The Jerusalem Question (Continued P-4)
On 13 December 1949, the Israeli government declared Jerusalem as its capital, which was later passed as a resolution in the Knesset on January 23, 1950.
On June 5-10, 1967 Israel launched an offensive against neighboring Arab states and captured East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, plus the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Most Jews celebrated the event as a liberation of the city; a new Israeli holiday was created, Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalayim), and the popular Hebrew song, "Jerusalem of Gold" (Yerushalayim shel zahav), became popular in celebration.
Between 1949 and 1967 scores of Palestinian towns and more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Israel. In the first flush of victory in the 1967 war, Ben Gurion wanted the magnificent walls built by the Ottomans that surround the “Old City” destroyed because they were such a powerful reminder of the Islamic character of the city. Most of the Israeli government buildings in Jerusalem including the Knesset are built on Palestinian-owned land.
In defiance of the international community, Israel wasted no time in declaring the city of Jerusalem as its "eternal, undivided" capital.This meant that it extended its law to East Jerusalem and claimed it as part of Israel, a move that no country in the world recognized, including up until recently the US, citing international law which states that an occupying power does not have sovereignty in the territory it occupies.
Teddy Kollek, the mayor of the contested city, said in 1968: "The object is to ensure that all of Jerusalem remains forever a part of Israel. If this city is to be our capital, then we have to make it an integral part of our country, and we need Jewish inhabitants to do that."
In 1980, Israel formalized its annexation of the eastern half of the city when it passed the Jerusalem Law, claiming that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel".
In the 1967 census, the Israeli authorities registered 66,000 Palestinian residents (44,000 residing in the area known before the 1967 war as East Jerusalem; and 22,000, in the West Bank area annexed to Jerusalem after the war). Only a few hundred Jews were living in East Jerusalem at that time.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), since annexation of East Jerusalem, have embarked on a “Judaization” policy that entails constricting building permits to local Arabs to build houses on their ancestral land, withdrawing residency permits, demolishing Palestinian homes and mosques, and building illegal settlements. One of the first moves was to demolish the Maghariba quarter in order to enlarge the prayer area next to the Wailing Wall. One hundred and twenty-five Arab houses were destroyed in the process.
Jerusalem Palestinians are considered as foreign residents. As non-citizens, they can participate in municipal elections, but have no voting rights to the Knesset, under whose jurisdiction the whole of Jerusalem falls. If they stay out of Jerusalem for too long, they lose even their residence status and be thrown out of the city altogether, as happened to thousands of them. The policy of the Interior Ministry towards them – endorsed on 30 December 1996 by the Israeli Supreme Court – is too severe and arbitrary (especially since 1994). In 30 years (1967-97), an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Arab residents in Jerusalem lost their right of residency in the city. These include, for example, Jerusalem Palestinians who lived for over seven years outside the city limits. During the first two weeks of January 1997 alone, 233 Palestinian residents in Jerusalem were issued with expulsion orders. Palestinian refugees from camps located within the limits of Greater Jerusalem (the Shufat and Kalandia camps) have absolutely no political rights. [36]
Since its occupation, Israel has demolished hundreds of Palestinian-owned homes. Last year, some 88 homes were destroyed, leaving 295 people without shelter. Over the past decade, more than 2,600 people have been rendered homeless after their houses were demolished. Since 1967, Israel has revoked the residency status of 14,595 Palestinians in Jerusalem. Palestinian holders of the Jerusalem IDs live under the constant threat of residency revocation.
