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Breezes, if not winds, of change New documents and ideas that representatives of the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinian public figures have been producing show they have learned a thing or two from the many meetings over the past year with the remnants of the Israeli peace camp. It is difficult to leave such meetings without a feeling that the peace camp won't be revived until the Palestinian leadership changes its positions on two key issues - the status of Jewish holy sites, specifically the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), and the right of return of the refugees to the State of Israel. Prof. Sari Nusseibeh, the PLO's representative in Jerusalem, was the first to translate that understanding into real language. He proposed to his colleagues, in public (among other places in the pages of Ha'aretz on September 24, 2001), to give up the dream of return. Attorney Ziyad Abu Zayad, until recently the Minister for Jerusalem Affairs in the PA, and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is the first Palestinian representative to come out publicly in a message to the Palestinians, and in effect to the entire Muslim world, to give up the idea of sovereignty on the Haram al-Sharif. This important event took place last week in the picturesque Belgian town of Bruges, at a conference sponsored by the UCLA Forum on the Middle East. Israelis - mostly from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University - and Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iranians and Americans took part. In a declaration of principles he presented to the participants and which he allowed Ha'aretz to publish, Abu Zayad proposes granting the Haram and the Western Wall a "no man's land" status - meaning in effect that no sovereignty should apply to them. According to his plan, fashioned with a group of Palestinian intellectuals, the administration of the Haram will be conducted by the Palestinian state and the Wall will be run by Israel. Hebrew University Law Professor Ruth Lapidoth, the former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, has been pushing similar ideas for years to decision makers on all sides of the conflict. She believes that in those places where the religious and nationalist narratives are in conflict, the concept of "sovereignty" should be replaced with less anachronistic arrangements. As a bonus for the Israeli archaeological lobby, the Abu Zayad group proposes international monitoring of mutual guarantees not to conduct excavations in the holy places. On the other sensitive issue - the right of return - Zayad's group takes an important step further, past where the Arab League and the PA have gone, with their stating that the refugee arrangements should be based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Zayad limits the principle of return, proposing that the right be implemented in the return of the refugees to the new Palestinian state established in the West Bank and Gaza (and whatever territory Israel trades to Palestine in future border corrections). By elimination, that means no right of return to the sovereign State of Israel. A reminder - in early 1999 then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after consulting with then-Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, revoked Zayad's VIP pass. Zayad, who lives in an Arab neighborhood next to East Jerusalem, has since needed a special pass whenever he wants to enter Jerusalem, or to cross it on his way to a peace conference overseas.