Jerusalem

The recent trip of Pope John Paul II to the Holy Land reminds us that the Israelis and the Palestinians are still squabbling over Jerusalem, and it looks as if neither side is ever going to give. Given the international importance of Jerusalem, why not put this city and its environs under the governance of the U.N.? Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will be happy about this, but each will have the satisfaction of knowing that the other side is not happy either. This is better than having one side happy and the other not happy at all. JUANITA MATASSA Santa Ana

Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?" The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" he had just bought from a used-book store.

Reporting from New York — Just before his death, Frank Malone felt compelled to summon his grandson Jez Butterworth to the garden of the family house in Wiltshire, England, and pour out the accumulated wisdom of his years. He told him to never stop writing, to roll with the punches, to laugh at himself and the world, and left him with the coda that ".... girls, my boy, are wondrous … No man ever lay in his coffin wishing he'd made love to one less woman. " "I must've been all of 8," Butterworth says with a laugh nearly three decades later.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court weighed into one of the thorniest issues in the Middle East conflict - who has sovereignty over Jerusalem - ruling that courts have the power to decide whether Congress can order that passports for U.S. citizens born there list "Israel" as their birthplace. The justices, ruling 8 to 1 on Monday, passed the decision back to a lower court. So Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, now 9, will have to wait to find out what his passport will look like. The U.S. has long taken the position that sovereignty over Jerusalem, which Israelis and Palestinians both claim as their capital, must be resolved in negotiations, so the government does not recognize Israeli sovereignty there.

Occasionally comes a documentary whose title tells it all. Such an event is "Jerusalem: Center of the World," with the secondary title: "The Epic History of the World's Most Contested Piece of Real Estate." The two-hour program airs tonight at 9 on KCET. Ray Suarez, senior correspondent for PBS' "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," walks the viewer through a city at the crossroads of three religions, where turmoil and contention are ever-present.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World James Carroll Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 418 pp., $28 James Carroll's latest book is very ambitious. Invoking history, anthropology, social psychology, geography and theology, the author, a former Catholic priest, delves into the stories of the violence unleashed by the organized religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam throughout their existence. He anchors the book by describing how each has used the city of Jerusalem, holy to all three, as a symbol or metaphor or touchstone.

Israeli police have mercilessly killed 19 young and old Palestinians near the Al Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem. It was a show of brutality and barbarism by the Israeli government. The world order has been changed; all nations, including the Soviet Union and China, are talking world peace and cooperating with the Western world in the United Nations Security Council. These world leaders have passed five strong resolutions against Saddam Hussein without much trouble. They should stand up now against the fascist regime of Yitzhak Shamir and force him to vacate the occupied lands of Palestinian people or face a blockade and isolation similar to Iraq.

With a fire extinguisher in his hand and a cellphone pressed to his ear, principal Sameeh abu Rameelh battled an electrical fire in his Jerusalem high school's computer lab while pleading with the fire department to come to his aid. But when the emergency dispatcher heard that the school was in Kafr Aqab, separated from the rest of Jerusalem by a 36-foot-high concrete wall, he told Abu Rameelh that firetrucks wouldn't cross Israel's separation barrier...

Palestinian leaders voiced outrage Tuesday over a new report that Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank rose 20% last year. The report released by the Peace Now group also says that building on East Jerusalem land seized during the 1967 Middle East War was at the highest level in a decade. The study by the Israeli group, which is opposed to settlement construction, found that Israel began construction on more than 1,850 West Bank units in 2011, up from 1,550 in 2010. During much of 2010, Israel observed a partial moratorium on new West Bank construction, which reduced building starts that year.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's epic survey of Jerusalem's sanguinary history does not inspire confidence in the civilizing qualities of religion. The pile of corpses accumulated over millenniums from the persecutions both perpetrated and endured by all three of the faiths - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - that have contended for Jerusalem would surely be high enough to reach the celestial home of any one of them. Not that politicians come off any better than believers here. Anyone frustrated by the intractable stalemate in the contemporary Middle East peace process may take grim comfort from the knowledge that Jerusalem has been a flash point for global warfare since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs: "the desire and prize of empires," as Montefiore puts it, "yet of no strategic value.

When our youngest son was born in Jerusalem in 1995, a number of questions faced us. First was whether we should accept Israeli citizenship for him, which would grant him a second passport and the ability to work (and take refuge, if necessary) in a foreign land — but which would come with a military service requirement in a country that wouldn't really be his home. We opted against it. Then there was the less pressing question of whether our newborn son could become president of the United States despite some ambiguity about whether he was a "natural-born citizen," as required by Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court this week will take up the case of a 9-year-old boy born in Jerusalem to American parents who want their child's passport to say his birthplace is in Israel. The State Department refused their request in keeping with long-standing American foreign policy against recognizing Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. This seemingly narrow dispute over one word on a passport has put before the high court several broad questions that have long divided diplomats and constitutional scholars.

After a successful Palestinian bid to join the U.N. cultural agency, UNESCO, Israel said Tuesday that it would retaliate by issuing tenders for about 2,000 new housing units on land it seized during the 1967 Mideast War. After meeting with his top advisors, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would order construction of apartments in the Jerusalem area and the West Bank settlements of Gush Etzion and Maaleh Adumim. Officials said about 1,650 units would be built around Jerusalem and the rest in the West Bank.

When East Jerusalem teachers ask students to open their history books these days, pupils are wondering: Which one? Two sets of textbooks are vying for the formative minds of thousands of Palestinian students in Arabic-language schools in East Jerusalem. One was written by the Palestinian Authority, and the other is a revised version reprinted by Israeli authorities. It's a textbook war that underscores the long-running battle of narratives in the Mideast conflict, where the fight over the future is often rooted in understanding of the past, and schoolbooks can play a critical role.

Israel is moving forward with another large housing project on territory it seized during the 1967 Mideast war, unveiling plans to build 2,610 units in what critics say would be the first entirely new development on disputed Jerusalem land in 14 years. The planned project, to be called Givat Hamatos, would expand the footprint of Jewish housing development into new areas, nearly cutting off Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from West Bank communities. If built, the project would make it harder to create a Palestinian state with contiguous borders and a capital in East Jerusalem, opponents say. "This one is really bad," said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, the Israeli anti-settlement group.