MIT sponsoring contest to solve Israeli-Palestinian conflict

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts_The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes to
mobilize the world's brainpower to solve one of its most troubling problems:
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

MIT officials are inviting individuals or teams from any country to
participate in its "Just Jerusalem" competition. The contest aims to find a
way to make Jerusalem "just, peaceful and sustainable" by 2050 so that
Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in a city both consider
their capital.

The school will accept entries between March 31 and Dec. 31, The Boston
Globe reported. MIT will announce the winners next March.

Diane Davis, co-director of the project and associate dean of MIT's School
of Architecture and Planning, said inquiries about entering the competition
have come from the Palestinian city of Ramallah and from Israel, Ecuador,
Greece and the United States.

MIT can bring a "veneer of neutrality" to the issue, Davis said.

"We have a reputation for using serious, scholarly methods to solve
problems," she said. "We're a science and technology institution, and
there's a sense that science stands above politics."

Israel named West Jerusalem its capital in 1950 and annexed Arab East
Jerusalem after capturing it from Jordan in the Six Day War in 1967. In
1980, Israel passed a law declaring Jerusalem to be its "eternal, undivided"
capital. Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future
state.

Dennis Ross, a U.S. envoy to the peace process during the Clinton
administration, said in previous negotiations the two sides were close to an
agreement on Jerusalem. Ross said the chief problem has long been what to do
about governing and sovereignty in the complex that Muslims call al-Haram
al-Sharif and Jews call the Temple Mount.

"These are problems that should be solved, and I believe can be solved," he
said.

"The main value of a contest like this is to show that people care enough to
try to find solutions," he said.

The competition's nine-member jury includes a Palestinian scholar and a
former deputy mayor of Jerusalem.

Winners of four categories on the rebuilding of Jerusalem, from renovating
buildings to revamping its economy, and a fifth floating category will each
receive a $50,000 (?37,450) MIT fellowship.


MIT's Just Jerusalem contest: http://web.mit.edu/justjerusalem/