Wall Politics: Zionist and Palestinian Strategies in Jerusalem, 1928

Benedetto Croce noted that all history has "the character of 'contemporary history,' because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate."'

Exactly 50 years ago, late in September 1928, an "incident" occurred at the Western Wall of the Holy Sanctuary in Jerusalem which set in motion a sequence of violent events that clearly "vibrate," as Croce put it, in political situations and judgments today. The Western or "Wailing" Wall controversy, which became a public issue in 1928, triggered the intercommunal violence that in 1929 claimed 800 casualties and marked the shift of the political process in Palestine into the irreconcilably violent phase which continues today.

Recent discussions of the "present needs" of a Middle East peace settlement offer little to dispute Croce's observation. Those which reject the possibility and/or acceptability of a democratic, secular state in all of Palestine often refer back to the intercommunal violence of the Mandate era as proof of the unworkability of a common solution, in which Palestinian Arabs and Jews live amongst each other and constitutionally guarantee to each other certain communal rights. Several treatments which espouse the Zionist solution with or without expansion of the 1967 borders give a markedly monocular view of the incidents and pronouncements which occurred in Jerusalem when Zionists and Palestinian Arabs first clashed openly over control of "the Wall."

Mary Ellen Lundsten is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.