The last conquest of Jerusalem
Israel's plans for Jerusalem will create a large Jewish city but will have harsh consequences for the Palestinians, on both sides of the barrier
The Economist
Apr 12th 2006
IN THE twilight of a Bethlehem evening, Jerusalem shimmers on a distant hilltop like the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City, its floodlit walls giving it a surrealist glow. Except that these are not the fortifications of ancient Jerusalem as seen above, but the appropriately named Har Homa (Wall Mountain), one of the new Israeli settlements that now ring the city.
After millennia of violent conquest and reconquest, Jerusalem, centre of pilgrimage, crucible of history and the world's oldest international melting-pot, is changing hands once more, but with a slow and quiet finality. Israel redrew the municipal boundary after the 1967 war to enclose some of the West Bank land that it had occupied, a de facto (though not internationally recognised) annexation.
Settlements like Har Homa gradually encroached on the empty spaces. In 2002, as the second intifada raged, and central Jerusalem took the brunt of suicide bombings, Israel started building the West Bank barrier or wall, supposedly to keep out Palestinian bombers. But its route, enclosing Palestinian as well as Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem (see map), suggested another purpose too.
Before Israel's election last month, Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister, outlined his plan to do unilaterally what years of peace talks had failed to achieve: separate Israelis from Palestinians. Most of the smaller West Bank settlements would be removed, their residents brought over to the Israeli side of the barrier. A few days later, Otniel Schneller, a settler leader and member of Mr Olmert's Kadima party, publicly listed the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem that might stay on the West Bank side. Right-wingers accused Kadima of dividing the Jewish capital, but in fact all but two of the areas he mentioned—At-Tur and Az-Zaayem—were already on the West Bank side of the planned route of the barrier. The talk among politicians, said an article in Haaretz last month, is of “a strong, large, Jewish Jerusalem”.
In Mr Schneller's vision, the bits Israel does not want can serve as the capital of an eventual Palestinian state. But they are just fragments of what was once not only the Palestinians' cultural and religious centre, but also the hub of the West Bank's central economic zone. The concrete-block barrier, when finished, will cut right through Palestinian Jerusalem, severing it from its hinterland in the West Bank.
The Old City and its holy sites, the stumbling-block of countless peace negotiations (see article), will be put finally out of bounds to all but the couple of hundred thousand Palestinians living in Jerusalem, and the lucky few others who can get visiting permits. Moreover, the wall is just one part of a gradual and complex process of Israeli takeover.
East (Arab) and West (Jewish) Jerusalem functioned as two cities between 1948 and 1967, when the east was under Jordanian occupation. After 1967, Palestinians living within the expanded Jerusalem got blue Israeli identity cards. These give them the right to move freely within Israel, collect social benefits and vote in municipal elections. They do not bestow citizenship.
Box them in
Yet Jerusalem is still essentially two cities—not just in population and economic ties, but also in municipal policy. In a recent book (“Discrimination in the Heart of the Holy City”, International Peace and Co-operation Centre, Jerusalem, 2006), Meir Margalit, an Israeli peace activist and former city councillor, has detailed the differences. Arab Jerusalemites, now about 33% of the city's residents, get just 12% of its welfare budget, even though their poverty rate is more than double that of Jewish residents. They get 15% of the education budget, 8% of engineering services, just 1.2% of the culture and art, and so on. Overall, their share of the services' budget is under 12%, meaning a four-to-one difference in spending per person between Jews and Palestinians. In countless other things, from the number of garbage containers on the streets to the employment rates at city hall, there is a massive disparity in favour of the city's Jews.
Arab Jerusalemites share some blame for their disenfranchisement. They tend to boycott local elections in protest at the occupation, so that the city council is now dominated by ultra-Orthodox Jews. But the bias in policies is too blatant and too long-standing to be down to that alone.
There is a similar bias in the property market. Getting building permits, always hard and expensive for Arab Jerusalemites, has got still tougher. This is partly because a lot of East Jerusalem has been zoned as non-construction land, while other chunks have been allocated for settlements; partly because the Palestinians' land records are not always clear; and partly because the requirements for permits have got even more stringent than they were already.
