Who has been the best friend tiny Israel has had? Why do you want to stick your finger in the eye of your best friend? I don't get it.
Friendship should be based on mutual regard of each as equals.
In recent years the United States. It wasn't always so though one has to go back to the Eisenhower administration to find that to be true.
Why do you want to stick your finger in the eye of your best friend?
That is not what anyone at all is suggesting. What we are suggesting is that if and when the United States stops acting like a friend and starts plotting our demise instead our reaction has to change.
For the entire diaspora period Jews prayed "Leshana haba'a b'Yerushalayim" or, in English, "Next year in Jerusalem". Israel's national anthem, Hatikva, literally "The Hope", ends with the line "b'eretz Tzion, Yerushalayim" which translates as "in the land of Zion, Jerusalem". That is what Jews the world over hoped for.
During the almost 400 years of Ottoman rule the majority or plurality of Jerusalem's population was Jewish. In 1854 Jerusalem had 15,500 inhabitants, of which just over 8,000 were Jewish. The first Jews moved outside the ancient, walled city in 1860. That means that the entire Jewish majority was in what the media now calls "Arab East Jerusalem". What made it "Arab"? The conquest of that part of the city by the Jordanians in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of the Jewish population.
Jerusalem is holy to Jews. It has been the center of our culture and our religion for 3,009 years. It is our capital and it was our capital during all periods of Jewish sovereignty, from ancient times, to when the Persians restored Jewish sovereignty in the 6th century, to now.
You tell me this: Why should we allow anyone, even an emissary from a friendly nation, question our right to our capital for three milennia? Secretary Rice made a mistake. We are pointing that out. That is all. It is not an attack on the Secretary of State but rather an expression to a friend that she needs to choose her words more carefully.
Now let me make this clear: If any U.S. government demands that Israel cede Jerusalem or a significant part of it (i.e.: the ancient, walled city) the friendship between the U.S. and Israel would end at that moment. Thankfully that moment has never come. I sincerely think that all of us you have attacked would wish that such a moment would never come. It is precisely to help insure that and to preserve the friendship with the U.S. that we need to express our discomfort with the idea or redividing Jerusalem.
BTW, any Israeli Prime Minister who offers to divide Jerusalem falls from power. How do you think that Ehud Barak lost his coalition? When he offered to give away part of Jerusalem a large part bolted.