Race for East Jerusalem

By Graham Usher

Last week, America's Newsweek magazine published the full text of the 1995 "understandings" reached between Israel's present Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and the PLO's chief negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Whatever the provenance of the leak (American, Israeli or perhaps some deft coordination between the two), the political message to Yasser Arafat was plain. Since one of your top negotiators has agreed to a final status agreement that falls short of "international legitimacy," why not do so again, a mere six weeks before the US Presidential elections?

Needless to say, the leak caused acute embarrassment to the Palestinian leadership, and none more so than to the co-author. In a rare interview on Palestinian TV on 19 September, Abbas went so far as to claim "there is no such document as the Beilin-Abu Mazen document." It was a case of slamming the stable door after the horse had bolted. The "Beilin-Abu Mazen document" has many attributes, but "non-existence" is no longer among them.

It also appears to be operative, at least as far as Ehud Barak is concerned. He took another leaf from its file at the weekly cabinet meeting on 24 September. He suggested deferring certain final status issues, like Jerusalem and perhaps the refugees, in the context of "achieving a comprehensive and overall agreement on most issues." However, the condition for deferral would be a clear commitment from the Palestinians to "end the conflict."

The Palestinians shot down that balloon before it left the ground. "How can you ask for the termination of the conflict when you leave the root causes of the conflict -- Jerusalem and the refugees -- unresolved?" asked one Palestinian Authority official in exasperation.

Nor was the "end of conflict" clause part of the Beilin-Abu Mazen document. It is a Barak invention, intended mainly to shore up his perilous standing in Israeli opinion. In the 1995 "understandings" there was no "end of conflict" clause because there was no agreement on East Jerusalem. Rather -- in the immortal words of Beilin -- there was to be a de facto "maintenance of the status quo [in East Jerusalem] but with an agreement to change the status quo in the future," via the establishment of a joint Palestinian-Israeli committee.

Is this what Barak is now proposing? At Camp David, Barak simultaneously went further than the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan and retreated from it. He went further because he offered the Palestinians sovereignty over seven "islands" within what are now the annexed municipal boundaries of East Jerusalem. But he retreated from the "understandings" through his insistence on some form of Israeli sovereignty on or under the Haram Al-Sharif-Temple Mount compound. (In the Beilin-Abu Mazen document the Haram Al-Sharif is left "extra-territorial" to Israel).

Nor is there any evidence that Barak has moved from these positions in the two months since the Camp David summit, regardless of the fog his acting foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, is making about the possibility of some form of UN "international custodianship" of the site. The only thing Barak has explicitly ruled out is "any transfer of sovereignty on the Temple Mount to the Palestinians or to a Muslim body."

But there is increasing evidence that Barak is becoming amenable to the idea of a national unity government with Ariel Sharon's Likud Party. If so, Barak's deferral proposal casts a very different shadow. For Sharon has long made clear his preference for a long-term interim agreement with Palestinians to any final status deal that resolves the questions of borders, Jerusalem and the refugees once and for all. Barak has also intimated that he would invite Sharon to join a "national emergency" government should the Palestinians pursue any "unilateral measures" in the occupied territories, including a declaration of statehood.

The sum result of this rapprochement would be to leave the negotiations -- and the existing realities in the West Bank and Gaza -- precisely where they are. It is a prospect to which the Palestinian leadership appears unusually -- and dangerously -- blasé. Asked on Voice for Palestine radio on 24 September whether the next six weeks mark the "final chance" for peace, PLO negotiator Nabil Shaath replied: "In what sense is it 'final'? Perhaps for Clinton it is a final attempt, or for Barak." The implication clearly is that time is somehow on the Palestinians' side. This is a prognosis not shared by others, including some presently "advising" the Palestinian leadership.

According to the Dutch settlement expert, Jan de Jong, the Palestinians have about two years to arrest Israel's geo-political grip on Arab East Jerusalem, given the current rate of settlement and road construction. Unless the Palestinians start enlarging their urban, industrial and residential areas in East Jerusalem, he says, "they will become permanently what they are today -- ghettos in an apartheid political reality."

This is the Israeli vision. On 18 September, Israel's Interior Ministry -- with prime ministerial approval -- announced the confiscation of another 658 dunums of Palestinian land for the construction of a ring road around East Jerusalem. If built, the road will further separate East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland and connect Jewish settlements both to each other and to West Jerusalem. The "final chance" for peace may not be decided in the next six weeks. But the future of Arab East Jerusalem is going to be determined in the next three years, or the length of time it will take to build that road.