REMARKS BY ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS DORE GOLD BEFORE THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL JUNE 30, 1998 Mr. President, Fifty years ago the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem surrendered. Its Jewish inhabitants were expelled. Fifty-eight synagogues, including the 700 year old Hurva Synagogue, were destroyed and desecrated. Free access of the Jewish people to their holy places, particularly the Western Wall, was denied. Even Israeli Muslims were precluded from gaining access to the mosques in the Old City. During all those years, from 1948 until 1967, the UN Security Council never met once to consider the denial of Israeli rights or Jewish rights in Jerusalem. With Jerusalem's reunification, the State of Israel is determined to never let this happen again. Israel's position in Jerusalem is not a product of these recent events alone, but emanates from a continuous historical link between the Jewish people and their eternal capital that has endured from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem to this century. Equally, the Jewish people's majority in Jerusalem is not a present-day demographic development, but had already been restored by the middle of the previous century, in 1864, when Jerusalem was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Today, Israel has a special responsibility to preserve and protect Jerusalem as a city that is holy to each of the three great faiths in our region: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Israel has undertaken in the 1994 Washington Declaration to respect the special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem, and give high priority to this historical role in permanent status negotiations. Besides safeguarding the access of all faiths to the holy sites, Israel has carefully sought to ensure the development of Jerusalem for all its peoples. While the total population of Jerusalem has grown from 266,300 in 1967 to 603,000 in 1996, since unification, the Palestinian Arabs did not find themselves losing their relative position in the city. Indeed, if the Palestinians constituted 25.8 percent of the population in 1967, by 1996, they made up 30 percent of Jerusalem's population. Preserving Jerusalem requires planning. Across the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, cities face very different alternative courses of development. Rapid urbanization can overwhelm cities, leading to an exhaustion of all land reserves as downtown areas became enveloped with shanty towns, substandard housing, and increased poverty. Alternatively, cities also can lose population; a lack of adequate housing and employment opportunities can force residents to relocate to more prosperous suburban areas, leaving the core city to decay. Indeed, during the period prior to 1967, thousands of Palestinian Arabs left Jerusalem, seeking better opportunities in the city of Amman. The Government of Israel is determined to protect Jerusalem for all of its residents, and has therefore taken a ministerial-level initiative to strengthen the city. This is not a new political program affecting the political status of Jerusalem. This is not a plan to gerrymander district lines in order to affect political outcomes. It consists of a municipal blueprint for bolstering the city's economy and infrastructure. Israel's actions to preserve and protect Jerusalem are fully in accordance with the Interim Agreement between Israel and the PLO, which provides that Jerusalem remain under exclusive Israeli jurisdiction, while remaining an issue for permanent status negotiations. It is for this reason that the Palestinian Authority undertook in the 1997 Note for the Record, to close all of its offices in Jerusalem, which is outside of its area of jurisdiction. It is these clear obligations of the Interim Agreement that must provide basis for gauging the actions of the two sides; these obligations were, after all, freely entered into by the parties and represent binding undertakings. The Security Council debate, on any issue, must be based on facts and not on unproven political argumentation or claims. It should be recalled that in September 1996, the UN Security Council was informed that Israel had opened a tunnel under the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Of course, Israel had opened a 30 centimeter wall of a pre-existing archaeological tunnel from the Hasmonean period that was over 2,000 years old. The tunnel itself did not go under the Temple Mount on which the Al-Aqsa Mosque is situated. And the opening of the tunnel was not even near the mosques. Nonetheless, the assertion persisted. Today, Israel's municipal plans for Jerusalem have equally generated waves of disinformation. First, in his letter to the President of the Security Council, the Charge d'Affaires of the Republic of the Sudan states Israel's Jerusalem plan comes in "the context of annexing more occupied Palestinian territory." This is simply false. If a decision is taken to shift the municipal boundary of Jerusalem, the Government of Israel has stated that it will strictly apply to areas westward of Jerusalem that are within the pre-1967 lines. The planned adjustment is intended to provide land for housing and high-technology industries, thereby creating affordable homes and new employment opportunities for Jerusalem residents; the populations