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(Note: Professor Klein
teaches at Bar Illan University in Tel Aviv and was an advisor to
the Israeli delegation at the Camp David Summit in July 2000. This
essay is based on a lecture he gave under the auspices of Americans
for Peace Now on Capital Hill in Washington in September, 2003.)
Enveloping Jerusalem is
an attractive line for Israel since it is built on the Zionist ethos
of 'taking our fate into our own hands', undertaking unilateral
action and creating facts on the ground in accordance with exclusive
Israeli interests. This ethos has an enormous attraction in Israel
and it has only been strengthened by the assumption, a wrong one in
my view, that 'there is no partner for a peace arrangement' or that
'there is nobody to talk to'. This has been the prevalent assumption
since the summer of the year 2000: there is a great temptation to
use unilateral action as an instrument that will be decisive in
determining the wishes and deeds of the other party.
In 2002, Israel began to
build systems of physical and electronic separation between Israeli
and Palestinian territories and within the Palestinian areas,
similar to the border systems between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon,
and Egypt. On the ground, up to now only part of the line has been
built, but the government decided on its planned course in July
2003, and expropriation orders for the land have already been
issued. If and when the plan will be implemented, it will constitute
the most dramatic change effected by Israel in East Jerusalem since
it was conquered and annexed in 1967. From the geographical point of
view this de facto complex of walls changes the border of
annexation. In many places the new line extends into the West Bank
beyond the 1967 annexation, but without officially annexing the
area. Israel is working to include Rachel's Tomb and the settlement
Har Gilo in southern Jerusalem in the area of Israel, at the expense
of areas belonging to Bethlehem and Beit Jalla.
Moreover, Prime Minister
Sharon wants to include several settlements on the Israeli side of
the fence, principally Ma'aleh Adumim and Giv'at Ze'ev, which would
increase the number of Palestinians on the Israeli side. The World
Bank estimates that in addition to the 220,000 residents of East
Jerusalem, about 60,000 Palestinians will be trapped between the
border system separating them from the West Bank and the walls
separating them from East and West Jerusalem. Israel does not intend
to grant them residency or the status and rights possessed by East
Jerusalemites. It certainly does not intend to offer them the
Israeli citizenship that was rejected by almost all the residents of
East Jerusalem areas that it annexed in 1967 ("The Impact of
Israel's Separation Barrier on Affected West Bank Communities,"
Report for the Mission to the Humanitarian and Emergency Policy
Group (HEPG) of the Local Aid Coordination Committee (LACC), May 4,
2003, p.10,
www.miftah.org/doc/reports/wallreport.pdf).
Over and above extending
the area annexed, Israel wants to destroy Arab metropolitan
Jerusalem and control it without annexing it. It aspires to achieve
this through a wall enveloping all the following suburbs of East
Jerusalem: Anata, Hizma, Al Za'im, Al Ram, and Dahiat Al Barid,
leaving them only a narrow link with the Palestinian hinterland in
the form of a cramped road or tunnel under Israeli control. Only in
a limited number of places did Israel agree to relinquish suburbs
which it included in 'united Jerusalem' in 1967: Kafr Aqab in the
north, Arab al-Sawahara and Sheikh Sa'ad in the East. By that, about
twenty thousand East Jerusalem Palestinians will be left on the West
Bank side of the wall, cut off from their families in the eastern
side of the wall.
In densely populated
areas where there is no possibility of erecting a broad complex of
walls and obstacles, the concrete wall that Israel intends to build
will rise to a height of eight meters. In the center of Abu-Dis
Israel has already built a concrete wall about two meters high on
the 1967 annexation line, dividing in two the neighborhood's main
road. This wall divides the section officially annexed to Israel
from the section which in the near future will be cut off from the
West Bank and from Israel alike. The lower wall will be replaced by
one of eight meters, similar to what Israel is building near Beit
Hanina and Neve Ya'akov in the north, and near Rachel's Tomb in the
south.
On the neighborhood
level there will be Palestinian autonomy for each separate
neighborhood or suburb. Contact with the central Palestinian
government will be carried out through the local Palestinian
resident's coming to the central Palestinian governmental meeting
point, and not through agents of the Palestinian central government
coming to the neighborhood. Israeli supervision will be carried out
through its control over the road which is the main artery of the
besieged suburb. (Ha'aretz, March 12, 2003; August 19, 2003;
September 14, 2003; Akiva Eldar, "Carving Up Jerusalem for Security
of Course", Ha'aretz August 19, 2003; Daniel Seideman, "Erecting a
Barrier to Peace, Washington Post, August 14, 2003;).
The Israeli interest in
controlling the eastern side of the wall goes far beyond Israel's
narrow military goal of preventing free Palestinian access to the
border system in order to prevent its destruction. It has to do with
the Israeli vision of destroying East Jerusalem metropolitan
functions in order to assure Israeli domination.
Apart from the
neighborhood level, a major change can be expected in the
metropolitan area. There will be a wall between each of the
neighborhoods and the heart of East Jerusalem. If the Israeli plan
will be completed, about a quarter of a million Palestinian Arab
residents of East Jerusalem will be cut off from their social,
political, economic, cultural and language hinterland. This is about
ten percent of the total Palestinian population in the West Bank.
The metropolitan connections of East Jerusalem have already been
hard hit by Israeli measures since the early 1990's. Now it can be
expected that they will be destroyed.
On the other hand, the
accessibility to West Jerusalem of some Palestinians who are today
permanent residents in Israel is already not easy nowadays. Israel
has blocked many roads that connect East Jerusalem to the West Bank
by digging trenches, destroying roads, and constructing walls and
piles of earth. In order to control entry and exit through this new
wall, Israel has also built four permanent points of passage at the
entrances to East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Not all of these
points of passage were built on the city limits. Thus, Israel in
effect excluded from Jerusalem some northern neighborhoods that had
been part of the annexed city since 1967, such as Kufr Aqeb beyond
the Qalandiyah checkpoint.
