Today is the 45th Jerusalem Day in Jerusalem, Israel – the annual commemoration on the 28th of Iyar, the anniversary of the Six-Day War on the Hebrew calendar, when Israel liberated the eastern part of the city from Jordanian occupation. It is also worth recalling a little history on this day.

After the defeat of Turkey in World War I, President Wilson received a 1919 report from two American commissioners to the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey. The commissioners wrote that they “doubted whether the Jews could possibly seem to either Christians or Moslems proper guardians of the holy places”:

The places which are most sacred to Christians — those having to do with Jesus — and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them … [T]he Moslems, just because the sacred places of all three religions are sacred to them have made very naturally much more satisfactory custodians of the holy places than the Jews could be.

Wilson ignored the report, and the subsequent Mandate for Palestine issued by the League of Nations and backed by the United States recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”

Since 1948, when the State of Israel was re-established, we have had the opportunity to see who has been a “satisfactory custodian” of the holy places, and who was not. When the British Mandate expired in 1948, Jordan illegally occupied the Old City of Jerusalem and proceeded immediately to destroy or desecrate the Jewish presence within it. In the 45 years since the Six-Day War, Israel has protected the holy sites of all three major religions.

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has produced a four-minute video that demonstrates the re-division of Jerusalem is technically impossible, is both unnecessary and dangerous, and is opposed by a majority of the city’s residents — both Jews and Arabs. The city has grown dramatically and changed during the nearly half-century since the Six-Day War, and nearly half a million Arabs and Jews (270,000 Arabs and 200,000 Jews) now live in the mosaic of neighborhoods called “East Jerusalem,” intermingled not only in terms of populations and neighborhoods, but vital infrastructures.

This might also be a good day to read Anne Lieberman’s “Six Days Remembered,” her compelling day-by-day summary of the Arab movements in May and June 1967 to prepare to extinguish the 19-year-old Jewish state, which resulted instead in the re-unification of Israel’s capital. Its eternal, undivided capital.