International Jerusalem And The Right Of Return
By Cameron Hunt
06 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org
It is curious to note the surprise that has accompanied the recent announcement by Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister and leader of the Israeli Labour Party, of his proposed outcome for Jerusalem as part of any peace deal agreed with the Palestinians: “West Jerusalem and 12 Jewish neighborhoods [of East Jerusalem] … will be ours. The Arab neighborhoods [of East Jerusalem] … will be theirs. There will be a special regime in place along with agreed upon arrangements in the Old City, the Mount of Olives and the City of David.”
Mr Barak had already warned his fellow Israelis earlier in the year that Israel needed to finalize a peace agreement with the Palestinians soon: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… [And if] millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state… The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole.” However, it appears that Mr Barak has now reached the conclusion that as long as East Jerusalem remains under Israeli sovereignty, there can be no final status agreement with the Palestinians; something that has been clear for many years.
Nonetheless, Mr Barak’s proposal remains interesting not only because he was in charge of the pre-talks leading up to the direct peace talks just started in Washington – including secret negotiations with the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas – but also because his proposal was in fact born two years earlier to the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who was heading Israel’s caretaker government at the time.
Mr Olmert had proposed to Mr Abbas, at a private meeting on 13 September 2008, an outcome for Jerusalem in which: “The Holy Basin of Jerusalem [comprising of the Old City and its surrounding religious sites] would be under no sovereignty at all and administered by a consortium of Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans”. It was Mr Olmert that was the first Israeli leader ever to discuss the – albeit only partial – internationalization of Jerusalem; a requirement under international law since 1947. At the same September 2008 meeting, Mr Olmert stated that he could not accept any Palestinian ‘Right of Return’, but that as part of a final status agreement, he would be willing to accept between 2,000 and 3,000 Palestinian refugees as a “humanitarian gesture”.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, has since confirmed Mr Olmert’s 2008 offer to Mr Abbas: “He was serious, I have to say.” He also confirmed Mr Abbas’ rejection of the offer during a debate on Al-Jazeera TV, as well as the words spoken by Mr Abbas to Mr Olmert: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” Mr Erekat went on to state: “This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign… There will be no peace whatsoever unless East Jerusalem – with every single stone in it – becomes the capital of Palestine.” Finally, during the same TV debate, Mr Erekat confirmed that at a 23 July 2000 meeting at the Camp David talks, the then Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected proposals for joint Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem’s Holy Basin, saying: “Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah.”
Mr Abbas is certainly not alone in rejecting Mr Olmert and Mr Barak’s proposal for Jerusalem. Whilst in opposition in January 2009, the current Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, warned an audience at the ‘Jerusalem Conference’ that US President Barack Obama would try to internationalize Jerusalem’s holy sites; something that had already been recommended by the former US President, Bill Clinton, and more recently by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. “Some politicians are trying to blur the importance of the Temple Mount to the Jewish People by referring to it as the ‘Holy Basin’. We, as Jews, know who built the Temple Mount.” It comes as little surprise therefore that one of Mr Netanyahu's aides has in the past few days clarified the official Israeli Government position on Jerusalem, in response to Mr Barak’s recent statements on the topic: “Our position is that Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel”.
During the relaunch of peace talks at Washington in the past week, Mr Netanyahu told the Palestinians: “Just as you expect us to be ready to recognise a Palestinian state as the nation state of the Palestinian people, we expect you to be prepared to recognise Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people”. It is well understood that this demand – something Mr Netanyahu referred to as one of two ‘pillars to peace’ – is a not-so-subtle attempt to force the Palestinian leadership to formally renounce the ‘Right of Return’ of Palestinian refugees; a legal right under customary international law. It is therefore a precondition of Mr Netanyahu (as it was for Mr Olmert) – at the same time as offering nothing at all to the Palestinians in regards to Jerusalem – that any final status agreement between the two parties can only be concluded if the more than 5 million Palestinian refugees are to be resettled in the new Palestinian state, “the nation-state of the Palestinian people”, and not within Israel, “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
In this regard, the most fascinating point that is raised by Israeli proposals to internationalize at least part of Jerusalem, is that neither Mr Olmert nor Mr Barak appears to have considered the future capacity of the State of Israel – which would constitute a minority component of the proposed international consortium of Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the USA – to continue to block the long-established legal right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes; in those cases where their homes had existed or continued to exist within Jerusalem. By agreeing to the internationalization of the Holy Basin, the Israelis would effectively be agreeing to permit all Palestinians who had, or whose forefathers had lived within its environs to return home unimpeded; Israel could no longer veto the capacity of some thousands of Palestinian refugees to exercise their ‘Right of Return’.
Uncomfortably for Mr Abbas and other Arab leadership, such considerations might well lead the millions of Palestinians left languishing for decades within refugees camps to question the true value of Palestinian ‘sovereignty’ over the Holy Basin of Jerusalem; particulary when the faithful among them believe that “there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah”, and particulary when it meant that they and their children had to live within the camps, forever. Even more unfomfortably for the PA’s well-appointed ruling class, those very same Palestinians might begin to wonder what the outcome would be if they demanded that historic Palestine be internationalized in its entirety – something that can be easily achieved through the UN General Assembly. Maybe they could all go home?
Cameron Hunt is the author of Pax UNita - A novel solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
