JERUSALEM, A CITY IN DANGER

One of the oldest cities in the World, Jerusalem has had a long, rich and tumultuous history. A Holy City for the three Religions of the Book, it has, many times throughout the centuries, been the object of conflictual and rival claims. Occupied on several instances by various empires, its population, like that of Palestine at large, has absorbed the descendants of the many peoples rooted or settled in the region, from the original Canaanite inhabitants of Palestine to the successive waves of settlers, whether they came from the sea or from the desert. Among those were Hebrews and Philistines, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and many others. The Arab character of the city, however, stabilized under Islamic rule, which lasted, safe for relatively short interruptions, for some thirteen centuries. Shattered for a period by the Crusades, a colonial-religious enterprise based in Europe, it was restored for more than seven centuries, and the last centuries of Ottoman administration over the Holy City were years of peace, stability and peaceful coexistence for all the religious and ethnic communities living in Jerusalem, including a great number of pilgrim communities made up of foreigners from the three monotheistic faiths, Jews, Christians and Moslems alike.

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM IN HISTORY

As has been the case, throughout history , for many ancient cities, Jerusalem, several times conquered and destroyed, kept rebuilding itself on top of its ruins, but also displaced itself in various directions. Until 1850, however, the City is wholly intra-muros, included inside its ramparts, even though the villages surrounding it orbit around its economic, administrative and political-religious centrality, as they form a single Sanjak (a separate circonscription in terms of the Ottoman administration) a special status directly linked to the Holy Places and the religious activities attached to them - including pilgrimages.

It is only in the second part of the nineteenth century that the city started expanding outside the Walls. Moslem and Christian schools, which became the center of new neighborhoods, were built outside the Old City , while Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, started building new quarters, mostly on the western outskirts of the town.

THE BRITISH MANDATE

The British military occupation of Palestine, (1918), followed by the Mandate granted to Great Britain by the League of Nations (1922), brought about considerable changes in the geography and demography of Jerusalem: by encouraging European Jewish immigration into Palestine, by overthrowing the traditional modes of land tenure and artificially creating massive absentee landlordhip, as well as through the extension of Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, so as to include in it the Jewish colonies neighbouring the Holy City. As in the rest of the country, massive Jewish immigration from Europe was upsetting all earlier equilibriums, and multiplying frictions and tensions. By the end of the twenties, the situation in Jerusalem (and in Hebron) had become untenable, and in 1929, in response to provocations staged by Jewish religious extremists on the Jerusalem Holy sites, riots erupted and violence took to the streets.

The events in Jerusalem and Hebron, however, were only a prelude to a wider crisis and explosion. By the mid-thirties the whole of Mandatory Palestine was in flames. 1936 witnessed the longest general strike in history , while an armed insurrection flared throughout the country. The British Royal Commission of Inquiry (the "Peel" Commission) dispatched to search for the causes of "disturbances" and inter-community violence identified what it called "The fear of the Arabs of being transformed into a minority in their own country" . It emphasized that only a drastic halt in the sale of land to foreigners and severe limitations on Jewish immigration could appease these fears. As an alternative, the Commission proposed to partition the country into two states.

Delayed by the War in Europe, and the War at large, the plan to partition the country reappeared after the war with more vigour. It eventually inspired, on November 29th, 1947, the famed UN General Assembly Resolution 181, recommending the establishment, in Palestine, of two states ( one" Arab" , and the other" Jewish" ) in economic union, with Jerusalem as a Corpus Separatum. According to the Plan, which gave 55 % of the territory to 30% of the population, Jerusalem was to become an intemationally-controlled enclave in the center of the projected Arab state.

  The war that followed the UN vote, however, was to change the map, and with it the status of Jerusalem, radically.

