A condominium solution for a divided Jerusalem

Both Palestinians and Israelis should have sovereignty over the holy city.

from the May 29, 2007 edition

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There is a widespread misconception among Israelis that, under the status quo, Israel possesses sovereignty over expanded East Jerusalem. It does not. It possesses administrative control. A country can acquire administrative control by force of arms. It can acquire sovereignty only with the consent of the international community. Israel has possessed and exercised administrative control over expanded East Jerusalem for four decades. To this day, none of the world's other 194 sovereign states has recognized its claim to sovereignty. Furthermore, Israel's purported annexation of expanded East Jerusalem has been declared void, and Jerusalem has been explicitly included among the occupied territories in a long series of unanimous or near-unanimous UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

Since the right of a country to declare any part of its territory to be its capital is not contested, the universal refusal to recognize even West Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the maintenance of all embassies to Israel in Tel Aviv is striking evidence of the refusal of the international community to concede that any part of the city is Israel's sovereign territory. As if to emphasize the point, all European Union ambassadors and the American ambassador to Israel boycotted the country's recent celebration of the 40th anniversary of Jerusalem's "unification."

A clearer understanding of what the legal status quo regarding Jerusalem really is could make Israeli public opinion less resistant to a modification of that status quo.

Israelis concerned about their future might well look back at the vision for Jerusalem of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism: "We'll simply extraterritorialize Jerusalem, which will then belong to nobody and yet to everybody, the holy place common to the adherents of all faiths, the great condominium of culture and morality." Mr. Herzl's dream of a Jewish state was wildly impractical at the time, but it existed half a century later. Whether its people ever enjoy peace and security may well depend on whether they can grasp the visionary practicality of Herzl's own recognition that what neither people of the Holy Land could ever relinquish or renounce must therefore be shared.

The late president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, clearly recognized this principle when, in a 1995 speech delivered at Harvard University in 1995, he asked: " Why not Jerusalem as the capital of two states, with no Berlin Wall? United, open, coexistence, living together." The audience rose for a standing ovation.

If Herzl and Mr. Arafat could agree on the potential of the "condominium" solution, shouldn't this potential key to peace be explored and developed by those who still believe that peace is possible and who recognize that it is urgent?

• John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is the author of "The World According to Whitbeck." This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service ( www.commongroundnews.org ).

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