The day that started the recent history of the Middle East was at the end of September 2000. The place was the holy city of Jerusalem, the crystallization of all the hatred and ill-will that pervade the entire area and seem impossible to soothe. The UN idea when it proposed partition of Palestine into two states was that Jerusalem should be an international city. But when the fighting stopped (slowed down) after the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence, Israel had the western part of the city and Jordan had the eastern – the old – part, the section containing some of the holiest sites on earth.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel took East Jerusalem along with the West Bank from Jordan (and the Gaza Strip from Egypt) and now a nation of a few million had complete control of a city claimed as sacred by three religions representing over half the population of the world.

There are certainly other issues that separate Palestinians and Israelis and make attempts to find a peaceful resolution to their conflict elusive: what about the several million Palestinian refugees, for instance, and the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories? But although those are concerns filled with fierce emotion, they are also practical questions, most important to those immediately affected. Jerusalem is a matter of the heart and therefore, it seems, the issue most likely to continue inflaming everyone on every side.

Ariel Sharon

On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon, then-leader of the right-wing Israeli Opposition Likud party, visited a site in East Jerusalem that’s revered by both Muslims and Jews – Jews call it Temple Mount, Muslims call it Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary. The site is in the old part of Jerusalem, the part taken by Israel during the 1967 war. Palestinians saw the visit as a provocation. Sharon, it seemed, was marking his territory, as well as thumbing his nose at Israel’s prime minister Ehud Barak, accused by the right of being too conciliatory, of promising to give away too much in the way of sovereignty in return for too little in the way of security. To Sharon, Jerusalem was not up for bargaining, not even the part that’s Arab because that’s the holy part, the part Jews must always have access to.

There was an immediate outpouring of popular Palestinian anger to Sharon’s presence at the mosque. The result was a new intifada and a rise in violence on both sides that increased destruction, produced hundreds of dead, and had the Middle East poised nearer to war than at any time since the Gulf crisis in 1991.

Sharon, military leader and then prime minister of Israel, had been demonized by the Arab world since the early 1980s when he was directly responsible for invading Lebanon and “indirectly responsible” (as an Israeli inquiry said) for Christian troops in Lebanon murdering helpless Palestinians in two Beirut refugee camps.

Sharon said he went to Temple Mount in a gesture of peace and has claimed that the intifada was stage-managed. The Israeli position was that Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority until his death in November 2004, didn't want peace but rather supported the ongoing struggle by militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad against the existence of Israel.

Israelis demonized Arafat since his founding in the 1950s of the al-Fatah – dedicated to getting rid of Israel – but especially since the Munich Olympics in 1972 when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by members of Black September, an al-Fatah subgroup.

Palestinian resistance to Israel takes the form of trying to make life in Israel so terrible that Israelis will leave. It hardly seems a rational objective and suicide bombers blowing up Israelis by ones and twos seem to increase hatred and intransigence more than fear.

Sharon, who always seemed most comfortable with military solutions, responded to the increasing Palestinian violence with increasing military might though much of it was aimed at symbols of Palestinian national aspirations – buildings and services. He penned up Arafat in Ramallah, in the West Bank, surrounded by tanks. Israel only let him out to go to France for medical care in the days before his death in a Paris hospital.

So Israel and the Palestinians were both led by men the other side found loathesome and absolutely untrustworthy. The Palestinians want nationhood and the Israelis want security. Jerusalem, unfortunately, remains at the centre of both their mythologies, national and religious. The Israelis and Palestinians both live with fear, the Palestinians bear, as well, statelessness and great poverty. Neither side will give up its claim to Old Jerusalem, whatever the promised rewards. Even diplomatic intervention by the U.S. couldn’t break the deadlock.

It’s interesting to conjecture where the Middle East might be today if the UN proposal for the partition of Palestine had been greeted with optimism on both sides. Might there now be, half a century later, two thriving states on the land, symbiotic neighbours, instead of two groups who have nothing to give each other but anger and the desire to inflict pain? And might Jerusalem be an international city, free and safe to all who are drawn to it in reverence?

The reality is the existence of both groups and the necessity of sharing one chunk of land. That has to be better than what’s happening now.