Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2000, pages 67-68

Israel and Judaism

For Genuine Peace, An Equitable Resolution of the Status of Jerusalem Is Increasingly Viewed as Essential

By Allan C. Brownfeld

In mid-March, Israel’s cabinet narrowly approved a long-overdue Israeli troop withdrawal from 6.1 percent of the West Bank. Prime Minister Ehud Barak presented a heavily revised withdrawal map that did not include the Arab village of Anata on the border of Jerusalem. His reversal on Anata raised questions about negotiations on a final peace treaty. In the accord, among the key issues which must be resolved is the status of Jerusalem, whose eastern sector is claimed by the Palestinians as a capital.

There was some fear that if Mr. Barak was unable to get political backing for a troop withdrawal from an Arab neighborhood close to Jerusalem, it appears virtually impossible to win approval for concessions in the city itself.

At the same time, a consensus seems to be growing that only an equitable resolution of the status of Jerusalem can lead to a lasting peace in the region. A hopeful sign is that many prominent American Jews, and many Israelis as well, seem to be coming to this conclusion.

In January, a group of American rabbis, concerned that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks might collapse over the tangled issue of Jerusalem, called for the two sides to share the city.

A statement signed by more than 300 rabbis organized by the Jewish Peace Lobby declared that, “The question is whether Jerusalem should be under the exclusive sovereignty of one nation. The question is whether the pursuit of both justice and peace requires that, in some form, Jerusalem be shared with the Palestinian people. We believe that it does.”

Professor Jerome Segal, a research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland who founded the Peace Lobby a decade ago, said: “We know there has been no serious discussion inside Israel about any general compromise on Jerusalem. Jerusalem is still viewed as the third rail of Israeli politics, with the right claiming that the left will redivide Jerusalem and the left saying that is a lie.” According to Segal, the subject is so emotional that no one has ever analyzed the actual geography involved in detaching western Jerusalem from the eastern portion, where all 180,000 Palestinians live.

A survey devised by Segal with researchers from both sides found that neither Israelis nor Palestinians viewed the borders of the city as sacrosanct when it was broken down neighborhood by neighborhood. “When you ask people what parts of the city are important,” he said, “only the Mount of Olives and the Old City are really important to both peoples.”

“In the end we will have to live with our neighbors and there is no way around it.”

The Old City constitutes only one percent of the area of modern Jerusalem, the rabbis pointed out in their statement. Sovereignty in this area, which contains places of religious significance to Jews, Christians and Muslims, could come through creative negotiations that would not have to apply to other lands. They also suggested that the borders of Jerusalem—which Israel has expanded a number of times since it captured the city in 1967 and reunited its eastern and western parts—might be reduced to create a more Jewish city. By giving up control over the mostly undeveloped Arab areas, the rabbis say, Israel would remove from Israeli Jerusalem most Palestinians, who would most likely become citizens of a future Palestinian state anyway.

Rabbis who signed the statement said they felt it was a moral question and that peace was the most important goal for Jews. “The notion that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews and only the Jews, if that precludes peace, is wrong,” said Rabbi Burton Visotzky, a professor of rabbinic literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. “I think in the end we will have to live with our neighbors and there is no way around it, and that includes Jerusalem.”

The fact is that Jerusalem’s present border is only 32 years old. Writing in The Jerusalem Report (Feb. 28, 2000), Leslie Susser points out that the current boundaries were drawn after the Six-Day War. Responsibility for drawing those lines fell to Central Command Chief Rehavan Ze’evi. The line he drew “took in not only the five square kilometers of Arab East Jerusalem—but also 65 square kilometers of surrounding open country and villages, most of which never had any municipal link to Jerusalem. Overnight they became part of Israel’s eternal and indivisible capital.”

Irony and Paradox

Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York states that, “Today 200,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Jerusalem, mostly east, southeast and northeast of the old city’s easternmost wall. It costs Israel $70 million a year to provide services for this population.” Oded Eran, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians on permanent status issues, wonders publicly why Israel needs to continue such an arrangement. There is no reason why Suafat or Beit Hanina (areas hard to locate on an Israeli-issued tourist map) should be part of Jewish Jerusalem…Ironically, paradoxically, the Palestinian Authority already is in control of much of East Jerusalem. It controls and administers many basic civil services, some neglected for years by the Israelis. There are few Israeli police in these areas. The vacuum is filled by the P.A. Ministry of Education. Yasser Arafat’s governor of Jerusalem, Jamil Othman Nasser, observes: ‘I exercise more authority in East Jerusalem than Israel does. Israel’s rule in East Jerusalem is nearing its end.’”

There are other indications of changing views. A new study calling for the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital has been issued by a joint working group of four Arabs and four Israelis who met under the auspices of Harvard University’s Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution working with a grant from the U.S. Information Agency.

Early in February, the vice chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Ellen Laipson, speaking at a Capitol Hill strategy session about the question of Jerusalem, suggested that those who oppose changing Jerusalem’s current status are part of an “underclass” that “need to be informed and educated.”

There was also the $35,000 grant from the U.S. government’s U.S. Institute of Peace to University of Maryland Professor Segal for a study of attitudes on Jerusalem which led to the petition signed by 300 American rabbis.

It is clear that the U.S. government is moving toward a view that some equitable division of Jerusalem is an essential ingredient in any Middle East peace settlement. The Forward (Feb. 25, 2000), a widely read New York Jewish weekly which is critical of any division of Jerusalem, reports: “In the past, the [Clinton] administration has explained its refusal to implement the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 by saying it wanted to stay neutral on Jerusalem, a delicate final-status issue. But the latest moves go beyond neutrality, tilting toward an endorsement of the Arab claim to Jerusalem and a rejection of the current Israeli sovereignty.”

