Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
More than 200,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem and share many of Israel's freedoms. But the arrest of a Hamas cell there has exposed a deep, angry divide.
Aug 24, 2002 | A dusty dirt road flanked by heaps of rotting garbage, no street lights, no pay phones -- this is Silwan, a largely Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. "You call this Jerusalem?" scoffs Abu Murad, a 57-year-old retired policeman. "This is not Jerusalem, this is Africa. No, that's an insult for Africa." Murad is seated in front of a bakery, talking to a friend, and he angrily gestures to the neighborhood around him. "Look at this! We pay taxes and we get nothing in return. Is it any wonder people here are fed up?"
Silwan sprang uneasily to prominence in Israel this week after security officials arrested five people -- three of them from the neighborhood -- identified as members of the militant Islamic group Hamas; they were accused of involvement in the bombing at Hebrew University that killed nine people. For years, Israelis assumed that Palestians in East Jerusalem were content to be there, with a freedom to move and work throughout Israel, and the Arab residents had remained largely aloof of the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza. But the arrests have broken that illusion and replaced it with a new awareness that the Palestinians' grievances make Jerusalem a tense, divided city.
"This is going to be very bad for all of us," says Murad.
Already, right-wing members of Israel's broad-based coalition cabinet have announced they want to strip the suspects of their residency rights in Jerusalem and demolish their families' houses. The right-leaning English-language Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post, typified the official attitude toward East Jerusalem's Palestinians in a sour editorial: "For too long now, Arab Jerusalemites have been content with playing a double game. They have availed themselves of the civic and economic opportunities that a unified city, under Israeli sovereignty, affords them, and which has saved them from the despotism, corruption and indigence under which their cousins in Ramallah and elsewhere in the Palestinian Authority suffer."
Israel annexed the eastern part of Jerusalem and greatly extended the municipal boundaries after it conquered the West Bank during the Six-Day War of 1967. The Palestinian residents of the city have Israeli identity cards that set them apart from the people of the West Bank and they drive cars with Israeli rather than Palestinian plates. Israel takes great pains to emphasize the unity of the city that it still calls its "eternal united capital," despite discussions during the last, doomed rounds of peace talks to divide the city between the two peoples. Jerusalem is regarded as one of the main stumbling blocks in achieving a peace.
But the arrests of the Hamas members and the announcement that they were responsible for a string of attacks in Israel in which 35 people died have clearly chilled Israeli interest in such a compromise.
After the arrests Jerusalem's right-wing mayor, Ehud Olmert, emphatically denounced the idea of dividing the city. "Even to talk about it at this point is playing into the hand of the extremists," he said. "They carry out these attacks exactly with this in mind." He also said that he had been afraid for a long time that the situation in East Jerusalem was not as calm as it seemed, and while he warned against overreacting, he said more difficult times might lie ahead. "This will raise the level of suspicion and raise the sensitivity of security forces to check, to stop, to investigate people that in many cases will be innocent ... because we can't take too many risks," he said.
Former mayor Teddy Kollek, a liberal who oversaw the reunification of Jerusalem after 1967, had different advice. Israel has no option but to share the city with the Palestinians, he said, however painful that may be. "I think that we have to reach a deal ... As part of the arrangement, something must be given to them," said Kollek, now 91. "They have been sitting here for so many years and feel that it is theirs."
But for some of the 200,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, the city has been united in name only. Many feel they are as occupied as the people in the West Bank and Gaza. The overwhelming majority does not have citizenship and hence no voting rights in national elections; East Jerusalem Palestinians can vote only in local elections, but most refuse to do so because they regard it as a recognition of Israel's annexation. That explains how the right-winger Olmert is mayor in a city that officially has a population more than 30 percent Palestinian. And that's why the Jerusalem Post blames many of the discrepancies between East and West on the Palestinians themselves. "It is difficult to feel sympathy for those who complain about being treated wretchedly by municipal authorities while refusing to participate in municipal politics," the Post stated. "Civic advancement requires civic involvement. If Arab Jerusalemites genuinely wish to improve their lot, they have an obligation to play ball with the state."
Many of East Jerusalem's Palestinian residents work in the western, predominantly Jewish, part of the city or elsewhere in Israel. The checkpoints that prevent West Bank Palestinians from entering Israel are mostly placed outside the Greater Jerusalem city limits. East Jerusalemites also receive social and other benefits through the state, but they do not hold an Israeli passport. Still, their economic situation in particular is much better than that of the people on the West Bank, and Israel had hoped that this would prevent them from joining the intifada.
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