This "policy of Judaization," which has been conducted openly by the Israeli government to reduce the Arab presence in Jerusalem, is starting to bear fruit. While in 1990, there was still a majority of 150,000 Palestinians against 120,000 Jews in the eastern part of the city, the ratio has been reversed to the benefit of the latter. In 1993, East Jerusalem counted 155,000 Palestinian Arabs against 160,000 Israeli Jews. Some 250,000 Israelis lived in West Jerusalem. [37]
On 19 April 1999, an inter-ministerial committee on Jerusalem recommended that Israel needs to build 116,000 new housing units in the city for Jews by 2020 in order to maintain a 70/30 percent Jewish majority in Jerusalem. This would signify an annual rate of 5,500. Figures published on 28 May 2003 by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics showedthat Jerusalem’s population reached 683,000, of which sixty-six percent was Jewish. Of the 32 percent of the population who were Arabs, 94% were Muslim and 6% were Christians. [38] In 2004, the Jewish population in Jerusalem was estimated at 464,000 out of a total population of 692,000. [39]
The illegal Israeli settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem have expanded rapidly, in violation of all international laws. Between 1967 and 2003, 35% of the land in East Jerusalem was expropriated for the construction of Jewish neighborhoods and attendant facilities. Of the more than 38,500 houses built on expropriated land, as of 2003, none was constructed for Arabs. As a result of such settlement policies, by 2003, there were over 43,000 homes in Jewish neighborhoods and only 28,000 in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. [40]
The Jewish settler population in East Jerusalem has also multiplied accordingly. In 2000, it was estimated to be close to 180,000. [41] In 2003, 217,000 Palestinians shared East Jerusalem with 200,000 Jewish settlers. Of these, 66,500 were in the Greater Jerusalem area of Ma’aleh Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Betar Elite, Har Adar, Efrat and part of the Etzion Bloc. [42] Today, 86 percent of East Jerusalem is under direct control of the Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers. Around 200,000 settlers live in settlements that have been mostly built either entirely or partially on private Palestinian property.
Worse still, Israel has constructed a wall to separate Jewish illegal settlements from Palestinian neighborhoods. Thisapartheid wall, which Israel started building in 2002, snakes through the West Bank territory, dividing villages, encircling towns and splitting families from each other.
It has also impacted Palestinian Jerusalemites: more than 140,000 residents living in Jerusalem neighborhoods are disconnected from the rest of the city and as a result, suffer from a severe lack of basic services and infrastructure. [For instance, more than 40% of Palestinians living inside Jerusalem are not connected to city’s official water grid.]
Moreover, Israeli lawmakers are now making moves to annex three large settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank to the Israeli-defined boundaries of Jerusalem.
The so-called "Greater Jerusalem bill" would see the addition of 140,000 Jewish Israelis who live in these settlements to the population of Jerusalem, to ensure a Jewish majority in the city.With the approval of new construction permits for Jewish settlements, the demography of Jerusalem in its 50th anniversary of statehood and beyond is bound to change steadily.
The Israeli government has succeeded in applying Jerusalem’s religious symbolism to vast areas that have nothing to do with historic Jerusalem. So, e.g., over half of what we call Jerusalem today was not part of the city pre-1967, but were parts of Bethlehem and 28 other West Bank towns.
In today’s Israel, even the dead are not safe from desecration. For example, during Olmert’s tenure as the mayor of Jerusalem, Islamic burial places in West Jerusalem ‘Ma’man Allah’ (or colloquially Mamilla), measuring some 250,000 square meters, were turned into building plots. The Sheraton Plaza Hotel, Supersol supermarket, Beit Argon building and the adjacent car parking lot are all built on this Islamic Waqf owned land which was used by Muslims as their burial place in Jerusalem until 1948. What remains of this Muslim cemetery is being used as an open park, courtesy of Jerusalem mayors.
Moreover, Palestinians in Jerusalem are required to pay taxes, such as the national insurance tax, for services they barely receive. This is in contravention of international law, which considers East Jerusalem as occupied territory and thus, Israeli law should not be applied to the area.The Arnona municipal tax has been imposed on residents of the city since 1967. It is widely seen as a form of discrimination as it affects Palestinians disproportionally.With the rates highest for East Jerusalem, Arnona taxes can exceed the annual rent of low-income families.Businesses are also subject to Arnona taxes. The rate applicable to each business correlates with the size of the property and not its economic revenue.The system has strenuously placed pressure on Palestinians, forcing many to relocate to the occupied West Bank.