“The two-state solution here refers to two states, each of which is sovereign, viable and secure,” the Harvard study says. “The solution of the Jerusalem problem should respect the national, cultural, religious, political, legal and historical rights of both peoples. Jerusalem should be an open and undivided city, with free access to the holy sites, serving as the capital of both states.”

The Israelis who participated in the working group that came up with the study included the defense correspondent of Ha’aretz, Ze’ev Schiff; a Knesset member from the Labor Party, Yossi Katz; a former ambassador to Egypt and Jordan, Shimon Shamir; and a professor, Moshe Maoz. The Palestinian Arabs included three academics, Khalil Shikaki, Yezid Sayigh and Ghassan Khatib, as well as a member of the PLO’s economic arm, Ibrahim Dakkak.

The Harvard psychology professor who helped organize the working group and wrote the paper, Herbert Kelman, said that no representatives of the Likud Party were part of the effort: “The purpose here was not to be representative; the purpose was to come up with some new ideas. We needed people who were willing to engage in this kind of process.” He said there is more flexibility on the Jerusalem issue among the Israeli public than there appears to be. “There have been a lot of slogans, but when you go into it in more detail, you find that really the issue is not as insoluble as it has sometimes been presented,” Kelman said.

The director of the Jewish Life Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Rabbi Rachel Cowan, said her foundation helped fund the working group with $100,000 because Professor Kelman “is one of the most effective people working on track-two diplomacy…I just felt it was really important for Israelis and Palestinians to be talking about it seriously and in depth.”

Rabbi Cowan said she knows “lots of people are upset” by talk of sharing Jerusalem, “It’s a highly emotional issue…People are just talking in alarmist terms about symbols,” she said. But she said she supported a realistic approach that will yield a peaceful settlement that will assure Israel’s security. “Without peace in the area, the country is just tremendously threatened,” Rabbi Cowan said.

The New Middle East

In her Capitol Hill talk, National Intelligence Council Middle East specialist Laipson, who previously was with the Department of State and the National Security Council, said that in the emerging “new Middle East” neither side is “going to achieve total vindication of their historic grievances [and] nobody is going to get 100 percent of what they think they are entitled to or what they think their father’s legacy or their grandfather’s memory deserves…What the New Middle East means is that we are creating a future together that doesn’t mean everybody gets to satisfy all of the demands and grievances and inequalities of the past. I think that’s something that is very, very difficult for many constituencies, especially in Jerusalem.”

Laipson noted that “in the early ’80s there was a lot of discussion, and some academics did some very useful work on what shared sovereignty of Jerusalem would look like.” Today, she states, many people are thinking of “side-by-side sovereignty” in which “there will be as little shared sovereignty as possible, possibly shared sovereignty only over those core holy sites, but essentially people who have ID cards for the Palestinian Authority would be let into Jerusalem, would pay their taxes and get their municipal services, would largely be under Palestinian sovereignty, for the municipal part of Jerusalem, that would be recognized as the Palestinian capital. And those on the Israeli side would see themselves exclusively under Israeli sovereignty…What I think was a utopian idea of shared sovereignty has evolved into something that is more parallel.”

A possible solution being widely discussed is an “improved” version of the agreement on Jerusalem completed on Oct. 31, 1995 after 17 months of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian counterparts in Stockholm. Hammered out by Yossi Beilin, then-Israeli deputy foreign minister, and Abu Mazen, Yassir Arafat’s number-two associate, it was intended to serve as a framework for a permanent peace treaty. It was to have been presented to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but Rabin was assassinated and his successor, Shimon Peres, rejected the concept, as did Yasser Arafat. It did not, however, seem to die.

The plan provides for a redrawing of Jerusalem’s borders to include Abu Dis and other adjacent villages like Al-Azaria and Ar-Ram, along with Jewish settlements like Ma’ale and Adumim. The Jewish areas become part of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital; the Palestinian suburbs and villages make up Al-Quds, the Palestinian capital. The two capitals together form one open city, with free access to all parts. The Old City and the surrounding holy areas, defined as the “holy Basin,” are accorded special status in which both sides are allowed to maintain national symbols, but with sovereignty questions deferred for several years.

At the present time Prime Minister Barak says that he has no intention of making any concessions on Jerusalem in the near future. Many others, however, believe that a compromise is essential for peace. The Jerusalem Institute’s Yisrael Kimchi says: “With a rational approach we can do things for the city that serve the municipal, urban and political interests of both sides. But first we will have to get over 30 years of brainwashing.”

Jerusalem was founded and named neither by Jews, Christians nor Muslims. In his book Jerusalem, Thomas A. Idinopulos, professor of religious studies at Miami University of Ohio, notes that, “The Canaanites knew there was something strange about Jerusalem…In their eyes here was the axis of the world, the meeting point of heaven and earth…Nowhere else but here was the home of the solar deities, Shahrar, the god of the rising sun [and] Shalem, the god of the setting sun. Shalem gave his name to Jerusalem. Jeru-shalem, meaning ‘place of the god Shalem’…When the Israelites made their appearance in the ancient land of Canaan, they proceeded to confuse the name of Shalem with their own Hebrew word for peace, sholom. Thereafter, Jerusalem was mistakenly called ‘city of peace.’ What a mockery history has made of their mistake.”

Jerusalem has been destroyed and occupied by many different nations and faiths. In Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Karen Armstrong points out that, “The societies that have lasted longest in the Holy City have, generally, been the ones that were prepared for some kind of tolerance and co-existence in the Holy City. That, rather than a sterile and deadly struggle for sovereignty, must be the way to celebrate Jerusalem’s sanctity today.”

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.