Editorial Jerusalem

...A new Jerusalem Court of Justice would be established, composed of an equal number of Israeli and Palestinian justices...

...Some resolution of these conundra is the necessary cornerstone for peace in the Middle East...

...The city would be demilitarized, and a police force of Palestinians and Israelis would handle responsibilities for their appointed sections...

...While events of the past month will have shaken some of that support- Israelis have every reason to deplore Yassir Arafat's release of well-known Hamas militants-it is precisely in the present explosive situation that peace must be pursued most urgently...

...Anat Hoffman, a city councilwoman for Jerusalem from the leftist Meretz party, recently reported that for every Palestinian dollar the city takes in, it returns only ten to fifteen cents...

...Furthermore, bureaucratic zoning and construction delays for Palestinian development in East Jerusalem have been designed to encourage Palestinian emigration from the city (see, New York Times, March 13...

...His later declaration that a "final settlement" should be wrapped up in six months seemed reckless in light of the current breakdown in negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians...

...Thus, Netanyahu's declaration, "I am building Har Homa, and nothing is going to stop me," seemed to them a unilateral move to finalize the "status of Jerusalem...

...Yet proposals exist that can help Israelis and Palestinians think about how to govern and manage a united Jerusalem...

...Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision was not new Israeli policy...

...If these proposals sound wildly Utopian, note that similar ones were made recently by two Knesset members from opposing parties, Michael Eitan of Likud and Yossi Beilin of Labor (see, The Tablet, February 8...

...It would arbitrate cases on a supranational level, that is, one transcending the regulations of either Israel or a Palestinian state...

...The development, joined to other new Jewish neighborhoods such as Gilo, would preclude the Palestinians from piecing together a viable, contiguous entity in East Jerusalem...

...But so too are the contrasts and disparities it has produced for the city's Palestinian residents...

...Within this enlarged municipality, housing developments will concentrically ring the ancient center city, squeezing and sequestering the remaining Palestinian settlements into so many poor and isolated Bantustans...

...For despite Jerusalem's mystical and nearly mythical hold on residents, exiles, captors, and pilgrims, settlement of the city's mundane historical conflicts will determine whether its people realize the holy city's promise...

...Beilin further suggests that the Arab suburbs might serve one day as the capital of a new Palestinian state...

...The land had been appropriated for some years, and the Israeli Supreme Court gave its go-ahead for construction in 1995...

...And absent such an achievement, the battle for Jerusalem may not be resolved this side of Armageddon...

...Both Israeli and Palestinian human-rights groups concur that since 1967 more than a third of East Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel, and that more that 39,000 housing units have been built for Jews compared to 600 for Palestinians...

...Today, Palestinians are permitted to live and build in only 10 percent of East Jerusalem, against the Israelis' 34 percent (the rest is set aside for "green areas" where construction is precluded...

...The plan of successive Israeli governments has been to expand Jerusalem's pre-1967 borders (today they reach almost as far south as Bethlehem) in order to create a new "Greater Jerusalem...

...Such a charter would provide for either a united municipal government or for two separate municipal councils, each responsible for its own sections...

...Jerusalem The Israeli government's decision in February to allow construction of a substantial new Jewish suburb in Arab East Jerusalem, and the violent Palestinian reaction, have brought the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to a standstill and virtually drained the reservoir of trust built up so painstakingly since the beginning of the Oslo peace process...

...But Palestinians in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem-both areas came under Israeli control in the 1967 war-continue to point to the UN Security Council Resolution 478 of 1980 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 as the legal basis for overriding the Israeli decision...

...Gershon Baskin's Jerusalem of Peace (Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, 1994) makes a strong argument for rapprochement and proposes a new city charter that would guarantee Jerusalem as "the eternal capital of the state of Israel and at the same time [allow it to] be the capital of the new Palestinian state...

...They propose that Jerusalem remain a single unified city and the capital of Israel, but that the municipality be divided into two subsections...

...Because the new neighborhood is meant to drive a stake into the heart of the Palestinians' dream of a capital in East Jerusalem...

...In the late 1980s, Israeli revulsion at the disproportionate use of military force against Palestinians during the intifada led to a transformation of Israeli attitudes that eventually changed government policy and gave birth to the peace process...

...Despite those legal guidelines, Israel has continued to create preemptive "facts on the ground...

...Despite last year's election of the hawkish Netanyahu, 75 percent of Israelis continue to support that process...

...In 1992, the city of Jerusalem paid out $900 per capita in expenditures in the Jewish sectors of the city, but only $150 in the Palestinian areas...

...As the convention states in part, victors are forbidden to alter the demographic composition of conquered territories, either by forced migration or the displacement of resident populations...

...But if Israeli policy had been in place for so long, why was there such a violent reaction to the announcement of construction at Har Homa...

...To the eye of even the casual visitor, the success of this plan is palpable...