You Cannot Divide What You Do Not Own

When the American ambassador stood in Jerusalem this week and said that the decision about the city had been made by God some thirty-eight centuries ago, he affirmed a thing worth affirming: that Jerusalem’s status is not the gift of diplomacy but the settlement of covenant. But there is a corollary to that affirmation — harder, and far less often spoken — and it is this. If Jerusalem was decided long ago and by a higher authority, then every effort to divide it is not a peace plan. It is a trespass. You cannot negotiate away what was never yours to hold; and you cannot divide what you do not own.

This needs saying, because the instinct of the age runs so hard the other way. For a generation the settled wisdom of the chancelleries has held that peace lies through partition — that the land must be cut, the city shared, its eastern half sliced off to crown another state, its holy places apportioned among rival claims. The plan changes its clothing from decade to decade, but the operative verb never changes. Divide. It is offered always in the language of fairness, and always as the road to peace. And it has never once arrived there.

Look at the record without sentiment. The first partition was proposed in 1947, when the nations drew their line across the land and offered the Jews a truncated state; the Jews accepted the knife, and their neighbours answered with five armies. Every scheme since has run the same course. The land was divided, or promised to be divided, and what followed was not the peace that was sworn but a fresh harvest of grievance — a new line to be contested, a new claim to be pressed, a new war dressed as a correction of the last. Partition has been tried more thoroughly than almost any policy in the modern age, and it has produced everything except the single thing its authors promised. When a remedy has failed for eighty years, honesty at some point requires us to ask whether the diagnosis was wrong.

Scripture supplies the reason, and it is blunt. The prophet Joel records a judgment God reserves for the nations, and he names the offence with unusual precision. God will gather the nations, Joel says, and enter into judgment with them — and the charge laid against them is that they scattered His people and parted His land. Parted. Divided. The one act singled out for the nations’ reckoning is the very act our diplomacy has spent a generation calling peace. This is no obscure or marginal text. It is God stating plainly that the land is His, that Israel is His heritage, and that the carving of it is an offence He intends to answer. A man may disbelieve the prophet if he chooses. He may not pretend the prophet did not say it.

And Joel does not stand alone. Zechariah looks down the same corridor of history and sees Jerusalem made a burdensome stone for all the peoples — a stone that every nation will strain to lift, and by which every nation that lifts it will be cut. It is a striking image, because it does not describe Jerusalem as a prize the nations divide. It describes Jerusalem as a weight that divides them. The city the world keeps trying to partition turns out to be the stone on which the partitioners are broken. Read the last hundred years of Jerusalem’s diplomacy, and then tell me the prophet was wrong.

Return, then, to the ambassador’s sentence. If it is true — if the title to Jerusalem was written thirty-eight centuries ago and never revoked — then there are finally only two things a nation can do with that title. It can recognise it, or it can defy it. To move an embassy into the whole city, and to build it there to last, is to recognise it. To sit at a conference table and draw a line through that same city is to defy it. There is no third posture, no sophisticated middle ground in which a nation both honours the deed and partitions the property. The two-state reflex, whatever the good intentions dressed around it, stands on the wrong side of the only document that finally matters, because it begins by assuming the one thing that document denies — that Jerusalem is ours to divide.

I write this knowing that some of my own brethren have grown comfortable with the language of division — that there are Christians now who would split the city in the name of justice and call the splitting Christlike. But there is nothing Christlike in improving upon the word of God. The same Scripture that gives the Church her Lord gives Jerusalem her title, and a faith that reaches eagerly for the first while quietly setting aside the second has not grown more compassionate. It has merely grown more forgetful. You do not honour the God of Abraham by redistributing the inheritance He swore to Abraham’s seed.

The permanent embassy will stand, I hope, for a very long time, and it is fitting that it stands in the undivided city and not on the safe side of some imagined line. For the deed to Jerusalem, like the God who wrote it, is not divisible. The nations may keep drawing their maps; the maps will keep failing, exactly as the prophets said they would, because you cannot cut in half a thing that was given whole and given for ever. The ambassador named the owner. The rest of us would do well to remember what that naming means — that the peace of Jerusalem was never going to be found by dividing her, and never will be.