In the lead up to Israel’s upcoming 70th anniversary, J Street has launched a new series, Solutions@70, focused on highlighting the work being done to develop innovative approaches to advance the prospects for a two-state solution. Each month, we’ll feature a videoconference call with a different changemaker in the region who is leading the charge.
For the first of these calls, we were joined yesterday by the award-winning Jerusalem-based architect Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat, whose designs for how to divide Jerusalem as part of a two-state solution were used by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in 2008.
Greenfield-Gilat and his firm SAYA have come up with a number of plans for how Jerusalem could be shared by Israel and a Palestinian state without dividing the contiguity of the city. They have developed solutions to some of the most difficult questions surrounding negotiations over the city’s future, including sovereignty over the Old City, Road 60 and Abu Tor — a mixed Jewish and Arab neighborhood.
Watch the recording of yesterday’s discussion below — and look out for more details to come on the next conversations in this series.