Jerusalem

For many centuries Jerusalem was home to Muslims. Christians and Jews living in harmony and peacefully side-by-side. The seventh century Dome of the Rock is the place where Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven to meet with Allah. It is the next to the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest mosque in Islam. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is perhaps the most sacred of the many Christian sites in the Old City. Jews pray at the Western Wall, believed to b part of Herod's Temple. As an international place for pilgrimage, Jerusalem was for centuries at the heart of Palestinian religious and social life for Muslims, Christians and Jews and the hub of the Palestinians economy. The future of Jerusalem is vital for the future of the state of Palestine. When the state of Israel was declared in 1948, the United Nations designated Jerusalem as an international zone, lying in the heart of the future intended Palestinian state. However in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and what remained of Jerusalem. This illegal annexation is not recognized by the international community but Israel defied UN Resolution 242 to withdraw from Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. The European Union Missions Report 2005 states "Israel's main motivation is almost certainly demographic, to reduce the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, while exerting efforts to boost the number of Jewish Israelis living in the city". This is an apartheid policy to destroy the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that Jerusalem has enjoyed in the past. Almost completed in Jerusalem, it is the most visible form of Israel's Apartheid inhumane acts of racism. Despite the UN Resolution of 2004, which called on Israel to dismantle the Wall, it cuts deep into Palestinian communities, expropriating their fertile lands and water resources and handing them to Israeli settlers colonizing the area. Palestinian towns and villages are being turned into disconnected ghettos subject to military incursions, total closures and arbitrary curfews.