Last week, a group of Likud members and experts presented Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a plan to carve up Arab Jerusalem in somewhat the same way that Hebron was dismembered. Some saw news of this effort as a positive sign that the Netanyahu government might be considering ideas that would end direct rule over almost 300,000 Palestinians. In reality, the intent was quite different, though.
The design behind the plan was both financial and racist. By shedding Israel of the responsibility of providing support to these Palestinians, “billions of shekels” would be saved. At the same time, by ridding itself of 300,000 Palestinians, Israel would insure Jewish demographic dominance in what remained of their part of occupied Jerusalem.
What the plan does not consider is the fate of Palestinians that Israel would be casting off. Far from free, they would remain a captive people surrounded by a maze of colonies and a 28-foot wall. And they would remain impoverished and cut off from the rest of the West Bank and denied the ability to engage in meaningful commerce with the world beyond the wall.
Whether or not this proposed plan is ever implemented, it is clear that Israel’s Jerusalem policy, since it first occupied the eastern part of the city, has been moving in this direction. They have sought to reconcile two imperatives: Keeping control over the city, and “Judaising” its character. This has had a devastating impact on the lives of Palestinians in the city and its environs.
Up until the early 1990s, occupied Jerusalem had served as the hub of Palestinian economic, cultural, social and political activity. The city was not only the home of Palestine’s most important religious sites and institutions, it was where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories came to work or shop, to go to school, to receive medical treatment or social services, to attend cultural events, or to consult with professionals of all types.
After the Israelis occupied all of Palestine in 1967, it wasn’t always easy for Palestinians to gain access to the city. There were periodic closures and checkpoints with which they had to contend. But even with the burdens imposed by the Israeli authorities, Jerusalem remained the hub.
One way occupiers control perceptions is by naming their handiwork. The Israeli construct — ”Greater Jerusalem” — is a misnomer. When the Israelis announced this fiction a few years after the 1967 war, it included not just the eastern part of the city, but a large swath of West Bank land that included 28 other Palestinian villages. To mask this crime of illegal annexation, Israel began to call these villages “Arab neighbourhoods”, while referring to their colonies as “Jewish neighbourhoods” of occupied Jerusalem.
Palestinian life changed dramatically in 1994 after a Jewish terrorist massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in a Hebron mosque. Fearing a Palestinian reaction, then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin imposed a “closure” — one that would never be lifted. In the years that followed, the closure became intense with more rigorous enforcement. Permits to enter the city became more difficult to obtain. Palestinian institutions in the city were shuttered and foreign groups were advised that they were forbidden from holding meetings of a political nature with Palestinians in the city.
Concrete barrier
All the while, colonies were growing. Even before Israel began building its notorious wall, occupied Jerusalem was being surrounded by a concrete barrier of ever-expanding Israeli colonies snaking up and down the hills enclosing the city with a wall of Jewish-only housing. Then came the construction of the wall, which, once again, Israel tried to camouflage by insisting that it be called a “barrier”.
Within the wall, thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israeli authorities because the Israelis say they were built without necessary permits — precisely because the Israelis will not issue permits to Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians have had their residency in the city terminated either because they were forced to find work outside the city or because they married someone from the West Bank and were not allowed to bring their spouses to live with them.
And so, the stage has been set for the plan that was presented to Netanyahu. It is a plan designed, quite simply, to solve a “demographic problem” by removing 300,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem’s tally and to save the state a rather large sum. At the same time, it keeps Palestinians poor and under tight control. Occupied Jerusalem has become like Hebron. In their never-ending effort to control perceptions, Israel will say “we’ve freed the Palestinians”. In reality, they will remain prisoners.
Dr James J. Zogby is the president of Arab American Institute.
