The Holy City, he believes, is at the core of the Arab-Israeli relationship. Although prospects for a settlement look bleaker today than for many years, Wasserstein believes that the current violence cannot prevent a long term-solution. And for that solution, he sees the best hope of success in aspects of the draft final-status agreement reached, on October 31, 1995, between then Israeli deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and scuppered only four days later by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

While leaving many key questions unanswered, the so-called Beilin-Abu Mazin agreement (incorporating Abbas' nom de guerre) attempted to settle all outstanding issues between the Israelis and Palestinians and--most crucially--came close to providing a blueprint for solving the Jerusalem problem. Detailing its main points over several pages, Wasserstein describes the agreement as "a surprising achievement" and adds: "We cannot now know whether [it] could have turned into a final peace treaty. Yet the experience of its negotiators in relation to the Oslo Agreement, which had also started out as a similar back-channel document, gave them some ground for optimism." Whether its findings can be resurrected, and the optimism realised, only time will tell.-- Meir Persoff