On bloggingheads this week, as President Obama was on his way to Israel, I spoke with Sarah Wildman, who is just back from Jerusalem with the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, about the myth and reality of Jerusalem. The mantra that the holy city is the “undivided capital of Israel” is a political flashpoint in the US, capable of upending almost any political gathering. Recall the brouhaha during the Democratic National Convention last year over the change in platform language, after which Israeli activist Daniel Seidemann (who Wildman and I discuss in this segment) noted, “the only place that Jerusalem remains the eternal, undivided capital of Israel is in the fantasies of the ideological right in Israel and the United States.”
In the segment below, we discuss how Jerusalem is being Disney-fied, particularly through the City of David archaeological dig, with the aim of “proving” that Jews have a biblical, historical claim to Jerusalem:
The segments during which we discussed continued settlement-building are here, here and here; the entire video is here.
