Israelis don't understand

[newyorican]

It was said of the late attorney Abraham Suchovolsky, one of Israel's leading experts on matters of church and land, that he saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as primarily being a disagreement over territory - in other words, a real-estate dispute. Once, when the Jewish holiday commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple was drawing near, he supposedly asked: Why cry so much for the Temple's destruction? After all, we still have the lot where it used to stand!

To think of the Temple Mount as real estate is ludicrous, of course. But the anecdote can be helpful in trying to determine to what degree the territorial issue is indeed - as the authors of this booklet argue - the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Dr. Ron Pundak, director general of the Peres Center for Peace and co-initiator of the Oslo Accords, and Col. (res.) Shaul Arieli, who worked in the Prime Minister's Office under Ehud Barak, have joined forces to examine the territorial question, which has ramifications for several key aspects of the dispute: security, the status of Jerusalem, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees.

The authors' basic premise - that territory is the most important issue under negotiation - may be the biggest problem in this publication. Many supporters of the Israeli right wing would deny that this is indeed the point of departure, or even the reality. The Jewish settlers, and not only they, have long argued that the problem is not some piece of land or another; the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, they claim, will not accept Jewish (Israeli) sovereignty over any part of Eretz Israel's territory. This indeed used to be the position of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and it remains today the declared position of the Hamas.

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