Some people therefore build illegally to accommodate growing families. But even then, there is discrimination in enforcement. Inspectors recorded three to four times as many infractions of building regulations in West as in East Jerusalem in 2004 and 2005, but in the west charges are much less likely to be brought, and in the east far more houses are demolished.
The same tough enforcement is rarely meted out in settlements like Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev, both built after the start of the Oslo peace process in 1993, which have filled in the gaps between Palestinian districts, constricting their growth. The final boxing-in will be done by building thousands of houses in the currently empty zone known as E-1, east of the city, to form a Jewish swathe joining Jerusalem to the settlement of Maale Adumim.
Other settlements stake out absurd claims for Jerusalem's new boundaries. Tel Zion, an ultra-Orthodox settlement on an isolated hilltop near Ramallah, describes itself as “part of North Jerusalem”. Travellers heading eastwards from Pisgat Zeev see a billboard advertising Anatot, still just a small gaggle of buildings lost in the desert a few kilometres farther on, as the “best deal in Jerusalem”. Both Tel Zion and Anatot will be outside the barrier. Yet in both, building continues apace.
Squeeze them out
Because of the expense and difficulty, some Arab Jerusalemites have left for villages on the outskirts, or for Ramallah or Bethlehem. That makes their homes targets for a form of settlement more subtle than Har Homa. Religious Zionist organisations, such as the El Ad City of David Foundation and Ateret Cohanim, want to recreate the Jewish communities that used to exist in and near the Old City. In a place with so long and multi-layered a past, making a historical claim to land is merely a matter of going back the right distance in time. Such bodies specialise in buying properties from Arab Jerusalemites, sometimes through middlemen so the owners do not know who the real customers are, and selling it on to fervent Zionists. Arab neighbourhoods like Silwan (where the biblical City of David stood) are now dotted with fenced Jewish compounds.
In the late 1990s, when Israel briefly threatened to take away blue ID cards from anyone who could not demonstrate that their “centre of life” was in Jerusalem, many Arab Jerusalemites rushed back. The policy was then revoked, but the fear that it might be renewed as the barrier takes shape has made more people return. That has increased the pressure on space and services in the already run-down eastern city, and pushed up property prices.
There will be other consequences as the barrier is completed, writes Yisrael Kimchi of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) in a recent report (in Hebrew) called “The Security Fence in Jerusalem: Consequences for the City and its Inhabitants”. Jerusalem is already one of Israel's poorest cities because both Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox Jews, two groups of which the city has plenty, tend to have large families and be low-paid or unemployed. Overcrowding and rising poverty in East Jerusalem will add strain to the budget. And with them will come higher crime rates and greater friction at the seams between Jewish and Arab areas.
To escape such conditions, better-off East Jerusalemites and those from districts like the Shuafat refugee camp, who hold blue IDs and are going to be left on the Israeli side of the barrier, are already moving to Jewish neighbourhoods—among them, ironically, settlements like Pisgat Zeev. A paradoxical result of walling off a strong, large, Jewish Jerusalem from the Palestinians is to make it more Palestinian.
Fence them off
In the easternmost parts of the city, where the barrier cuts between the Mount of Olives (inside) and Abu Dis (outside), running right through residential neighbourhoods, a strange sight presents itself. The great concrete wall leaks people. In the morning, they squeeze through gaps between the blocks and existing buildings, helping each other to negotiate piles of rubble and loops of barbed wire. In the evening they are sucked back in. For thousands, this is the daily commute.
Most of them are blue ID holders who prefer some discomfort to a long detour to the nearest official crossing point. One way or the other, some 60,000 people are thought to cross each day in each direction. While the wall is still incomplete, the soldiers often tolerate their infractions.
But according to a survey by the JIIS, a wide swathe of West Bank Palestinians without blue IDs are also in East Jerusalem's catchment area. For it is (or it was until recently) their main place of work or study, of shopping and recreation. An unknown number—some say 40,000—also live there illegally. Cutting them off from Jerusalem not only complicates their lives and splits up families. It takes away business from Jerusalem, impoverishing it further. And it creates joblessness in Ramallah, Bethlehem and the surroundings, adding to the severe depression of the West Bank's economy.
