Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium

Jerusalem is under assault. With sites holy to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, Jerusalem has always been a potential – and sometimes actual – fault line between East and West. As Middle East expert Dore Gold explains in his new book, the city has become central to the radical Islamists’ apocalyptic vision of global jihad. The attack on the veracity of its Biblical past is only a prelude for compromising its political future.

In Western diplomatic circles it is now being argued that by pushing hard for a Middle East settlement, with the re-division of Jerusalem at its core, the flames of radical Islamic rage will be lowered, stemming the tide of al-Qaeda’s ideological spread. Yet, in the view of Dore Gold, the exact opposite is true. In the last decades, radical Islam has been fed by its sense of victory in the face of repeated withdrawals: a re-division of Jerusalem would not only endanger its holy sites, but also unleash new jihadist momentum, on a scale that most political leaders have not begun to consider.

Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 through 1999 and was Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He has been a diplomatic envoy to the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, the Persian Gulf states, and the Palestinian Authority and has been intimately involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations. He earned his Ph.D. in International Relations and Middle East Studies from Columbia University and has written numerous books and articles on the region.