With new shifts in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the impasse has not receded from the front pages
With new shifts in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including the Hamas-PLO standoff, the strengthening of Fatah’s armed capabilities and a renewed push for peace efforts, the impasse has not receded from the front pages. In 2006, the Associated Press devoted more than half of its top ten stories to the world’s most troubled region.
Already, this year looks set to be no different. At the heart of the region’s impasse is the “City of Peace.” Early in the last century, David Lloyd George termed Jerusalem “the most famous city in the world”—a place that is presently shared by more than 600,000 indigenous inhabitants, three dominant faiths, and the world community—a unique place whose hard-won peace would reverberate for the good of all. Yet peace does not come to the city of peace.
Why not? Is the primary reason that Palestinians and Israelis cannot agree on the city’s future a matter of legalities? Is it for economic reasons that the Israelis cannot relinquish the city? Might it be security threats that prevent agreement? Certainly the history of terror in Jerusalem dictates that the Israelis put security issues at the forefront of their concerns in any renewal of the peace process.
On the other hand, the imposition of Israeli civil and military strictures around Jerusalem has meant the destruction of the continuity of Palestinian life and Palestinian-populated territory between the northern and southern West Bank. For their own security reasons the Palestinians can sustain the argument that possession of East Jerusalem is essential to their survival. But do security issues prevent compromise on the city’s future configuration as capital of both the Israeli and Palestinian states?
From an economic point of view, the city has grown to be the largest conurbation in Israel and/or the West Bank. But does its demographic and geographic size equate with economic strength that cannot be shared? The same Israeli civil and military dislocations that have decimated Palestinian life on the West Bank have seriously disrupted its natural commercial activity and economic prospects.
On the legal front, arguments have been advanced at the international level in support of the rights of both sides to sovereignty over all or part of the city. Interrelated are the moral arguments centered on the right of return for refugees and the legitimate property rights of the dispossessed.
Are any of these arguments compelling enough to preclude negotiated agreement? Next time, what leading Israelis and Palestinians have said about the possible reasons for lack of progress on the Jerusalem Question.
