“When the Twentieth Century opened Jerusalem was a small provincial town of the Ottoman Empire, one of the towns furthest from the imperial capital, Constantinople. It had a population of only 70,000, of whom the majority, 45,000, were Jews, and 25,000 were Arabs. As the Twentieth Century draws to a close Jerusalem is the busy capital of an independent nation, Israel, with a population of more than half a million, a quarter of whom are Palestinian Arabs.
“… It is, in addition, as it has been for so many centuries, the ‘Holy City’, the centre of religious worship for both Judaism and Christianity, and an important religious centre for Islam, figuring immediately after Mecca and Medina as a focal point of the Muslim world.”