The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians demand that the eastern half of Jerusalem be given to them, in order to declare it the capital of a new Arab state called Palestine. 
An independent Arab state called Palestine has never existed in all of recorded history.
Such an independent Arab state called Palestine has never existed in all of recorded history. Palestine has always been a geographical area, just as Siberia or Patagonia are: never an independent state.
Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of only one people in all of that same recorded history: the Jewish people. A Kingdom of Jerusalem existed under the regime of the Christian Crusaders, but this was created by a motley group of European knights who had no historical roots in the land.
The Jewish Bible, along with the Talmud and the Midrash, tell us that the Torah, its light and its message, is to be broadcast to the entire world from one specific place - Jerusalem. Not just its western half.
We know that each time the Torah scroll is taken from the Ark to be read during synagogue services, the following prayer is always sung: "For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah (Law), and the word of G-d from Jerusalem." (Isaiah 2:1 and Micah 4:2)
In the holy Jewish Bible (the Tanach), the words "Jerusalem" and "Zion" appear 821 times, with "Jerusalem" appearing 667 times and "Zion", 154 times. Both Zion and Jerusalem are considered synonymous.
In the Christian Bible, which itself is an account primarily of Jewish personalities whose lives were formed within the Jewish province of Rome known as Judea, as well as in the Galilee, the name "Jerusalem" appears 154 times and "Zion", seven.
In the Koran, Islam's holy book, Jerusalem and Zion do not appear at all. Indeed, it was only after the Arabs, under their new banner of Islam, conquered Jerusalem in the year 638 that they invented Islamic history in and around Jerusalem.
After the Holy Temple was destroyed in the year 70 CE by Titus, Jerusalem lay stricken. But Jews still maintained a presence there and continued to suffer under the Roman yoke. The heroic Bar-Kochba Revolt, which broke out in 135 CE, was crushed by the legions of the Roman emperor, Hadrian. Jerusalem was plowed under and the city renamed Aelia Capitolina, in part after the emperor's own name, Hadrian Publius Aelius. He built a shrine to the Roman god Jupiter on the site where the Holy Jewish Temple had once stood.
From the 10th century, the Muslim Arabs still called the city various names that echoed the original Jewish origins. For instance, they called it Beit al-Makdis, the Arabic version of the Hebrew name Beit HaMikdash - House of the Sanctuary. The present Arabic name, beloved of Palestinian Arab terrorists, is Al-Kuds, which is derived from the Hebrew, Ir Hakodesh - City of Holiness.
The Crusader Christian king, Frederick II, obtained Jerusalem, along with Bethlehem and Nazareth, in a treaty with the Egyptian Sultan Al-Kamil. This was a lease agreement given by the Muslim ruler and meant to last some ten years. Frederick subsequently crowned himself King of Jerusalem. But in 1244, the Muslims retook Jerusalem and the city no longer was considered important to them. It lapsed into a long slumber and the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, which today are a focal point of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activity, fell into disrepair and abandonment.
Only when Israeli forces, in June 1967, liberated the Temple Mount and east Jerusalem, during their defensive Six Day War against Arab aggression, did the Arab and Muslim world suddenly wake up and demand control of the city, or at least the Temple Mount and Jerusalem's eastern half. It is instructive to note that when the Jordanian Arab Legion occupied east Jerusalem and the Old City in 1948, after driving out its Jewish population, the Arab world again lost interest in the city. Indeed, King Hussein, Jordan's ruler, had little interest in Jerusalem compared with his desire to build up his capital, Amman, which he considered far more important. Between 1948 and 1967, during the illegal Jordanian Arab occupation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, no Arab leader ever thought it important enough to visit Jerusalem except King Hussein, who visited it rarely.
Today, Mahmoud Abbas - the successor to arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and now head of the Palestinian Authority - demands that Jerusalem be divided again as it was from 1948 to 1967, and that a new Arab capital - for the first time in history - be established in Jerusalem.
Not only the Muslim world, with its more than fifty seven member states, but the Europeans and President Barack Obama are relentlessly pressuring Israel into conceding parts of its holy capital to further placate the voracious Arab appetite and "further the peace process." Obama goes even further and arrogates to himself the chutzpah to tell Jews where they can and where they can not live in their own Biblical and ancestral homeland.
Giving away even one inch of Jerusalem would be to spit in the face of the endless generations of Jews who have held Jerusalem as the central spiritual and physical place of Jewish history. It would be a cataclysmic act of betrayal of Jewish history and faith if any part of Jerusalem is lost to the Jewish people by this generation.
For Jews, Jerusalem is the spiritual and temporal heart. The prayer uttered at Passover and Yom Kippur - "Next year in Jerusalem" - must not become an empty phrase. It must not be made even more bitter in its utterance by Israeli politicians and leaders abandoning much of eternal Jerusalem to placate a fraudulent Arab people called Palestinians, and to appease a hostile world by succumbing to an equally fraudulent peace. Imagine the time immemorial Passover prayer corrupted into, 'Next year in West Jerusalem.'
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently reminded Britain's George Brown that Jerusalem is Israel's eternal capital. But it was Netanyahu who, in his first premiership, gave away one of Judaism's four holy cities, Hebron, to the Arabs. 
We must pray that Prime Minister Netanyahu remains steadfast.
As Jerold S. Auerbach mentioned in his August 28, 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Remembering the Hebron Massacre": "The Jewish community of Hebron - some 700 people - recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of their return.... All the other ancient peoples mentioned in the Bible have vanished. But Jews, a community of memory, still live in Hebron."
Mr. Auerbach added that this month they commemorate the 80th anniversary of Tarpat, which is the acronym for the date in the Hebrew calendar when the ghastly massacre of Jews by their Arab neighbors took place in 1929. It was fomented by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, whose hatred of the Jews later led him to spend time plotting with Adolf Hitler in the notorious Berlin bunker.
We must pray that Prime Minister Netanyahu remains steadfast in the face of the enormous pressure that is building upon him, thanks in large part to the new American president, and that he never, never abandons any part of Jerusalem.