The Future of Jerusalem

There’s no other square kilometer on earth like Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s packed with the most important religious sites for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Tread carefully!

Soon after Israel’s establishment, a divided Jerusalem was declared its eternal capital city. Even though many of the founders of Israel lived in new cities like Tel Aviv which they created from scratch—and despite the fact that Jerusalem’s Old City was ruled by the Jordanians and utterly off-limits to Israelis—they knew only Jerusalem could serve as the state’s capital given the city’s history as the seat of power for King David over 3,000 years ago.

Jerusalem is also the city in which the Temple of Solomon was built, only to be destroyed and then rebuilt 70 years later. It was then further upgraded 2,100 years ago by King Herod whose handiwork is still evident in Jerusalem and throughout Israel even today. In fact, the massive stones that make up the retaining wall of the Temple Mount were set by Herod, and visitors to the Western Wall in the Old City can easily discern the telltale carved frame of these stones. Those Western Wall retaining stones are all that remains of the Temple complex that once stood atop the Temple Mount where the golden Dome of the Rock now stands.

Even though Jerusalem has been the capital of modern Israel for decades and is the seat of the Knesset and the institutions of government, it historically struggled to garner official foreign recognition. A major diplomatic milestone occurred when the United States formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved its embassy there. While Australia initially stepped toward a partial recognition of West Jerusalem, it fully reversed that policy in late 2022. However, a steady momentum has continued building. Today, a growing list of nations maintain their official embassies directly in Jerusalem, including the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Kosovo.

With so many sensitive religious sites all crowded into the Old City, it is no wonder that the United Nations’ 1947 Partition Plan originally assigned Jerusalem the status of a "separate body" (corpus separatum) to be administered by the UN itself. However, at the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949, the Jordanians held the Old City and annexed it the next year, burying the idea of international administration under decades of Jordanian rule.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem was unified after the Jordanians entered the war on the side of Egypt and Syria. Jerusalem's reunification was an epic event in Israeli history and—for the first time since 1948—Jews were allowed to enter the Old City and visit their holiest sites. Israel moved swiftly to unify the city under one municipality while safeguarding the religious rights and shrines of all denominations. In addition, Israel cleared and reconstructed much of the historic Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, which had been systematically destroyed under Jordanian occupation, and built thriving new neighborhoods throughout the unified city.

In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the Palestinians also began to claim the city as the capital of a future state. With claims to the city that appear mutually exclusive, it is no wonder that most countries and international bodies considered this aspect of Arab-Israeli peacemaking as the most intractable. So sticky was the issue considered that almost all historic peace plans pushed the final status of the city to the absolute end of the diplomatic process.

Enter Donald Trump. In 2017 the US President decided to break the decades-long diplomatic stagnation. Noting the inability of the parties to arrive at a lasting peace, and the undeniable fact that Jerusalem functions as Israel's de facto capital—where the Knesset, the President’s House, and Prime Minister’s residence are located—the US administration formally recognized reality. Many presidential candidates before him had solemnly pledged to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem but, upon ascending to the office, found expedient ways to postpone the move. The US Embassy finally opened in Jerusalem in May 2018.

Most Israelis celebrated the shift, though they took it with characteristic aplomb. On one hand, they chafed at the historic unwillingness of foreign nations to recognize Israel’s declared capital, a hesitation driven largely by a fear of provoking Arab OPEC nations. On the other hand, non-recognition had been the status quo for so long that external validation changed little about Israel's internal resolve. If other countries could not bring themselves to recognize a simple and obvious geographical fact about the Jewish state, so be it.

The modern strategic landscape of the city was fundamentally rewritten following the shockwaves of October 7, 2023. For decades, international peace initiatives treated Jerusalem like a legal prize to be split at a negotiating table, operating under the assumption that slicing the municipal municipal boundaries would satisfy regional adversaries. The post-October 7 reality exposed the flaw in this logic, demonstrating to the Israeli electorate that security cannot be maintained if key terrain is compromised. For a population deeply focused on protective deterrence, any proposal to reduce sovereign administrative control or introduce international monitoring over the holy basin is viewed not as a compromise, but as a direct threat to urban stability.

"The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities. It’s hard to breathe. And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives" -Israeli Poet Yehuda Amichai

Political Parties and Jerusalem

Until Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's surprise offer at the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 to divide Jerusalem, Israeli political parties (except the Arab factions) talked of Jerusalem exclusively as the undivided and eternal capital of Israel. Barak's offer broke the long-standing taboo surrounding the city's potential division.

According to former US President Bill Clinton, who hosted the summit, Israel agreed to hand the Palestinians control of the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism and the compound where the al-Aqsa Mosque is situated—on the condition that the area around the Western Wall remain under Israel’s control. Israel also offered Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem (the Muslim and Christian quarters) as the crowning jewel of a proposed state. Without bothering to make a counteroffer, Yasser Arafat rejected it, walking away to launch a pre-planned war of terror.

Eight years later, at the end of a horrific period of suicide bombings, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Kadima party tried again with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert went beyond Barak’s offer, ceding Israeli control of the entire Old City of Jerusalem to place it under international administration. Olmert famously told Abbas, “It will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I am offering you now.” True to form, the opportunity was missed, and the offer was rejected.

In the years since those rejections, the political consensus in Israel has fundamentally hardened. The underlying ideological reality is that dividing Jerusalem is an exceptionally dangerous proposition. The sovereign presence of Israel is the sole mechanism preventing the capital from transforming into a volatile launchpad for regional adversaries. The upcoming October 2026 general elections reflect this paradigm shift; right-wing and nationalist coalitions are actively campaigning on fortifying the city’s unity, advancing major infrastructure projects to seamlessly connect Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, and securing the holy basin against international pressure.

While left-wing factions historically entertained division, and centrist parties remained vague, the modern security era has largely closed the door on the rhetoric of partition. The defining electoral issue of 2026 is no longer about how to execute a division of Jerusalem, but how to effectively secure, govern, and develop the undivided capital. The nation stands fully prepared to defend its ancient inheritance, ensuring that its golden capital remains unified, open, and secure under sovereign Israeli rule.