When the kingdom of Jordan ruled Jerusalem's Old City between 1948 and 1967, Jews were barred from sacred sites, and the famous Hurva and Ramban synagogues were blasted into rubble. But since capturing eastern Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel has ensured Christians and Muslims free access to their holy places. Why? Because from its inception, the Jewish state was a liberal democracy, enshrining religious freedom in its declaration of independence and enforcing it through policy and law.

As Dore Gold shows in "The Fight for Jerusalem" (Regnery, 384 pages, $27.95) re-dividing Jerusalem probably would never have been on the international agenda if not for a series of diplomatic blunders by Israeli and American leaders, beginning with the 1993 Oslo Accords which raised the status of Jerusalem for the first time as an issue for negotiations, and culminating in the 2000 Camp David talks, in which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, backed by President Clinton, actively proposed handing over control of much of eastern Jerusalem to the Palestinian government of Yasser Arafat. ( Arafat's response was to turn them down and go to war.) Mr. Gold is in a position to know: As Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations and head of the prestigious Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, few writers today have the breadth of experience to turn this kind of insight into a powerful argument.