A series of industrial estates that have gone up around the edge of Jerusalem and in the West Bank could help. Ezri Levi, head of the Jerusalem Development Authority, says that places like the Atarot industrial estate, located just by the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, are intended partly to create jobs for those West Bankers who can get permits to work there, which should, he argues, “reduce the tensions between the two populations”. But Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a pressure group, points out that the estates also allow Israel to maintain its economic dominion: Israeli firms can compete with West Bank firms for cheap labour, yet the Palestinian firms cannot compete with the Israeli ones for custom.
Before the barrier began to go up, the intifada had done its worst to the tourist industry on which both Jerusalem and Bethlehem thrive. Though more than a year of relative calm (thanks less to the barrier than to a ceasefire by the militants) has brought an upturn, tourists and pilgrims are still reluctant to stay the night in Bethlehem, on the West Bank side of the barrier, so the city's hotel business is collapsing.
The cruelly winding wall
If there has to be a barrier—and Israel is not going to abandon it so long as a hostile Hamas remains in control of the Palestinian Authority—how could it create less damage? There are no easy answers. The JIIS outlines a number of possible routes, each with pros and cons. Following the pre-1967 border would mean leaving settlements with over 200,000 people, which the wall is supposed to protect, outside it. Drawing it along demographic lines—separating Jews from Palestinians—would preserve a sensible economic division, but nobody wants a new Berlin Wall down the middle of the city, and it would mean depriving 230,000 blue ID holders of at least some benefits. Following the municipal boundary exactly would still drive in the economic wedge that the current route does. Enclosing everybody, Arab or Jewish, who lives in Jerusalem's catchment area would take a huge bite out of the West Bank.
What may matter more than the barrier's route, says Maya Khoshen, a researcher at the JIIS, are the arrangements: the economic ties between Israel and the West Bank, Israel's readiness to grant permits to cross the barrier, the number of available crossing-points, and how efficiently and civilly they are run.
If the barrier really is just for security, Israel could take measures to reduce its economic impact. It could improve the conditions for Palestinian Jerusalemites and it could stop the incessant encroachment of Jewish neighbourhoods into Palestinian areas. But so far its main concern seems to be to ensure that this conquest of Jerusalem be the last one.
The Economist
Apr 12th 2006
IN THE twilight of a Bethlehem evening, Jerusalem shimmers on a distant hilltop like the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City, its floodlit walls giving it a surrealist glow. Except that these are not the fortifications of ancient Jerusalem as seen above, but the appropriately named Har Homa (Wall Mountain), one of the new Israeli settlements that now ring the city.
After millennia of violent conquest and reconquest, Jerusalem, centre of pilgrimage, crucible of history and the world's oldest international melting-pot, is changing hands once more, but with a slow and quiet finality. Israel redrew the municipal boundary after the 1967 war to enclose some of the West Bank land that it had occupied, a de facto (though not internationally recognised) annexation.
Settlements like Har Homa gradually encroached on the empty spaces. In 2002, as the second intifada raged, and central Jerusalem took the brunt of suicide bombings, Israel started building the West Bank barrier or wall, supposedly to keep out Palestinian bombers. But its route, enclosing Palestinian as well as Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem (see map), suggested another purpose too.
Before Israel's election last month, Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister, outlined his plan to do unilaterally what years of peace talks had failed to achieve: separate Israelis from Palestinians. Most of the smaller West Bank settlements would be removed, their residents brought over to the Israeli side of the barrier. A few days later, Otniel Schneller, a settler leader and member of Mr Olmert's Kadima party, publicly listed the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem that might stay on the West Bank side. Right-wingers accused Kadima of dividing the Jewish capital, but in fact all but two of the areas he mentioned—At-Tur and Az-Zaayem—were already on the West Bank side of the planned route of the barrier. The talk among politicians, said an article in Haaretz last month, is of “a strong, large, Jewish Jerusalem”.
In Mr Schneller's vision, the bits Israel does not want can serve as the capital of an eventual Palestinian state. But they are just fragments of what was once not only the Palestinians' cultural and religious centre, but also the hub of the West Bank's central economic zone. The concrete-block barrier, when finished, will cut right through Palestinian Jerusalem, severing it from its hinterland in the West Bank.
