JERUSALEM is much more than a Berlin, or a Belfast, or a Beirut, or any other city divided by ideology or theology, the thrice Holy City, sacred to Jews Muslims and Christians, is built on combustible myth. National ambition and religious tradition have collided through the millennia. The symbols - synagogue, mosque and church - dominate the skyline and yet are submerged by the tides of conflict and violence.
The late 20th century phase of the contest began when Israel took over Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War. Israelis regard the entire city, Yerushalayim, as the indivisible and eternal capital of the Jewish state.
That view of the history begins and ends with the Old Testament. What matters is that, according to the second Book of Samuel, King David made this "fortress of Zion" his capital around 1000BC. It is not relevant that only Zaire, El Salvador and Costa Rica recognise any part of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
The Palestinians are equally determined that the east of the city they call Al Quds will become the capital of their independent state which will occupy only a portion of their ancestral land, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their national ambition is supported by other Arabs and complemented by the spiritual, aspiration of the world's one billion Muslims in the importance they attach to Jerusalem.
Saladin, the Muslim hero who recaptured the Holy City from the marauding Crusaders in 1187, reminded the departing Richard the Lionheart that it is from Temple Mount, the third holiest place in Islam, that the Prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended to heaven. The Dome of the Rock, built on that site, is the earliest surviving mosque. Jerusalem, indeed, preceded Mecca as the qibla, the direction towards which Muslims turned in prayer.
Christians of all denominations have their churches in the Holy City and share the majestic Holy Sepulchre. As Crusaders they were responsible for one of the bloodiest chapters in Jerusalem's history, slaughtering over 70,000 Muslims and Jews upon capturing the city. Christians are not party to the present dispute except as Christian Arabs, whose forebears helped the Muslim armies take the city from the Byzantines in 638.
With the advent of a new Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem's potential to set the entire region on fire has increased. The immediate cause of the recent bloody violence, a tunnel the Israelis bored into Temple Mount for the convenience of tourists, has itself been a reminder of the role that the sacred past could play in a troubled future.
Netanyahu won last May's elections on the issue of security and by declaring that he would not return any more conquered Arab land in exchange for peace with Israel's neighbours. One of his most damaging charges against Shimon Peres, his Labour opponent and architect of the Middle East peace process, was to warn that Labour would divide Jerusalem and hand over the Israeli-occupied Arab east of the Holy City to the Palestinians.
Without Jerusalem, the Palestinian Question" would not he what it is the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Without Jerusalem and, its overlay of religion and myth, the Palestinians would probably command little more international concern than other peoples without a state in the region, like the Kurds or the Armenians. Jerusalem is also too Important for Arab leaders, habituated to intra-brotherly intrigue and squabbling, to disagree over.
In May last year, an Israeli decree expropriating another 131 acres of Arab land in east Jerusalem enabled the Arab League to overcome the bitter divisions caused by Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and call its first summit for five years (the decree was revoked and the summit cancelled).
Israel, however, is poised to decide the future of Jerusalem without further negotiations. By creating what Israelis like to call "facts on the ground", the new government expects to be able to put Jerusalem physically beyond Palestinian grasp, constructing a wall of Jewish settlements to separate east Jerusalem from the West Bank and settling the issue of the eternally divided city.
Just after Israel occupied east Jerusalem, the state's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, initially wanted to demolish the Ottoman-built wall ringing the old city to expunge its Islamic heritage, - rather as the Roman emperor Hadrian obliterated Jewish Jerusalem and the (Christian) Byzantines used Temple Mount as the city rubbish dump.
Subsequent Israeli governments, whether led by Labour or Netanyahu's Likud, have been less dramatic, but more effective. In essence, they have used housing and zoning policy, and discrimination over residence permits, to create a Jewish majority in the eastern quarter and make it impossible for Arab residents to build enough to house their expanding families.
Jerusalem's mayor, Ehud Olmert, says Jews will constitute a majority in the annexed areas by the end of this year. By Palestinian reckoning, that target was passed in 1994, with Jews in the east now numbering 165,000 to 150,000 Arabs.
Ariel Sharon, the extreme right-wing general who, as housing minister in the last Likud government, spearheaded the drive to build Jewish settlements on Arab land and who has returned under Netanyahu as infrastructure minister has explained in detail what his policy was and remains.
He has defined the problem as "how to bring Jerusalem, to have a Jewish majority for ever". The solution was to expropriate Arab land and encircle east Jerusalem with four big clusters of settlements Givat Zeev north of the city, Maale Adumim to the east, and Efrat and Gush Etzion in the south and south-west looming from the hills over the Arab villages like modern Crusader castles. These are the main building blocks which will permit the Likud-led coalition to enclose east Jerusalem. As Sharon wrote: "In Jerusalem we built and created facts that can no longer be changed. We did it openly." Under Labour there was a freeze on new settlements as part of the Oslo peace process with the PLO. This did not extend, to the settlements of Greater or metropolitan Jerusalem and over all, the number of settlers on Arab land under the Labour peacemakers expanded almost 50 per cent, according to the settler publication Nekuda from 105,940 to 151,324.
