My daughter was born in Jerusalem, but apparently not in Israel. I'll explain.

When Kayla was born in Jerusalem during our sabbatical in 1994, we shlepped, like most Americans, to the United States Consulate in East Jerusalem. According to the U.S. State Department, the sovereignty of Jerusalem remains “the subject of profound dispute.“ As a result, the consulate issued Kayla a U.S. passport with a blank where the country of birth would normally appear. This remains the policy, despite legislation in 2002 requiring the State Department to list the place of birth as Israel. President Bush signed the law but has shown no inclination to roil the diplomatic waters by actually enforcing it.

Just last month a federal judge in the District of Columbia threw out a lawsuit by an American couple who have been trying to have “Israel“ added to their Jerusalem-born son's passport. Judge Gladys Kessler supported the administration's assertion that a congressional directive on Jerusalem “impermissibly interferes“ with the president's authority, under the Constitution, to conduct foreign affairs.

This is the kind of legal bait and switch that drives Israel's supporters crazy. Every election cycle, presidential candidates promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And after every election, the winner reneges, citing “national security interests.“ AIPAC fumes, and the president's Jewish opponents vow retribution.

It drives me crazy too, but perhaps not for the reasons you may think. Yes, I am disheartened that after all these years the status of Jerusalem remains unresolved. But I am also sad that Jerusalem will never be allowed to be a city like any other. For Jews it is their undivided eternal capital, the city of David, the seat of the First and Second Temple. Muslims regard it as their third most holy site. Christians walk the cobbled streets where their Bible tells them Jesus preached and died.

All this historical, spiritual, and theological weight causes Jerusalem to be treated not as a bricks and mortar city but as a theoretical construct — more the idea of a city than a place where people actually live, breathe, and pay taxes.

So Palestinians cling to the fantasy that, whether through force of arms or the stroke of a negotiator's pen, they will return to “their“ homes, and the city's Jewish residents and protectors will either pack up and leave or disappear like files deleted from a hard drive. Jews, meanwhile, treat the city as if it were not already divided, believing that by having drawn municipal boundaries that include tens of thousands of Arabs living in neighborhoods no Jew would dare visit, they have solved once and for all the puzzle of Jerusalem's indivisibility.

There are other lines being drawn — battle lines, actually — as Israel and the Palestinians rev up for another round of negotiations. Orthodox and right-wing pro-Israel groups are worried that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will concede large parts of the city to the control of the Palestinian Authority and hand control of the Old City and Temple Mount to Muslim authorities. The Zionist Organization of America has issued an “action alert“ asking its members to write to Israeli and U.S. Congressional leaders. The Orthodox Union is “delivering educational materials to every Member of Congress regarding the centrality of Jerusalem in the religion and history of the Jewish people.“ A newly formed Coordinating Council on Jerusalem includes 17 groups opposed to “any discussion of ceding sovereignty over part or all of Jerusalem.“

The platform of these groups is the Jewish equivalent of mom and apple pie: What Jew can stand opposed to a movement dedicated to the security of a united Jerusalem? But theirs is essentially a statement that the Israeli-Palestinian question will never be solved. Because just as few if any Israelis will accept the “return“ of Palestinians to Israel proper, few if any Palestinians will recognize Israel's claims to a map that ignores their presence and history.

I too worry about any move that puts Palestinian leadership in control of Jewish holy sites. Students of recent and ancient history don't need to guess what will happen if Muslim or “international“ authorities are appointed custodians of the Old City. In recent weeks alone, the Muslim Wakf has shown a taste of things to come by plowing up parts of the Temple Mount with no regard to the archaeological treasures that lie below.

But the need to assert Jewish sovereignty within the Old City is exactly why it is necessary to consider a future Jerusalem in which swaths of its eastern portions are not under Israeli control. Much of eastern Jerusalem is made up of Arab villages roped into Jerusalem by a few generations of Israeli mapmakers. And nearly all of these neighborhoods are already treated as “other,“ especially by planners and taxpayers who balk at providing East Jerusalemites with the services West Jerusalemites take for granted. Jerusalem is not a city, but two cities, welded together by each side's inability to recognize or tolerate the reality of the other.

So I am frustrated that my daughter's passport doesn't say she was born in Israel. She was, in a city that is vibrant and challenged, constantly inspiring and occasionally discouraging, surreal in its beauty, and all-too-real in the daily bustle, clash, and clamor of its street life. In short it is a real place, in a real country, and it deserves to be acknowledged as such by this or any other president.

But as long as we continue to treat Jerusalem as an idea or a dream of what we would like it to be, its status will never be resolved. Both sides will demand all or nothing, and united in this they will fall.