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The centuries after the Crusader expulsion from Jerusalem did not bring with them a revival of the city's fortunes. If anything, Jerusalem sank into an impoverished squalor. Seemingly for the first time in millennia, the city was largely ignored, except for the occasional renovation of a shrine.

All this changed when the Ottoman Turks overthrew Mamluk rule in the Jerusalem area. The new rulers were both great conquerors and builders, and Suleiman the Magnificent embodied the best of both these talents. Driving Ottoman armies to the gates of Vienna in 1528, Suleiman impressed the likes of Charles V and Henry VIII, and once again made Christian Europe just a little nervous.

Suleiman felt a deep and abiding love for Jerusalem, as well as a strong desire to protect it from any future Christian incursions. Toward that end, he ordered the complete rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls in 1536. Completed five years later, the walls stretched around the entire city, 2 miles in length and 40 feet high. The city was not only well protected by this wall, it was beautifully adorned. Like a diadem, the masterfully built wall was decorated with seven jewels: its gates. The largest and most impressive was Damascus Gate at the northern end of town (shown above). Suleiman also underwrote the cost of the renovation of Jerusalem's water system, creating beautiful fountains visible to this day. When Suleiman died in 1566, the city had grown from an unwalled village of a few thousand souls to a city of around 15,000 whose population included roughly 3,000 Christians and Jews. Once again, Muslim rulers distinguished themselves both in their love for Al Quds (their name for Jerusalem) and in their tolerance of their religious neighbors.

While Suleiman restored Jerusalem, Europe was emerging into an age of nation-states creating their own empires as they jockeyed for a competitive edge against their neighbors. Initially, the imperial expansion of Europe went mostly to the Americas in the west. But interest in Africa and the Far East led Europe to look again at the eastern Mediterranean, not to reclaim holy sites for Christianity, but to create pathways to new sources of raw materials and new markets. Yet Jerusalem still claimed the hearts and minds of Europeans, as this early map demonstrates, with Jerusalem at the center of the three world regions. One man in particular redirected imperial Europe's gaze toward the Middle East: Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1798, he invaded Egypt, and during the course of the French occupation, Napoleon's forces advanced into the Holy Land as far north as Acco in what is now Israel. While Napoleon's invasion had the positive result of giving birth to the modern field of Egyptology and the rediscovery of the ancient Near East, it also served as fair warning to the other powers of Europe that the Middle East would now be a new arena for competition. The pivotal role of the Middle East in European strategic planning was confirmed with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

As the once mighty Ottoman Empire of Suleiman aged and declined as the "Old Man of Europe," diplomats, military attaches, commercial interests and tourists began to flood Egypt and the Holy Land (now known by the geographic term 'Palestine'). Thomas Cook and Sons made the journey for the wealthy and emerging middle class more affordable, faster, and somewhat safer than it had been in previous centuries. But Christian tourists were not the only visitors. The Jewish communities of most European states had been liberated from the restrictions and discrimination of earlier generations, and were now looking back to Palestine as a home to which they could return. Along with many other dramatic changes, the Nineteenth Century saw the beginning of modern Zionism in the Diaspora community.

Already in the middle of the century, Jewish pioneers had established their own communities just west of the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City: Mishkenot Sha'ananim, and Yemin Moshe, whose signature windmill you see here. The remainder of the Nineteenth Century also brought a renewed Jewish commitment to the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. In the 1870's, the massive new Hurva Synagogue was completed, the largest of the all the Jewish Quarter's religious structures. Ironically, it would be leveled by Jordanian forces in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

The Twentieth Century accelerated the pace of events in Jerusalem to a break-neck rate not seen in two millennia. In late 1917, the forces of General Sir Edmund Allenby's British Expeditionary Force expelled the last Ottoman troops from the Jerusalem area. Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain had asked Allenby to give Jerusalem to the British people as a special Christmas present as World War I approached the end of a fourth devastating year. Allenby accepted the challenge and marched through Jaffa Gate on December 11. Standing by the Citadel, he declared to the war-weary inhabitants that he would protect the religious and civil rights of all three faiths of the Holy City. Only a month earlier, Britain issued a statement that would ultimately affect the world Jewish community as deeply as Cyrus' Edict allowing Jews to return to rebuild Jerusalem 25 centuries before. We know it as the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

While Jews worldwide celebrated the first part of the Declaration as the beginning of the Return to Zion, the non-Jewish Palestinian population realized that they must now find and assert their own nationalist aspirations.

