@waageWHO GETS JERUSALEM?
Olmert and Abbas departed from transcendental claims to holy space and decided to base a solution on the practical challenge of governing the holy sites — so as to maximize access for all pilgrims from the three Abrahamic religions — and adherence to the principle that sovereignty derives from the consent of the governed.
The leaders agreed that Jewish neighborhoods should remain under Israeli sovereignty, while Arab neighborhoods would revert to Palestinian sovereignty. (Olmert even showed me an architectural sketch for a symbolic Palestinian checkpoint leading to the American Colony Hotel in Sheik Jarrah.) At the same time, Abbas suggested that East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem would be municipalities, but the city as a whole would not be divided. “There would be an overall body to coordinate between them,” he said.
The really creative ideas were about the disposition of the Old City and holy places — the Islamic sites of the Haram Al-Sharif (or Temple Mount), the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and so forth, which both sides agreed were indeed part of the “holy basin.” Olmert suggested that it be governed by a kind of custodial committee, made up of five countries: Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Israel. (Abbas was under the impression that as many as seven trustees might be involved, including Egypt and the Vatican.)
The trusteeship would maintain the holy sites and guarantee access for all religions; some kind of international force would administer it. Abbas accepted Olmert’s proposal in principle, as long as the two could agree on precisely what the holy basin was. And there was the rub.
Olmert wanted the holy basin to include not only the Old City but also the Mount of Olives, the so-called City of David (an archaeological site) and a considerable part of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Abbas was willing to define the holy basin as the Old City only, since the Mount of Olives includes the Palestinian neighborhood of A-Tur, and he was unwilling to exclude residents of A-Tur and Silwan from a future Palestinian state. He implied, but did not say, that these neighborhoods had been inflamed by Jewish settlers. The extremist Ateret Cohanim, a settlement organization, has moved into expropriated apartment blocks there.
Olmert knew his offer was an important concession, one that redeemed in its way the U.N. partition plan of 1947, which envisioned ancient Jerusalem as an international city. “You cannot come away from negotiations without a scar that will bleed for a long time,” Olmert reflected. “I, the mayor of Jerusalem, the man who stood in the front line advocating how the city was the one, undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people, was the first to propose unambiguously not only the division of the city, which [Prime Minister Ehud] Barak did in a way, but to give up sovereignty over the entire holy basin. This is not something I did with joy; this is something I did with a broken heart.”
Abbas told me (as Olmert had) that he assumed the status quo regarding the governance of Islamic sites by a Palestinian religious authority would be preserved, and that he would try to get an endorsement for this plan from the Arab League.
And so the putatively impossible problem of Jerusalem now boiled down to the question of whether A-Tur and parts of Silwan would be excluded from Palestine and whether the Har Homa suburb would be excluded from Israel. I checked back with Olmert about the question of the holy basin, and he replied, “The exact lines were not drawn, but I believe it could easily be agreed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Israel-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Nur zur Info.