1947-1949: TERROR AND PARTITION

The so-called " 1948" war unfolded in two distinct phases: from November 1947 to May 15th, 1948, and from May 16th, 1948 until January 1st, 1949. During the first phase, the armed forces of the Jewish community of Palestine confronted only local militiae and a small Volunteer brigade. In the latter, regular Arab forces, even though inferior in numbers and poorly equipped, were also involved.

The strategic design underlying military operations was evident: to expand the territory of the newly created Jewish state at the expense of the territory alloted to the Arab state, thus making the latter's establishment impossible, while provoking, often by way of deliberate terror campaigns, at times through forcible displacement of populations, a mass exodus of the Palestinian population away from the Israeli­controlled aareas. It was also to include Jerusalem in Israel's borders. At the outcome of the war, as reflected in the Rhodes Armistice Agreements, Israel controlled 77 % of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, and had seized the property of the nearly one million Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war . And it controlled more than half of municipal Jerusalem as it stood in 1947, but not the Old City intra­muros, i.e. not the Holy Sites. The fierce battle in and around Jerusalem for more than a year had left the city divided, with a cease-fire line transformed into a line of demarcation made of barbed wire, concrete, mines and snipers meandering in its midst, sometimes narrow as a street or a wall, at times taking the shape of an actual No Man's land.

1949-1967: PHYSICAL DIVISION

From the end of the 1948 war to the Israeli conquest and occupation of the city in June 1967, Jerusalem was physically divided. A wall, and a barbed-wire no-man's-land which soon fell under Israeli control separated West Jerusalem, where the newborn State of Israel had installed its government and its parliament, from East-Jerusalem, including the Old City, which had, as the rest of what remained of the Palestinian territory, been annexed to the Kingdom of Jordan. More than three quarters of the houses in West Jerusalem, however, were Arab Absentee property, whose rightful owners were now beyond the border: sometimes just across the line, sometimes in faraway exile.

1967: ANNEXATION AND EXPANSION

In the immediate wake of the 1967 war, the government of Israel, while instoring its military rule in the occupied Palestinian, Egyptian and Syrian territories, took two strategic measures making Jerusalem an exception: it extended the municipal boundaries of East Jerusalem to a much larger territory, including some 28 Palestinian villages over an area of 70 square kilometers, and simultaneously proclaimed the full annexation of the enlarged City to the State of Israel. And one of the first fundamental laws of the newly "united" municipality was to determine a "demographic balance", whereby "non-Jews" should never become more than 28 % of the' total population of the supposedly "unified" city, which an Israeli 1981 Law proclaimed "Eternal Capital of the Jewish People".

From 1967 to this day, this has remained both theory and practice for Israeli government policies in Jerusalem. Both the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem and the Israeli Ministry of Interior in Jerusalem are implementing discriminatory policies in all fields of life and activity, but most of all in the field of residency rights and real estate property , construction and housing. This is a multiform apartheid, put at the service of settlement colonization and "judaization", which is to say ethnic cleansing: destruction of houses, confiscation of property , expulsion outside the city, complemented by organized Jewish settlement into illegally seized property .

The closure policy inaugurated a few months before the signing, in Washington, of the "Oslo Accords" (the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Declaration of Principles of September 13th, 1993) is also meant to isolate Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territory , while the repeated attacks on Palestinian national institutions in Jerusalem reflect the will of the Israeli government to pursue its policy of faits accomplis in Jerusalem. The construction of a new colony in Jebel Abu Ghneim, the seizing of Arab property in Ras-El-Amud, the continuation of provocations against Palestinian residents inside the Old City and the Plan to enlarge once again municipal limits so as to create the Greater Metropolitan Jerusalem - all stem from the same design: to transform the city , to abolish its Arab, Christian and Islamic character .

In short, Jerusalem is a city in danger, from the human, cultural and environmental point of view. A city divided by a wall of violence and inequality more surely than it was when a wall ran through its center. A captive city , taken hostage by the extremists and the fanatics, which concentrates in its tensions, but also in its challenges, all the problems of today's area at large: a microcosm of Mediterranean dilemmas, where new forms of coexistence and cooperation must be invented.

