BYE BYE GAZA - Barry Chamish

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Teiku is the only solution to the issue of sovereignty over
Jerusalem’s holiest site.
By every account, Israel and the Palestinians made
significant progress on most of the permanent-status issues
during their 15-day negotiations at Camp David. Only the
issue of Jerusalem defied agreement, thus rendering all
other agreements null and void. The ground rules included a
clear understanding that "nothing is agreed to until
everything is agreed to."
So both sides preferred to abandon historic agreements on
most of the issues that divide them for the sake of retaining
certain claims to sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem.
For Israelis, a redivision of Jerusalem, which has served as
the "undivided, eternal capital" of the Jewish state since
1967, is inconceivable. Equally inconceivable to Palestinians
is Jewish sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in East
Jerusalem, and above all over the Haram al Sharif, on which
stand the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques.
The surpassing irony is that by failing to reach an accord,
each side is in fact bringing about the very situation it is
seeking to prevent. Israel is all but assuring the division of
Jerusalem, and the Palestinians are assuring that they will
have far less access to their holiest shrines than they now
do.
Israel has had complete sovereignty over all of East
Jerusalem for more than three decades, yet for Israelis the
Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem might just as well be on
the other side of the moon. Most Israelis have never entered
these areas, a foreign and threatening place for them. It is
quite common for Israeli taxi drivers to refuse to take
passengers to these parts of East Jerusalem.
If that is today’s reality, how much more isolated will East
Jerusalem be from the rest of the city in conditions of far