OF ALL the issues to be resolved in so-called “final status” talks over Palestine, when they eventually take place, the place of Jerusalem – holy city to both communities and the desired capital of both – may well prove to be the most intractable.
A foretaste was provided in recent days in the spat about a Swedish EU presidency draft text for foreign ministers which initially suggested east Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state. It was diluted under Israeli pressure to a recognition that “a way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states”.
Ireland backed the original draft which would have taken the EU to new ground diplomatically, although the final wording was also blunt about the fact the union “has never recognised the annexation of east Jerusalem”, and deplored both Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian institutions to function there and continuing discrimination in the city against Palestinians.
Israel, although unhappy at the idea of ceding part of Jerusalem, was reassured that by making it subject to negotiations, the EU text does not prejudge the issue. But others argue that as territory illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, east Jerusalem will have to be part of an independent Palestine. “The West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem – I don’t see what there is to negotiate,” Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn rightly insisted. “It is a fact that we have maintained for years and years at the UN.”
An unpublished report from EU diplomats based in Ramallah last month accused both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality of working deliberately to alter the city’s demographic balance. The municipality, the report added, discriminates against the city’s Arab residents with regard to building permits, health services, education, sanitation and more.
In truth, Jerusalem is two cities, one Israeli and one Palestinian, notwithstanding repeated efforts through expanded settlements and expulsions to establish new facts on the map. A refusal explicitly to accept that a solution will require ceding of Jerusalem’s Arab neighbourhoods to a Palestinian state suggests both a half-hearted commitment to a two-state solution and to negotiations that were made more complicated yesterday when the Knesset gave preliminary approval to a Bill requiring a national referendum on any peace agreement that calls for further territorial concessions. The Bill specifically refers to the Golan Heights and east Jerusalem.