When the American ambassador stood in Jerusalem this week and said that the decision about the city had been made by God some thirty-eight centuries ago, he affirmed a thing worth affirming: that Jerusalem’s status is not the gift of diplomacy but the settlement of covenant. But there is a corollary to that affirmation — harder, and far less often spoken — and it is this. If Jerusalem was decided long ago and by a higher authority, then every effort to divide it is not a peace plan. It is a trespass. You cannot negotiate away what was never yours to hold; and you cannot divide what you do not own.

This needs saying, because the instinct of the age runs so hard the other way. For a generation the settled wisdom of the chancelleries has held that peace lies through partition — that the land must be cut, the city shared, its eastern half sliced off to crown another state, its holy places apportioned among rival claims. The plan changes its clothing from decade to decade, but the operative verb never changes. Divide. It is offered always in the language of fairness, and always as the road to peace. And it has never once arrived there.

Look at the record without sentiment. The first partition was proposed in 1947, when the nations drew their line across the land and offered the Jews a truncated state; the Jews........

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