This week happens to be the 60th anniversary of the UN resolution 181 which partitioned the holy land between Jews and Arabs, leaving Jerusalem under the UN’s authority.
The Guardian‘s Ian Black points out that the city’s designation as a corpus separatum undermines Palestinian claims on the capitol:
Jerusalem, in a decision worthy of the setting for Pontius Pilate’s famous manual ablutions, was to belong to neither. It was to become a “corpus separatum” under UN direction – which is why today, except for a few banana republics, no country in the world, not even the US, will build an embassy there, or recognise it as Israel’s capital, eternal or otherwise. Indeed, it is a telling argument against Palestinian claims to the city as its capital – but for obvious reasons it is not one that Israel and its supporters are likely to make.
Food for thought: The official map of what would have been the UN’s Jerusalem district includes the areas of Bethlehem, Maale Adumim, Motza, Shuafat and beyond, far surpassing anything Israelis or Palestinians would now define as “Greater Jerusalem.”
