Klein M. (2001), Jerusalem The contested city
Klein M. (2001), Jerusalem The contested city, Hurst & Company, London, p.363
P.9
The term “frontier” is characteristically from the term “boundary”. “Frontier” suggests open spaces available for settlement and conquest. “Frontierity” motives people and states to expand their borders. A state’s frontier lie not only qt the geographical and physical limits; there is also, for example, a frontier of outer space and a frontier of knowledge. A frontier is thus any place where the state seeks to expand or extend itself, where it seeks to move a geographical or intellectual boundary. From this perspective, the movement is unidirectional – forward in the name of enlightenment, civilization, and progress. At some frontier the state is more salient presence than on its home ground because it is exerting a national will to expand. At other frontiers, the state’s control is looser than it is in the center, since the expansion is being accomplished by individuals, or by groups acting on theirs own initiatives. In the both case, however, the frontier region lacks a local character and is rather an extension and operational instrument of national policy. In contrast, the term “border” designates something static, a place where one must halt. A border is inward directed and marks the existing situation and the limit of current possibilities. The frontier is inclusive and implies an open future, while a border is exclusive, a buffer between foreigners and ourselves (Barth 1969; Gal-Nur, 1995; Hasson, 1996; Kervi, 1997; Kimmerling 1997; Kotek, 1997b).
p.10
According to more recent thinking, however, there is little difference between a frontier and a boundary. The frontier is now thought to mark confrontation between conceptions or communities, not finality or unidirectional movement. In contrast with the classical Pierre, the new conception no longer assumes a confrontation between the enlightened and the uncultured, but rather a confrontation between two cultures. A boundary, according to this new view, marks the point to which each collectives reaches, while the frontier directs its gaze to the other side of the boundary, to encounter and confrontation with an opposing entity or culture. Each side has an empiric history and mythic past; each has it own religion ad values, norms and aspirations. Each group defines how it distinguishes itself from the others, and each group continually revises or updates its worldview in light of the political and historical circumstances. The confrontation on the frontier does not take place on a broad front, but rather is concentrated in a specific territory. Each of the contending groups seeks to control or defend its territory against being physically taken over by the “other”, the “invader”. In the conflict over territory, each group develops holy sites of its own and turns certain site into symbols of struggle and defense, or enhances the value of the territory and defines it as a strategic asset. Territory thus has symbolic value, in the name of which the group can mobilize its members in defense of their territory against the “other” that threatens it. The iconographic characteristics of a territory carry weight in a frontier area. The community creates a set of sacred symbols that link its members to each other and motivate them to defend and hold fast to their homeland. This a static situation that is opposed to the activity that takes place in “regular” areas, which are characterized by mobility and cyclicity. In “regular” areas there is a constant flow of ideas, people, commerce, capital, and knowledge, and the connection with the territory is secondary. Accord into this view, in East Jerusalem there is a confrontation between two cultures and communities that are competing for a single space, yet also divide it between them. Jerusalem, as will be shown, has several boundary lines that separate the Arabs east from the Jewish west. The two sparring entities in the city have developed mutual relation of exchanges alongside confrontation and animosity (Hasson, 1977a; Hasson 1996; Hasson 1998; Kimmerling, 1989; Kotek, 1997a; Stotkin 1996).
The term “frontier” also designates the relation between those in the rear and those who bear the burden the confrontation. The term “frontier city” denotes not only the confrontation between Arab and Jewish Jerusalem, but also the connection that in the State of Israel, and the place held by East Jerusalem in Palestinians consciousness and action, reflects the distinction between the frontier and the center. In order to close the distance between frontier and center, the national leadership will turn the frontier area, and the confrontation with the other side, into unifying axes achieving “national unity”. Despite vows of loyalty and declaration about the mobilization of the entire center behind the people of the frontier, the lines of contradiction and friction- lie in the frontier area not in the interior. The lines of confrontation distinguish the heartland from the frontier and passionate declaration cannot bridge that gap.
The concept of frontier designates a deeper fissure than that of a multicultural and multi-ethnic city. Today, all modern cities in the Western world, such as Paris, New York, and London, are multinational because of the large-scale immigration of members of other national groups and speakers of other languages. Multi-cultural cities are composed of different linguistic-cultural minorities and of one dominant culture, whereas a frontier city is a city in which there is an ethnic-national confrontation between two communities. Unlike the multicultural city, in which the minority feels disadvantaged because of its linguistic-cultural difference, in a frontier city the minority group does not see itself as inferior. First of all, this distinction derives from the fact that in a common system that they share with the majority. Their dispute with the majority about the legitimacy of their minority status, about the regime’s policy towards them, and about the just division of resources. The members of the minority do not seek to break away from the system, but rather to integrate into it as legitimate entity with equal rights.
p.11
In a frontier city, by contrast, the minority seeks to delegitimize the rule of the majority, and to disengage itself in one way or another from that rule. Each of the communities in a frontier city sees itself to be equal, if not higher, status than the other groups. Therefore, in a frontier city the principal question preoccupying the rivals is who the ruler is and who has the right to define the government’s agenda. For the minority, the majority’s policies, aimed at stability and continuity, are simply a means for perpetuating the majority’s pre-eminence. In many case, the government of the majority is incapable of dividing assets equitably, thus reinforce the minority’s demand for separation. Furthermore, in a frontier city, the demographic minority’s case against the majority is not local, but rather represents one facet of the national confrontation. The national-ethnic gap prevails over the municipal boundaries defined by urban management, borders, the supply of services, demographic and territory. It takes on national significance , and becomes part of the identities of each side. In contrast, the multicultural city does not embody a confrontation between national groups- at most it reflects a social problem that characterizes the country itself. The multicultural city is heterogeneous and there can be different coalition between the ethnic groups that comprise it. These coalitions vary according to the issue at hand. In a frontier city, however, the polarization is deep and dichotomous, and the fissures that characterize it largely coincide with national fissures (Bollens, 1998a; Kotek, 1997b; Roman, 1997a). Some of these sources call the frontier city the “polarized city” but is only a difference in terminology; all the characteristics of a polarized city are shared by the frontier city.
p.15
On the other hand, Jerusalem as a frontier city is not physically divided and its two populations are not at war. It is thus distinct from Belfast of 1968-98, from Beirut during the civil war of 1975-91, and Nicosia since 1974. Belfast is the principal city in Northern Ireland, containing 23.6 per cent of the inhabitants if the province, which is part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Catholics, a quart of the city population, have wanted to become part of the Republic of Ireland, whereas the Protestant majority insists on preserving the ties with London. This had led to a confrontation between Protestants and Catholics on a long series of question principally involving political loyalty, national identity, the division of resources, and equitable political representation. During the period of conflict Belfast was polarized and divided horizontally and vertically; it was impossible to remain neutral. There was a sharp ecological and institutional separation between Protestants and Catholic in their areas of residence, employment, and in the education system. Armed militias and underground forces took responsibility for defense and public order, preventing effective action by the municipality, Gutmann and Klein concluded in their study of Belfast that, when faced with national-ethnic confrontation, a city cannot disassociated from its surroundings. Implicitly referring to Jerusalem Mayor, Teddy Kollek, Gutmann and Klein stated that wise municipal management can reduce tensions, if only temporarily, but that the larger conflict will, in the end, impinge on the city and sweep it into the struggle.
