Israel relents

Israel Relents, Letting Arab Live for Now in Jerusalem

New York Times - 12 September 1999

by JOEL GREENBERG

On a visit to East Jerusalem in July, Interior Minister Natan Sharansky announced that he wanted to end an Israeli policy that in recent years has stripped some Palestinians of their right to live in the city. "The time has come to change this policy and to stop canceling the residence of inhabitants of East Jerusalem," Sharansky said. "We cannot talk about a united Jerusalem without proper treatment of the residents of East Jerusalem. We need to do everything to insure that residents of the east receive equal treatment to those of the west." Critics had long condemned the practice of stripping Palestinians of their East Jerusalem residency as a means of curbing the growth of the Arab population in this bitterly contested city. Interior Ministry figures show that nearly 5,400 Palestinians have lost their East Jerusalem residency in this way since Israel captured the area in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. About half lost it during the three-year term of the rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was defeated in national elections in May. A few days after Sharansky spoke, a test case landed in his lap. Following standard procedure, his ministry had sent an eviction letter to another Palestinian, this time a member of a prominent Jerusalem family that has lived in the city for centuries. Dr. Musa Budeiri, 53, a political science professor who has British citizenship and travels regularly abroad, was served notice that his residence had expired and that he was henceforth a tourist, required to leave Israel within 30 days. His British residence permit, obtained after he married a British woman, was cited as the reason for this move. Under ministry regulations, East Jerusalem residence expires if someone has "moved the center of his life" outside the city for more than seven years, received a permanent residence permit in another country or become a foreign citizen. Those expelled are apparently free to go to the West Bank or Gaza. Budeiri stayed home beyond the Aug. 22 eviction deadline, vowing to fight the order. His predicament drew public protests from academic colleagues in Israel and abroad and was widely reported in the press, becoming a high profile test of Sharansky's statement of intent. Sharansky, a former human rights campaigner in the Soviet Union, came under criticism for violating Budeiri's right to live in his native city. Israel has for years sought to maintain a large Jewish majority in Jerusalem, primarily through restrictions on Arab housing construction. But while Jews make up two-thirds of the city's population of 633,000, a recent Israeli study has found that because of population shifts and a higher Arab birthrate, Jerusalem's Arab population is increasing at three times the rate of the Jews. The Interior Ministry has routinely maintained that in revoking residence permits it is simply applying the law to the Arabs of East Jerusalem, which was annexed to Israel in 1980 and whose inhabitants have been granted the status of permanent residents, not Israeli citizens. Many Palestinians in search of housing have moved to West Bank suburbs of East Jerusalem outside the Israeli-drawn city limits and lost their residence rights, including Israeli health insurance and social security benefits. Budeiri, who is the founding director of the Israeli studies program at Al Quds University here, said that the policy belied Israel's claims that Jerusalem was a united city. "If unifying the city means that its 200,000 Arabs can have their residence revoked at any time," he said, "what do you unify? The stone?" Last week brought the first sign of a change. After extensive consultations, Sharansky suspended the revocation of Budeiri's residency. However, the Interior Ministry also notified Budeiri's lawyer that while his client retained his residency, there had been legal grounds to revoke it, and that the case would be reviewed in six years. Budeiri had won a battle, but not the war.