A roadblock further
south effectively excludes Bait Hanina and Sho'afat from Jerusalem
and connects them to the nearby Dahiat Al Barid and Al-Ram, which
were never included in the territory annexed by Israel. Thus the
ground is ready there to the next stage in the Israeli plan: divided
autonomous neighborhoods. Israel erected concrete and earth barriers
at the entrance to East Jerusalem neighborhoods looking West, in
order to control traffic to the few exit roads which Israel can
supervise. From time to time Israel places checkpoints on these
roads. A mobile and rapidly changing line of checkpoints and
inspections is also occasionally set up close to the old
international border or the 'demographic border'.
These measures imposed
by Israeli soldiers and police on the Palestinians in East Jerusalem
emphasize the basic difference in their status as 'others'.
Moreover, this is proof that steps like these are taken not only
against the residents of the West Bank but also against East
Jerusalem Palestinians, even if for the time being they are less
harsh and systematic.
The wall is not only
defensive. It is aggressive and dominating, because it preserves
control over poor and neglected Palestinian areas. The Intifada, the
swelling unemployment, the militarization of life in the city ,the
lack of a centralized and institutionalized authority which can
impose the law in most areas of East Jerusalem - all had grave
consequences in places like el-Tur, Silwan, and Ras al-Amud and they
found themselves on the way to becoming slums. The faster this
process proceeds, the greater the Israeli interest to define and
limit the Palestine 'other' with increasing severity so as to cut
down to the minimum the damage it can do to the dominant majority.
Israel argues that her
plan to 'envelop Jerusalem' will upgrade the status of the
Palestinians in East Jerusalem. They prefer to disconnect their
relationship with the corrupted Palestinian regime in order to enjoy
many economic benefits that the Israeli regime offers them, the
Israeli argument goes. 36 years of Israeli annexation disprove this
argument and show the classical colonial approach behind it.
From the beginning
Israel saw the Palestinians in Jerusalem as a demographic problem
and a threat. Israel's failure to restrict the number of the
Palestinians in the city broke the taboo over dividing sovereignty
in Jerusalem but also increased Israeli fears of 'the other'. Even
without the penetration of the Intifada to West Jerusalem, Israel
neither desired to propose, nor was capable of proposing, to East
Jerusalem that corrective preference which could create full
equality under Israeli sovereignty.
Neither could Israel
agree to the transformation of Jerusalem into an open, equal and
bi-national city which belongs exclusively to neither side. This
would run counter not only to Israeli policy since 1948 but also to
the self-determination of the state of Israel and the Zionist
movement as Jewish entities. Moreover, Israel could not agree to the
creation of a city which would be neutral, civic, nationally
'blind'; and would have an orientation toward providing the needs of
the residents, a part of which are, of course, religious. After so
many years of Israeli dominance, it would also be difficult to
expect from the Israeli authorities to relate to the Palestinians as
equals, be it on the municipal or the national level.
Israel declares that its
intentions are exclusively for security purposes but under this
pretext the rightist Israeli government sets out to determine two
political, facts: first, to change that reality on the ground shaped
in Jerusalem by the Oslo accords (Menachem Klein, Jerusalem The
Contested City, New York: New York University Press 2001: 247-326)
and second, to do away as far as possible with the 'change in
consciousness' created in the year 2000 by the negotiations over a
permanent arrangement in Jerusalem. In other words, Israel is trying
to contain both the territory and the population and to develop
levers of control over them, instead of sharing rule with the
Palestinians.
What the Barak
government's proposed with the start of negotiations on permanent
arrangements for the urban and historical heart of East Jerusalem (Menachem
Klein, The Jerusalem Problem - The Struggle for Permanent Status,
The University Press of Florida, forthcoming November 2003), the
Sharon government proposes to the Palestinians only in distant
suburbs scraped off the body of Jerusalem. The rightist government
tries to control the Arab metropolitan area of Jerusalem through
weakening it, cutting it off from its natural hinterland in the West
Bank and dissecting it into small slices.
The Israelis hope is
that the conditions of life in these besieged areas will be so hard
that most of the residents will prefer to leave. Moreover the
policies will lead to a deterioration in the situation of Arab East
Jerusalem which was annexed in 1967 and ever since then has been
discriminated against. In such policies the Sharon government is
also marking the borders of the authority of that sort of
Palestinian state to which it can agree. The authority of the
Palestinian state will be weak in metropolitan Jerusalem and
non-existent in East Jerusalem.
Israel is now attempting
to achieve by means of destructive walls which will envelop the
Palestinian neighborhoods what it was unable to achieve since 1967
through a belt of new construction: the building of new Jewish
neighborhoods around the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhoods.
In this way Israel forced demographic Jewish-Arab equality in the
area annexed in 1967. In the talks in the year 2000 on a permanent
settlement, discussions took place on models of dividing both
territory and control between Israel and the planned Palestinian
state.
The rightist Israeli
government was not satisfied with this and strives for exclusive
Israeli control over all the area annexed in 1967. This demands the
destruction of the demographic, urban and metropolitan reality which
developed since 1967 in Arab Jerusalem. The East Jerusalem metropole
must be destroyed both by damaging its periphery and by weakening of
the center itself, as well as cutting it off from its natural
hinterland. All these measures are intended to perpetuate the
control and the superiority of Jewish over Arab Jerusalem. The most
appropiate name for this policy is 'Spartheid', Apartheid through
the arguments and means employed by Greek Sparta.
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