The Missing Peaces
Article Summary and Author Biography
To resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, policymakers will have to develop a new regime for Jerusalem's Old City. Striking an Israeli-Syrian deal that draws Damascus away from Tehran is also essential, but it will be harder than it appears.
Michael D. Bell is Paul Martin, Sr., Senior Scholar on International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor. He has served as Canadian Ambassador to Jordan, Egypt, and Israel. Daniel C. Kurtzer is S. Daniel Abraham Visiting Professor in Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has served as U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and Israel. Prem G. Kumar, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer who has served in Jerusalem, in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, is an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government.
Jerusalem's Old City covers only one square kilometer, but it embodies every aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Within its walls, overlapping demographic, economic, political, religious, security, and symbolic issues pose substantial challenges to even the most experienced negotiators. It is widely believed that the impasse over Jerusalem -- especially sovereignty over the walled Old City and its holy places -- will prevent a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. For such a crucial issue, the Old City does not receive the serious attention it deserves; commentators proposing plans for Israeli-Palestinian peace often simply sidestep the Old City entirely.
The January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs is a case in point. Although Richard Haass and Martin Indyk identify the difficulties in agreeing on a formula for Jerusalem in their article, "Beyond Iraq," they stop short of proposing ways to overcome the seemingly irreconcilable differences. Writing in the same issue, Walter Russell Mead ("Change They Can Believe In") focuses on the Palestinian refugee issue as the key to a peace deal and pays little attention to Jerusalem.
Many peace proposals tend to focus exclusively on sovereignty when it comes to Jerusalem. There has been no shortage of plans for the future of this troubled city, but attempts to resolve the Jerusalem issue since 1948 have always failed because they have invariably hinged on the question of sovereignty -- reducing the issue to a dispute over territory and political control. The two parties' sovereignty claims should not be devalued, but because these claims are mutually exclusive and based on such diametrically opposed historical narratives, the standard compromise solution -- shared governance -- simply will not work...
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