Palestine-Mandate

So, how was “The Day After”, that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice famously said Israeli and Palestinian negotiators must prepare so assiduously for?

The Jerusalem and Washington correspondents of the McClatchy newspaper group wrote that “The Wednesday morning newspapers trumpeting the latest fresh start toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians hadn’t hit American doorsteps when the first crude Qassam rocket of the day soared out of the Gaza Strip and into southern Israel. Before lunch, Palestinian Authority police in the West Bank were using truncheons to break up angry mourners trying to bury a demonstrator who was killed a day earlier while protesting the new peace initiative. By the time Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas joined President Bush in the Rose Garden to launch the latest round of negotiations, an Israeli airstrike had killed two naval police officers in the Gaza Strip, where the militant Islamist group Hamas seized military control in June after winning U.S.-backed elections in January…” The McClatchy newspapers report is here.

The Associated Press’ Bureau Chief for Israel and the Palestinian territories had these reflections on the complicated implications for future negotiations: “If Israelis and Palestinians have any hope of achieving their stated goal of signing a final peace treaty within a year, they may have to slice Jerusalem in half with a wall, come up with $85 billion for Palestinian refugees and figure out how to wrest control of the Gaza Strip from Hamas. They’ll also have to agree on which territory Israel should give to a future Palestine in exchange for being allowed to keep major settlement blocs in the West Bank. And if they decide not to divide Jerusalem, they’ll have to determine how to share it while avoiding the potential security nightmare of an open border … The Palestinians want to establish an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem — areas that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. Of all the obstacles to a peace deal, none looms larger than Jerusalem — the city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its holy sites of such enormous importance to Muslims, Jews and Christians. [n.b., others believe that the Palestinian refugee question, which Steve mentions later in his piece, is a much bigger problem...] Past peace negotiations have made it clear that the city will have to serve as the capital of both Israel and a future Palestine. But that raises more questions than it answers. How can you transfer east Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty without stripping its residents of Israeli social security benefits, for instance, or how can Israelis and Palestinians each have access to the city but not the other’s country? [n.b., this is an Israeli concern, not a Palestinian one] Most Israelis and Palestinians do not want to divide the city, like the way it was before Israel captured its eastern sector in 1967. However, security concerns may require just that — unless the sides can come up with an alternative such as erecting checkpoints at all roads leading out of Jerusalem to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israeli cities. But there’s an even thornier issue — how to share the emotionally charged Jerusalem holy site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount. As the site contains a Muslim shrine built on the remains of a Jewish one, a solution will almost certainly require an international presence to administer jurisdiction…” The AP piece is here.