The Israeli government has been hammered with a succession of reports in the local press this week charging that it is secretly negotiating over the future of Jerusalem with leaders in the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization.
According to investigations carried out by journalists at The Jerusalem Post, the back channel discussions are taking place in tandem with the official talks that have been spurred along under pressure from the United States.
While the official talks are said to be making little progress, the secret discussions are dealing with the de facto division of Jerusalem, with Arab claims to property on both eastern and western sides of the city being put forward.
PLO/PA official Hatem Abdel Qader was quoted in the Post Wednesday as saying that the question of Jerusalem is both "on the table and under the table."
Jerusalem is Israel's 3,000-year-old capital which, after nearly two millennia under gentile rule, was restored to Jewish control by the Six Day War, 40 years ago last year, in what was seen by most Jews and many millions of Christians as a miraculous answer to unbroken centuries of prayer.
During the first decades after 1967, Israeli leaders repeatedly vowed that Jerusalem would henceforth be Israel's "eternal and indivisible capital."
Subjected to, on the one hand, unyielding demands backed by unrelenting terrorism from the Arabs, and on the other, by intense diplomatic pressure from a world unwilling to stand up to the Arab states, that position has slowly been whittled away until today there are elected Jewish lawmakers who speak openly about the "need" to surrender parts of the capital once again.
Since 1992, those in Israel's governments who have opted to go along with the land-for-peace process have resorted to holding secret negotiations in parallel with open talks, the latter diverting public and media attention while the former deal with the "taboo" or "core" issues.
In this way the 1993 Oslo Agreement was reached - the Israeli negotiators actually breaking the laws of their own land which prohibited meetings with the PLO.
Back channel proponents argue that these "core issues" - like Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water - are far too sensitive to talk about openly, and any government (or PLO-leadership, were it sincere) that tried to negotiate over these would be toppled or in some way be forced to stop.
Writing in the latest issue of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, a former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, David Kimche, argues that such clandestine talks are "the only way that progress can be made towards an end-of-conflict agreement."
The results of this approach to peace-making in the Middle East - where elitist leaders reach and try to impose "solutions" not agreed to in the transparent environment of official talks - backfired with Oslo, which instead of bringing peace unleashed the worst terrorism-inflicted bloodshed in the 60-year-history of the Jewish state.
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