of the major western suburbs are not even being incorporated into Jerusalem according to this plan. A similar adjustment of Jerusalem's western municipal border occurred in May 1993 without being the subject of UN debate for good reason; this is entirely an internal Israeli matter on the municipal-administrative level, rather than on the international level. Second, Israel's critics point to the proposal for an "umbrella municipality" as a scheme to give Jerusalem administrative powers over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinian Permanent Observer has stated, in his letter to the Secretary-General dated 22 June that the "umbrella municipality" is a "concrete step towards illegal annexation." This is simply not true. The "umbrella municipality" is nothing more than a coordination mechanism between Jerusalem and surrounding communities. It does not entail a shift of municipal boundaries. It does not entail the extension of municipal authority over any Israeli settlements. It allows neighboring communities to coordinate services such as public works, sanitation, water, public health clinics, and education, with the purpose of creating economies of scale to reduce costs. These coordination mechanisms exist in different forms worldwide, without prejudice to formal municipal borders: in Brussels, Lyon, Montreal, Toronto, and San Francisco. Today, such patterns of regional coordination exist between Jerusalem and Palestinian cities in the West Bank that are under the complete jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. For example, today Ramallah supplies water to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kafr Aqab. Does Israel believe that this is a conspiracy by the Palestinian Authority to erode Israel's status in northern Jerusalem? No. It is a practical solution to a local problem. Today, part of the sewage of Bethlehem and Beit Jalla flows westward to Jerusalem's waste treatment plants. Does local cooperation in sewage indicate that someone is planning to alter Jerusalem's borders in the south? Nonsense. These are vital forms of coordination between neighboring municipalities and have no international political implications. Third, in a letter to the Secretary-General dated 9 June 1998, that was distributed to the Security Council, the Palestinian Observer claimed Israel's Ministry of the Interior had approved 58 housing units for Jewish settlers in the area of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. These facts are wrong. The Interior Ministry's Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee approved plans for the construction of 100 housing units - not 58 units. But these 100 units are for the Palestinian Arab residents of the A-Tur neighborhood, in Jerusalem, just next to the Mount of Olives. The June 9 letter was being considered for the preamble in a proposed resolution, being considered for the Security Council. Does the UN Security Council wish to take any part in a PLO complaint against housing for Palestinian Arabs? Mr. President, The greatest problem for Jerusalem today does not come from Israel's efforts to preserve and protect this city. Presently, Israel faces massive Palestinian non-compliance in fighting terrorism and preventing violence. When Israel signed the Hebron Protocol on 15 January 1997, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat undertook in the Note for the Record to "combat systematically and effectively terrorist organizations and infrastructure." Yet in the last year it was disclosed that bomb factories belonging to the Hamas organization were operating in Ramallah and Bethlehem just outside of Jerusalem. The bulk of the infrastructure used for repeated suicide bus bombings in the heart of Jerusalem remains intact. Additionally, in the Note for the Record, Chairman Arafat undertook to prevent violence and hostile propaganda. Yet on January 19, 1998, Mr. Arafat himself appeared on official Palestinian television praising Yahya Ayyash, the mastermind of the Hamas suicide bombings, calling him "the example, the model, and the goal" of the Palestinians. This is simply unacceptable. Real peace requires that governments educate for peace, rather than legitimize hatred, violence, and further bloodshed. Israel has a long list of Palestinian Authority violations in the West Bank and around Jerusalem. And while it is useful to keep UN member states apprised of these issues, Israel brings its complaints directly to the negotiating table and not to the United Nations. Israel is seeking to complete a new set of understandings with the PLO, through the assistance of the United States, that will provide a framework for achieving Palestinian compliance with the Note for the Record and the Oslo II Interim Agreement. Equally, the place to address Palestinian concerns with Israeli policies is at the negotiating table and not in every multilateral body. Israel is determined to make this peace process work. No state has been more frustrated with the lack of progress in the negotiations in recent months, for the lack of Palestinian compliance in security places, first and foremost, Israeli lives at risk. The international community has an enormous responsibility in this regard; it can support the existing framework for direct negotiations between the parties, or undermine it with sterile political resolutions that have little factual basis.