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Naseer Aruri
Chancellor
Professor of Political Science Emeritus, U. Mass, Dartmouth
Having consolidated its
control of West Jerusalem after 1948, Israel used its 1967 conquest
as an opportunity to
extend its jurisdiction to the Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem, and
to
enlarge the boundaries
yet another time to add numerous new Arab villages and
neighborhoods. More than
25 percent of the area known as the West Bank was
expropriated and
incorporated into a newly- created greater Jerusalem. The physical
barriers between East
and West Jerusalem were removed.
The Moghrabi section of the Old City was totally
razed with its 350 homes for more than 1500 residents, who were subsequently expelled in
order to accommodate a new plaza in front of the Western Wall.
Defying U.N. resolutions
the Israeli Knesset adopted three legislative acts on June 27, 28
and 29, 1967, extending
Israeli law to the occupied Eastern sector of the city and enlarging
the municipal boundaries
of "united" Jerusalem, which had suddenly grown from 44,000
donums to 108,000 donums
(approximately 29,000 acres). According to Sarah Kaminker,
an Israeli town planner
in the Jerusalem municipality, the new land grab constituted 70,500
donums (about 17,500
acres), which had almost doubled what had been quadrupled in
1948. Israel managed to
avoid adding about 80,000 Arabs to the population of the
expanded city by not
applying its amendment to the Law and Administration Ordinance to
the Arab villages of
Abu-Dis, Anata, Hizma, Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, and al-Ram, as well
as
the Qalandia refugee
camp and the neighborhood of Bethany. To bolster the Zionist dictum
of acquiring the land
without the people, Israel carried out a general census of the
entire
newly occupied
territory, including Jerusalem on July 25, 1967.
All residents who
were away working, visiting
relatives or touring were considered absentees and thus denied their right to reside in the
City. That was also applied to the Palestinian civilians who either
fledthe fighting or were
persuaded to board the Israeli buses waiting to take them to the Allenby Bridge. An
estimated number of 100,000 lost their international right to belong
totheir national
patrimony. The process of dispossession, displacement,
dismemberment, disenfranchisement and
dispersal, which was savagely applied to the Palestinians in 1948, was reenacted
systematically after 1967. For Jerusalem and its surroundings, the
objective objective was to create
a huge Jewish metropolis that would disrupt the territorial
continuity of the West Bank, keep
the Arab population to no more than a manageable 30 percent and preempt any sovereign
existence for the Palestinians there.
To operationalize that imperative, Israel
mobilized varied resources and utilized legal gimmickry that would facilitate the passing
of Arab land into Jewish ownership, and then making it off limits to Arabs. During the past
25 years, more than 33 percent, or about 16 square miles of the expanded Arab East
Jerusalem areas were confiscated. East Jerusalem, which was a mere 4.3 square miles or
4% of all of Jerusalem prior to 1967, is now 48 square miles or 63% of the newly
redefined Jerusalem-expanding eleven fold. The land confiscated
from the West Bank is now
part of non-negotiable Jerusalem, and is not therefore an issue for
discussion until the
so-called final status negotiations. Netanyahu’s so-called
"umbrella
municipality" adopted on
June 25, 1998 had simply formalized what is now "greater
Jerusalem". It extended
Jerusalem's jurisdiction from a territory of 48 square miles to 72
square miles, by
incorporating the illegal settlements of Givat Ze`ev to the North,
Ma`ale
Adumim to the East and
Betar and Efrata to the South. The new Jewish population thus
added plus the 142,000
apartments built for Jews only, will accomplish Israel's
demographic balance of
70 Jewish majority and a tolerated Arab minority of less than 30%.
Such an enterprise,
which flies in the face of numerous U.N. resolutions, the Universal
Declaration of Human
Rights, the Geneva Convention (1949) and even the Oslo Accords,
may last 20, 30 or even
50 years; but it will not last forever. For it is being driven by
the
engine of power and
hegemony.
Ethnic cleansing and
apartheid-style living, which have already been discredited in the
world, will ultimately
crash head on with the norms of universalist humanism. How long can
the Jewish ideals of
tolerance and conciliation remain alienated from the Israeli
political
agenda? How long can
the Palestinian people remain reticent in the face of steady
conquest proceeding
under no-war conditions? The future of Palestine/Israel will be
more
secure when all the
inhabitants of that land, Muslims, Christians and Jews, can feel
equal
under the law and can
co-exist in a society free of population quotas, by-pass roads, and
discriminatory
legislation-a society which can give dignity to every single human
being. The
widely publicized
“compromise” offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp
David II in July, 2000
is very distant from these ideals in that it expects the Palestinian
and
Arab people to acquiesce
in Israeli sovereignty over a city that has been unilaterally
expanded twelve fold
since 1967.
The Palestine Authority
would be given civil control in the surrounding villages and
Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. The Muslim and Christian Holy Places
would be effectively under Israeli sovereignty, but The Palestinians would be offered a
formula that would allow them to claim that they have control over
the Holy Places. In fact,
under the dying Oslo formula Arafat would be able to establish his government in the
village of Abu-Dis, but it could be called Jerusalem. The uprising
which began on September 28th
of this year after Israel’s General Sharon made his provocative and unwelcome visit to
the Haram al-Sharif, served notice that the gap is wide not only between the Palestinians
and Israel but also between the Palestinians and Mr. Arafat.
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