The Old City and its holy sites, the stumbling-block of countless peace negotiations (see article), will be put finally out of bounds to all but the couple of hundred thousand Palestinians living in Jerusalem, and the lucky few others who can get visiting permits. Moreover, the wall is just one part of a gradual and complex process of Israeli takeover.
East (Arab) and West (Jewish) Jerusalem functioned as two cities between 1948 and 1967, when the east was under Jordanian occupation. After 1967, Palestinians living within the expanded Jerusalem got blue Israeli identity cards. These give them the right to move freely within Israel, collect social benefits and vote in municipal elections. They do not bestow citizenship.
Box them in
Yet Jerusalem is still essentially two cities—not just in population and economic ties, but also in municipal policy. In a recent book (“Discrimination in the Heart of the Holy City”, International Peace and Co-operation Centre, Jerusalem, 2006), Meir Margalit, an Israeli peace activist and former city councillor, has detailed the differences. Arab Jerusalemites, now about 33% of the city's residents, get just 12% of its welfare budget, even though their poverty rate is more than double that of Jewish residents. They get 15% of the education budget, 8% of engineering services, just 1.2% of the culture and art, and so on. Overall, their share of the services' budget is under 12%, meaning a four-to-one difference in spending per person between Jews and Palestinians. In countless other things, from the number of garbage containers on the streets to the employment rates at city hall, there is a massive disparity in favour of the city's Jews.
Arab Jerusalemites share some blame for their disenfranchisement. They tend to boycott local elections in protest at the occupation, so that the city council is now dominated by ultra-Orthodox Jews. But the bias in policies is too blatant and too long-standing to be down to that alone.
There is a similar bias in the property market. Getting building permits, always hard and expensive for Arab Jerusalemites, has got still tougher. This is partly because a lot of East Jerusalem has been zoned as non-construction land, while other chunks have been allocated for settlements; partly because the Palestinians' land records are not always clear; and partly because the requirements for permits have got even more stringent than they were already.
Some people therefore build illegally to accommodate growing families. But even then, there is discrimination in enforcement. Inspectors recorded three to four times as many infractions of building regulations in West as in East Jerusalem in 2004 and 2005, but in the west charges are much less likely to be brought, and in the east far more houses are demolished.
The same tough enforcement is rarely meted out in settlements like Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev, both built after the start of the Oslo peace process in 1993, which have filled in the gaps between Palestinian districts, constricting their growth. The final boxing-in will be done by building thousands of houses in the currently empty zone known as E-1, east of the city, to form a Jewish swathe joining Jerusalem to the settlement of Maale Adumim.
Other settlements stake out absurd claims for Jerusalem's new boundaries. Tel Zion, an ultra-Orthodox settlement on an isolated hilltop near Ramallah, describes itself as “part of North Jerusalem”. Travellers heading eastwards from Pisgat Zeev see a billboard advertising Anatot, still just a small gaggle of buildings lost in the desert a few kilometres farther on, as the “best deal in Jerusalem”. Both Tel Zion and Anatot will be outside the barrier. Yet in both, building continues apace.
Squeeze them out
Because of the expense and difficulty, some Arab Jerusalemites have left for villages on the outskirts, or for Ramallah or Bethlehem. That makes their homes targets for a form of settlement more subtle than Har Homa. Religious Zionist organisations, such as the El Ad City of David Foundation and Ateret Cohanim, want to recreate the Jewish communities that used to exist in and near the Old City. In a place with so long and multi-layered a past, making a historical claim to land is merely a matter of going back the right distance in time. Such bodies specialise in buying properties from Arab Jerusalemites, sometimes through middlemen so the owners do not know who the real customers are, and selling it on to fervent Zionists. Arab neighbourhoods like Silwan (where the biblical City of David stood) are now dotted with fenced Jewish compounds.
In the late 1990s, when Israel briefly threatened to take away blue ID cards from anyone who could not demonstrate that their “centre of life” was in Jerusalem, many Arab Jerusalemites rushed back. The policy was then revoked, but the fear that it might be renewed as the barrier takes shape has made more people return. That has increased the pressure on space and services in the already run-down eastern city, and pushed up property prices.
