Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently confirmed in an interview in Gaza with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Israelis and Palestinians have been holding unofficial discussions about the future of Jerusalem.
The confirmation was potentially embarrassing for the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Labor, because it could supply useful ammunition for the opposition.
Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu intends to make Jerusalem a central issue in the upcoming Knesset election campaign.
Arafat was short on detail, but the unofficial talks are understood to involve, on the Israeli side, political scientists Yair Hirshfeld and Ron Pundak.
Under the direction of then-Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, they discreetly launched what later evolved into the Oslo process, the Israeli negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization that produced the Declaration of Principles signed in 1993.
Opposition sources have maintained for some time that contacts on Jerusalem are taking place, while Beilin, now a minister without portfolio in the Prime Minister’s Office, has made do with perfunctory details.
Under the Declaration of Principles, discussions on both Israeli settlements and Jerusalem – two of the toughest disputed areas – were postponed until the permanent-status negotiations, due to begin in May.
The Likud and its allies contend that the informal talks blatantly contravene that provision and that they reflect the government’s softening position on Jerusalem.
The fact that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem were allowed to vote in the recent Palestinian elections, some of them in post offices inside the city limits, is cited by the opposition as further evidence of the government’s steady retreat.
But in speeches before two American Jewish groups in Jerusalem this week, Peres insisted that there is no weakening in the government’s position.
Jerusalem, he said, is not negotiable as the exclusive capital of Israel.
He accused the Likud of seeking artificially to puncture the national consensus about Jerusalem.
Although Likud indicated this week that it may be prepared to reconsider its stance on the Palestinian Authority by recognizing the self-rule areas under Arafat’s leadership, no shift is being contemplated on Jerusalem.
Netanyahu pledged this week in unequivocal terms that if he is elected prime minister, he would immediately shut down the Orient House, the de facto Palestinian headquarters in eastern Jerusalem where, much to the chagrin of the Israeli government, diplomatic as well as social and administrative activities take place.
Visiting foreign dignitaries often make a point of visiting Orient House, deliberately defying Israel’s demands that they refrain from doing so.
This situation developed even before the first accord between the Jewish state and the Palestine Liberation Organization, initially occurring under the previous Likud-led government of Yitzhak Shamir.
Netanyahu argues that the creation of the Palestinian Authority makes it all the more necessary for Israel to put a stop now to the evolution of a Palestinian government facility in the heart of the Israeli capital.
Although Labor’s public rhetoric is as strong as Likud’s when it comes to maintaining the current status of Jerusalem, within Labor’s ranks there is a greater readiness to consider creative solutions.
Some circles in Labor even take issue – so far, privately – with the widely held theory that Jerusalem is the single most intractable part of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict – and must therefore be left for last, for fear of exploding the entire peace process if it is introduced prematurely.
In these circles, it is instead felt that an imaginative compromise over Jerusalem could tie together a string of compromise on other seemingly insoluble problems, including the settlements.
With Israel’s demographic predominance in the city not in question – more than two-thirds of the residents of municipal Jerusalem, as delineated under Israeli law, are Jews – these circles believe that some form of “Vaticanization” for the Palestinians can be contemplated without danger.
They believe that the Palestinians themselves do not realistically expect to obtain sovereignty over large areas of the city and that they ultimately would accept a Vatican-type proposal that would satisfy the symbolic and religious aspects of their demands concerning Jerusalem.
In return, it is argued in these circles, the Palestinians might be prepared to trade heavily settled Jewish areas in the West Bank for territories alongside the Gaza Strip.
It is no accident, in the view of seasoned observers here, that it is the same Beilin, reportedly running a vicarious dialogue with the Palestinians about Jerusalem, who repeatedly declares that the final-status negotiations must allow most Jewish settlers to stay in their present homes.
The question, though, that those in dovish circles within the Peres government are asking is whether on the even of the election campaign the time is right to go public with such radical thinking.
The Likud and its allies will be eager to draw Labor into an emotive battle over Jerusalem, confident that most voters are not prepared to countenance any concession to the Palestinians in the city.
It was against this backdrop that the opposition parties accused the government of selling out the status of the capital during the Palestinian elections.
While the government insisted that candidates running for the Palestinian Council not be Jerusalem residents – a demand easily satisfied by such candidates producing second addresses outside the city limits – it did allow eastern Jerusalem residents to vote.
And while most voted in polling stations outside the municipal area, several thousand were eligible to vote in Jerusalem post offices.
Less than 30 percent of those eligible actually availed themselves of this right, which, paradoxically, the Likud seized on as proof of the Palestinian Authority’s “failure in Jerusalem.”
For its part, the government maintained that a prominent police presence at the polling stations in Jerusalem had not frightened or deterred the Palestinian voters.
But many observers – both foreign and Israeli – took issue with this version of the day’s events.
They felt that the government had in fact deliberately beefed up police presence to scare off Palestinian voters.
Indeed, the government, too, seemed gratified at the Palestinian Authority’s failure to get the vote out in Jerusalem.
Clearly, there is much political soul-searching yet to be done in the Labor camp before a credible, consistent and authoritative position on Jerusalem is put on the negotiating table in the permanent-status talks.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