P.16
The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 turned Nicosia into the heart of the conflict between Greece and Turkey, a conflict that has its roots in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. Cyprus is not a case of a political divided nation as Korea is and were Germany and Vietnam. Instead, it suffers from a conflict between two national, ethnic, mother countries their historical memory and culture, and to the control of financial systems, territory, and resources. Nicosia was first divided by the British military demarcation line of 1963-64; the division was perpetuated by the link that Turkey established in the 1960s with its loyalist in Cyprus, and by the provision of Turkish services such as drivers’ licenses, building licenses, commercial licenses, and postal facilities, as preparation for the possible failure of the Greek-dominated federation. Afterward, a dual regime was created and, with the Turkish invasion, Nicosia was divided physically into two parts. Major population movements created large areas of demographic homogeneity in Cyprus, and in Nicosia specifically. The two part of the city are divided by impassable border check post and there is animosity between the two national leaderships. Not only are the languages, the religious and social institution, and the regimes different in the two part of the city, so is collective memory and public space.
p.17
Fostering the expectation that the northern part of the island will be liberated from the Turks, the public spaces in the south preserves a historical memory of the Turkish presence by retaining the names of parks, houses, and streets. In the north, in contrast, there has been a Turkification and Islamization of the region, from which Greek and Christian marking have been removed. Despite this, Nicosia is not a completed divided city. There is cooperation between the two municipalities in certain areas. The supply of electricity to the north depends on the Greek-ruled south, the supplu of water to the south on the Turkish north. There are a common sewage, drainage, and sanitation systems; and there is coordination on the planning of the urban space and in certain health services ( Kilot & Mansfield, 1997). The casse of Nicosia leads to the conclusion that a broad and profound conflict that divides a city into two parts, even physically, does not prevent cooperation in defined professional fields. This inverse is also true – professional cooperation in several area connected to the joint management of the metropolitan area does not bridge the fissures of the physical divided city.
p.40
Jerusalem thus has ethnic-national, demographic, political and metropolitan borders. Since it is the frontier, the borderlines divide the city and also close it. On the face of it, this multiplicity of borderlines should intensify the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian, but in fact it moderate the conflict. Instead of a single deep fissure in a single place, the Israelis and the Palestinians have, unintentionally, made the national-ethnic-geographic confrontation run along several faults. As will be shown below, this division of the borders cushions rather than sharpens the conflict. The borderlines in Jerusalem are permeable, soft, and flexible.
p.66-67
Even in Jerusalem, in which a policy of de jure rather than de facto integration was pursued, and where Israeli leaders were constantly declaring that the city had been united for eternity, the national-ethnic split remained a fact of daily life. While it is true, as Micheal Romann and Alex Weingrod have proven (Romann & Weingrod, 1991), that Jerusalem is not physically divided between East and West as it was in the 1948-67 period, even after June 1967 it remained split between Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinian on two planes. There was a vertical division between East and West in day-to-day affair and a horizontal division, meaning that where there was contact between the two populations, Jews generally had the upper hand. The annexation did not narrow the ethnic-national division or the cultural gap. The distinction between the residential neighborhoods of the two national communities in the city, their different city enter, the separate business and commercial center, school systems, public institutions, public transportation and medical services all created a notional borderline. This is nit a small matter. It is a notional but concrete wedge between two groups that are very much aware of the division and in fact they perceive it to be dangerous.
p74-75_1995
Municipal report about the gap between the Arab and Jewish in term of infrastructure and services:_
-garbage collection
-distribution of mail & household gas
-electric & telephone network
-Fire fighting service
-Shortage of 21 Km of road (East Jerusalem)
-Shortage of345 schoolroom
The East Jerusalem Arabs make up 30 per cent of the city population but received, in 1995, only about 7 per cent of fund budgeted by the city
In 1995, the Arabs of East Jerusalem received less than 1 per cent – NIS 15 million – of the NIS 175 million allocated by the governments to Jerusalem.
In 199, 1 per cent of the municipality’s development budget was designated for East Jerusalem, most of the projects were related to the tourism activity.
At a special cabinet meeting in 1999, the municipality presented further data on the East-West gap in the city, gap running from 300 to 1,000 per cent depending on the area. In Jewish Jerusalem there were 743 inhabitants per Km of sewage pipe, in Arab Jerusalem 7,362 inhabitants. In Jewish Jerusalem there were 690 inhabitants per Km of sidewalk, as opposed to 2,917 in the East (Ha’aretz, 25 March 1999; Kol Ha-Ir 16 April 1999).
p.77
Labor Party government and Teddy Kollek maintained that Israel sovereignty would be determined in accordance with physical changes- the construction and habitation of Jewish neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, and unequivocal preference for Jerusalem’s Jewish over its Arabs. As compensation, Arabs were allowed to maintain their own symbolic space in the form of the link with Jordan. This included the use if Jordanian passports and of the Jordanian dinar, maintenance of Jordanian citizenship, the operation of the Wafq and the Sharia Courts that were nor subject to Israeli law, and a measure of local freedom of action allowing the development of local institution and identity. The shortage and discrimination preserved the Palestinian uniqueness of East Jerusalem and reinforced its ties to the rest of the 1967 territories. This enabled energetic development of the Jewish sector in Jerusalem and its suburbs, from which Arabs in the metropolitan area also beneficed. This benefit was, however, only indirect, especially in the form of the growth of employment and income. In the infrastructure and services, construction and education, as well as in welfare services, their situation worsened as the gap between them and the Jews grew larger and as the Arab population of East Jerusalem increased dramatically. The discourse between Israel and the Palestinian public was a hegemonic one, characterized by the dominance Israeli and the exclusion of Palestinian from position of power and from resource allocation. This exclusion was not forced on the Palestinians, on contrary, they choose it.
p.78
The Likud governments assumed that improvement in day-to-day life would, for the Palestinians, serve as compensation for their loses in the symbolic level (Ha’aretz, 10 July 1997). The first step was made by the national government when it decided, at the beginning of January 1997, to add NIS 130 million to the municipality budget “in the framework of the program to strengthen Israeli sovereignty in the eastern city” (Ha’aretz, 27 Jan. 1997)
p.78
As will be made clear below, the East Jerusalem Palestinians reject Israel national symbols and have no demand for the improvement of their daily life. They see Israel government decisions as another type of conquest and of the imposition of Israeli identity, not as the government’s obligation to the residents of its territory.
p.84
In the period that preceded the Israel occupation, Jerusalem was not a remote area but rather a city of great religious importance, rule over which had granted legitimacy to the Hashemite dynasty, even if from an administrative and political point of view the city had been marginal. Beyond this, the lack of contact between the Arab of East Jerusalem and their Palestinian and Arab brethren for 19 years had led to far reaching changes among them. Unlike the Arabs of the East Jerusalem, only a minority of the Palestinians in the state of Israel has social and family links to the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The East Jerusalem Arabs are politically linked to the institutions of the territories, ad the vast majority of them boycott Israeli municipality and political institutions.