The 1993 Oslo Accord left the future of Jerusalem to be determined later through serious negotiation. At Camp David in July 2000 and later at Taba, Israeli negotiators considered allowing some sovereignty to the Palestinian state over Arab areas of East Jerusalem but no agreement was reached. The Palestinian side was ready to concede Israel’s claim to West Jerusalem of which Palestinians had privately owned 40 per cent in 1948. The final negotiation fell flat on the status of Haram al-Sharif. [44] But more problematic was the apparent arm-twisting of the Palestinian negotiators by their US counterparts to appease the Israelis. It failed to give importance to the legal arguments, i.e., who owned/owns what property. Just because Barak “conceded” more than any other Israeli government does not mean that it was just or fair.
In the post-Clinton era, nothing significant has been done to settle Jerusalem’s long-standing problem except President Bush’s announcement of the so-called “Roadmap” for the creation of a Palestinian state, which aimed more at getting the necessary cooperation from his Arab client states before toppling Saddam than establishing the groundwork for real peace or finding a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.As subsequent events had proved, Bush Jr. administration gave a Carte Blanche endorsing Israel’s war crimes inside Gaza. Between 2001 and 2008, the US vetoed 9 times in the UNSC on resolutionscritical of Israel on the Palestine question.
During Obama’s presidency, no substantive initiative was undertaken either to stop Israel’s excesses and to find a solution to the crisis. His administration cast its first negative vote in the UN General Assembly in 2009 on a resolution that called for an end to the 22-day Israeli attack on Gaza. It cast its first veto in the Security Council on 18 February 2011 to block a resolution denouncing Israel’s settlement policy as an illegal obstacle to peace efforts in the Middle East. Not only that, the US voted against a UNGA resolution that called on Israel to cease obstructing the movement and access of personnel, vehicles and assets of the Agency of the United Nations Relief and Works for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).In 2012, italso opposed and attempted to block Palestine's upgraded UN status at every step. Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN, described all efforts to hold Israel accountable for its criminal actions and to abide by the international treaties, charters and conventions to which it is bound as "anti-Israel crap."
In 2014, the world witnessed the murder of more than a thousand unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. The Obama administration once again allowed Netanyahu’s war crimes to go unpunished.The shortly lived ad on metro buses of Boston's transit authority, the MBTA(before it was removed under pressure from pro-Israel groups and in an apparent violation of its own policies) summed upthe US complicity: "Since September, 2000 Israel's Military has killed one Palestinian child every four days, using U.S. tax dollars. End U.S. support for Israeli apartheid."
Instead of disciplining Israel for its plethora of crimes, the Obama administration in September 2016rewarded the pariah state with a whopping $38 billion military aid package, the largest given to any state anytime in US history. It was a criminal gesture, which only emboldened Israel to expand its settlement activities. The Obama administration in its last days, as if out of some moral bite of conscience, stood by as the U.N. Security Council voted in December 2016 to adopt a resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem illegal and demanding a halt to their expansion. The abstention was the first time the Obama administration stepped aside and allowed the Security Council to censure Israel. Speaking after the vote, Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, defended the abstention, comparing it to policies of Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to the Reagan administration. “Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 undermine Israel’s security, harm the viability of a negotiated two-state outcome, and erode prospects for peace and security,” Power told the council after the vote. “We could not in good conscience veto the resolution,” Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, added.
The president-elect Donald Trump blasted the U.N. and the Obama administration after the vote. Trump tweeted, “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th,” after the UN vote.
Surely, with Trump in the White House now, Netanyahu has a narcissist, delusional and psychopath to lean on to! On December 17, 2017, a UN security council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been backed by every council member except the US, which used its veto.
As can be seen the US support inside and outside the UN has been crucial for Israel to defying world opinion and international law, and maintaining its apartheid character.
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Abdus Sattar Ghazali
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Prof. Arthur Scott
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