Within a few years, British control of Palestine had received the official blessing of the newly created League of Nations. So began the British Mandate over Palestine, which everyone hoped would be a benevolent occupation ultimately resulting in an independent and peace-loving democracy in the British mold.

When you consider that such a dream was doomed from the start, it's remarkable the British did so well. Jerusalem grew dramatically. The early Mandate period saw building on a scale not equaled in centuries, including Palestine's first modern archaeological museum near Damascus Gate, the Rockefeller, seen in this view to the right. While Europeans, Americans and the rest of the world visited the world's holiest city in droves, the British faced the growing and ultimately hopeless task of preventing Arab and Jewish nationalists from embroiling the land in a full-scale civil war. The 1920's and early 1930's saw massive Jewish immigration into Palestine, as the Balfour Declaration had mandated. The frustrated Arab response was frequently violence. With the rise of Hitler and the specter of a new world war, Britain began to back-peddle on its Balfour-based commitment to Diaspora Jewry. In 1939, the British issued the infamous White Paper, which effectively shut the door on Jewish emigration to Palestine from Europe, at precisely the time when this last refuge of hope was most desperately needed.

The Holocaust of World War II ended the lives of six million Jews. Some historians argue that the sheer monstrosity of this act created a sense of guilt among the great powers that served as a catalyst for the creation of an independent Jewish state. Whether or not this belief has substance, we cannot ignore the extraordinary contribution of Jewish leaders worldwide toward the rebirth of a Jewish nation in the Holy Land with Jerusalem as its capital. Chief among them was David Ben-Gurion (shown above with his wife Paula). Ben-Gurion arrived in Palestine in 1907, established himself as Mandate Palestine's premier labor leader and Jewish nationalist over the next four decades, and led Israel into statehood on May 14, 1948.

The fighting that followed the Declaration of Israeli Independence would ultimately give it a state significantly larger than any previous partition proposal had allotted. But for the next nineteen years, Jerusalem would live with only half a heart. The Old City of Jerusalem and its suburbs, collectively known as East Jerusalem, would remain in Jordanian hands after the Rhodes Armistice Agreement of 1949 gave the Middle East an end to war without a commitment to peace.

What you see to the left is what many residents of West Jerusalem saw for nearly 20 years: a city cut in two by barbed wire. Like the Cold War towns of Berlin, and later Nicosia, Jerusalem was both a sacred place and a political pariah. The United Nations vainly tried to unravel this Gordian knot, suggesting internationalizing the city and its environs, only to hear uniform condemnation from both Israeli and Palestinian interests. In the end, the only solution would be the same as Alexander the Great's: violently cut the Gordian knot.

Early in June, 1967, Israel responded to the tightening Arab blockade and war preparations with a pre-emptive strike against Egypt. King Hussein of Jordan began shelling Israeli West Jerusalem, and before long, Israel was fighting a three-front war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, all armed to the teeth with Soviet weapons. Israel's lightning response to the Arab threat gave it victory over all its opponents in the space of six days. It took only two to give Israel the rest of Jerusalem. Once the city and its environs were securely in Israel's hands, its Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, pushed through an extraordinary new policy: the old lines separating the city would be obliterated. People on either side would be able to travel freely to the other. While many at the time thought this a disastrous proposal, Dayan and Jerusalem's new mayor, Teddy Kollek, proved them wrong.

In taking all of Jerusalem and declaring it the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, perhaps the greatest dream of the Jewish people over 20 centuries had been fulfilled. The Old City of East Jerusalem contained the Western or 'Wailing' Wall, a portion of the perimeter wall which supported the Temple Mount itself. Although the focal point of Jewish prayers for two millennia, practically no Jews had been allowed to pray there for decades. Now the birthplace of the City of David was again controlled by David's religious descendants.