The Arabs of Israel, in stark contrast, are active participant in Israel politics and one of them, Knesset Member, Azmi Bishara, was in 1999, a candidate for Prime Minister. The ethnic-geographic boundaries between and the dominant and ruling Jewish majority have been open since the dissolution of the military government over Israel’s Arabs population in 1966. In many case, the Arab in Israel cross over the ethnic-cultural border and assimilate the norms of the majority as part of the process of Israelification they are undergoing (Mana’and Haj Yehiye, 1995; Rekhes,1992: 127-99). Many of them have adopted Israeli identity, and the mainstream among them demand that theirs country’s government treat them with equal right. In practice this is a movement in two opposite directions. While the Palestinian in Israel are intensifying their demands for equal division of resources and access to the collective institutions, the process of separation has intensified among the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians in Jerusalem do not want to penetrate the heart of the political structure and change the division of power and resources, but rather to detach themselves from Israel rule. Until the Oslo accord, the official of the Palestinian was to separate Jerusalem into two sovereign municipal entities while keeping the city undivided physically. Since them the peace process has produced other ways to divide position of control, administration and resources in Jerusalem between Jew and Arab.
p.100
[Sadat ] suggested Israel-Palestinian partnership in the administration of the city and a division of sovereignty in Jerusalem and the preservation of its administrative and municipal unity through the joint management model offered a faire compromise between Israel’s goal of not physical redividing the city and the having East Jerusalem as part of the Israel capital, and the Arab goal of returning Arab sovereignty to Jerusalem and making it part of the Palestinian territories. In practice, Sadat was proposing de facto unity and de jure partition. This was proposal of a pragmatic statesman to a statesman for whom the symbol and legal status were paramount and actually shaped daily life. Begin [Israeli PM] preferred a city that was unified de jure and divided de facto – although from his point of view, it should be noted, the de facto reality was a product of the de jure situation.
p.153
If [Rabin] meant all of Jerusalem he is wrong…East Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Palestine and the Jewish West Jerusalem is and remains the capital of Israel and will remain such, and against which there are no objection…when the time comes, the human brain, that is, we will certainly find a model that fits Jerusalem. I know one thing for certain: Palestinians and Israelis will live peacefully side by side in the city.
Arafat FBIS, Daily Report, 21 Sept. 1993
p.162
The Washington Declaration states that Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the muslin holy shrine [lieu saint] in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines. In addition the two side have agreed to act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions. This clause did not appear in the Declaration of Principles that King Hussein and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were to sign on November 2, 1993, although that agreement is generally similar to the Washington Declaration (Ha’aretz, 23 Nov. 1994). Rabin and Hussein drafted this clause themselves (Ad. M. Kokohanovski, 27 Oct. 1995), with the purpose of separating the discussion of the political sovereignty over Jerusalem from the issue of the religious status of the holy places.
p.163
Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan was more open and direct. He stated that Jordan had never, and would never, relinquish its responsibility over the Islamic holy places in East Jerusalem. In this view, it was necessary to do everything to separate the religious and the political issue in East Jerusalem, not only in the interim period but also in the permanent settlement. This might even involve dividing Jerusalem in different ways for religious and political purposes. In the permanent agreement, he suggested, political sovereignty would be in Palestinian hands, should they attain it, but the religious sovereignty would be in the hands of a pan-Islamic Council in which both Palestinians and Jordanians would participate (Ha’artz, 20 July 1994).
p.164
In 1993, Adnan Abu Odeh, the former Jordanian Prime Minister and King Hussein’s confidant, suggested –possibly with the king’s acknowledge- that the old city of Jerusalem (inside the wall) should not be under the political sovereignty of any state but rather be designated as a holy place. A joint Jewish-Muslim-Christian council would administer the site, and each religion would have custody [detention]of its own shrines.
P.166
In [PLO] opinion it was not possible to separate political sovereignty over the holy place from the religious status, especially given that a great part of the Palestinian claim to political sovereignty was based on the religious status of Al-Haram al-Sharif in Islam.
p.189
Four our purpose, the level of institutionalization, organization and functioning is not important, but rather the fact that they are located in Jerusalem. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem is the capital-designate and they are trying to locate all their national, social, religious, scientific, cultural, media, employment, and economic institutions in the city, especially those whose field of activity are not municipal but national and cover the entire West Bank.
p. 196
The PLO leadership had wanted in the past to prevent the growth of an alternative leadership among the “internal” and had taken no steps to establish a Palestinian institutional presence in Jerusalem as Fussal Husseini had suggested. From the beginning of the implementation of the Oslo accord, the Palestinian Authority’s leaders had preferred to operate the institutions in Jerusalem as arms of the Gaza regime, rather than risking the creation of a parallel, independent local establishment.
p.224
The source of the rivality between the political establishment in Jerusalem- Husseini’s Orient House- and the leaders of the national Fatah organization had its base in the relation between the “outside” and the “inside”. Husseini, it should be recalled, is one of the leading figures of what was formerly the “inside”, while Sakher Habash, Muhammad Ghanim, and Abas Zaki were Fatah officials from the “outside”. Hussein’s appointment as Fatah chief in the West Bank, in September 1993, and the entry of the “outside” officials to the “inside”, in the mid-1994, turned the prior rivality into one that was now local in Jerusalem, and a national center of power that now wanted to subjugate the different local branches to its command and which was unwilling to accept the independence of the Jerusalem organization. The struggle between the Fatah apparatus and the Husseini’s Jerusalem political elite was also a generational one. The Fatah organization opposed Husseini’s political and social Orient House elite with young field operatives who had won glory in the Intifada.
p.231
the compromise found for the design of the boxes was that the slit was placed ant one of the edges of the top of the box. This way it did not make it too much like a ballot box fir the Israelis and not too much like a mail box the Palestinians. As for the terminology; the two side agreed to used the neutral term “receptacles”, although the voting documents would be called “ballot”. Likewise, the post official staff would be responsible for transferring the sealed ballot boxes to Palestinian Officials outside the city for counting. According to the agreement, the internationals observers who were to oversee the elections would be allowed to function in East Jerusalem as well. The Palestinian saw this as an achievement that , in a certain extent, put the election in East Jerusalem under international supervision and outside the range of Israel law; but Israel claimed that the observers were meant to ensure a fair election and did not symbolize the end of the Israel’s annexation(Ha’aretz, 16 July 1995, 4 Sept. 1995, 5 Jan. 1996, 15 Jan. 1996, State of Israel, 1995: 119-20).
p.234
Jerusalem distance, as a frontier city, from the political center was expressed in the elections not only by the low level of registration and low number of participants, but also by a lack of order, bad organization, and no information on the lection procedures. Even in Silwan, which became part of the front line against the annexation in the 1980s, when Israeli settlers bought houses there and moved in, only 40 per cent of eligible voters registered (Cohen, 19 Jan. 1996). The election emphasized Jerusalem’s remoteness from the political center rather than the front line of the confrontation with Israel.
p. 240
Geographically, 60.2 per cent f the Legislative Council’s members lives in the cities, 22.7 per cent in towns and villages, and 17 per cent in refugee camps. In the Jerusalem district, however, all the representatives live in the city (JMCC, 1996: annex VI). In Jerusalem the link between place of residence and political activity, including theirs to political establishment, is stronger than elsewhere, although it is impossible to say what came first – whether place of residence drew people to politic and establishment, to whether the opposite case.
p.265
The competition between the Palestinians and Israel over the purchase of the real estate in East Jerusalem was not between two equal sides. The Arab organizations and states who promised to help the Palestinians in this area talked more than they acted.
