

Book Review: The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West and the Future of the Holy City - Jonathan Schanzer (JPost)

Wearing the hats of historian, archeologist, theologian and political analyst, Dore Gold provides a short but thorough tour of Jerusalem's complex history, demonstrating persuasively that the interests of Jews, Christians and Muslims there were always safeguarded best when Jews were the city's custodians.

Gold notes that Jerusalem was an obscure backwater during the Abbasid era (750-945). Islamic scholar Taqiyy al-Din ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) ruled it inappropriate to pray toward Jerusalem. Broadly speaking, the Muslim world grew enraged over Christian or Jewish attempts to control Jerusalem, but often neglected the city when other religions were uninterested in its conquest. On the other hand, Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jews comprised nearly 50% of the population in 1842 and 65% in 1914.

Israel's leaders hoped Jordan's King Hussein would sit out the 1967 Six-Day War. However, Jordan launched 6,000 artillery shells into Jewish Jerusalem, causing indiscriminate death and destruction. Israel captured the entirety of Jerusalem on June 8, 1967, in what can only be seen as a defensive war.