Global Issues
MIDEAST: Israel Tightens Stranglehold in East Jerusalem
'What are you doing here?' The motorist in the battered white Volvo stops to ask us alongside an overflowing rubbish cart. Residents of this poor Palestinian neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem have been burning garbage in a bid to clear the uncollected mounds.
'Reporting on the dire conditions here,' we tell him. 'About time somebody took notice - I've written so many complaints to the municipality about the neglect from which we suffer. After all, don't we pay all our taxes just like the Israelis in Jerusalem. Yet, they do nothing for us,' he says, switching his engine on again.
The ignition fails. 'I must be out of gas,' says Salim - he doesn't want to give his surname. 'No, it's the battery,' he adds, a little embarrassed. 'My car seems to be part of the sorry situation.' He calls over a friend to give him a push, but first opens the bonnet, tugs a few wires and, miraculously, the engine coughs to life.
The accidental encounter on the bumpy roads of Wadi Qadoum takes place beneath the higgledy-piggledy buildings that line the two sides of the valley in this segment of what's called the Holy Basin. The area stretches away from Jerusalem's walled Old City down to the Judean Desert to the south-east, and contains most of the sites holy to the world's three great monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It's part of East Jerusalem, home to a quarter of a million Palestinians, the area which Israel annexed after conquering it in the 1967 Arab-Israel war.
Salim may have extricated himself from his predicament fairly easily. But this morning there's no relief on the horizon for Palestinians hoping to ease their desperate housing shortage. Only a day earlier, employees of Jerusalem's Israeli-run municipality handed house demolition orders to three more families in the Al-Bustan area of Silwan, which lies alongside Wadi Qadoum and abuts the walls of the Old City. All of the homes in Al-Bustan - 90 in total - are slated for demolition, despite ongoing negotiations between residents and City Hall.
There is even more cause for Palestinian alarm at Israeli intentions. Eli Yishai, the interior minister in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right- wing government, has reportedly instructed ministry employees to nix a new master plan for the city on the ground that it allocates too much land for the construction of Palestinian homes.
The master plan, on which dozens of Israeli architects and town planners worked for several years, was intended to outline the city's development over the next few decades and to remedy a situation in which, since 1959, Jerusalem has not been developed according to a comprehensive agenda.
Palestinians have long had difficulty getting permits to build even on their own property. The plan, if implemented, would allow increased building in the eastern part of the city, including 13,500 more housing units for the city's Palestinians.
The outline of the plan was recently submitted to the interior ministry for approval, but city officials discovered this week that Yishai had ordered the plan shelved. Instead, he threw his support behind another programme, drafted in 2000, which set aside considerably less area for new Palestinian building.
Palestinian planners say that even the relatively more generous building policy recommended in the frozen master plan is highly problematic. Sami Arshid, a Palestinian attorney, told reporters, 'The Israelis are trying to disconnect completely Palestinians from the Old City and its holy places by reducing their number in the centre of Jerusalem. The only Palestinian building they would have authorised under this plan is on the northern and southern fringes of the occupied part of the city.'
Earlier this week Yishai had instructed his ministry to assist the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank by funnelling more funds into the settlements. He is also said to be seeking to calculate Jerusalem city limits as liberally as possible in order to argue that that building is in East Jerusalem rather than in the West Bank. That, he hopes, will not fall under the blanket ban being called by the U.S. on settlement building.
The U.S. has taken an emphatic position on the need for a total settlement freeze, including in the settlement blocs surrounding Jerusalem in the West Bank. The United States has also censured Israel in no uncertain terms over its house demolition policy in East Jerusalem. In addition, the U.S. has cautioned Israel not to go ahead with a new hotel project in the Wadi Joz area close to the old city. The municipality has authorised destruction of a Palestinian wholesale market which was recently opened on the site.
What is not clear, however, is whether the Obama Administration's demand for a settlement freeze extends also to the Jewish-Israeli neighbourhoods established in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war. Home to around 200,000 Israelis, Palestinians define them as 'settlements' while Israelis regard them as regular neighbourhoods that are an integral part of their 'united capital'.
Meanwhile, in the Silwan neighbourhood, a shadowy organisation known as Elad, and a front for the settler movement that aims to settle as many Jews as possible in East Jerusalem, boasts that it has quietly purchased scores of Palestinian properties to augment the Jewish presence in the Holy Basin. The number settled there is already estimated to be as many as 2,000 or more.
And, reliable Israeli news reports say that Elad made a major contribution to the financing of the drafting of the master plan, clearly in the hope that this will lead to more Palestinians leaving the coveted area.
After meetings this week with the visiting U.S. special presidential envoy, Senator George Mitchell, the Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, told reporters that 'for the first time in our history Palestinians are in position of strength vis-à-vis Israel.' The Palestinians are hopeful that the tough stance adopted by President Barack Obama on settlements will finally enable a peace process to move forward on terms favourable to them.
The future of Jerusalem will be one of the core issues on the negotiating table that Mitchell is trying to set up. But it's not only sovereignty over the city which preoccupies the city's Palestinian population - it's also a question of simply having somewhere to live, for a community which has been left in limbo for over 40 years.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service