Who’ll go first?

With regard to the recent visit to the area by US President Donald Trump, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas promised that he wanted to make peace, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that he wanted to make peace. So what’s the problem?

It reminds me of a story they say of a yekke woman who became pregnant with twins. The time came to give birth and nothing happened. Weeks, then months, then years passed by, and she remained pregnant.

After 70 years she died, so the doctors opened her up to see what was going on inside. They found two old yekkes with goatees. One was saying to the other, “I insist, you go out first.” The other was saying, “No, no, no, you go out first.” And on and on. YOSEF TUCKER

Jerusalem

CLARIFICATION Betty Herschman, director of international relations and advocacy at Ir Amim, wishes to clarify regarding her May 29 letter “Problematic plan”: I was responding to an online report in which Likud MK Anat Berko’s unilateral separation plan was mistakenly said to include the revocation of east Jerusalem Palestinians’ “citizenship” status. My point was to distinguish between citizenship rights – which the Palestinians of east Jerusalem were never collectively granted – and permanent residency status, the secondary status assigned to Palestinians that affords them no citizenship rights. The larger problem with Berko’s plan is that it is unilateral. Jerusalem cannot be divided unilaterally, and any attempt to do so without addressing the importance of the historic basin for Palestinians is doomed to failure. Such plans play into the hands of those who oppose an agreed-upon solution by creating significant facts on the ground that radically change the opening conditions for future negotiations.