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by Tanya Willmer JERUSALEM (AFP) - With a deadline for a peace deal less than two weeks away, the United States pursued efforts Wednesday to mediate a settlement on Jerusalem, the city at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
U.S. special envoy Dennis Ross was due to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for the second time in two days after U.S. President Bill Clinton's warning Tuesday during a stopover in Egypt that time for a peace deal was running short. But in public at least, the two sides are still at loggerheads over sovereignty over east Jerusalem and its sacred sites, and officials have so far ruled out the possibility of a three-way meeting when Barak, Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are in New York next week for the UN millennium summit. "Such a three-way meeting is not on the agenda," Barak's security advisor Danny Yatom told army radio. "A meeting will only be possible if the differences have been reduced beforehand, but that is not the case." The two sides face a September 13th deadline for a comprehensive pact on not only Jerusalem but also the fate of Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements, final borders and water and security issues. They have been engaged in informal contacts since the collapse of the U.S.-brokered Camp David summit on July 25th over Jerusalem. Arafat, who was in Egypt only hours after Clinton's visit, said consultations with the United States would continue in an effort to push the peace process forward. Israel press reports said negotiators were discussing complex proposals to divide control over Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount, or to put the walled Old City under "God's sovereignty." "Both sides must make concessions and compromises," said the Israeli cabinet minister with responsibility for Jerusalem, Haim Ramon. "If the Palestinians think that we are going to be the only side that makes concessions, I am afraid it will be very difficult to reach an agreement between us and the Palestinians," he told reporters. "It will be almost unforgivable if we miss this golden opportunity to bring and end to the conflict between us and the Palestinians." The Palestinians insist that any accord must give them sovereignty over all of east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in war 33 years ago and annexed as part of its "united, eternal" capital, a move not recognized internationally. "The Palestinian leadership is not willing to accept limitations on sovereignty in Jerusalem," top Arafat aide Tayeb Abdel Rahim told the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds. Palestinian international cooperation minister Nabil Shaath said in Cairo Tuesday that Palestinian sovereignty could not be questioned because east Jerusalem falls under UN resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from land seized in 1967. The Haaretz daily reported that the United States has proposed a new plan to split the al-Aqsa mosque compound into four sectors under different control. Jerusalem's right-wing mayor Ehud Olmert warned that such a division would lead to "chaos, anarchy, confrontation and violence" but that he was not opposed to the idea of divine sovereignty. "Divine sovereignty is something that can be pursued as fundamentally it offers the continuation of the present status quo: security control over the Temple Mount by Israel and maintaining complete access for Muslims to the holy sites of Islam," he told reporters. |
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