p.266
For example, The Jerusalem Treasury Fund, founded by the king of Morocco in January 1995, began operating only in April 1997, and by December 1997 had raised only $5 million out of the $500 million that the king wanted to devote to “saving Jerusalem” (Al-Quds, 3 Dec. 1997). Even though the pace and the extent of Israeli purchases is not specially high, and their demographic effect nearly nil, they have been very visible, given the Palestinian establishment’s impotence in preventing the sale of Arab property to Jews.
p.166
This state of affair led the legislative council to pass a law in May 1997 forbidding Palestinians to sell houses and lands in East Jerusalem to Jews; religious leaders concurred and issued a ban against the dealers. The Palestinians cabinet announced that violator of the lax would receive the death penalty. It ordered General Intelligence to block such transactions and to hunt down and punish the sellers. General Intelligence identified 16 dealers who had been active during the five previous years. In may 1997 three land dealers were murdered about 12 arrested, with the Israel police succeeding in preventing, at the last minute, the murderer of another. In Israel’s view, these actions infringed on its sovereignty because the victims were residents of East Jerusalem who held Israel identity cards and who had been murderer by the Palestinian Authority for doing business with Israelis.
p. 270
In the final analysis, Israel’s policy accomplished little, since bought about no change in Jerusalem’s demographic balance. On the contrary, even though its implementation was spotty, the new policy alarmed 50,000 – 80,000 Palestinians who were concerned that they might become its victims (Ha’aretz, 2 June 1997, 3 June 1997; Kil Ha)Ir, 6 June 1997). Between 20,000 and 30,000 residents of the suburbs returned to live in Jerusalem in harsh housing conditions so as not to lose their Israeli identity cards and their resident rights. The demand for housing rose and the prices spiraled upward, housing density increased, and housing and living conditions worsened (Ha’aretz 2 June 1997; Kol Ha-Ir 22 Aug. 1998). The result was that at the end of 1997 the ministry decided to slow down the implementation (Rubinstein, 12 Fed. 1998), and in October 1999 it announced that it would no longer cheek to see of a person had been absent from Jerusalem for seven years, on condition that he or she demonstrated a “suitable connection” to the city (Ha aretz, 18 Oct. 1999). It is doubtful, however, if the policy has really been changed (Al-Quds, 11 Nov. 1999). Both Social Security and health plans have continued with their policies, and East Jerusalem residents who have sought health services in the hospitals or who have applied to Social Security to cover health costs were required to prove that they bore Israeli identity cards. A Social Security investigation took several months, during which the right to receive medical care was suspended. The policy was criticized by the ombudsman for the national health law, who ordered that medical care could not be denied to babies and to those whose lives were in danger during rhe course of a Social Security investigation (B’tselem, 1998, 20-37). It tool a Supreme Court appeal to get the state to agree not to revoke right under the national health law before all the bureaucratic steps had been taken to determine that the person in question was eligible. The myriad problems these policies caused led the Israeli Authorities to use the planning and construction laws to tip the demographic balance in Jerusalem in Israel’s favor.
p.278
Har Homa: an obstacle to the Oslo accords
Immediately after the 1967 war, Israel declared a hill to south-east of Jerusalem, called Jabel abu-Ghnim by the Arabs and Har Homa by Israel, as a “green” territory, in order to prevent the local Arabs from building there. In April 1991 Israel appropriated 1,850 dunams there for “public use”, with the intention of constructing a Jewish neighborhood of 30,000 inhabitants. Only a third of the land was expropriated from local Arabs. The rest was taken from Jewish landowners, half of them private individual and half public bodies. The change of government in 1992 had no effect on the plan’s progress, even though the housing minister tried to push forward with Rabin’s approval and blessing (Ha aretz, 11 Jan. 1995). Israel wanted to use the new residential neighborhood to complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem by controlling all the heights that overlook it. Jerusalem’s city engineer said that “Har Homa is not exceptional. Political rather than professional planning consideration dictate the development of the entire city. The greater part of planning and development in the city after unification has been done for political purposes, the principals of which is to establish a Jewish majority in the city and hold the most important strategic positions and establish Jewish neighborhoods on them” (Eldar, 17 March 1997). In the wake of the Oslo accords, the political importance of theses neighborhoods increased, because their establishment would create a physical Israeli wedge between Palestinian Authority territory and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. For the same reasons, the Palestinians had an escalating interest in preventing the establishment of these neighborhoods.
p.281
The policy of labor Governments and Jerusalem municipal government under Teddy Kollek had discriminated against East Jerusalem’s Arabs on day-to-day issues, in contrast with the momentum given to the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem. At the same time, however, the East Jerusalem Arabs were allowed to compensate for this discrimination by fostering institutions and local and national identity symbols. In contrast, the Likud government and the Olmert administration advocated the full imposition of Israeli sovereignty on the East Jerusalem Arabs, while promising them compensation on the level of municipal services. The Palestinians rejected the Likud-Olmert approach and demanded the constinuation of the previous policy; which was consistent with the Oslo accords. But the Likud government realized that Israel sovereignty in East Jerusalem was being eroded, and feared losing it completely in the permanent settlement.
p.292
Third, the likud acted to expand the Israeli settlement in general, and Jewish housing in Jerusalem particular, with the aim of taking control of land that ,in its view had to be under Israeli sovereignty. Unilateral action thus replaced agreements with the Palestinians, and the Likud government stood behind the Oslo agreements only in word. To achieve broad public support for ots actions, the Likud government chose to concentrate its efforts in Jerusalem. The capital, it believed, wad an area od national consensus, a sacred value even broader support ot kept silent about this argument, and instead formulated its goal negatively: the Labor government, it claimed, had begun the process of handing the city over the Palestinians (Ha aretz 19 March).
p.306
Furthermore, the Beilin/Abu-Mazen understanding use a range of means to mitigate the dispute over Jerusalem, for example by postponing the resolution of sovereignty over the annexed part of Jerusalem, the declaration of a holy zone so as to prevent extremists from using religious fervor to ignite a nationalist conflagration, the blurring of the term sovereignty, and distinguishing between its legal-official aspects and its political, symbolic, and functional aspects. Each one of the characteristics of sovereignty is divided differently between the sides in the Jerusalem region.
p.328
It is not a physical boundary, but rather one that has spread an separated, as by a prism, into multiple lines. The inhabitants of Jerusalem region have many borders in their daily lives and in their consciousness. Alongside the municipal border is the Green Line, the border that split the city between 1948 and 1967, not longer visible but palpably felt. There is the ethnic-national line that divides the Israeli neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war from their Palestinian neighbors. There is also the larger border that defines the city’s space as a focus of employment and services for the population that depends on it, and there is a whole gamut of functional relationships within Israel Jerusalem that divide areas of responsibility and operation between the Jewish and Arab populations. The application of Israel law, jurisdiction, and administration has not succeeded in separating East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Nor has it led to full integration between the city’ Jews and Arabs. Instead of a rigid border splitting the city or cutting off its eastern boundary from the Palestinians rear, there are a number of borders, and all of them are permeable and soft. Luckily for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, both Israelis and Palestinians, the fissure in Jerusalem are varied and only congruent. It is easier to bridge over a “soft” fissure than a “hard” one that concentrates in one spot all the contentious issues and dividing lines between the two population.
