Look, it is nearly 41 years since Egypt, Syria and Jordan started their war against Israel. Yes, exactly: the Six Day War, which the Arabs imagined would be a romp over the Jews but turned out to be a political and psychological disaster precisely for them.
All of the scholarship demonstrates that Israel implored the Jordanians not to attack West Jerusalem or Israel proper. But even King Hussein couldn't resist the pan-Arab nationalist entreaties from Gamal Abdel Nasser to join with the rest of the gang to reconquer "Palestine." The Hashemite monarch, whom the Israelis had protected in many ways as they had his grandfather King Abdullah, mounted an assault on the Holy City which after bitter fighting there and in the rest of the West Bank resulted in a pathetic Jordanian withdrawal behind the River to the east.
The history goes back further, to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan which allocated the envisioned Jewish state some chintzy bits of territory and declared Jerusalem an international (and internationalized) city. The Arab states and the local Arabs (they had never been called Palestinians until the seventies) rejected both partition and internationalization. The Jewish Agency for Palestine (yes, the Jews were then called Palestinians and their institutions, too: United Palestine Appeal, the Palestine Post, the Palestine Philharmonic, on and on) accepted the sparse allocation and all of the Jews were driven out of the Old City, leaving only the western (new) half of the city in Israeli hands. The few square kilometers with the holy sites were in Jordanian hands and under actually unchallenged but also unrecognized Jordanian suzerainty.
This was part of what was captured in 1967. Of course, the Israeli government reunited its people with the Holy City, its history and its sacred history, in particular. The Arabs had never made a big thing out of Jerusalem anyway until, that is, the Jews became its custodians.
So forty years and more after the six days the Arabs behaved as if they had been the victors of the conflagration they started. But they were not, and even is such sparse negotiations that ensued they seem to be persuaded that they had the future on their side.
Yes, there may be parts of Jerusalem that will be up for grabs in a full-scale negotiation. But it is hard to see how Israel will relinquish anything more than Barak offered (under cajoling from Bill Clinton) and Arafat spat on.
While the Arabs demonstrate that are still not yet ready for serious negotiations, the State of Israel and the city of Jerusalem grow. As Palestinian Arabs also build in Jerusalem, so too do the Israelis. Everyone understands that Neve Ya'akov and Pisgat Ze'ev, neighborhoods at the Jewish edge of Jerusalem, will not be given back and they will not suffocate. So they will be expanded. Javier Solana can bitch until he is blue in the face, and Ban Ki-moon, too. You can read about all the grievances these folk and others have in Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post.
But history won't be hijacked by the Arabs much longer.