"Nash kontrol"

By BERNARD WASSERSTEIN Jerusalem Post, Monday, September 27, 1999

(September 27) - Musa Budeiri has won a qualified victory in his battle to maintain his permanent residence status in Jerusalem. The Palestinian academic, a naturalized UK citizen, had been threatened three months ago with deportation after the Ministry of Interior declined to renew his permanent residency status.

Now Rafael Cohen, director of the Population Administration Department of the Ministry of Interior, has written to Budeiri's attorney to inform him of his latest decision, taken in agreement with Minister Natan Sharansky.

Budeiri is, after all, to be granted a renewal of his permanent residency status until 2003 - after which the matter will be reviewed again.

The volte-face is attributed by Cohen to a bureaucratic technicality. The letter to attorney Elias Khoury explains: "when the details of the case of your client were examined and it became clear that our ministry has placed in his UK passport stamps which are a returning resident to Israel stamps, and as these stamps are given only to those who are permanent residents in Israel, it has been decided for the present that our office will not see your client as someone whose residence in Israel has ended."

Readers may require a translation of this formulation from bureaucratese worthy of Dickens's Circumlocution Office. Unscrambled into basic English, it means: "We were right before. Now we've changed our mind and we're still right!"

Some inconsistency there? You're right too. Governments seldom admit they were wrong in the first place, so we may allow Mr. Cohen his pathetic little exercise in face-saving.

Meanwhile, Minister for Jerusalem Affairs Haim Ramon issued a press release confirming the decision and declaring that the change of heart was "the result of a call from Minister Ramon to Minister Sharansky."

The reality, of course, is that neither technical considerations nor Ramon's intervention was ultimately responsible for the decision. The case had blown up into a cause celebre, evoking a protest by Prime Minister Tony Blair and throwing an unwelcome press searchlight on Israel's policy of quietly extruding Arabs from east Jerusalem. Rather than endure further such scrutiny, the government decided to give way.

This was a prudent, if belated, decision. But it does not end the matter.

This is a remarkable admission of the bankruptcy of Israel's policy in east Jerusalem. Of course, it lays the blame on the previous government. Again we must forgive some face-saving. As everybody knows, this policy was not invented by the Netanyahu government.

The question now arises: what will replace it? The logical and (to use Ramon's word) moral answer is: the Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem should no longer be forcibly subjected to alien rule. They should be enabled to exercise the same right of self-determination that Palestinian residents of other occupied territories are belatedly starting to enjoy.

Previous Israeli governments half-recognized this by permitting east Jerusalemites to vote in elections to the Palestinian assembly - while at the same time placing numerous obstacles in the way of their casting ballots.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak wants to postpone hard bargaining over the Jerusalem issue to an almost indefinite point in future. That is a matter of diplomatic tactics. But a prerequisite for any such negotiation is that Israel should know its own mind.

A serious public debate over Jerusalem is long overdue. Leaving aside all the posturing about "our eternal, undivided capital," what do Israelis actually want to do about east Jerusalem and its Arab citizens? Their full absorption into Israel is impracticable. This is the most highly educated and politically sophisticated segment of the Palestinian people, rooted in the city that is its geographical and ideological heart. Even if such absorption were imaginable, it could only have one result: the creation in Israel's capital of an instant anti-Zionist majority. Even extreme nationalists must balk at that prospect.

The obvious solution is the return of the Arab-inhabited districts of east Jerusalem to Arab rule.

With a little help from their friends, Ministers Sharansky and Ramon have taken the right decision in the Budeiri case. But in the longer run Israelis have no business making these decisions at all.

It is high time that the Palestinians in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, were allowed to control their own lives. There is a phrase for this that became well-known at the last election. It is "nash kontrol."