MIT CONTEST: IMAGINE A NON-ISRAELI JERUSALEM

MIT's Jerusalem Contest: A "Veneer" of Neutrality Can't Conceal Bias (CAMERA)
The university is a place for the exchange and exploration of ideas. And so, at first glace, there is nothing especially remarkable about the Just Jerusalem competition at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The competition, according to its executive summary, is meant "to generate new ideas and discussions about Jerusalem as it might be in the future—a just city shared in peace by all residents" and to lead to a "plurality of ideas and design visions that will make the competition a starting point for future deliberations over the city."

If that description seems straightforward enough, another comment about the contest might seem somewhat more odd. Diane Davis, director of the steering committee of Jerusalem 2050, the MIT group running the Just Jerusalem competition, stated that the competition’s affiliation with MIT brings "a veneer of neutrality because we have a reputation for using serious, scholarly methods, not political ideology, when facing difficult problems." Is it really possible for a contest about the status of Jerusalem to be free of "political ideology"? Or, rather, is the purported neutrality of the competition really just a "veneer," as Davis bizarrely asserted? (The American Heritage Dictionary defines veneer as "a deceptive, superficial show.")

It is first worth noting that Just Jerusalem literature steers potential participants — the contest is open to anyone — away from submitting certain ideas. The contest’s executive summary, for example, calls for ideas about a "shared" city and visions that "transcend nationalist discourses." Three members of the Jerusalem 2050 steering committee, including its two directors, wrote an article explaining that the competition arose from a sense that "it may be time to try a new approach to Jerusalem, one that entails envisioning this city as transcending the constraints imposed by nation-states," and more specifically, "a city that is institutionally autonomous from competing nation-states." A solution to Jerusalem’s problems, they suggested, would be one that would "emancipate" the city from "nationalist blueprints" (Common Ground News Service, "Just Jerusalem: Vision for a place of peace," 4/19/07).

These implied criteria seem to preclude, or in the very least discourage, proposals that leave even part of the city under Israeli sovereignty, including proposals along the lines of the one suggested by Bill Clinton in December 2000. The so-called Clinton Parameters, which represented the culmination of long and painstaking negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, called for what is Arab in Jerusalem to be Palestinian and what is Jewish to be Israeli. (Israel accepted the proposal and the Palestinians effectively rejected them. For details about the Clinton Parameters, see Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace.)

By seemingly ruling out solutions that divide sovereignty in Jerusalem while calling for the city to be "institutionally autonomous from competing nation-states," the MIT competition appears instead to encourage proposals that wrest Jerusalem from Israeli sovereignty and turn the area into an international or binational "corpus separatum," or separate entity.

One might wonder, though, notwithstanding that the results of the competition appear predetermined to sever Jerusalem from Israeli sovereignty (and putting aside the question of whether any such contest could possibly do any good for the region), might it still be true that the contest will be free of political ideology, as Diane Davis claimed? Can we reasonably expect it to promote solutions fair to both Israelis and Palestinians? After all, according to the contest’s executive summary, the steering committee overseeing the project "represents ... a diversity of national, religious, and political perspectives," and the competition’s jury includes both an Israeli and a Palestinian.

A closer look at the competition’s steering committee members and jurists, however, raises serious questions about the supposed neutrality of Just Jerusalem. [READ ON]