City of Protest and Prayer

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should be free access to the holy places, and that these shrines should be administered by the religious groups. U.S. officials support all these points, always adding that the overall question of sovereignty remains to be negotiated. But those who have tried to negotiate have never come closer than Moses wandering in the wilderness in search of the Promised Land just beyond the horizon. Aside from the alternative absolutes of total Israeli or Arab control, the main proposals include: 1) let Israelis and Arabs somehow share or rotate power (an idea urged by Egypt's Anwar Sadat); 2) make Jerusalem, or perhaps just the walled section, an international free city (an idea long advocated by the Vatican); 3) put the U.N. in charge of all holy places; 4) put the Jordanians, the Saudis or some other Islamic authority in charge of the Muslim holy places; 5) create a Palestinian state on the West Bank and grant Jerusalem Arabs citizenship in that.

All these schemes are in varying degrees unrealistic, since all require substantial concessions. Mayor Kollek, as usual, has some plans of his own, which would concentrate on making the city function better. Specifically, he wants to provide the diverse neighborhoods with greater autonomy. The plan originally aroused fears that the city would once again be divided, but Kollek has gradually started a series of experiments. In five neighborhoods (four Jewish and one Arab), authorities appointed activists to local councils in 1981 and asked them what they needed most.

At A-Tur, a Muslim village, the council wanted new sewage lines so badly that it solicited contributions and even organized citizens to volunteer for digging. At Gilo, which had more children than the Education Ministry had expected, the council wanted temporary classrooms. "These may sound like picayune things," says a ranking city official, "but they are the start of something important."

They may also be the beginning of the only solution that has any realistic prospect of being fulfilled. It is not a solution that will satisfy the rival demands of international power politics or of sectarian ideology, but it may hold out the best prospects for the citizens involved.

Listen for a moment to an Arab who was supervising a construction gang at work in Ben Yehuda Street last month. "Right after the war, I didn't want the walls taken down," he said, "but then I went out with my children to walk around Jewish Jerusalem, and I saw that even though the people weren't like us, they had worked hard to make the city beautiful. These men here, they would rather be working for an Arab city. But they aren't, so I tell them, 'We have to do what we can.' This isn't the Jews city or the Arabs' city. It's our city."

To which, in Holy Week, Amen.

— By Otto Friedrich. Reported by David Aikman and Robert Rosenberg/Jerusalem

^{* A11 twelve other embassies in Jerusalem, all from Latin America, also went to Tel Aviv.}