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Israeli police guarding the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Flash90)
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| By Israel Insider staff October 9, 2007 |
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PA Minister for Jerusalem Affairs Adnan Husseini demanded today that east Jerusalem be made the capital of a future Palestinian state, a remark that signifies the growing gap between Israel and the PA as the Palestinians harden their stance ahead of the November summit.
"The outline for Jerusalem is very clear," the Jerusalem Post quoted Husseini as saying. "East Jerusalem is for the Palestinians and west Jerusalem is for the Israelis."
Husseini dismissed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's proposal to cede at least six outlying Arab neighborhoods to the PA as "a street here and a street there," calling for more concessions.
However some key members of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's coalition are vehemently opposed to dividing the city at all, a dissonance that does not bode well for the summit's success.
"If we talk to the Palestinians, it should be about issues like respecting previous agreements and stopping Kassam rockets and incitement. Jerusalem is stronger than all Israeli governments past and future. I am against talking about what to give up, because it only damages us," Shas chairman Eli Yishai said.
The debate about Jerusalem's "holy basin" and old city continues to rage even more fiercely amid media reports that Israel is considering ceding Judaism's holiest sites, among them the Temple Mount, to the Palestinian Authority or Jordan.
According to a poll published on Ynet, 68 percent of Israelis are against relinquishing the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority, and 61 percent say that the Temple Mount and Western Wall should remain under Israeli sovereignty.
Meanwhile, MK Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the hardline Israel Beitenu Party and a member of Olmert's coalition, announced that he supported giving the PA Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, according to the Associated Press. However as the PA continues to become more inflexible, even that proposal would not meet the Palestinians' demands.
Last year former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk summed up the pessimism that today surrounds the upcoming summit, stressing the complexity of the issues at hand.
"In the Middle East and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular some problems do not have solutions," Indyk, who served as ambassador during the failed Camp David talks, said in Jerusalem last year. "You should leave well enough alone."
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