There will be other consequences as the barrier is completed, writes Yisrael Kimchi of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) in a recent report (in Hebrew) called “The Security Fence in Jerusalem: Consequences for the City and its Inhabitants”. Jerusalem is already one of Israel's poorest cities because both Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox Jews, two groups of which the city has plenty, tend to have large families and be low-paid or unemployed. Overcrowding and rising poverty in East Jerusalem will add strain to the budget. And with them will come higher crime rates and greater friction at the seams between Jewish and Arab areas.
To escape such conditions, better-off East Jerusalemites and those from districts like the Shuafat refugee camp, who hold blue IDs and are going to be left on the Israeli side of the barrier, are already moving to Jewish neighbourhoods—among them, ironically, settlements like Pisgat Zeev. A paradoxical result of walling off a strong, large, Jewish Jerusalem from the Palestinians is to make it more Palestinian.
Fence them off
In the easternmost parts of the city, where the barrier cuts between the Mount of Olives (inside) and Abu Dis (outside), running right through residential neighbourhoods, a strange sight presents itself. The great concrete wall leaks people. In the morning, they squeeze through gaps between the blocks and existing buildings, helping each other to negotiate piles of rubble and loops of barbed wire. In the evening they are sucked back in. For thousands, this is the daily commute.
Most of them are blue ID holders who prefer some discomfort to a long detour to the nearest official crossing point. One way or the other, some 60,000 people are thought to cross each day in each direction. While the wall is still incomplete, the soldiers often tolerate their infractions.
But according to a survey by the JIIS, a wide swathe of West Bank Palestinians without blue IDs are also in East Jerusalem's catchment area. For it is (or it was until recently) their main place of work or study, of shopping and recreation. An unknown number—some say 40,000—also live there illegally. Cutting them off from Jerusalem not only complicates their lives and splits up families. It takes away business from Jerusalem, impoverishing it further. And it creates joblessness in Ramallah, Bethlehem and the surroundings, adding to the severe depression of the West Bank's economy.
A series of industrial estates that have gone up around the edge of Jerusalem and in the West Bank could help. Ezri Levi, head of the Jerusalem Development Authority, says that places like the Atarot industrial estate, located just by the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, are intended partly to create jobs for those West Bankers who can get permits to work there, which should, he argues, “reduce the tensions between the two populations”. But Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a pressure group, points out that the estates also allow Israel to maintain its economic dominion: Israeli firms can compete with West Bank firms for cheap labour, yet the Palestinian firms cannot compete with the Israeli ones for custom.
Before the barrier began to go up, the intifada had done its worst to the tourist industry on which both Jerusalem and Bethlehem thrive. Though more than a year of relative calm (thanks less to the barrier than to a ceasefire by the militants) has brought an upturn, tourists and pilgrims are still reluctant to stay the night in Bethlehem, on the West Bank side of the barrier, so the city's hotel business is collapsing.
The cruelly winding wall
If there has to be a barrier—and Israel is not going to abandon it so long as a hostile Hamas remains in control of the Palestinian Authority—how could it create less damage? There are no easy answers. The JIIS outlines a number of possible routes, each with pros and cons. Following the pre-1967 border would mean leaving settlements with over 200,000 people, which the wall is supposed to protect, outside it. Drawing it along demographic lines—separating Jews from Palestinians—would preserve a sensible economic division, but nobody wants a new Berlin Wall down the middle of the city, and it would mean depriving 230,000 blue ID holders of at least some benefits. Following the municipal boundary exactly would still drive in the economic wedge that the current route does. Enclosing everybody, Arab or Jewish, who lives in Jerusalem's catchment area would take a huge bite out of the West Bank.
What may matter more than the barrier's route, says Maya Khoshen, a researcher at the JIIS, are the arrangements: the economic ties between Israel and the West Bank, Israel's readiness to grant permits to cross the barrier, the number of available crossing-points, and how efficiently and civilly they are run.
If the barrier really is just for security, Israel could take measures to reduce its economic impact. It could improve the conditions for Palestinian Jerusalemites and it could stop the incessant encroachment of Jewish neighbourhoods into Palestinian areas. But so far its main concern seems to be to ensure that this conquest of Jerusalem be the last one.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 5:14 PM
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