P.9
The term “frontier” is characteristically from the term “boundary”. “Frontier” suggests open spaces available for settlement and conquest. “Frontierity” motives people and states to expand their borders. A state’s frontier lie not only qt the geographical and physical limits; there is also, for example, a frontier of outer space and a frontier of knowledge. A frontier is thus any place where the state seeks to expand or extend itself, where it seeks to move a geographical or intellectual boundary. From this perspective, the movement is unidirectional – forward in the name of enlightenment, civilization, and progress. At some frontier the state is more salient presence than on its home ground because it is exerting a national will to expand. At other frontiers, the state’s control is looser than it is in the center, since the expansion is being accomplished by individuals, or by groups acting on theirs own initiatives. In the both case, however, the frontier region lacks a local character and is rather an extension and operational instrument of national policy. In contrast, the term “border” designates something static, a place where one must halt. A border is inward directed and marks the existing situation and the limit of current possibilities. The frontier is inclusive and implies an open future, while a border is exclusive, a buffer between foreigners and ourselves (Barth 1969; Gal-Nur, 1995; Hasson, 1996; Kervi, 1997; Kimmerling 1997; Kotek, 1997b).
p.10
According to more recent thinking, however, there is little difference between a frontier and a boundary. The frontier is now thought to mark confrontation between conceptions or communities, not finality or unidirectional movement. In contrast with the classical Pierre, the new conception no longer assumes a confrontation between the enlightened and the uncultured, but rather a confrontation between two cultures. A boundary, according to this new view, marks the point to which each collectives reaches, while the frontier directs its gaze to the other side of the boundary, to encounter and confrontation with an opposing entity or culture. Each side has an empiric history and mythic past; each has it own religion ad values, norms and aspirations. Each group defines how it distinguishes itself from the others, and each group continually revises or updates its worldview in light of the political and historical circumstances. The confrontation on the frontier does not take place on a broad front, but rather is concentrated in a specific territory. Each of the contending groups seeks to control or defend its territory against being physically taken over by the “other”, the “invader”. In the conflict over territory, each group develops holy sites of its own and turns certain site into symbols of struggle and defense, or enhances the value of the territory and defines it as a strategic asset. Territory thus has symbolic value, in the name of which the group can mobilize its members in defense of their territory against the “other” that threatens it. The iconographic characteristics of a territory carry weight in a frontier area. The community creates a set of sacred symbols that link its members to each other and motivate them to defend and hold fast to their homeland. This a static situation that is opposed to the activity that takes place in “regular” areas, which are characterized by mobility and cyclicity. In “regular” areas there is a constant flow of ideas, people, commerce, capital, and knowledge, and the connection with the territory is secondary. Accord into this view, in East Jerusalem there is a confrontation between two cultures and communities that are competing for a single space, yet also divide it between them. Jerusalem, as will be shown, has several boundary lines that separate the Arabs east from the Jewish west. The two sparring entities in the city have developed mutual relation of exchanges alongside confrontation and animosity (Hasson, 1977a; Hasson 1996; Hasson 1998; Kimmerling, 1989; Kotek, 1997a; Stotkin 1996).
The term “frontier” also designates the relation between those in the rear and those who bear the burden the confrontation. The term “frontier city” denotes not only the confrontation between Arab and Jewish Jerusalem, but also the connection that in the State of Israel, and the place held by East Jerusalem in Palestinians consciousness and action, reflects the distinction between the frontier and the center. In order to close the distance between frontier and center, the national leadership will turn the frontier area, and the confrontation with the other side, into unifying axes achieving “national unity”. Despite vows of loyalty and declaration about the mobilization of the entire center behind the people of the frontier, the lines of contradiction and friction- lie in the frontier area not in the interior. The lines of confrontation distinguish the heartland from the frontier and passionate declaration cannot bridge that gap.
The concept of frontier designates a deeper fissure than that of a multicultural and multi-ethnic city. Today, all modern cities in the Western world, such as Paris, New York, and London, are multinational because of the large-scale immigration of members of other national groups and speakers of other languages. Multi-cultural cities are composed of different linguistic-cultural minorities and of one dominant culture, whereas a frontier city is a city in which there is an ethnic-national confrontation between two communities. Unlike the multicultural city, in which the minority feels disadvantaged because of its linguistic-cultural difference, in a frontier city the minority group does not see itself as inferior. First of all, this distinction derives from the fact that in a common system that they share with the majority. Their dispute with the majority about the legitimacy of their minority status, about the regime’s policy towards them, and about the just division of resources. The members of the minority do not seek to break away from the system, but rather to integrate into it as legitimate entity with equal rights.
p.11
In a frontier city, by contrast, the minority seeks to delegitimize the rule of the majority, and to disengage itself in one way or another from that rule. Each of the communities in a frontier city sees itself to be equal, if not higher, status than the other groups. Therefore, in a frontier city the principal question preoccupying the rivals is who the ruler is and who has the right to define the government’s agenda. For the minority, the majority’s policies, aimed at stability and continuity, are simply a means for perpetuating the majority’s pre-eminence. In many case, the government of the majority is incapable of dividing assets equitably, thus reinforce the minority’s demand for separation. Furthermore, in a frontier city, the demographic minority’s case against the majority is not local, but rather represents one facet of the national confrontation. The national-ethnic gap prevails over the municipal boundaries defined by urban management, borders, the supply of services, demographic and territory. It takes on national significance , and becomes part of the identities of each side. In contrast, the multicultural city does not embody a confrontation between national groups- at most it reflects a social problem that characterizes the country itself. The multicultural city is heterogeneous and there can be different coalition between the ethnic groups that comprise it. These coalitions vary according to the issue at hand. In a frontier city, however, the polarization is deep and dichotomous, and the fissures that characterize it largely coincide with national fissures (Bollens, 1998a; Kotek, 1997b; Roman, 1997a). Some of these sources call the frontier city the “polarized city” but is only a difference in terminology; all the characteristics of a polarized city are shared by the frontier city.
p.15
On the other hand, Jerusalem as a frontier city is not physically divided and its two populations are not at war. It is thus distinct from Belfast of 1968-98, from Beirut during the civil war of 1975-91, and Nicosia since 1974. Belfast is the principal city in Northern Ireland, containing 23.6 per cent of the inhabitants if the province, which is part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Catholics, a quart of the city population, have wanted to become part of the Republic of Ireland, whereas the Protestant majority insists on preserving the ties with London. This had led to a confrontation between Protestants and Catholics on a long series of question principally involving political loyalty, national identity, the division of resources, and equitable political representation. During the period of conflict Belfast was polarized and divided horizontally and vertically; it was impossible to remain neutral. There was a sharp ecological and institutional separation between Protestants and Catholic in their areas of residence, employment, and in the education system. Armed militias and underground forces took responsibility for defense and public order, preventing effective action by the municipality, Gutmann and Klein concluded in their study of Belfast that, when faced with national-ethnic confrontation, a city cannot disassociated from its surroundings. Implicitly referring to Jerusalem Mayor, Teddy Kollek, Gutmann and Klein stated that wise municipal management can reduce tensions, if only temporarily, but that the larger conflict will, in the end, impinge on the city and sweep it into the struggle.
