'Go to Amman and never come back to Jerusalem'

Occupied Jerusalem: "Look at Jerusalem. Does it look the capital of anything?" asked Amir De'na, a 78-year-old newspaper salesman in old occupied Jerusalem.

"I don't think so. Believe me, after 40 years of occupation, the Israelis have reduced it into a suburb where the owners became guests and the foreigners became owners," De'na said, casting a look of sorrow towards Bab Al Amoud, the most important of the city's old gates.

De'na is the best-known newspaper salesman in the city, so much so that he has become one of the city's features just like the gate. They both have stood together since the British occupation.

De'na remembers very well what it was like on June 8, 1967, when Israeli forces gathered Arab men, handcuffed them, loaded them onto open trucks and drove them around west Jerusalem for all to see, while Jews lined the streets and clapped.

Failed

"On the fifth and sixth days of the war, the occupiers brought big buses to Bab Al Amoud, and ordered people to go to Amman," De'na said. "'Go to Amman and never come back,' they were yelling," he added.

On June 7, 1967, the occupation army seized East Jerusalem, including the old town, and took control of the holy places. The then Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan announced: "We have unified Jerusalem ... We have returned to our holy places, and shall never leave them."

Within days, Israel extended the administrative borders of occupied Jerusalem's municipality to include Arab East Jerusalem in the unified capital.

However, Israel failed to make the city its unified capital, according to Rami Nasrullah, Director of the International Cooperation Research Centre, who told Gulf News: "Occupied Jerusalem cannot be a capital or an open city.

"It is a poor city, and a myth for those who live two kilometres from here," he added, pointing to the nearby French Hill Jewish neighbourhood.

This is confirmed by former municipal consultant Mair Margalit, who told Gulf News that one third of the city's residents are Palestinian, and more than 70 per cent of them live in poverty, with an income of less than $2 per day.

They have been deliberately ignored by the municipality, which imposes impossible conditions for building licences, while demolishing more than 150 houses every year under the pretext that they were built without licences.

A look at the past reveals that it was all pre-planned, according to Khalil Al Tafakji, member of the Palestinian negotiating team to Oslo and expert in the Palestinian issue.

"When the Palestinian National Authority arrived in 1994, I said that Israel is working against time to create a new reality in occupied Jerusalem, and that former president of the authority Yasser Arafat will not have anything left to negotiate about with Israel except the Al Aqsa Mosque," said Al Tafakji.

"If you look around now, you will know that even that space is no longer negotiable, and Jerusalem has become a memory," he said, expressing fears of erasing the Arabic identity of the city.

Meanwhile, Reuters news agency quoted Amoz Oz, a leader of Israel's peace camp, as saying, "Everyone knows that at the end of the day Jerusalem will be the capital of both Israelis and Palestinians.

"It seems that it is very hard for Israelis to come to terms with this particular issue," he added.