In re-uniting and restoring Jerusalem after 1967, a principal focus was the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Mostly leveled by the Jordanians in the wake of the War of Independence, the Quarter had remained largely abandoned for the last 19 years. Ironically, the Jordanian destruction had given the Israelis an unparalleled opportunity to discover their past. Under the direction of Hebrew University archaeologists Nahman Avigad and Benyamin Mazar, the world of ancient Jerusalem began to emerge from the rubble you see to the left. Great mansions of Herodian Jerusalem revealed all their beauty as well as the tragedy of their destruction at the hands of the Romans. Gateways of Biblical Jerusalem were uncovered. Umayyad Muslim palaces and Crusader hospices were rediscovered. Later excavations led by the late Professor Yigal Shiloh would explore south of the Old City in the East Jerusalem suburb of Silwan. Shiloh's work was constantly dogged by the protests of local Arab residents who feared ancient Jewish discoveries that might lead to modern Israeli claims on the land. Even more troubling was the violent reaction of certain Jewish groups who claimed Shiloh's team was digging up and desecrating the burials of Jews from over 2,000 years ago. Despite the challenges, Yigal Shiloh left behind a unique protrait of Jerusalem's earliest years: a Middle Bronze Age wall from the time of Abraham, King David's millo structure, and the House of Ahiel, which was destroyed by the Babylonians at the same time as Solomon's Temple. Thanks to the determined and brilliant work of Avigad, Shiloh, Mazar and also the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, the ancient stones of Jerusalem could finally begin to tell their story.

The principal architect of Jerusalem's restoration and growth as the united capital of Israel is Jerusalem's mayor from 1965 to 1991, Teddy Kollek. No man has worked harder with greater success to make Jerusalem one city for all the world. Through his Jerusalem Foundation, contributions large and small from all over the world have helped in building parks, museums, clinics and other public works that have made Jerusalem one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. Among the many famous supporters of the Jerusalem Foundation was Marlene Dietrich, whose renowned legs were just a bit too tempting for Kollek to avoid glimpsing.

To create 'facts on the ground,' Israeli policy from the late 1960's called for the building of large apartment complexes in nearly all directions to surround the central core of both east and west Jerusalem. One of the new suburbs in the north was French Hill. While these and other buildings offered new homes for the flood of immigrants of Seventies, Eighties, and Post-Soviet Union Nineties, they also made a profound and troubling political statement: greater Jerusalem would include large areas of territory that local Palestinians felt was properly their heritage for a future Palestinian state. This unresolved problem will face a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians as we enter the next century.

Another phenomenon only hinted at in these buildings is architectural: Israel is building up. The land of the Patriarchs is quickly becoming the land of ever taller skyscrapers. With a rapidly growing population and far too little land, the only way to go is up rather than out.

Jerusalem is forever a source of hope for people worldwide. You are looking at one of the most joyous fulfillments of hope in Jerusalem in recent years. In May 1991, nearly 15,000 Jews were evacuated from war-torn Ethiopia, the latest in a long history of redeeming the threatened Jewish populations of the Diaspora. While later years would see many challenges for these new Israelis, on this day, they found their lives' dreams fulfilled as they prayed for the first time at the Western Wall.

We end where we began, nearly 4,000 years ago. In the suburbs of Jerusalem, just across the valley from Ein Yael, Jerusalem built its new Tisch Family Zoo, completed in 1993. Here, a satellite village a few miles from the Old City sprang to life nearly four millennia in the past, about the time Jerusalem built its first city wall. Today, a rare species of goats roams over the ruins of this ancient village. Jerusalem's population now has passed the half-million mark, far larger than at any time in its history.

In the wake of peace treaties with Egypt, Palestine, and Jordan, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the election of the Likud government of Benyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem faces a new century with vibrant hopes and grave doubts. Will it remain one city, or once again become two? Can Arab and Jew find a way to share the city's future? Can a city so rooted in the past survive the overwhelming change of identity brought about in recent decades?

The answer for the future may live in a prayer from the past:

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls,
And prosperity within your palaces
For the sake of my brothers and companions 
I will say now: 'Peace be within you.' 
For the sake of the House of the Lord our God, 

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