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East Jerusalem: no state in sight |
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Published by Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
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Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
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East Jerusalem: no state in sight “..the consolidation of a Greater Jerusalem as the capital for Israel will further complicate final status negotiations, and could render the two-state solution obsolete. The current course of settlement activity makes it difficult to envision how East Jerusalem could become the Palestinian capital. Where precisely in East Jerusalem could a Palestinian capital be situated? One can envision a possible token Palestinian Authority office at the now empty Orient House, where the quasi- headquarters of the PLO once were; but even flying a symbolic Palestinian flag above the entrance seems so far-fetched that it would be laughable. The other possibility would be a symbolic religious capital on the Haram Al-Sharif, which is also highly improbable. High levels of Israeli creativity and Palestinian imagination will be required to determine where the location of a Palestinian capital would be in Jerusalem. Ideally, Tel Aviv and Ramallah would be the political capitals of Israel and Palestine, and Jerusalem would become a corpus separatum, as the UN proposed in 1947. But this is unacceptable to Israel, which claims that it is entitled to a holy city, Jerusalem being the only one pertaining to Israel, whereas Al-Quds (Jerusalem) remains third in line for the Arab Muslim world, after Medina and Mecca…”
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Jerusalem