BYU-Jerusalem students say they feel safe there

This week, Seidemann is teaching a half-credit, weeklong class at BYU. He told more than 100 students Wednesday that the Obama administration can't hesitate to attempt to broker peace or the opportunity for a two-state resolution to the conflict might soon become impossible.

Seidemann was asked by President Bill Clinton and Israel's president in 2000 to draw the maps for a solution. It is still doable, he said, but not for much longer.

"The geography and demography of Jerusalem and greater Jerusalem will be so checkered and so dismembered," Seidemann said, "that Israelis and Palestinians will become Siamese twins that will not allow the political separation that is necessary in order to reach closure, in order to solve this conflict."

Seidemann visited friends in Washington, D.C., last week to deliver that message.

"I told my friends in the Obama administration that putting this conflict on the back burner is not an option," he said.

Jerusalem Center students heard a similar opinion last week from Alon Liel, former director general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Liel said the United States must act as a powerful third party to push the sides together, according to a report in the Daily Universe by a student at the center.

Students also heard from an official from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on Jan. 13.

"The world has had an enormous amount of experience about how to divide cities in war and how to unite them in peace," Seidemann said Wednesday. "It doesn't have a lot of experience on how to divide a city in peace without mortally wounding its soul."

The thorny problem now has the outline of a resolution crafted since 2000, he said, adding that American will and credible Israeli and Palestinian leaders are needed.

"We know that the Israeli public will accept this," Seidemann said. "We know that the Palestinians will accept it. And we know it will work and allow Jerusalem to begin this healing process. What we don't know is how to get there. We are living in a period with a horrible chasm between the politically possible and the historically inevitable."

E-mail: twalch@desnews.com