Jerusalem

The Guardian
9 October 2007

A senior Israeli cabinet minister said yesterday that Israel may be willing to divide Jerusalem with the Palestinians as part of a future peace agreement.

Haim Ramon said Jewish districts of Jerusalem should remain Israeli while Arab areas could be transferred to the Palestinian Authority. "Wouldn’t it be the right deal today for the Palestinians, the western world and the international community to recognise [Israel’s] annexation of .... [Jewish] neighbourhoods as part of Jerusalem, and for us to quit the Arab neighbourhoods?" he told Israel Radio.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders are expected to meet at a peace conference next month in Annapolis, Maryland, but a peace deal is not believed to be close.

Mr Ramon, the vice-prime minister, said decisions over the sovereignty of holy sites of Jerusalem such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Haram al-Sharif and the Western Wall would be more complicated. "We need to say there will be a special regime in the ’holy basin’, which we will talk about in the future," he said.

Many Israelis insist that Jerusalem should never be shared, even though almost half its population is Palestinian. It is often referred to as the "indivisible" capital of the Jewish people. Israel took control of West Jerusalem in 1948 and conquered East Jerusalem in 1967. Since then Israel has built huge housing estates on the occupied territory, mixing Jewish and Arab areas. Palestinians insist that all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City, should form part of a Palestinian state and that all Jewish settlements are illegal under international law. The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak proposed dividing Jerusalem in 2000 but failed to reach an agreement with Yasser Arafat.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, told the Knesset yesterday that he intended to spend the next year working on a peace deal with the Palestinians.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk