Verfehlte Mission - taz Talk

It all began with the newly founded United Nations, the UN: in November 1947, its General Assembly adopted the partition plan for the British Mandate of Palestine - with the exception of Jerusalem.

This city, to which all three monotheistic religions laid claim and still do today, was to be transferred undivided to the care of the UN. But the Israeli-Arab War in 1948 thwarted this plan. Jerusalem was divided into East and West with an exclave in the north-east of the city.

For her recently published book "Missed Mission. Divided Jerusalem and the United Nations", historian Yfaat Weiss examined the history of this exclave up to the Six-Day War in 1967 for the first time on the basis of sources scattered around the world.

It sheds light on the UN's futile attempts to bring about peace between the conflicting parties Jordan and Israel, the sovereignty claims of both parties, the relocated holdings of the National Library, the abandoned institutes of the Hebrew University, the biblical zoo with starving animals, the neglected cemetery of the Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First World War, and finally the Palestinian village of Issawiya in the middle of the exclave. Here, history reaches into our present.

A taz Talk with:

🐾 Yfaat Weiss is a historian and teaches modern and Jewish history in Jerusalem and Leipzig. In 2012, she was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Her latest book "Missed Mission. Divided Jerusalem and the United Nations" was published this year.

🐾 Jan Feddersen moderates this taz Talk. He is a taz editor, curator of the taz lab and author of various books, for example on identity politics and Berlin's Sonnenallee after October 7.