The Battle for the Future of Jerusalem by Nancy Murray

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-eight years ago Israel captured Palestinian East Jerusalem and began the battle to make the Holy City entirely its own, in defiance of world opinion and international law. Its weapons for the "Judaization" of Jerusalem were planning and zoning regulations, the oppressive apparatus of occupation and the acquiescence of the United States.

The Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. With discussions about the status of Jerusalem not formally on the agenda of peace talks until May 1996, the Rabin government, again with US acquiescence, is aggressively pushing ahead to complete the encirclement of Jerusalem with Jewish settlements that cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank and to alter fundamentally its culture and demographic character.

Historical Background

• In September 1995, Israel launched a multi-million dollar "Celebration of the 3000th Anniversary of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of King David" to assert its historical claims to the city. King David captured Jerusalem when Jews returned from exile about 1000 BCE (before the common era), but after the reign of his son Solomon it frequently changed hands. Jews last held the city in 135 CE (common era). Over the next millennium Romans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders and Mongols conquered Jerusalem. From the 14th Century until the end of World War I it was controlled by Muslim Ottomans; from 1992-1947 it was part of the British Mandate.

• By the end of the British Mandate Jews made up about 60 percent of Jerusalem's population of 165,000, but only about 2,000 (out of 33,000) remained within the walled Old City. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947), which proposed partitioning Palestine into two states, international regime and shall be administered by the U.N."

• During Israel's mid 1948 "war of independence," some 60,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area that would become known as West Jerusalem and were not permitted to return. Residential neighborhoods of West Jerusalem have been built on 7,000 acres of land taken from Palestinians, and Jews moved into Palestinian homes.

• On December 13, 1948, Israel proclaimed Jerusalem its "eternal capital." But the city was divided by the 1949 armistice line known as the "Green Line," which separated the state of Israel from territories occupied by Jordan and Israeli West Jerusalem from the Old City.

• During the Six Day War (June 1967) Israel captured Jordanian-administered East Jerusalem (including the Old City). In late June the state of Israel extended its law, jurisdiction and administration over East Jerusalem and expanded the city's size form 38 to 108 square kilometers, by including land from adjacent West Bank villages. The Knesset (Israeli parliament) passed "the Jerusalem Law" on July 30, 1980, confirming the annexation and claiming the "complete and united Jerusalem" as the capital of Israel.

• On July 3, 1969, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 267, which "censures in the strongest terms all measures taken to change the status of Jerusalem," ordering Israel to reverse them.

Under Israeli Rule

• Palestinian residents of Jerusalem who were physically present in the annexed area when the Israelis conducted a census after the Six Day War were given permanent residency status, which entitled them to the possession of an Israeli identity card and a laissez-passer (not a passport). Considered neither aliens nor citizens, permanent residents who live abroad for more than seven years or are granted permanent residency or citizenship in another country can have their status revoked. The status can only be gained through marriage or the difficult procedures of family reunification and the registration of children whose parents are both permanent residents of Jerusalem or whose mother is a permanent resident and petitions to have her child so registered. Then it is granted only on a case by case basis.

• Since 1967, Israel has confiscated from Palestinians over 33 percent of the land of East Jerusalem. More than 6,000 acres of East Jerusalem real estate have been confiscated from Muslim and Christian Palestinians and used for roads, Israeli government departments and other institutions or for building Jews-only housing.

• Some 80,000 Palestinians own property in East Jerusalem. They have been denied permits to build on their land. Two-thousand homes belonging to Palestinians have been designated as "illegal"--built without permits--by the Jerusalem municipality and are slated for destruction. Fifty-thousand Palestinians have been forced to move outside city borders because of the severe housing shortage. An April 1992 Reuters report stated that for every one home Palestinians have been permitted to build in East Jerusalem, Israel has built 1,000 exclusively for Jews (62,330 total).

• In 1967 an estimated 26,000 Palestinian Christians lived in Jerusalem. That number is below 8,000.

• In August 1993 the Jewish Municipality Planning Department announced that Jews in East Jerusalem outnumbered Arabs, 152,800 to 150,600. By May 1995 those figures were 168,000 Jews and 160,800 Palestinians.

• Palestinians, who make up 28 percent of the population of Jerusalem, receive only a 5 percent share of its budget.

• The economic, cultural and spiritual life of East Jerusalem has been strangled by the closure first imposed by Israel in the aftermath of the Gulf War and permanently in place since March 30, 1993. The closure cuts off the city from the rest of the West Bank and from Palestinians living in the occupied territories who lack the requisite permits. It keeps patients from hospitals, students from their schools, raw materials from factories and produce from markets. Since March 1993, 21 Palestinians have been killed at checkpoints around Jerusalem.

