The middle-of-the-night eviction last week of an elderly
Palestinian couple from their home in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish
settlers is a demonstration of Israeli intent towards a future peace deal with
the Palestinians.
Mohammed and Fawziya Khurd are now on the street, living in a
tent, after Israeli police enforced a court order issued in July to expel them.
The couple have been living in the same property in the Sheikh
Jarrah neighbourhood since the mid-1950s, when East Jerusalem was under
Jordanian control. The United Nations allotted them the land after they were
expelled from their homes in territory that was seized by Israel during the 1948
war.
Since East Jerusalem’s occupation by Israel in 1967, however,
Jewish settler groups have been waging a relentless battle for the Khurds’ home,
claiming that the land originally belonged to Jews.
In 1999, the settlers occupied a wing of the house belonging to
the couple’s son, Raed, though the courts subsequently ruled in favour of the
family. The eviction order against the settlers, unlike that against the Khurds,
was never enforced.
The takeover of the Khurds’ house is far from an isolated
incident. Settlers are quietly grabbing homes from Palestinians in key
neighbourhoods around the Old City of Jerusalem in an attempt to pre-empt any
future peace deal with the Palestinians.
What makes the case of the Khurd family exceptional is that it
has attracted the attention of western consulates, particularly those of
Israel’s important allies, that is, the United States and Britain. They have
appealed without success to the Israeli government to intercede.
In particular, the diplomats are concerned that the takeover of
the Khurds’ home will set a dangerous precedent, freeing settler groups to wrest
control of most of Sheikh Jarrah. The settlers plan to oust more than 500
Palestinians from the neighbourhood and build 200 apartments for Jewish
families.
If the settlers can take control of other areas, such as Silwan,
Ras al-Amud and the Mount of Olives, the Old City and its holy sites would be as
good as sealed off not only to Palestinians in the West Bank – as is the case
already – but also to nearly 250,000 Palestinians in the outlying suburbs of
East Jerusalem.
Because the Palestinians expect East Jerusalem and its holy
places to be the core of their state, the Sheikh Jarrah judgment effectively
offers the settlers a blocking veto on any future negotiations.
That may be one reason why the Israeli government has shown
little inclination to intervene in cases like that of the Khurds. In Israeli
law, all of Jerusalem, including the eastern half of the city, is the
“indivisible” capital of the Jewish state.
The eviction order also worries western diplomats because it
opens up a Pandora’s box of competing land claims that will make it impossible
for Palestinian negotiators to sign up to a deal on the division of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has already pointed out to the
consulates that nearly two-thirds of West Jerusalem’s land was owned by
Palestinians before the creation of Israel. Fawziya Khurd, for example, lived in
Talbieh, in what is now the city’s western half, before 1948.
If the settlers can make property claims in East Jerusalem based
on title deeds that pre-exist 1948, why cannot Palestinians make similar claims
in West Jerusalem?
The US involvement in the Khurd case demonstrates its desire to
mark its red lines in East Jerusalem. The concern is that Israeli actions on the
ground are seeking to unravel the outlines of an agreement being promoted by
Washington to create some kind of circumscribed Palestinian state.
In the US view, the basis of such a deal is an exchange of
letters between George W Bush and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at
the time, in spring 2004 in which the US president affirmed that Israel would
not be expected to return to the armistice lines of 1949. Instead, he declared
that Israel would be able to hold on to its “population centres” in the West
Bank – code for the established settlement blocs.
As a result, the current US administration has turned a blind eye
to continuing construction in the main settlements, home to most of the West
Bank’s 250,000 settlers. The unstated agreement between Tel Aviv and Washington
is that these areas will be annexed to Israel in a future peace deal.
In an indication of Israel’s confidence about the West Bank
settlements, the Israeli media reported at the weekend that Ehud Barak, the
defence minister and the leader of the Labor Party, had personally approved
hundreds of new apartments for the settlers in the past few months.
The separation wall is being crafted to include these blocs,
eating into one tenth of the West Bank and leaving only a few tens of thousands
of settlers on the “wrong side”.
For the time being, the US is showing indecision only about two
settlement-cities, Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim. If the wall encompasses them, it
will effectively sever the West Bank into three parts.
In relation to East Jerusalem, the White House has so far
appeared to favour maintaining the status quo. That would entail the eastern
half of the city being carved up into a series of complex zones, or “bubbles” as
they have been described in the Israeli media.
Another 250,000 Jewish settlers live in East Jerusalem, though
almost all of them reside in their own discreet colonies implanted between
Palestinian neighbourhoods. These settlements are considered so established by
Israelis that most of their inhabitants do not regard themselves as settlers.
However, the more ideological settlers of the kind taking over
homes in Sheikh Jarrah refuse to accept partition of the city on any terms. They
are trying to erode the Palestinians’ chances of ever controlling their own
neighbourhoods in the eastern half of the city.
Backed by powerful allies in the courts, government and
municipality, the settlers look set to continue expanding in East Jerusalem.
Nir Barkat, the millionaire businessman who
was elected mayor of Jerusalem last week, forged close ties with some of the
most extreme figures in the city’s settlement movement during his campaign.
Like his chief rival for the mayoralty, he has promised to build
a new Jewish neighbourhood, called Eastern Gate, that will be home to at least
10,000 settlers on land next to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Anata.
The move, much like the eviction of the Khurds, has been greeted
with silence from the government. Both developments are a sign of Washington’s
powerlessness to force even the limited concessions it expects from Israel in
East Jerusalem.
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