The Guardian, 5 August 1999

Cleansing Jerusalem by Ian Black

Travel for Palestinians can often be a stressful
business: fighting for the right passport and ID papers, being
stranded at border posts, sometimes not even having a home to go
back to, are common experiences for a people who have been
refugees, stateless or strangers in their own land for half a
century.

Musa Budeiri, an Oxford-trained historian and native of Jerusalem,
is no stranger to these complications. But just as Israel's
new government has signalled its intention of reviving the long-
stalled peace process, he has fallen victim to what looks like a
transparent and clumsy attempt to reduce the number of
Palestinians living in the disputed city.

Budeiri was born to a well-known Muslim family in Katamon, now
on the Israeli side of town, in 1946, in the final, violent years
of the British mandate. He received permanent residence status
from Israel in 1971 and then travelled to England to study.
After acquiring a British wife, British citizenship & a British
passport, Budeiri went back to Jerusalem in 1983 with the status
of a "returning resident". He was able to renew this status
annually until last month, when the ministry informed him by post
that he, his wife and two sons had to leave the country within 30
days. Budeiri was told he no longer spent enough time in Jerusalem
to be eligible for an Israeli ID card. In fact, he spent only 22
days abroad last year, and in previous years, his absences were
for seminars or sabbaticals at foreign universities - a normal
part of academic life. Thus, he is faced with the prospect of
becoming a tourist in the city where he was born and his family
have lived for generations.
But Budeiri is just one case. Since the Oslo agreement with the
PLO in 1993, Israel's interior ministry has revoked the ID cards
of 1,600 Arabs living in East Jerusalem. Last month, the new
minister, the former Soviet Jewish dissident and refusenik Natan
(Anatoly) Sharansky - whose dramatic release in 1986 was the high
point of a long and bitter struggle - announced that the ministry
would stop doing this. With exquisite timing, Budeiri's letter
arrived the next day.

Together with the suspension of a long-standing ban on Palestinian
political activities at Orient House - the unofficial PLO
headquarters in Jerusalem - Sharansky's announcement was seen as
a badly needed gesture of reconciliation by the new government of
prime minister Ehud Barak, anxious to rebuild trust after the
years of impasse under Binyamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu.

Of all the tough "final status" issues yet to be negotiated
between Barak and Yasser Arafat - borders, settlements and
refugees - Jerusalem is perhaps the toughest. East Jerusalem,
then ruled by Jordan, was conquered by Israel in the six days' war
of 1967 and unilaterally annexed - an act that remains
unrecognised by most of the world.

United in law but rigidly divided in fact, Israel has been
unwilling to let the Arab population rise above one-third of the
total - now some 630,000.The city's Jewish majority has been
artificially swollen over the past 32 years by the construction of
new suburbs in the West Bank, which have now been incorporated
into "Greater Jerusalem". Much of Israel's history has been about
creating irreversible facts on the ground and Palestinians fear
that what has happened in Jerusalem fits this pattern.
Paradoxically, the step-by-step confidence-building structure of
the Oslo agreement-leaving the most difficult problems until the
end of the peace process-has increased the isolation of the
city's Arabs, cutting them off from their natural West Bank
hinterland. Political, economic and administrative life has
shifted to Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian legislative council.
Arab Jerusalemites feel they live in an ever-shrinking ghetto.
Budeiri has until Aug. 22 to leave, launch an appeal, or apply to
live in an area controlled by the Palestinian authority, no great
respecter of free-thinking intellectuals. But why should he? He
was born in Jerusalem and should enjoy the basic human right to
live and work there. Thousands of Israeli Jews have foreign
passports and acquire full citizenship under Israel's law of
return. No-one threatens to deport them because they have been
working abroad. Budeiri's case is a legacy of an openly
undemocratic and discriminatory policy against Palestinians in
Jerusalem, whose final status has yet to be negotiated. In the era
of peace, this policy must stop.

Sharansky, himself a living symbol of the indivisibility of
human rights, should need no convincing of that. Israel is not
even pretending that this is about security: Budeiri has never
been imprisoned, unlike so many Palestinians. He also runs a
unique Israel Studies programme at Jerusalem's Al-Quds university
and has been at the forefront of academic dialogue between two
peoples who need all the help they can get in overcoming decades
of mutual hostility. Palestinians describe the removal of their
right to live in the city as "transfer on the quiet". Danny
Rubinstein, the well-known liberal Israeli commentator, is
blunter: he calls it the policy of "ethnic cleansing in
Jerusalem".