P.16
The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 turned Nicosia into the heart of the conflict between Greece and Turkey, a conflict that has its roots in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. Cyprus is not a case of a political divided nation as Korea is and were Germany and Vietnam. Instead, it suffers from a conflict between two national, ethnic, mother countries their historical memory and culture, and to the control of financial systems, territory, and resources. Nicosia was first divided by the British military demarcation line of 1963-64; the division was perpetuated by the link that Turkey established in the 1960s with its loyalist in Cyprus, and by the provision of Turkish services such as drivers’ licenses, building licenses, commercial licenses, and postal facilities, as preparation for the possible failure of the Greek-dominated federation. Afterward, a dual regime was created and, with the Turkish invasion, Nicosia was divided physically into two parts. Major population movements created large areas of demographic homogeneity in Cyprus, and in Nicosia specifically. The two part of the city are divided by impassable border check post and there is animosity between the two national leaderships. Not only are the languages, the religious and social institution, and the regimes different in the two part of the city, so is collective memory and public space.
p.17
Fostering the expectation that the northern part of the island will be liberated from the Turks, the public spaces in the south preserves a historical memory of the Turkish presence by retaining the names of parks, houses, and streets. In the north, in contrast, there has been a Turkification and Islamization of the region, from which Greek and Christian marking have been removed. Despite this, Nicosia is not a completed divided city. There is cooperation between the two municipalities in certain areas. The supply of electricity to the north depends on the Greek-ruled south, the supplu of water to the south on the Turkish north. There are a common sewage, drainage, and sanitation systems; and there is coordination on the planning of the urban space and in certain health services ( Kilot & Mansfield, 1997). The casse of Nicosia leads to the conclusion that a broad and profound conflict that divides a city into two parts, even physically, does not prevent cooperation in defined professional fields. This inverse is also true – professional cooperation in several area connected to the joint management of the metropolitan area does not bridge the fissures of the physical divided city.
p.40
Jerusalem thus has ethnic-national, demographic, political and metropolitan borders. Since it is the frontier, the borderlines divide the city and also close it. On the face of it, this multiplicity of borderlines should intensify the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian, but in fact it moderate the conflict. Instead of a single deep fissure in a single place, the Israelis and the Palestinians have, unintentionally, made the national-ethnic-geographic confrontation run along several faults. As will be shown below, this division of the borders cushions rather than sharpens the conflict. The borderlines in Jerusalem are permeable, soft, and flexible.
p.66-67
Even in Jerusalem, in which a policy of de jure rather than de facto integration was pursued, and where Israeli leaders were constantly declaring that the city had been united for eternity, the national-ethnic split remained a fact of daily life. While it is true, as Micheal Romann and Alex Weingrod have proven (Romann & Weingrod, 1991), that Jerusalem is not physically divided between East and West as it was in the 1948-67 period, even after June 1967 it remained split between Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinian on two planes. There was a vertical division between East and West in day-to-day affair and a horizontal division, meaning that where there was contact between the two populations, Jews generally had the upper hand. The annexation did not narrow the ethnic-national division or the cultural gap. The distinction between the residential neighborhoods of the two national communities in the city, their different city enter, the separate business and commercial center, school systems, public institutions, public transportation and medical services all created a notional borderline. This is nit a small matter. It is a notional but concrete wedge between two groups that are very much aware of the division and in fact they perceive it to be dangerous.
p74-75_1995
Municipal report about the gap between the Arab and Jewish in term of infrastructure and services:_
-garbage collection
-distribution of mail & household gas
-electric & telephone network
-Fire fighting service
-Shortage of 21 Km of road (East Jerusalem)
-Shortage of345 schoolroom
The East Jerusalem Arabs make up 30 per cent of the city population but received, in 1995, only about 7 per cent of fund budgeted by the city
In 1995, the Arabs of East Jerusalem received less than 1 per cent – NIS 15 million – of the NIS 175 million allocated by the governments to Jerusalem.
In 199, 1 per cent of the municipality’s development budget was designated for East Jerusalem, most of the projects were related to the tourism activity.
At a special cabinet meeting in 1999, the municipality presented further data on the East-West gap in the city, gap running from 300 to 1,000 per cent depending on the area. In Jewish Jerusalem there were 743 inhabitants per Km of sewage pipe, in Arab Jerusalem 7,362 inhabitants. In Jewish Jerusalem there were 690 inhabitants per Km of sidewalk, as opposed to 2,917 in the East (Ha’aretz, 25 March 1999; Kol Ha-Ir 16 April 1999).
p.77
Labor Party government and Teddy Kollek maintained that Israel sovereignty would be determined in accordance with physical changes- the construction and habitation of Jewish neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, and unequivocal preference for Jerusalem’s Jewish over its Arabs. As compensation, Arabs were allowed to maintain their own symbolic space in the form of the link with Jordan. This included the use if Jordanian passports and of the Jordanian dinar, maintenance of Jordanian citizenship, the operation of the Wafq and the Sharia Courts that were nor subject to Israeli law, and a measure of local freedom of action allowing the development of local institution and identity. The shortage and discrimination preserved the Palestinian uniqueness of East Jerusalem and reinforced its ties to the rest of the 1967 territories. This enabled energetic development of the Jewish sector in Jerusalem and its suburbs, from which Arabs in the metropolitan area also beneficed. This benefit was, however, only indirect, especially in the form of the growth of employment and income. In the infrastructure and services, construction and education, as well as in welfare services, their situation worsened as the gap between them and the Jews grew larger and as the Arab population of East Jerusalem increased dramatically. The discourse between Israel and the Palestinian public was a hegemonic one, characterized by the dominance Israeli and the exclusion of Palestinian from position of power and from resource allocation. This exclusion was not forced on the Palestinians, on contrary, they choose it.
p.78
The Likud governments assumed that improvement in day-to-day life would, for the Palestinians, serve as compensation for their loses in the symbolic level (Ha’aretz, 10 July 1997). The first step was made by the national government when it decided, at the beginning of January 1997, to add NIS 130 million to the municipality budget “in the framework of the program to strengthen Israeli sovereignty in the eastern city” (Ha’aretz, 27 Jan. 1997)
p.78
As will be made clear below, the East Jerusalem Palestinians reject Israel national symbols and have no demand for the improvement of their daily life. They see Israel government decisions as another type of conquest and of the imposition of Israeli identity, not as the government’s obligation to the residents of its territory.
p.84
In the period that preceded the Israel occupation, Jerusalem was not a remote area but rather a city of great religious importance, rule over which had granted legitimacy to the Hashemite dynasty, even if from an administrative and political point of view the city had been marginal. Beyond this, the lack of contact between the Arab of East Jerusalem and their Palestinian and Arab brethren for 19 years had led to far reaching changes among them. Unlike the Arabs of the East Jerusalem, only a minority of the Palestinians in the state of Israel has social and family links to the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The East Jerusalem Arabs are politically linked to the institutions of the territories, ad the vast majority of them boycott Israeli municipality and political institutions.
