RIGHTS-MIDEAST: Palestinians See Writing on the Wall
The three-storey, 36-room Cliff Hotel used to be a favourite with Western pilgrims in quest of the ‘authentic Holy Land flavour’, as also with Jerusalem Palestinians for wedding parties.
Perched on a hillock opposite the biblical Mount of Olives, the Cliff offers imposing views. Eastwards it overlooks the Judean desert down to the Dead Sea and up the mountains of Moab across the Jordan River; southwards to the church spires of Bethlehem; and westwards to the walled Old City and the Golden Dome of the Rock.
But the Cliff is no longer a hotel. Five years ago, in the wake of the Palestinian Intifada uprising, when Israel began to build its concrete wall to ward off would-be bombers coming into Jerusalem, border police seized the hotel and turned it into a security outpost.
As the world united in celebration of the coming down of another infamous wall, earlier this month, Palestinians tried to draw a parallel. On the northern outskirts of the city, at another site where Israel’s high concrete security perimeter cuts the West Bank off from Jerusalem, protestors managed to do a Berlin Wall act by toppling over one of the barrier’s eight-metre-high concrete slabs.
The victory was short-lived.
Few Palestinians believe that kind of action can create a precedent. 'Even 40 years from now, this wall won’t follow Berlin down,' says Deif Ayyad fatalistically. His family home lies in the shadow of the concrete barrier and The Cliff.
The Ayyad family built the hotel in 1955 and it now belongs to Deif’s uncle Walid Ayyad.
Dipping behind the hotel the wall carves its way summarily between houses at the edge of what Israel designates as ‘East Jerusalem’ and the adjacent Palestinian homes across the street in the suburb of Abu Dis which Israel decrees is part of the West Bank.
In 2004, when the Israeli government resurveyed Jerusalem's municipal boundary, it ruled that the hotel was not actually in the West Bank but inside the city.
Deif stresses, however, that the hotel had always paid property taxes to the West Bank town of Bethlehem, never to Jerusalem.
But, bending the rationale of their own bureaucracy, Israeli municipal authorities ruled that since Walid Ayyad had a West Bank identity card he was not recognised as a resident of Jerusalem. Classified as an 'absentee owner', his property 'inside Jerusalem' was deemed liable for expropriation.
Walid Ayyad now lives in London. The family has received no compensation for the takeover.
The despairing Palestinian mindset is written on the wall —literally. 'This wall is a shame on the Israeli people, a shame for my people,' reads the graffiti just metres away from the former hotel.
Today, the building has none of its former grandeur. The polished limestone walls have withstood the battering of the conflict but little else. All the windows are shattered, the garden is a wreck, the derelict entrance has a camouflage net thrown over it.
With the wall protecting them, the few border police staffing the outpost seem secure in their flimsy prefab caravans that hide the pleasant stairway that leads up to The Cliff. Even the limp Blue-and-White Israeli flag shows signs of being worse for wear.
Other buildings are coming up, however.
Against the skyline west of The Cliff, close to Jewish and Muslim holy places, a giant crane revolves on its turret setting up new apartments in the Ras el-Amud compound, colloquially known as the ‘Moskowitz Project’ — after the right-wing American Jewish entrepreneur Irving Moskowitz who funds most settlement projects in the heart of the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods.
'Over there,' says Deif, pointing across the adjacent hillock beneath where the wall snakes its way eastward, 'you can see two homes that used to belong to Palestinians. Six settler families live there now.’’
‘’And, down there on the slope,' he adds, ‘’is where Moskowitz plans to set up a whole new complex. The people living in those two houses — you see the ramshackle one and that new two-storey building — have been told they must move out soon.'
The 21-year-old is an accountancy graduate from Al-Quds (Jerusalem in Arabic) University in Abu Dis, just on the other side of the wall. Walking distance, but it takes a 45-minute roundabout bus ride through Israeli checkpoints to get there simply because the campus is on the wrong side of the wall.
'There’s no hope here, no point staying,' Deif adds. 'I plan to move to the United States to further my studies, and from there to Canada.'
The prevailing sentiment about living in Jerusalem is one of resignation. 'Nothing can change here — they hold all the cards.'
Back in 2005, at the time of the Cliff’s takeover, Condoleezza Rice was making her first trip to the region as George W. Bush’s secretary of state. At meetings with Israeli leaders she warned against one-sided actions that could influence the city's status: 'We do believe that unilateral steps in Jerusalem, particularly those that might appear to prejudge future discussions, would be unhelpful at this time.'
Similar noises were heard when President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made her first visit to Jerusalem earlier this year.
Nothing changed though, except a deepening of Palestinian incapacity, and pain. As the wall graffiti says: ‘This Wall of Tears’.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service