Encirclement

• The first Jewish-only "neighborhoods," or fortress settlements ringing East Jerusalem--Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Ma'aleh Dafna, and Mt. Scopus--were built in 1968-1969 and today house 20,000 Jews; over 100,000 live in Ramot, East Talpiot, Giol and Neve Ya'acov, built on confiscated Palestinian land in the early 1970s. In the early 1980s, Pisgat Ze'ev was built on Jerusalem's eastern flank, housing over 30,000.

• The confiscation announced in April 1995 of 134 acres of land in Beit Hanina (to the north) and Beit Safafa (to the South) is part of a plan to complete the encirclement of Jerusalem. The Palestinian owners of that land have been denied building permits since the occupation began.

• On May 9, 1995, Israeli Housing Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer stated that Israel would confiscate more land under a 5-year plan to build 30,000 new apartments and win the "battle for the future of Jerusalem." The first stage involved the confiscation of 300 additional acres of Arab-owned land between French Hill and Pisgat Ze'ev.

• Rapid settlement construction under the Rabin government is intended to establish "Greater Jerusalem" as a gigantic fact on the ground consuming up to a third of the entire West Bank and extending from Ramallah in the North, to Bethlehem in the South and nearly to Jericho in the East, in the minds of some Israeli planners.

Penetration

• Shortly after Israelis occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, they destroyed 160 Palestinian houses adjoining the Western Wall, took over a further 600 buildings and expelled thousands of Palestinians to make way for a new Jewish Quarter in the Old City. In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that Palestinians could be barred from living in the Jewish Quarter.

• In Easter week 1990, 150 Jewish settlers took over St. John's Hospice, a large Greek Orthodox property in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, which bordered an entire side of square in which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands. Settlers have also targeted the Muslim Quarter for penetration. In October 1991 settlers moved into Silwan, taking over buildings from which Palestinians were forcibly evicted. During the same month Housing Ministry plans were publicized for houses or institutional buildings on 26 plots of East Jerusalem land confiscated from Palestinians for "public benefit." Much of the money used to settle Jews in East Jerusalem was raised in the United States. American Jews have bought Arab Homes in Silwan and rented them to settlers.

• The Rabin government has been reluctant to sanction the settler take-over of Palestinian property in areas like Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah and the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. (Ehud Olmert, Jerusalem's mayor since November 1993, has no such scruples.) Instead, it has been confiscating Palestinian land to build new tourist facilities, especially for Christians, thereby promoting its image as the protector of all faiths.

• Under both Likud and Labor, road building has aggressively eaten into the land of East Jerusalem and fragmented Palestinian neighborhoods, often making them difficult to reach. The Rabin government has pushed ahead with a major road connecting the north and south of the West Bank, bypassing Jerusalem and effectively excising it from the West Bank.

Jerusalem and US Policy

• US Presidents have routinely called for Jerusalem to be maintained as an undivided city, with free access to the holy places for all faiths, and its status decided in negotiations as part of a comprehensive peace settlement.

• As late as 1992 the US gave lip service to the international consensus on Jerusalem, which saw it as occupied territory. On January 6, 1992, the US signed UN Security Council Resolution 726, which accepts the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to "all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem." The Convention states that "the occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies," and bars it from changing the character of that territory.

• The Clinton Administration has backed away from the traditional US position on East Jerusalem as "occupied" and settlements as "obstacles to peace." It has referred to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "disputed," and has given Israel the green light to provide for "natural growth" in the settlements. In December 1994 it abstained from a UN General Assembly Resolution calling Israel's decision to impose its laws and administration on all of Jerusalem illegal, null and void, and deploring the transfer of diplomatic missions to the city. On May 5, 1995, it opposed discussing in the Security Council the confiscation in Jerusalem of 134 acres of Palestinian land, saying this was a subject for the parties themselves to address.

• Strong bipartisan Congressional support for moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem meanwhile threatens Washington's posture as the "honest broker" of the peace process.

Looking Ahead

Israel seems to have ruled out any notion of shared sovereignty within a united city or an arrangement which recognizes its "universal" character and importance to the international community. In so doing, it may well have doomed any chance for a lasting and comprehensive regional peace.

In July 1993 former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti gave an interview to Ha'aretz, which was reprinted in Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories (February 1994). In response to the question, "Have Israelis succeeded on the demographic front in East Jerusalem?" Benvenisti replied:

"They can pat themselves on the back that they achieved what they wanted, but the Arab's don't accept these borders that the Jews drew, and therefore they don't accept these numbers. The Arabs will never permit the Jews to enjoy the fruits of this victory and as a result, the conflict will continue. It's impossible to solve the problem of Jerusalem by power -- not by demographic power nor by any other kind of power."

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Nancy Murray is the co-founder and director of The Middle East Justice Network in Boston. This article first appeared in MEJN's newsletter, Breaking the Siege, June-July 1995.