The Arabs of Israel, in stark contrast, are active participant in Israel politics and one of them, Knesset Member, Azmi Bishara, was in 1999, a candidate for Prime Minister. The ethnic-geographic boundaries between and the dominant and ruling Jewish majority have been open since the dissolution of the military government over Israel’s Arabs population in 1966. In many case, the Arab in Israel cross over the ethnic-cultural border and assimilate the norms of the majority as part of the process of Israelification they are undergoing (Mana’and Haj Yehiye, 1995; Rekhes,1992: 127-99). Many of them have adopted Israeli identity, and the mainstream among them demand that theirs country’s government treat them with equal right. In practice this is a movement in two opposite directions. While the Palestinian in Israel are intensifying their demands for equal division of resources and access to the collective institutions, the process of separation has intensified among the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians in Jerusalem do not want to penetrate the heart of the political structure and change the division of power and resources, but rather to detach themselves from Israel rule. Until the Oslo accord, the official of the Palestinian was to separate Jerusalem into two sovereign municipal entities while keeping the city undivided physically. Since them the peace process has produced other ways to divide position of control, administration and resources in Jerusalem between Jew and Arab.
p.100
[Sadat ] suggested Israel-Palestinian partnership in the administration of the city and a division of sovereignty in Jerusalem and the preservation of its administrative and municipal unity through the joint management model offered a faire compromise between Israel’s goal of not physical redividing the city and the having East Jerusalem as part of the Israel capital, and the Arab goal of returning Arab sovereignty to Jerusalem and making it part of the Palestinian territories. In practice, Sadat was proposing de facto unity and de jure partition. This was proposal of a pragmatic statesman to a statesman for whom the symbol and legal status were paramount and actually shaped daily life. Begin [Israeli PM] preferred a city that was unified de jure and divided de facto – although from his point of view, it should be noted, the de facto reality was a product of the de jure situation.
p.153
If [Rabin] meant all of Jerusalem he is wrong…East Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Palestine and the Jewish West Jerusalem is and remains the capital of Israel and will remain such, and against which there are no objection…when the time comes, the human brain, that is, we will certainly find a model that fits Jerusalem. I know one thing for certain: Palestinians and Israelis will live peacefully side by side in the city.
Arafat FBIS, Daily Report, 21 Sept. 1993
p.162
The Washington Declaration states that Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the muslin holy shrine [lieu saint] in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines. In addition the two side have agreed to act together to promote interfaith relations among the three monotheistic religions. This clause did not appear in the Declaration of Principles that King Hussein and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were to sign on November 2, 1993, although that agreement is generally similar to the Washington Declaration (Ha’aretz, 23 Nov. 1994). Rabin and Hussein drafted this clause themselves (Ad. M. Kokohanovski, 27 Oct. 1995), with the purpose of separating the discussion of the political sovereignty over Jerusalem from the issue of the religious status of the holy places.
p.163
Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan was more open and direct. He stated that Jordan had never, and would never, relinquish its responsibility over the Islamic holy places in East Jerusalem. In this view, it was necessary to do everything to separate the religious and the political issue in East Jerusalem, not only in the interim period but also in the permanent settlement. This might even involve dividing Jerusalem in different ways for religious and political purposes. In the permanent agreement, he suggested, political sovereignty would be in Palestinian hands, should they attain it, but the religious sovereignty would be in the hands of a pan-Islamic Council in which both Palestinians and Jordanians would participate (Ha’artz, 20 July 1994).
p.164
In 1993, Adnan Abu Odeh, the former Jordanian Prime Minister and King Hussein’s confidant, suggested –possibly with the king’s acknowledge- that the old city of Jerusalem (inside the wall) should not be under the political sovereignty of any state but rather be designated as a holy place. A joint Jewish-Muslim-Christian council would administer the site, and each religion would have custody [detention]of its own shrines.
P.166
In [PLO] opinion it was not possible to separate political sovereignty over the holy place from the religious status, especially given that a great part of the Palestinian claim to political sovereignty was based on the religious status of Al-Haram al-Sharif in Islam.
p.189
Four our purpose, the level of institutionalization, organization and functioning is not important, but rather the fact that they are located in Jerusalem. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem is the capital-designate and they are trying to locate all their national, social, religious, scientific, cultural, media, employment, and economic institutions in the city, especially those whose field of activity are not municipal but national and cover the entire West Bank.
p. 196
The PLO leadership had wanted in the past to prevent the growth of an alternative leadership among the “internal” and had taken no steps to establish a Palestinian institutional presence in Jerusalem as Fussal Husseini had suggested. From the beginning of the implementation of the Oslo accord, the Palestinian Authority’s leaders had preferred to operate the institutions in Jerusalem as arms of the Gaza regime, rather than risking the creation of a parallel, independent local establishment.
p.224
The source of the rivality between the political establishment in Jerusalem- Husseini’s Orient House- and the leaders of the national Fatah organization had its base in the relation between the “outside” and the “inside”. Husseini, it should be recalled, is one of the leading figures of what was formerly the “inside”, while Sakher Habash, Muhammad Ghanim, and Abas Zaki were Fatah officials from the “outside”. Hussein’s appointment as Fatah chief in the West Bank, in September 1993, and the entry of the “outside” officials to the “inside”, in the mid-1994, turned the prior rivality into one that was now local in Jerusalem, and a national center of power that now wanted to subjugate the different local branches to its command and which was unwilling to accept the independence of the Jerusalem organization. The struggle between the Fatah apparatus and the Husseini’s Jerusalem political elite was also a generational one. The Fatah organization opposed Husseini’s political and social Orient House elite with young field operatives who had won glory in the Intifada.
p.231
the compromise found for the design of the boxes was that the slit was placed ant one of the edges of the top of the box. This way it did not make it too much like a ballot box fir the Israelis and not too much like a mail box the Palestinians. As for the terminology; the two side agreed to used the neutral term “receptacles”, although the voting documents would be called “ballot”. Likewise, the post official staff would be responsible for transferring the sealed ballot boxes to Palestinian Officials outside the city for counting. According to the agreement, the internationals observers who were to oversee the elections would be allowed to function in East Jerusalem as well. The Palestinian saw this as an achievement that , in a certain extent, put the election in East Jerusalem under international supervision and outside the range of Israel law; but Israel claimed that the observers were meant to ensure a fair election and did not symbolize the end of the Israel’s annexation(Ha’aretz, 16 July 1995, 4 Sept. 1995, 5 Jan. 1996, 15 Jan. 1996, State of Israel, 1995: 119-20).
p.234
Jerusalem distance, as a frontier city, from the political center was expressed in the elections not only by the low level of registration and low number of participants, but also by a lack of order, bad organization, and no information on the lection procedures. Even in Silwan, which became part of the front line against the annexation in the 1980s, when Israeli settlers bought houses there and moved in, only 40 per cent of eligible voters registered (Cohen, 19 Jan. 1996). The election emphasized Jerusalem’s remoteness from the political center rather than the front line of the confrontation with Israel.
p. 240
Geographically, 60.2 per cent f the Legislative Council’s members lives in the cities, 22.7 per cent in towns and villages, and 17 per cent in refugee camps. In the Jerusalem district, however, all the representatives live in the city (JMCC, 1996: annex VI). In Jerusalem the link between place of residence and political activity, including theirs to political establishment, is stronger than elsewhere, although it is impossible to say what came first – whether place of residence drew people to politic and establishment, to whether the opposite case.
p.265
The competition between the Palestinians and Israel over the purchase of the real estate in East Jerusalem was not between two equal sides. The Arab organizations and states who promised to help the Palestinians in this area talked more than they acted.
