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Change Your Life! |
Backdoor Peacemaking |
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August 20, 2000
JERUSALEM (AP) - It was a sweltering day, even for Jerusalem, when 16 Israeli and Palestinian city planners and geographers met over coffee and cake in a well-to-do Arab neighborhood. The Mideast summit at Camp David had just collapsed, but the atmosphere in the air-conditioned conference room of the Ambassador Hotel was relaxed. Undeterred by their leaders' failure, the experts tossed around ideas about how to run a city that might one day be home to two capitals. They carefully avoided the dispute over sovereignty that stumped Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Instead, they talked about practical matters. Should there be a joint police force? Where should dozens of new embassies be located? How to limit building height around the walled Old City, Jerusalem's main attraction and home to major holy shrines? Jerusalem's future is quietly being shaped in such informal sessions, the so-called "second track" that has run alongside the official negotiations. Since participants are not designated as negotiators, they have greater freedom to explore proposals and test the other side's reaction. At the same time, they are in close touch with the political leaders. For example, a leading Israeli participant, political science professor Menachem Klein, also serves as an adviser to Israel's acting foreign minister and top negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami. Palestinian Manuel Hassassian, head of the Jerusalem Task Force, works at the Orient House, the PLO headquarters in Jerusalem. The give-and-take works both ways. Barak's new proposals at Camp David - he offered the Palestinians limited control in traditionally Arab east Jerusalem and suggested he was willing to redraw the municipal boundaries - galvanized the second track. "The idea of swapping (Jerusalem land) that was taboo in the past is now something we are taking into consideration," said Hassassian, sweeping his hands over a large map of Jerusalem in his Orient House office. Before Camp David, Israel had insisted it would never relinquish sovereignty over any part of the city, including the Arab neighborhoods it captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. "Camp David was a partial failure only, not totally, and I think that we have to build on it more intensively," Hassassian said. The method of talking informally in a comfortable setting was first successfully applied in 1993 when Israelis and Palestinians met away from the spotlight in Oslo, Norway. Those meetings led to the breakthrough agreement of mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO. Since then, dozens of experts have come together in Israel, the Palestinian areas and abroad, sometimes in large groups, sometimes in an intimate circle. Muslim, Christian and Jewish clergy have begun tackling the most difficult issue - control of the holy shrines in the Old City. The Temple Mount, former site of the Jewish Temples and known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, is considered the fault line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We need to be creative enough to propose ideas that benefit both sides," said Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin who, along with Israeli academic Ron Pundak helped organize the second track. "This is opening our horizons," Hassassian said. Meeting at the hotel in east Jerusalem's Arab neighborhood of Sheik Jarrah on July 27, two days after the breakdown of the Camp David talks, participants tackled several angles of the Jerusalem problem, including security, city management and economic affairs. Each side will present detailed ideas in writing in upcoming meetings, including sessions in September and November. "The papers are trying to answer the question of what will happen the day after the (peace) agreement," said Klein. Hassassian, who is writing the Palestinian paper on security, said he is proposing to form a joint force he calls PIP, Palestinian-Israeli Police, that would respond, for example, to traffic accidents involving residents from both sides. A similar idea is also mentioned in the Israeli paper on security, written by former Jerusalem Police Chief Arieh Amit.
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