The Fight for Jerusalem is not written for academics but for a general audience. In it, Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, argues that Jerusalem must remain under Israeli sovereignty and only then can “peace be safeguarded,” for “Muslim Palestinians are looking to obliterate other faiths” from the city. The first two-thirds of the book contain historical material on the relationship between Jerusalem and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, respectively, from antiquity through the Middle Ages and beyond, and then the physical and diplomatic struggle over Jerusalem from 1948 to 2000. Much of this data has been presented previously, and with more authority and fewer errors, by other scholars—upon whom Gold is heavily dependent.
However, his section on “Temple Denial,” i.e., the recent habit of Palestinian and Arab leaders of denying that the First or Second Temple was in Jerusalem, is very important and expands upon accounts presented by previous authors. The final section of the volume, “Radical Islam and Jerusalem,” contains material relevant to the subtitle and is the most interesting and original part of the volume. It includes a thorough documentation of the recent trend toward popularizing Arab apocalyptic literature and a discussion of radical Islam’s potential impact upon the future of Jerusalem.
Unfortunately, Gold’s book suffers from three kinds of errors that detract and distract from his argument: typographical errors, factual errors (perhaps the result of delegating research to the “virtual army of research assistants” whom Gold thanks), and errors of omission (where Gold selectively uses archaeological data to support his ideas and glosses over historical controversies to strengthen his theme of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, consigning mentions of the substantial scholarly discussions about these issues to the footnotes).
It is essential to get the historical facts correct, lest we base our actions on erroneous data and misconceptions in moving forward. One hopes that these will be corrected in a future revised edition, for Gold’s book will likely be read widely, including by policymakers.
