Israel — Then & Now
Jerusalem: The Indivisible Capital of the Jewish People
No city on earth has been loved, longed for, and fought over as Jerusalem. It is named hundreds of times in the Hebrew Scriptures and many more in the New Testament. For three thousand years it has stood at the center of the religious imagination of the Jewish people — the place of the Temple, the city of David, the destination of pilgrimage, the subject of psalms sung in exile and prayers whispered in every land of the dispersion. To understand why Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal and undivided capital, one must understand a simple historical fact that no amount of modern politics can erase: of all the peoples who have ever ruled this city, only one has ever made it their capital. That people is Israel.
The City of David
Around the year 1000 before Christ, King David captured the fortified hill town of the Jebusites and made it the capital of the united kingdom of Israel. His son Solomon built upon Mount Moriah the great Temple that would become the focal point of Jewish worship for centuries. From that moment Jerusalem was not merely a city among cities; it was the political and spiritual heart of a nation, the place where the presence of God was understood to dwell among His people. When the Babylonians destroyed the city and the Temple in 586 before Christ and carried the people into exile, the loss of Jerusalem was felt as the loss of everything. And yet, even in exile, the people did not let it go.
The prophet Daniel, an old man serving in the courts of a foreign empire, opened his windows toward Jerusalem and prayed three times a day, though it cost him the lions’ den to do so. The exiles by the rivers of Babylon swore that if they forgot Jerusalem, their right hands should forget their skill. Through every subsequent dispersion, in every century and every land, the Jewish people closed their Passover with the same words their ancestors had spoken: next year in Jerusalem. No other city in human history has been the object of such unbroken devotion by a single people across so many centuries of separation from it.
The Capital of No Other Nation
Across the long centuries between the Roman destruction and the modern era, Jerusalem was ruled by a succession of empires — Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British. Under all of them, Jerusalem was a provincial town, never a capital. The great Muslim empires governed from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Constantinople; Jerusalem was never the seat of any of them. There was never a sovereign Arab state, and certainly never a sovereign Palestinian state, that made Jerusalem its capital, for the simple reason that no such state ever existed. The historical record is unambiguous: in three thousand years, Jerusalem has served as the capital of exactly one nation, and that nation is Israel — first in antiquity, and again in the modern age.
This is not to deny that the city is holy to others, or that Christians and Muslims have deep attachments to it. It is simply to state the political and historical reality that is so often obscured in modern debate. The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is not a recent colonial imposition. It is the oldest and most continuous national claim to any capital city on earth.
“In three thousand years, Jerusalem has served as the capital of exactly one nation — and that nation is Israel.”
Divided, and Reunited
For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, Jerusalem was a divided city. Jordan held the eastern part, including the Old City and the holy sites, and during those years Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple Mount. Synagogues in the ancient Jewish Quarter were destroyed, and Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives were used as paving and building material. A divided Jerusalem was not a city of peace; it was a city of barbed wire and exclusion, in which the holiest site of the Jewish faith was placed off-limits to the Jewish people.
In June 1967, the city was reunited under Israeli sovereignty. For the first time in nineteen centuries, the whole of Jerusalem was governed by a Jewish state — and, significantly, access to the holy places of all three faiths was restored and has been maintained since. The administration of the Temple Mount was left in Muslim hands; churches and mosques continued in their worship. Whatever its critics allege, a united Jerusalem under Israel has guaranteed freedom of worship to a degree the divided city never knew.
An Undivided Capital
In 1980, Israel enshrined in its Basic Law the declaration that Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel. In 1995 the United States Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, though successive administrations delayed acting upon it. In 2018, on the seventieth anniversary of the nation’s rebirth, the United States at last moved its embassy to Jerusalem — a recognition of what had been true for three thousand years. To speak of re-dividing Jerusalem, of running a border once more through the heart of the city, is to propose a return to the barbed wire and the exclusion of the years before 1967. Israel has declared, and the friends of Israel affirm, that the city will not be divided again.
The City of the Great King
For the Christian, Jerusalem is more than a matter of history and politics. It is the city where the Lord Jesus walked, taught, died, and rose; the city to which, the Scriptures declare, He will return. The prophets speak of a day when the nations will go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, and when the city the world has so often sought to divide will become the center of a peace that does not fail. The Christian Zionist does not love Jerusalem in place of loving the Church, nor does he imagine that the modern state has fulfilled every prophecy. But he refuses the false teaching that God has finished with the city of David, and he sees in the return of the Jewish people to their ancient capital a sign that the purposes of God are moving toward their appointed end.
We are commanded to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and that command has never been more needed than now. To stand with Israel on the question of Jerusalem is not to wish harm upon anyone; it is to affirm a historical truth and a biblical hope — that the city chosen by God for His habitation, the capital of His covenant people, will endure, undivided, until the day its King returns to reign from it. They shall prosper that love thee, the psalmist sang of Jerusalem. The friends of Israel say amen.