The question of who Jerusalem belongs to and who is entitled to share the city has divided parties to conflicts in the Middle East along religious, ethnic and political lines for thousands of years.
Today, Palestinians want East Jerusalem, including the Old City, as their capital, while Israelis want Jerusalem to remain intact as their "undivided and eternal capital". It should have come as no surprise then that the City of David was the one great stumbling block at Camp David this week.
Jerusalem's skyline is a vivid illustration of religious tension. Church steeples stand out beside the golden dome of al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest shrine in Islam, which is on the site of the Temples built by Solomon and Herod and the remaining Western Wall, the most holy place in Judaism.
While Israeli flags with the Star of David fly from the rooftops of Jewish houses and pious Orthodox Jews sway in prayer at the Western Wall, church bells in the Old City clamour to be heard above the muezzins' call to prayer at the mosques. Even in prayer, the city that is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians is torn by rivalry and distrust.
The walled Old City is divided into four quarters - Armenian, Jewish, Muslim and Christian. Its strange mix of people and of architecture bears witness to the tumultuous past of the city founded by King David 3,000 years ago. Peace in the holy city has always been scarce. Throughout the ages, bloodshed has invariably determined the destiny of Jerusalem. An endless stream of conquerors - from Babylonians and Persians to Roman centurions, Byzantine princes, Arab warriors, Crusader knights, Ottoman Turks and British colonialists - have breached the city walls. And in 1967, Israeli soldiers captured the Old City from Jordan.
The Israelis annexed East Jerusalem as part of their "eternal and indivisible" capital. Now the Palestinians are demanding the eastern sector for their own capital, and Yasser Arafat plans to declare a Palestinian state by September 13th. In Ramallah this week he declared that the Palestinian flag would soon be raised from the walls, the mosques and the churches of Jerusalem. He was, he said, holding out for "all of Jerusalem. All of it. All of it."
Reports suggest that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, suggested that Mr Arafat could establish a capital for his state to be called "Al-Quds" - the Arabic name for Jerusalem - under which he would gain full sovereignty over Arab neighbourhoods on the edge of the city and some neighbourhoods within the existing municipal borders, along with "administrative" or "religious" rights to parts of the Old City, including the Temple Mount.
While the walled Old City would formally remain under Israeli sovereignty, an access route would be built from al-Quds to the Temple Mount, and a mechanism for "joint control" would be instituted in the Old City.
A more generous US proposal would have given him sovereignty in the Muslim and the Christian quarters of the Old City. But Mr Arafat turned this down too, along with the offer of a presidential office in the Muslim quarter. Instead, he insisted on full sovereignty throughout East Jerusalem and the entire Old City, with the exception of the Jewish Quarter, and lost everything.
It was, apparently, Mr Barak's unbending refusal to cede sovereignty on the Temple Mount that doomed the summit. When Mr Arafat reminded Mr Barak that "our mosques" were atop the Mount, Mr Barak reportedly retorted: "Our Temple is underneath them."
The Western Wall is all that remains of the Jewish temples. But in Hebrew myth this sacred place was also the navel of the earth, where the waters of the flood gushed out and where they once again receded into the abyss before they were sealed by the Stone of Mount Moriah.
Ironically, even the project of building Solomon's Temple betrayed in its very execution the cocktail that must always be imbibed in Jerusalem: Solomon's architect, Hiram of Tyre, who is credited with the design of the Temple - "a cunning man, endued with understanding" - was the son of a Jewish mother and a Phoenician father; in today's terms, he would be an Arab in the eyes of Arabs and a Jew in the eyes of Jews.
The Romans levelled the Temple Mount after Bar Kochba's revolt. Later Christians, more interested in the heavenly Jerusalem, converted the site into a rubbish dump, only regaining interest in the Temple Mount after the Crusades.
But the site is holy to Muslims too. The 17th sura of the Quran says Muhammad was transported by angels from "the inviolable place of worship", Mecca, to "the far distant place of worship", Jerusalem, and from the Temple Mount ascended to heaven.
In the early days of Islam, Muslims first prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, until they were instructed to pray towards Mecca. In one saying, Muhammad declares that the reward or blessings for a Muslim who prays in al-Aqsa is multiplied 500 times. In another saying, he advises Muslims not to undertake difficult journeys except to reach three destinations: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.
With Omar's conquest of the city in 638, the Christian Patriarch, Sophronius, was made to crawl on his hands and knees in penitence for the desecration of the rock, on which Omar built al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. But under Muslim rule, Jews and Christians were tolerated as "People of the Book", as long as they paid tribute, and Bishop Arcluf, an early visitor later cited by the Venerable Bede, testified to the great tolerance in the city.
That tolerance was in stark contrast to the brutality of the Crusaders, who burned the cities, Jews in their synagogues and persecuted the Eastern Orthodox Christians. Al-Aqsa became the religious centre of the Knights Templar and the Dome of the Rock became Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord, with a monastery, a baptistry, and a shrine to Saint James built alongside them on the Temple Mount.
Strong religious claims such as these, with their scriptural warrants, are irreconcilable, and they neglect the pressing claims of other minorities in the city. Armenians have their own quarter, and many protest that the hue of any future administration is irrelevant as long as the city is not divided.
A community of 1,000 gypsies or Domari has been living among the Arab population for many generations and now fears its culture is in danger of extinction in an effort to divide the city between exclusively Israeli and exclusively Arab sectors.
But if anything was achieved at Camp David, then it must be that Israel for the first time has agreed to discuss the status of Jerusalem, and that the city map has been placed on the negotiating table.
As the EU special envoy to the Middle East, Miguel Angel Moratinos, told Le Figaro, the "taboo" surrounding Jerusalem's sovereignty has been broken. "They discussed Jerusalem at Camp David. They even spoke about it in detail. They've done the most difficult part," he said.
The Jerusalem taboo has been broken.