p.266
For example, The Jerusalem Treasury Fund, founded by the king of Morocco in January 1995, began operating only in April 1997, and by December 1997 had raised only $5 million out of the $500 million that the king wanted to devote to “saving Jerusalem” (Al-Quds, 3 Dec. 1997). Even though the pace and the extent of Israeli purchases is not specially high, and their demographic effect nearly nil, they have been very visible, given the Palestinian establishment’s impotence in preventing the sale of Arab property to Jews.
p.166
This state of affair led the legislative council to pass a law in May 1997 forbidding Palestinians to sell houses and lands in East Jerusalem to Jews; religious leaders concurred and issued a ban against the dealers. The Palestinians cabinet announced that violator of the lax would receive the death penalty. It ordered General Intelligence to block such transactions and to hunt down and punish the sellers. General Intelligence identified 16 dealers who had been active during the five previous years. In may 1997 three land dealers were murdered about 12 arrested, with the Israel police succeeding in preventing, at the last minute, the murderer of another. In Israel’s view, these actions infringed on its sovereignty because the victims were residents of East Jerusalem who held Israel identity cards and who had been murderer by the Palestinian Authority for doing business with Israelis.
p. 270
In the final analysis, Israel’s policy accomplished little, since bought about no change in Jerusalem’s demographic balance. On the contrary, even though its implementation was spotty, the new policy alarmed 50,000 – 80,000 Palestinians who were concerned that they might become its victims (Ha’aretz, 2 June 1997, 3 June 1997; Kil Ha)Ir, 6 June 1997). Between 20,000 and 30,000 residents of the suburbs returned to live in Jerusalem in harsh housing conditions so as not to lose their Israeli identity cards and their resident rights. The demand for housing rose and the prices spiraled upward, housing density increased, and housing and living conditions worsened (Ha’aretz 2 June 1997; Kol Ha-Ir 22 Aug. 1998). The result was that at the end of 1997 the ministry decided to slow down the implementation (Rubinstein, 12 Fed. 1998), and in October 1999 it announced that it would no longer cheek to see of a person had been absent from Jerusalem for seven years, on condition that he or she demonstrated a “suitable connection” to the city (Ha aretz, 18 Oct. 1999). It is doubtful, however, if the policy has really been changed (Al-Quds, 11 Nov. 1999). Both Social Security and health plans have continued with their policies, and East Jerusalem residents who have sought health services in the hospitals or who have applied to Social Security to cover health costs were required to prove that they bore Israeli identity cards. A Social Security investigation took several months, during which the right to receive medical care was suspended. The policy was criticized by the ombudsman for the national health law, who ordered that medical care could not be denied to babies and to those whose lives were in danger during rhe course of a Social Security investigation (B’tselem, 1998, 20-37). It tool a Supreme Court appeal to get the state to agree not to revoke right under the national health law before all the bureaucratic steps had been taken to determine that the person in question was eligible. The myriad problems these policies caused led the Israeli Authorities to use the planning and construction laws to tip the demographic balance in Jerusalem in Israel’s favor.
p.278
Har Homa: an obstacle to the Oslo accords
Immediately after the 1967 war, Israel declared a hill to south-east of Jerusalem, called Jabel abu-Ghnim by the Arabs and Har Homa by Israel, as a “green” territory, in order to prevent the local Arabs from building there. In April 1991 Israel appropriated 1,850 dunams there for “public use”, with the intention of constructing a Jewish neighborhood of 30,000 inhabitants. Only a third of the land was expropriated from local Arabs. The rest was taken from Jewish landowners, half of them private individual and half public bodies. The change of government in 1992 had no effect on the plan’s progress, even though the housing minister tried to push forward with Rabin’s approval and blessing (Ha aretz, 11 Jan. 1995). Israel wanted to use the new residential neighborhood to complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem by controlling all the heights that overlook it. Jerusalem’s city engineer said that “Har Homa is not exceptional. Political rather than professional planning consideration dictate the development of the entire city. The greater part of planning and development in the city after unification has been done for political purposes, the principals of which is to establish a Jewish majority in the city and hold the most important strategic positions and establish Jewish neighborhoods on them” (Eldar, 17 March 1997). In the wake of the Oslo accords, the political importance of theses neighborhoods increased, because their establishment would create a physical Israeli wedge between Palestinian Authority territory and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. For the same reasons, the Palestinians had an escalating interest in preventing the establishment of these neighborhoods.
p.281
The policy of labor Governments and Jerusalem municipal government under Teddy Kollek had discriminated against East Jerusalem’s Arabs on day-to-day issues, in contrast with the momentum given to the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem. At the same time, however, the East Jerusalem Arabs were allowed to compensate for this discrimination by fostering institutions and local and national identity symbols. In contrast, the Likud government and the Olmert administration advocated the full imposition of Israeli sovereignty on the East Jerusalem Arabs, while promising them compensation on the level of municipal services. The Palestinians rejected the Likud-Olmert approach and demanded the constinuation of the previous policy; which was consistent with the Oslo accords. But the Likud government realized that Israel sovereignty in East Jerusalem was being eroded, and feared losing it completely in the permanent settlement.
p.292
Third, the likud acted to expand the Israeli settlement in general, and Jewish housing in Jerusalem particular, with the aim of taking control of land that ,in its view had to be under Israeli sovereignty. Unilateral action thus replaced agreements with the Palestinians, and the Likud government stood behind the Oslo agreements only in word. To achieve broad public support for ots actions, the Likud government chose to concentrate its efforts in Jerusalem. The capital, it believed, wad an area od national consensus, a sacred value even broader support ot kept silent about this argument, and instead formulated its goal negatively: the Labor government, it claimed, had begun the process of handing the city over the Palestinians (Ha aretz 19 March).
p.306
Furthermore, the Beilin/Abu-Mazen understanding use a range of means to mitigate the dispute over Jerusalem, for example by postponing the resolution of sovereignty over the annexed part of Jerusalem, the declaration of a holy zone so as to prevent extremists from using religious fervor to ignite a nationalist conflagration, the blurring of the term sovereignty, and distinguishing between its legal-official aspects and its political, symbolic, and functional aspects. Each one of the characteristics of sovereignty is divided differently between the sides in the Jerusalem region.
p.328
It is not a physical boundary, but rather one that has spread an separated, as by a prism, into multiple lines. The inhabitants of Jerusalem region have many borders in their daily lives and in their consciousness. Alongside the municipal border is the Green Line, the border that split the city between 1948 and 1967, not longer visible but palpably felt. There is the ethnic-national line that divides the Israeli neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem after the 1967 war from their Palestinian neighbors. There is also the larger border that defines the city’s space as a focus of employment and services for the population that depends on it, and there is a whole gamut of functional relationships within Israel Jerusalem that divide areas of responsibility and operation between the Jewish and Arab populations. The application of Israel law, jurisdiction, and administration has not succeeded in separating East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Nor has it led to full integration between the city’ Jews and Arabs. Instead of a rigid border splitting the city or cutting off its eastern boundary from the Palestinians rear, there are a number of borders, and all of them are permeable and soft. Luckily for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, both Israelis and Palestinians, the fissure in Jerusalem are varied and only congruent. It is easier to bridge over a “soft” fissure than a “hard” one that concentrates in one spot all the contentious issues and dividing lines between the two population.
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