JERUSALEM, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- Israel's Labor Party is signaling a readiness to divide Jerusalem and cede some -- but not all -- Arab neighborhoods to Palestinian rule.
The city's future is one of the touchiest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Successive Israeli governments have stressed that the "united city" is the Jewish state's eternal capital while the Palestinians insist that East Jerusalem will be the capital of their future state.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 war after Jordanian troops seized United Nations headquarters in town. It promptly redrew the city's municipal boundaries to extend its law and administration to the Arab sectors.
Jerusalem grew almost overnight. Jewish West Jerusalem had covered some 9,500 acres before 1967, but the entire city now covers 63,200 acres. Israel has built large Jewish neighborhoods to ring the Arab quarters, but the ring is not complete.
During several election campaigns one of the right wing's effective slogans was that Labor's candidate would "divide Jerusalem." Labor denied it vehemently but now is the first major party to indicate such readiness openly.
Labor's platform was read out at a festive convention meeting in a Jerusalem concert hall Sunday evening while party youngsters in dark blue T-shirts kept waving national flags and occasionally beat drums.
"Jerusalem, with all its Jewish neighborhoods, will be Israel's eternal capital, and the sites holy to Judaism will remain under Israeli control," the platform said.
The implication was that Arab neighborhoods would be excluded.
Labor's leader Amir Peretz reinforced this impression when he stated his party would "maintain a united and strong Jerusalem with a Jewish character and majority."
Anyone who travels around the city knows there are large areas that Jews do not enter.
Labor wants to "turn Jerusalem into a city with a Jewish majority," Knesset Member Yuli Tamir told United Press International.
Asked whether that would mean redrawing the city's boundaries to exclude Arab neighborhoods she said: "Yes. Of course," but declined to detail.
Former Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog, who is number two on Labor's list, told UPI Israel would keep the Jewish neighborhoods. Arab neighborhoods in the city's "outskirts" will be up for negotiations.
"None of us wants to annex 250,000 Palestinians" to the State of Israel, he said.
The city's demographics are working against Israel. According to the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies' latest figures, the Jews accounted for 66.7 percent of Jerusalem's population. That majority is shrinking and by 2020 the Jews will account for 61.2 percent of the population, the institute predicted.
Nevertheless, Labor is not going as far as endorsing U.S. President Bill Clinton's plan, nor the Geneva accords that Israeli doves have concluded with Palestinians. Those plans talk of all Arab neighborhoods being Palestinian and a special arrangement for divided rule in the Old City and the holy sites.
"We're not dealing with the Old City," Herzog said.
Kadima's leader and former mayor of Jerusalem, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, has also expressed readiness to divide Jerusalem and exclude many Arab areas. However, Kadima's action plan is somewhat vague on this issue.
It talks of keeping within Israel's borders, "places holy to Judaism and important as a national symbol, first and foremost united Jerusalem as Israel's capital."
The most hawkish of the three big parties is the Likud whose leader, former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, told the Herzliya Conference Sunday that Israel's security boundaries must include "Greater Jerusalem."
Israel's strategic heart includes greater Jerusalem, he stressed. A government headed by him would push the security barrier eastwards, Netanyahu added.
A recent public opinion poll published in Yediot Aharonot showed that 49 percent of Israelis are ready to part with some Arab neighborhoods under an agreement that they would keep the Old City's Jewish areas and the Western Wall. Forty-nine percent opposed this idea, the pollsters reported.
The latest public polls indicate Labor is gaining popularity. If elections were held last week, Labor would have won 21 seats in the 120-member Knesset, making it Israel's second biggest party behind Kadima, which would have won 43 seats.
The Likud was slipping and down to 12 mandates.
If Kadima and Labor emerge triumphant from the March 28 national elections, lead the next government, and follow their pre-election statements, Israel will be ready to change the security barrier's present route, running through Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. At A-Ram, on the road to Ramallah, parts of the concrete gray wall are covered with Palestinian election posters.
The text of Labor's platform presented Sunday included a sentence indicating readiness for a unilateral disengagement in the West Bank in case of a political stalemate.
"In case of a political deadlock, Israel will take independent steps to ensure its military and political interests," the text said.
The announcer who read the text at the convention skipped that sentence, but Herzog indicated it was still Labor's policy. "We give priority to negotiations, to exhaust them before any other alternative," he said.
At the convention Peretz stressed his intention to handle security matters as well as social welfare issues, having emphasized social welfare issues in the past.
"I shall advance the negotiations for peace and strive for a permanent agreement" based on the principle of two states for two people, he declared.
Israel would not allow Palestinian refugees to return to its territories, he said.
The focus on peace and security issues seemed to be an attempt to present him as a credible candidate for prime minister to all those who saw him as a trade unionist in an open shirt.
