There are two distinct issues in attempting to arrive at a settlement concerning the status of Jerusalem: Holy Places and territorial jurisdiction. As regards Holy Places, both Israel and the PLO, apparently, are willing to accept special arrangements for international religious bodies in the holy sites. The Palestinians demand that East Jerusalem be the capital of a Palestinian State. In accordance with international law, an international organisation cannot be sovereign of territory, but it can administer it. All the parties concerned, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians object to internationalization. Any attempt to resolve this issue has to consider whether the City should be divided and should the division be a physical barrier. If there is no physical barrier then should there be another physical barrier between Israel and a Palestinian State or entity. As to possible solutions, there appears to be no international call for physically dividing the city again. There have been many proposals for solutions. Proposals include functional division and suspending the issue of sovereignty, treating the Old City within the walls as a separate issue, or dividing the city according to the demography of the different suburbs. Each proposal raises difficulties. It appears that international law may help buttress solutions but, unfortunately, international law holds no magic answer or golden key.

This chapter explores the Custody of the Holy Land as a legal, spiritual and cultural product of the Holy Land. It explores its roots in Catholic spirituality and pilgrimage, the Holy Land as a shared religious landscape, and the influence of Islamic law/Ottoman governance.

The feminist Women of the Wall (WOW) have been active in the Western Wall plaza since 1988. The group has struggled for women’s right to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the women’s section of the Western Wall. Such practices disrupt the restrictions imposed by the ultra-Orthodox administration of the site, which has argued that the women violate Israeli laws and regulations regarding holy places that require visitors to respect the “local custom” of the site. WOW has also engaged in a legal battle. Its activists have been repeatedly arrested over the years and the group has filed petitions with the Israeli High Court of Justice to be granted permission for their practice. Their struggle has been over who is authorized to determine the “local custom” of the site. From a space shaped exclusively by ultra-Orthodox norms, WOW argues that it wants to make the Western Wall a place inclusive of all Jewish strands. Dismantling such intra-Jewish divisions, it constructs the site as a religious-nationalist symbol that should unite rather than divide Jews.

This book explores three contemporary women’s movements in and around Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade: Women for the Temple, a messianic Jewish Orthodox women’s movement campaigning for access to Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif; Murabitat, pious Muslim women activists mobilizing for the defense of al-Aqsa Mosque from Jewish claims; and Women of the Wall (WOW), a Jewish feminist organization working against restrictive gender regulations at the Western Wall. Using these cases, the book demonstrates how attention to gender and to women’s engagement in conflict over central sacred places is essential for understanding the intra-communal processes that make contested sacred sites appear increasingly “indivisible” for parties in the inter-communal context. More broadly, the book argues that a gender analysis of contested sacred places enriches and sharpens both our description of the “choreographies” of such sites and our analytical understanding of the contemporary dynamics of conflict in these sites; in particular the processes that give rise to the problem of “indivisibility.”