In recent weeks, an upsurge in violence in Jerusalem has brought the embattled city back into the headlines.
According to Danny Seidemann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem and one of the leading experts on the city, this
violence, boiling at a level unseen in Jerusalem since 1967, actually began over a year ago, and it is not just
another spoke in the “cycle of violence.”
“Usually there’s a tendency to overstate the instability of Jerusalem,” Seidemann said at a meeting of journalists
and analysts in Washington this week. “But Jerusalem is normally a far more stable city than its reputation. What
we are seeing now are significant developments that go well beyond tomorrow’s headlines.”
Seidemann described a dangerous confluence of factors, with the political stalemate creating an atmosphere of
despair in which the conflict, which has always been political, will finally become the religious conflict that
many have believed, until now incorrectly, that it is. The current conflict centered on the Temple Mount is only
the tip of the iceberg. According to Seidemann, “The entire fabric of this conflict has changed.”
“The fighting over the Temple Mount indicates the establishment of a biblical narrative which is already fanning
the flames of a religious conflict,” Seidemann said. “It is planting the seeds of the transformation of a political
conflict, which can be solved, into a religious conflict which cannot be solved. We are seeing the ascendancy of
those faith communities that weaponize faith. We are seeing the marginalization of traditional religious bodies who
understand that Jerusalem is best served by the faiths working together.
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