LONDON – Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Mankind now has the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. For once we can see whether the work of imams, rabbis and priests has born fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been exerting their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance and brotherhood.

These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is their God, now will be tested in the hottest of fires. Have their peoples imbibed the true message of their faiths? Or have they been diverted along life’s way by ceremony over substance, by position over principle and by nationalistic myth over historic perspective? Has greed overcome charity and the recourse to violence driven out the spirit of human unity? The issue of the ownership of Jerusalem and its parts now being negotiated is a popular decision par excellence. The governments involved cannot go forward on this issue unless they carry the overwhelming majority of their people with them. The riots and killings of the last week suggest, at least on the Palestinian side, the mood of tolerance is at breaking point. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s room for manoeuvre is demonstrably even smaller than Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s.

In contrast, the progress made at the Camp David summit in July was nothing short of remarkable. In a matter of days, decades of Israeli intransigence were overturned by Mr Barak. Long held Israeli positions that would have in effect left a new Palestinian state as little more than an archipelago of isolated enclaves with perhaps as little as 50% of the land of the West Bank were thrown to the wind.

Very few politicians, scholars or journalists can cross their hearts and say they saw this coming. Most of them thought if a peace agreement were formulated it would be on lesser terms, as far as Palestinian interests were concerned. Barak’s great strength is that he knows enough about war to know that there can only be a sustainable peace if a vast majority on both sides concur with it. Even if by some feat of diplomacy Arafat’s will could have been bent to settle for less it would have been repudiated by enough of his own people and by much of the Arab community at large. Violence would have returned to centre stage. The Israeli settlements would have been besieged. Jerusalem itself would be in the perpetual grip of urban terrorism and the pressures and fissures in the Islamic world would help produce more rulers of the Saddam Hussein, Ayotollah Khomeini type. Who knows, at the end of the day there might be a nuclear exchange between Israel and a neighbouring country? To this extent, this week’s riots have been a useful reminder of the tinder box at hand.

Which brings us to Jerusalem, the last important outstanding issue to be negotiated. President Bill Clinton was profoundly wrong after the Camp David meeting broke up at the end of July to lead the U.S. side in berating Arafat publicly for not compromising on Jerusalem. He seemed not to understand Arafat’s observation: “The Arab leader has not been born who will give up Jerusalem”. Clinton looked at the enormous compromises Israel’s leader had already made and, in the detached manner of western diplomacy, assumed this was a very fair deal. It was, indeed, but it wasn’t enough.

First, consider the fall out from contemporary history. There is no question that at the time of the ending of the British mandate Jerusalem belonged to the Palestinians. They lost West Jerusalem in their ill-judged war with Israel in 1948. And only in 1967 during the Six Day War did Israel capture and annex East Jerusalem and its Old City. (But it did allow Islamic authorities to continue to exercise control over the two ancient mosques and the great stone plaza atop the Temple Mount.) At one time even the U.S. itself recognised there would be no peace until this occupation was reversed, hence its vote for UN Resolution 242 in 1967 that called on Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied”. Thus it is a matter of international justice that at the very least the Arab parts of East Jerusalem be returned to Palestine, as long as Jews have free, untrammeled access, to their sacred site, the Western Wall which sits at the foot of Temple Mount. (Imagine, by comparison, the wrath of the German people if Berlin were still occupied by the Allies.)

Nevertheless, it is also just as obvious that the Jewish identity is now so bound up with the idea of Jerusalem ( a fuzzy concept if ever there was one, since present day Jerusalem is four times the size of the one that existed in 1948) that to prize Israel loose by a process of capitulation is not within the realms of possibility.

At last, at the eleventh hour, under American prodding, the Israelis have begun to think seriously about the idea first mooted in this column of internationalising part of East Jerusalem. For the present the suggestion of a UN Security Council fiefdom only extends to the Temple Mount, but once that principle is accepted the possibilities of geographical extension to include some of the neighbourhoods around shouldn’t be so difficult to swallow. The Palestinians are still balking, but that is probably only because Arafat sees the idea as presently drawn as too geographically limited. Extend it somewhat and an agreement could be at hand.

Could the end be in sight? Yes, indeed it is. But realizing it will require enormous political courage by all the parties. Time is probably not on their side. And the people? Perhaps that depends on how well their religious teachers have performed their duties.

I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com