Since taking office, Netanyahu has quipped that he can hardly be expected to do less. But the clearest decision he has made is that he will not honour Israel's international commitment to negotiate the future status of east Jerusalem with the Palestinians. Under the US and Russian-backed Oslo agreements of 1993, which give the Palestinians interim self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, the two sides between now and May 1999 should conclude "final status" agreements on Jerusalem, Palestinian statehood borders, and the rights of more than 4 million Palestinian refugees.
LIKUD leaders routinely say that they will never assent to a Palestinian state so there is no point in discussing east Jerusalem as its capital. Sharon and cabinet allies such as interior minister Eli Suissa - a religious fundamentalist who controlled Jerusalem building policy under Labour - goes further.
Last month Suissa, said Israel would annex the settlements in Jerusalem, cutting off the east from its West Bank hinterland. Netanyahu has as yet said nothing definitive. But his chief political adviser, Dore Gold, wrote in a study last year that "the assertion of such territorial control would produce an Arab sector in east Jerusalem that was isolated from the West Bank and could not effectively serve as a national capital."
In an office just over the old, pre-1967, Green Line boundary in east Jerusalem, Khalil Toufagji, a PLO cartographer, lays out maps, patiently and unemotionally. He points out the areas inside the municipal limits of east Jerusalem expropriated from Arabs to house Jews over a third of the total area. Then he details a further 52 per cent of the land designated as green areas". Until Oslo, these tracts were regularly expropriated for "public purposes" which turned out to be Jewish housing.
Then we move outside the city limits to Greater Jerusalem and the West Bank. Toufigji produces what is known, to the Israelis as Military Order Number 50, dating from 1982. This shows a network of roads through and around Jerusalem, connecting up the settlements while slicing up and atomising the Arab villages and neighbourhoods.
The full impact of Military Order Number 50 was blunted by serial court actions by the Palestinians and more recently by Ir Shalem, an Israeli organisation fighting further land encroachments to ensure there will be something left to discuss under "final status".
"They are encircling us through three cycles of roads and (planned) new settlements, Toufagji says. In most cases, the device of connecting bypass roads will enable Israel to expand existing settlements around Jerusalem without risking the international opprobrium of creating "new" settlements.
"The first issue now is by-pass roads," says Toufagji, "the second is settlements. Look at these maps and you can see the future. That is final status. All these plans have been in their (Israeli) drawers for years.
"Since 1967, they've never changed. If they start to build quickly now, in four years we won't be able to talk about Al Quos but only about Yerushalayim. It'll be over."
Tsali Reschev, a young Labour leader and founder of Ir Shalem and the Peace Now movement, is also pessimistic and says: "They're not building roads to connect up Jewish neighbourhoods but to prevent access between Arab districts." But Ehud Olmert, the mayor of Jerusalem, says: "Don't believe this nonsense. There is no deliberate plan. Every city in the world expropriates land for public use."
THE nub of his argument is that every "satellite township" until Oslo was built "when we weren't negotiating with them (the Palestinians) and Israel's duty is now to link them up."
Changing east Jerusalem's demography is irrelevant: "If the city's not going to be divided, what difference does it make?" he asks. Last month Olmert's bulldozers demolished the Burj al Laqlaq Centre for the Aged and Handicapped in the old city. Although Palestinians insist this was on Waqf (Islamic religious trust) land under their control, virtually all Arab building inside Jerusalem is illegal under tightening rules.
The bulldozers have added to the growing sense of desperation among the Palestinians. Faisal Husseini, their Jerusalem leader, says: "If we can't stop them, we will be swept away. I don't know if we have time left or not. It's in their hands, not mine."
He denies that Labour and the PLO had, before the elections, secretly agreed in principle that Abu Dis - an Arab village east of the city boundary - would, be rechristened Al Quds and become the Palestinian capital. The argument now looks academic.
Netanyahu aides believe Israel can keep the whole city, by persuading any or all of three Arab kings - Hussein of Jordan, Hassan of Morocco and Fahd of Saudi Arabia - to become "trustees" of the Holy Places. There are flaws in the plan, the most obvious being that it could seriously compromise their legitimacy in their own countries at a time of rising Islamist challenge.
"The problem of Jerusalem could be the trigger for a Middle East in turmoil," observes Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, the leading Egyptian commentator and former Nasser intimate, "the springboard for a new series of revolutions in the Arab world . . . only Arafat could surrender Jerusalem." Husseini, descended from Haj-Amin alHusseini, who, before the PLO existed, led Palestinians as Grand Mufti, of Jerusalem, concurs. "Don't open the religious issue," he says, warning this will give "new legitimacy and motivation to the Islamic fundamentalists in Palestine and the region. "The PLO holds the most important card in the Arab world because Palestine has Jerusalem in it," he says, "that the PLO is secular and we cannot use this (religious card). But if that card drops from its hands, the only ones who can pick it up are the Islamist organisations. Every single Arab leader knows this.
The Palestinian scholar and Harvard professsor, Walid Khalidi, has pleaded for the "healing power of a historical reconciliation". Thai is why, he said, "all those committed to an honourable and peaceful solution must get together to stop in their tracks the forces of fundamentalism - Muslim Christian and Jewish - slouching towards their rendezvous in Jerusalem."