Salon News gathered opinions on the impact of the summit from all sides of the debate. Rabbi David Saperstein is director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington. This is a bitter disappointment. Israel's security and well-being depends on fashioning a stable and lasting peaceful relationship. Until they are faced with the reality that it is compromise on Jerusalem that can make everything else that they dream about possible, there probably won't be compromise.
Sovereignty is an amorphous term here.
Clearly the Israelis are not going to give back all of East Jerusalem. Clearly there are ways without giving back all of East Jerusalem in which Jerusalem could be the capital of a Palestinian state. All of this is possible, but until the compromise is weighed against the profoundly important geopolitical economic realities of what peace can bring, there is not going to be an incentive to do it. I think Barak, from the news reports that were leaked, clearly was prepared to move significantly in that direction, and apparently the Palestinians were not, and that is a great tragedy for the Palestinian people as well as for the people of Israel and the world. Towards the end, Barak was obviously prepared to be so flexible that, while he continued to enjoy the support of the Israeli people, he could not politically hold his whole coalition together.