Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has told a group of Jewish-Americans that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a "serious error" in raising the question of Jerusalem at the Camp David peace summit, a newspaper said Thursday.
The Yediot Aharonot daily said Arafat met privately with a delegation of the Jewish-American lobby group, the Anti-Defamation League
"Barak made a serious error in raising the question of Jerusalem at Camp David," a member of the group interviewed by the paper, Avram Foxman, said Arafat had told them.
"When he evoked the problem, the entire Arab world was stirred. The Arab world feels that it owns Jerusalem. The problem is beyond me and is beyond Barak."
Arafat said that Barak, in insisting that Jerusalem be included on the agenda of the Camp David talks, had turned a "political problem capable of resolution" into a "sensitive religious subject, agitating all the leaders of the Arab world.
"I was surprised by his initiative," Arafat told the group during a meeting at his office in Ramallah.
"He should have waited until we solved the other problems first and left Jerusalem to the end."
Arafat said that he chided Barak during the Camp David talks, acknowledging that he was a great general, but that Moishe Dayan, Israeli defense minister during the 1967 war was a "greater general than you."
Dayan "captured east Jerusalem, but he took care not to raise the Israeli flag" over that part of the sector that includes mosques that constitute the third-holiest site in Islam.
The site is known by Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and is known as Temple Mount to the Jews, for whom it is their most sacred site.
It is located in east Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel following the 1967 war and is at the heart of disputes between the two sides over the fate of the city.
Israel declared Jerusalem its "eternal and undivided" capital, a position accepted neither by the international community nor the Palestinians, who want east Jerusalem as capital of a future state.
The newspaper said Arafat told Barak that he did "not understand why you support such extremist positions (on Jerusalem), which cannot be the basis for an accord."
Israel wants to retain sovereignty over Temple Mount.
On a more personal note, Arafat recounted how, as a child, he watched every day as Jews prayed at the adjacent Western Wall of what had been the Temple of Solomon and is known as the Wailing Wall.
"I am ready to respect and to take into consideration your rights to worship," he told them - JERUSALEM (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
