At Ammunition Hill, Peres, Olmert pledge unity and peace for Jerusalem

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
Israel is still grappling with the results of the 1967 Six Day War, President Shimon Peres said at a ceremony at Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill battle site on Monday, and it will continue to do so until peace is achieved. "Israel, which saw Jerusalem torn to shreds, will know how to act in order to keep her united, open to all prayers and immune to all methods of terror," Peres said on the 41st anniversary of the unification of the capital. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has advocated ceding Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to the Palestinians as part of a final peace treaty, addressed the crowd and sought to draw a fine line between his oft-repeated pledges to keep the city united and his proposed territorial concession in the capital. "I believe there is no contradiction between the people of Israel's total allegiance to Jerusalem and its unity and our ambitions to create peace within it," he said. The hour-long event began on a mild Jerusalem evening under a crystalline blue sky with the lowering of the Israeli flag to half-mast, and the recital of the Kaddish by a bereaved father. At the end of the august event, which included musical interludes, two male participants scuffled with Shin Bet security guards after refusing to exit via a side door, with each side claiming the other threw the first punch, said police. Meanwhile, thousands of flag-waving Israelis marched to the Western Wall on Monday in commemoration of the reunification of the capital. Jerusalem police arrested four Arab teens suspected of pelting stones at the marchers in the Old City. There were no injuries reported in the attack. Another annual parade, including the traditional colorful agricultural floats, is slated to take place on Tuesday afternoon from the city's Sacher Park to the Teddy Stadium, where a gala musical concert is planned, the city said. Separately, a new working paper by the veteran Ha'aretz writer Nadav Shragai, published in Hebrew by a Jerusalem think tank, outlines the dangers of a future division of Jerusalem as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. The work, "Jerusalem: Dangers of Division," which was put out by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, calls for dealing with continued Jewish emigration from the city as a solution to the much-touted "demographic" problem, instead of withdrawing from Arab neighborhoods of the city. Some 300,000 Jewish residents have left the city over the past 20 years, primarily in search of affordable housing and job opportunities. "Dozens of government decisions, Jerusalem ministerial committees and experts have proposed various ways to attract [Jewish] population to the city and to prevent the emigration of [Jewish] residents... [yet] only a few of these decisions have been implemented and most have remained on paper," the study states. Shragai writes that a division of Jerusalem along the lines proposed by former US President Bill Clinton in 2000 - which was rejected by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and accepted by then-prime minister Ehud Barak - whereby Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would fall under Palestinian control while Jewish areas of the city would remain under Israeli control - would again turn Jerusalem into a "peripheral" city with serious security and economic repercussions.