Gorenberg vs. Clinton on an Undivided Jerusalem

Report: Israel, PA agree Jordanian control of Temple Mount

London-based Palestinian daily quotes Abbas aide as saying, Israel and Palestinians have agreed to transfer control of parts of Old City in Jerusalem to Jordan as part of future peace agreement

Israel and the Palestinians have agreed that the Temple Mount as well as other parts of the Old City in Jerusalem will be under Jordanian control as part of a future peace deal, a Palestinian daily reported on Monday.
The London-based al-Quds al-Arabi reported that President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reached the agreement during recent talks in Jerusalem. Under the arrangement, the Old City's Arab residents will be granted Jordanian citizenship.

The newspaper did not say whether Israel would keep control of Jewish holy sites and neighborhoods in the Old City.

The arrangement will make the Jordanian monarchy a guardian of holy Muslim shrines in Jerusalem.

The plan's details and implementation will be supervised by Jordan, Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations, the newspaper said.

The report comes a day after remarks by Vice Premier Haim Ramon that Abbas and Olmert will discuss the status of Jerusalem during the US-sponsored talks in November.

Ramon said it was in Israel's interest to hand over control of Jerusalem's Arab Neighborhoods to the Palestinian Authority.

A Palestinian official told Ynet it was agreed in principle that the neighborhoods of Shuafat, Wadi Jos, Beit Hanina, Ras el-Amoud and Jabal Mukaber would be transferred to PA control.

He added that progress was also made regarding the excavations at the Temple Mount. The Palestinians have recently claimed that Israel is attempting to build a synagogue under the complex.

The official said that under a future deal Israel would be responsible for security at the Temple Mount while the Palestinians would have sovereignty over the area. In addition, Israel agreed not to conduct any archeological digs at the complex.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office denied al-Quds al-Arabi's report, saying "no agreement has been reached."

Ali Waked contributed to the report

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3457435,00.html

Maybe Jerusalem is the wedge to split the Lobby. It will also smoke out the politicians for sure.

The issue of Jerusalem and the legality of anything done there is far beyond my expertise. One thing I know, though.

Walking the streets of Jerusalem at comparatively peaceful times 10 years ago was a mixed experience for me. The city is middle-eastern to its core. It is the gates to the mystical East, the outpost of the desert birthplace of monotheism. It seem to exist in another dimension. It silently hovers between the heavens and earth.
The mix of faces, languages, rhythms and attitudes does not violate the almost palpable presence of the slow rolling of the river of history and unreal airness of the place. What violates it is the insulting omnipresence of armed patrols of young IDF soldiers.
Disrespectful, rude, with Kiplingesque master-race grins on their teenage faces, ready and eager to project their order on an unarmed crowd that is mostly the age of their parents is simultaneously disgustingly ominous and helplessly childish. Like warts on a healthy body they do not affect your perception of the whole, but rather make you want to call a surgeon. The fact that the government in Tel Aviv made a decision at some point after 1967 to patrol Jerusalem by armed soldiers rather than equally armed police is very revealing of Israeli establishment deep instinctive understanding that they are really not the owners, but just the occupiers of it.

This time or another, this century or the next, but this city will return to its soul one day with all the communities living in a healthy dynamic and competitive mix with each other under the laisse-faire rule of Turkish republic or Jordanian monarchs, with large-bellied, bushy-mustached older policemen armed with awkward sabres rather than guns passing their time lazily seeping coffee outside silversmiths shops.
And in itself, the very quest of Euro-Galician Jewry to conquer the land of Zion and the birthplace of Judaism and thus establish themselves as leaders of Jewish race is as naive, childish and hopeless as these boorish soldiers-children imagining that they own this eternal place.
Both will return to their true meaning and their true Owner, who will, one day, give it to someone else again.
And the river of history will follow the will of its Creator. And the short, stormy rule of socialist Jewish sect will slowly fade away like the rings from a stone thrown in in its glassy waters.

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An interesting debate from back in May between Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe on the desirability/possibility of a one-state solution–
http://toibillboard.info/Transcript_eng_improved.mht

Hear hear, Alex…

I don't have any religious perspective on this, nor any belief in "holy lands."

I think a kid patrolling anything with an Uzi is an abomination, period.

The arms industry and black market weapons profiteering is an abomination, period.

Division of human beings into two classes by ethnicity, and deliberate control of populations by ethnicity, is an abomination, period.

I wonder if I'm alone wondering why anyone would consider any of this situation somehow sacred. That religion is one of the pretexts involved is just deeply ironic.