JERUSALEM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

It is to be noted that international Law, UN institutions and the international community have never recognized the annexation of East Jerusalem, nor endorsed the de facto control of West Jerusalem. The General Consulates in Jerusalem representing twelve major Western countries, which have never been part of diplomatic representations in Israel or in Jordan, indeed exist in reference to the Corpus Separatum, and bear witness to the fact that the status of Jerusalem as a whole still remains to determine. But insofar as occupied Arab East- Jerusalem is concerned, there is no uncertainty or ambiguity . Israeli occupation and annexation of the East- Jerusalem area are illegal, they are null and void. It runs counter to the preamble of UN Security Council Resolution 242, of November 22nd, 1967, which states the" inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war", as well as to dozens of subsequent resolutions of the Security Council. Occupied territory just like the rest of the West Bank, East- Jerusalem, the natural and historical capital of Palestine, must be returned to Palestinian sovereignty .

JERUSALEM AND THE NEGOTIATIONS

On the eve of the Madrid Conference, in October 1991 , Secretary of State James Baker, on behalf of the US administration, handed over to the Palestinian negotiating team a "Letter of Assurances" which stated, inter alia, that" The US administration does not recognize the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, nor the unilateral extension of its municipal boundaries ", but added that it also opposed a new physical division of the city. That letter, however, just like the Letter of Invitation which contained the first agreed upon terms of reference of the peace process, also stipulated that "All parties should abstain from measures which might preempt, or prejudice, the outcome of Final status negotiations ". This clearly forbids the settlement colonization, demographic pressures and administrative-territorial changes that occur daily in Jerusalem.

This endeavor shall not succeed, however, unless it is the result of a common effort of all the peoples concerned, and first and foremost of civil societies in the area at large. Without their will to achieve a sustainable compromise on Jerusalem, and their capacity to transform this aspiration into policy, Jerusalem, instead of being a city of peace, will remain a symbol of strife and disunion, and a time-bomb under any peace- process.

JERUSALEM AND OSLO

The September 1993 Declaration of Principles had stated that Jerusalem, like borders, settlements and refugees, would be discussed within the framework of permanent status negotiations, which were formally inaugurated in May 1996, on the eve of the Likud victory in Israeli elections, and were supposed to be completed before the end of the five-year interim period which started in May 1994, with the Cairo agreements on Gaza and Jericho, and will end in May 1999, in conformity with a time-table re-asserted by the present Israeli government on the occasion of the signing of the Protocol of Agreement on Hebron. A clear recognition of the Palestinian character of the city , however, as well as of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, was implied in the Israeli agreement to the participation of East Jerusalem Palestinians, in East- Jerusalem itself, to the general Palestinian legislative elections in January 1996.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

In the short run, and immediately, the people of Jerusalem expect the international community in general, (…) to support and cooperate with Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem, to recognize the Palestinian State with East- Jerusalem as its capital when its independence is proclaimed, and to support the peace forces in Israel which promote the idea of a mutually acceptable compromise in Jerusalem. All peace-loving personalities should also consistently boycott symbolic endorsements of annexation such as Israeli-sponsored events in Jerusalem, and denounce the policies of settlement, deportation and discrimination enforced in occupied East Jerusalem against Palestinian residents.

[One must] (…) convince the Israelis that Jerusalem - which is also a spiritual capital for millions of Christians and Moslems throughout the world - cannot be theirs wholly and alone, and encourage a serious and constructive dialogue on the future of Jerusalem, on the basis of international legality , as the key to a lasting historical reconciliation between the two peoples, but also between the civilizations of all the banks of the Mediterranean.

REPORT PREPARED BY THE PALESTINE DELEGATION TO THE WORLD CONFERENCE OF SOCIALIST MAYORS - FEZ, (MOROCCO) OCTOBER 4-5, 1998