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Barak Proposes Low-Level Talks on Jerusalem
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed Friday that Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States each name an envoy for talks on the future of Jerusalem, the major stumbling block which deadlocked the Camp David summit last month.
The proposal was made while Barak held phone conversations with Regional Cooperation Minister Shimon Peres, who arrived in the Norwegian capital of Oslo early Friday and prepared to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat there later, according to Israel Radio reports.
Peres called Barak to ask for his guidance for his talks with Arafat, the first direct contact between the Palestinian leader and a senior Israeli official following the Camp David talks, which failed to reach any agreement after 15-day-long talks in July.
Barak, who is vacationing in northern Israel this weekend, reportedly told Peres that he should explain to Arafat that the Israeli government really wants to make peace with the Palestinians through talks.
Both Peres and Arafat are touring foreign countries to explain to world leaders their respective views on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In his recent visit to Russia, Arafat was seeking Moscow's support for his plan to declare Palestinian independence this September. Israel is against the unilateral plan.
The two leaders are scheduled to brief Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Foreign Minister Thorbjoern Jagland on the Middle East peace process respectively.
The Jerusalem issue is intractable as Israel regards the holy city as its "eternal and undivided" capital, while the Palestinians want to secure at least the eastern part of the city, which Israel captured during the 1967 Middle East war, as the capital of their own future state.
During the Camp David talks, several sovereignty-sharing proposals were discussed but neither proposal managed to win the support of the Palestinians, who argued that the Jerusalem issue is not only a issue for the Palestinians, but for the whole Muslim world.
Officials in Barak's office said that since the conditions for a second three-way summit is premature, it should be better to have lower-level talks to resolve the issue first and convene another summit only to put final touches on an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
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